g with the sound of the church
bells, and calling upon her to arise, and leave her village home and the
still forests of Domremy and her silly sheep, and go out into a world of
war and confusion and violence, and rally the broken armies of her
people, and lead them, like another Deborah or Judith, to victory.

That Jeanne heard these voices or believed she heard them, the
documentary evidence unearthed by Quicherat abundantly proves. It
proves, too, that she was cool, clear-headed, self-possessed, thoroughly
honest, and absolutely trustworthy in every relation of life. This being
her character, what did she do? She made her way from her solitude in
Lorraine to the court of the King at Chinon, with nothing but her faith
in her voices and her mission to sustain her; put herself into the
forefront of the battle of France, threw the English back into England,
and saw the successor of St.-Remi put the crown of Clovis upon the head
of a prince whom nobody but herself could have led or driven to Reims.

If anybody in Paris or elsewhere knowing all this feels quite sure that
Jeanne did not hear the voices which she believed herself to have
heard, he certainly is to be pitied. It may do him good to consider in
his closet what Lord Macaulay has said in a certain celebrated essay
concerning Sir Thomas More and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

A man may intelligently believe or disbelieve in the reality of the
voices heard by Jeanne, but no man who intelligently disbelieves in them
can need to be told that his disbelief rests upon no better scientific
ground than the belief of the man who believes in them.

To take the home of Jeanne d'Arc out of the keeping of devout women who
share the faith of Jeanne, that faith which, well or ill founded,
unquestionably saved France, was simply a stupid indecency. In the
keeping of the Sisters the home of Jeanne was a shrine. In any other
keeping it becomes a show.

The essential vulgarity of the performance is bad enough. But a
sharp-witted Domremy man who took me on to Bourlemont in his 'trap'
assured me, in a matter-of-fact way, that in the village the chief mover
in the affair was commonly believed to have got a good _pot-de-vin_ for
securing the position of keeper of the house for a person of his
acquaintance. This may have been a bit of village scandal, but such
performances naturally breed village scandals. Whether it was or was not
a 'job' in this sense, it certainly marks as lo