ed
and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see it, the fit order
of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at her command. This I
honestly avow is to me the most incredible point in the story. I am not
disturbed by the apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable
appropriateness and fitness against which the imagination, at least,
has not a word to say. The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such
interpositions of heaven come, but that they come so seldom. But that
Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only
fault was that she went to church too often, should have the genius of a
soldier, is too bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring
influence leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful
with the rude artillery of the time, divining the better way in
strategy,--this is a wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet
according to Alencon, Dunois, and other military authorities, it was
true.

We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long
musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no longer,
nor what it was which induced her at last to select the confidant she
did. No doubt she must have been considering and weighing the matter for
a long time before she fixed upon the man who was her relation, yet
did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a townsman for the
extraordinary revelations she had to make. One of her neighbours, her
gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was godmother, had perhaps
at one moment seemed to her a likely helper. But he belonged to the
opposite party. "If you were not a Burgundian," she said to him once,
"there is something I might tell you." The honest fellow took this to
mean that she had some thought of marriage, the most likely and natural
supposition. It was at this moment, when her heart was burning with
her great secret, the voices urging her on day by day, and her power of
self-constraint almost at an end, that Providence sent Durand Laxart,
her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on some family visit. She would seem
to have taken advantage of the opportunity with eagerness, asking him
privately to take her home with him, and to explain to her father and
mother that he wanted her to take care of his wife. No doubt the girl,
devoured with so many thoughts, would have the air of requiring "a
change" as we say, and that the mother would be very ready to accept for
he