self had transgressed this universal custom but a little
while before, by giving up Franquet d'Arras to his prosecutors. But
Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted criminal, robber, and
destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have departed from the military
laws of right and wrong while everything in the country was under the
hasty arbitration of war. No one, however, so far as we know, produces
this matter of Franquet as a precedent in her own case. From the first
moment of her seizure there was no question of the custom and privilege
of warfare. She was taken as a wild animal might have been taken, the
only doubt being how to make the most signal example of her. Vengeance
in the gloomy form of the Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such
word as ransom was breathed from her own side, none was demanded, none
was offered. Her case is at once separated from every other.

Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed to
be the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to succour
and help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something of the
subtle jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger side, but
yet always existing, in the abrogation of every law of chivalry as well
as of warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is indeed of the highest
strain of generosity who can bear to be beaten by a woman. And all the
seething, agitated world of France had been beaten by this girl. The
English and Burgundians, in the ordinary sense of the word, had been
overcome in fair field, forced to fly before her; the French, her own
side, had experienced an even more penetrating downfall by having the
honours of victory taken from them, she alone winning the day where they
had all failed. This is bitterer, perhaps, than merely to be compelled
to raise a siege or to fail in a fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions,
but the praise was to Jeanne who never struck a blow. Such great hearts
as Dunois, such a courteous prince as Alencon, were too magnanimous to
feel, or at least to resent, the grievance; they seconded her and fought
under her with a nobility of mind and disinterestedness beyond praise;
but it was not to be supposed that the common mass of the French
captains were like these; she had wronged and shamed them by taking the
glory from them, as much as she had shamed the English by making those
universal victors fly before her. The burghers whom she had rescued, the