x Rabbe, _Jeanne d'Arc en Angleterre_, Paris, 1891,
p. 12.]

[Footnote 895: Monstrelet, vol. iv, p. 112. Vallet de Viriville,
_Histoire de Charles VII_, vol. i, p. 340.]

[Footnote 896: Le P. Marcellin Fornier, _Histoire des Alpes, Maritimes
ou Cottiennes_, vol. ii, pp. 315 _et seq._]

To summon the English and French to take the cross together, was to
proclaim that after ninety-one years of violence and crime the cycle
of secular warfare had come to an end. It was to bid Christendom
return to the days when Philippe de Valois and Edward Plantagenet
promised the Pope to join together against the infidel.

But when the Maid invited the English to unite with the French in a
holy and warlike enterprise, it is not difficult to imagine with what
kind of a reception the _Godons_ would greet such an angelic summons.
And at the time of the siege of Orleans, the French on their side had
good reasons for not taking the cross with the _Coues_.[897]

[Footnote 897: In all extant copies of the Letter to the English,
except that of the Trial, at the passage "you may come" [_Encore que
pourrez venir_] the text is completely illegible.]

The learned did not greatly appreciate the style of this letter. The
Bastard of Orleans thought the words very simple; and a few years
later a good French jurist pronounced it coarse, heavy, and badly
arranged.[898] We cannot aspire to judge better than the jurist and
the Bastard, both men of erudition. Nevertheless, we wonder whether it
were not that her manner of expression seemed bad to them, merely
because it differed from the style of legal documents. True it is that
the letter from Blois indicates the poverty of the French prose of
that time when not enriched by an Alain Chartier; but it contains
neither term nor expression which is not to be met with in the good
authors of the day. The words may not be correctly ordered, but the
style is none the less vivacious. There is nothing to suggest that the
writer came from the banks of the Meuse; no trace is there of the
speech of Lorraine or Champagne.[899] It is clerkly French.

[Footnote 898: _Per unam litteram suo materno idiomate confectam,
verbis bene simplicibus_, _Trial_, vol. iv, p. 7, evidence of the
Bastard of Orleans. Mathieu Thomassin, _Registre Delphinal_, in the
_Trial_, vol. iv, p. 306.]

[Footnote 899: On the contrary it contains forms which would never
have been penned by a native of Picardy, Burgundy, Lorraine, or
Champagne,