f Joanna was full of profound
suggestions to a heart that listened for the stealthy steps of change and
fear that too surely were in motion. But if the place were grand, the
times, the burthen of the times, was far more so. The air overhead in its
upper chambers were _hurtling_ with the obscure sound; was dark with sullen
fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred and thirty
years. The battle of Agincourt in Joanna's childhood had re-opened the
wounds of France. Crecy and Poictiers, those withering overthrows for the
chivalry of France, had been tranquillized by more than half a century; but
this resurrection of their trumpet wails made the whole series of battles
and endless skirmishes take their stations as parts in one drama. The
graves that had closed sixty years ago, seemed to fly open in sympathy
with a sorrow that echoed their own. The monarchy of France labored in
extremity, rocked and reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of
monsoons. The madness of the poor king (Charles VI.) falling in at such a
crisis, like the case of women laboring in childbirth during the storming
of a city, trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story of
the incident which had immediately occasioned the explosion of this
madness--the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself,
coming out of a forest at noon-day, laying his hand upon the bridle of
the king's horse, checking him for a moment to say, "Oh, King, thou art
betrayed," and then vanishing no man knew whither, as he had appeared for
no man knew what--fell in with the universal prostration of mind that laid
France on her knees as before the slow unweaving of some ancient prophetic
doom. The famines, the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the
peasantry up and down Europe, these were chords struck from the same
mysterious harp; but these were transitory chords. There had been others
of deeper and more sonorous sound. The termination of the Crusades, the
destruction of the Templars, the Papal interdicts, the tragedies caused or
suffered by the House of Anjou, by the Emperor--these were full of a more
permanent significance; but since then the colossal figure of feudalism was
seen standing as it were on tiptoe at Crecy for flight from earth: that was
a revolution unparalleled; yet _that_ was a trifle by comparison with the
more fearful revolutions that were mining below the Church. By her own
internal schisms, by the abominable