hing. To the best of my
ability I have studied figures carved and painted, not exactly in
France--for there, in those days of misery and death, art was little
practised--but in Flanders, in Burgundy, in Provence, where the
workmanship is often in a style at once affected and _naif_, and
frequently beautiful. As I gazed at the old miniatures, they seemed to
live before me, and I saw the nobles in the absurd magnificence of
their _etoffes a tripes_,[143] the dames and the damoiselles somewhat
devilish with their horned caps and their pointed shoes; clerks seated
at the desk, men-at-arms riding their chargers and merchants their
mules, husbandmen performing from April till March all the tasks of
the rural calendar; peasant women, whose broad coifs are still worn by
nuns. I drew near to these folk, who were our fellows, and who yet
differed from us by a thousand shades of sentiment and of thought; I
lived their lives; I read their hearts.

[Footnote 143: Imitation velvet.]

It is hardly necessary to say that there exists no authentic
representation of Jeanne. In the art of the fifteenth century all that
relates to her amounts to very little: hardly anything remains--a
small piece of _bestion_ tapestry, a slight pen-and-ink figure on a
register, a few illuminations in manuscripts of the reigns of Charles
VII, Louis XI, and Charles VIII, that is all. I have found it
necessary to contribute to this very meagre iconography of Jeanne
d'Arc, not because I had anything to add to it, but in order to
expunge the contributions of the forgers of that period. In Appendix
IV, at the end of this work, will be found the short article in which
I point out the forgeries which, for the most part, are already old,
but had not been previously denounced. I have limited my researches to
the fifteenth century, leaving to others the task of studying those
pictures of the Renaissance in which the Maid appears decked out in
the German fashion, with the plumed hat and slashed doubtlet of a
Saxon ritter or a Swiss mercenary.[144] I cannot say who served as a
prototype for these portraits, but they closely resemble the woman
accompanying the mercenaries in _La Danse des morts_, which Nicholas
Manuel painted at Berne, on the wall of the Dominican Monastery,
between 1515 and 1521.[145] In _le Grand Siecle_ Jeanne d'Arc becomes
Clorinda, Minerva, Bellona in ballet costume.[146]

[Footnote 144: See the picture of 1581, preserved in the Orleans
Museum a