hy of Brittany to the Count of Montfort,
De Clisson got embroiled none the less with his suzerain, who had given
John Chandos the castle of Gavre, near Nantes. "Devil take me, my lord,"
said Oliver to him, "if ever Englishman shall be my neighbor;" and he
went forthwith and attacked the castle, which he completely demolished.
The hatreds of women whose passions have made them heroines of war are
more personal and more obstinate than those of the roughest warriors.
Accordingly the war for the duchy of Brittany, in the fourteenth century,
has been called, in history, the war of the three Joans.

This war was, on both sides, remarkable for cruelty. If Joan de Clisson
gave to the sword all the people in a castle, belonging to Charles of
Blois, to which she had been admitted on a supposition of pacific
intentions, Charles of Blois, on his side, finding in another castle
thirty knights, partisans of the Count of Montfort, had their heads shot
from catapults over the walls of Nantes, which he was besieging, and, at
the same time that he saved from pillage the churches of Quimper, which
he had just taken, he allowed his troops to massacre fourteen hundred
inhabitants, and had his principal prisoners beheaded. One of them,
being a deacon, he caused to be degraded, and then handed over to the
populace, who stoned him. It is characteristic of the middle ages that
in them the ferocity of barbaric times existed side by side with the
sentiments of chivalry and the fervor of Christianity: so slow is the
race of man to eschew evil, even when it has begun to discern and relish
good. War was then the passion and habitual condition of men. They made
it without motive as well as without prevision, in a transport of feeling
or for the sake of pastime, to display their strength or to escape from
listlessness; and, whilst making it, they abandoned themselves without
scruple to all those deeds of violence, vengeance, brutal anger, or
fierce delight, which war provokes. At the same time, however, the
generous impulses of feudal chivalry, the sympathies of Christian piety,
tender affections, faithful devotion, noble tastes, were fermenting in
their souls; and human nature appeared with all its complications, its
inconsistencies, and its irregularities, but also with all its wealth of
prospective development. The three Joans of the fourteenth century were
but eighty years in advance of the Joan of Arc of the fifteenth; and the
knights of C