f constant antagonism; and Jeanne is another example of this
well known fact. It is even a question still languidly discussed whether
Jeanne and her family were actually on one side of the line or the
other. "Il faut opter," says M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest
biographers, as if the peasant household of 1412 had inhabited an
Alsatian cottage in 1872. When the line is drawn so closely, it is
difficult to determine, but Jeanne herself does not ever seem to have
entertained a moment's doubt on the subject, and she after all is the
best authority. Perhaps Villon was thinking more of his rhyme than of
absolute fact when he spoke of "Jeanne la bonne Lorraine." She was born
on the 5th of January, 1412, in the village of Domremy, on the banks
of the Meuse, one of those little grey hamlets, with its little church
tower, and remains of a little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound
not sufficient for the name of hill--which are scattered everywhere
through those level countries, like places which have never been built,
which have grown out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity--perhaps,
one feels, only a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old--yet always
inhabitable in all the ages, with the same names lingering about, the
same surroundings, the same mild rural occupations, simple plenty and
bare want mingling together with as little difference of level as exists
in the sweeping lines of the landscape round.

The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to
the invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the
universal conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak,
the adjacent village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English
alliance, while little Domremy was for the King. And once at least when
Jeanne was a girl at home, the family were startled in their quiet by
the swoop of an armed party of Burgundians, and had to gather up
babies and what portable property they might have, and flee across the
frontier, where the good Lorrainers received and sheltered them, till
they could go back to their village, sacked and pillaged and devastated
in the meantime by the passing storm. Thus even in their humility and
inoffensiveness the Domremy villagers knew what war and its miseries
were, and the recollection would no doubt be vivid among the children,
of that half terrible, half exhilarating adventure, the fright and
excitement of personal participation in the troubles, of which,