home, I was six years old. We lived close by the village church, and
the small garden of Joan's parents was behind the church. As to that
family there were Jacques d'Arc the father, his wife Isabel Romee; three
sons--Jacques, ten years old, Pierre, eight, and Jean, seven; Joan, four,
and her baby sister Catherine, about a year old. I had these
children for playmates from the beginning. I had some other playmates
besides--particularly four boys: Pierre Morel, Etienne Roze, Noel
Rainguesson, and Edmond Aubrey, whose father was maire at that time;
also two girls, about Joan's age, who by and by became her favorites;
one was named Haumetter, the other was called Little Mengette. These
girls were common peasant children, like Joan herself. When they grew
up, both married common laborers. Their estate was lowly enough, you
see; yet a time came, many years after, when no passing stranger,
howsoever great he might be, failed to go and pay his reverence to
those two humble old women who had been honored in their youth by the
friendship of Joan of Arc.

These were all good children, just of the ordinary peasant type;
not bright, of course--you would not expect that--but good-hearted and
companionable, obedient to their parents and the priest; and as they
grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and prejudices
got at second hand from their elders, and adopted without reserve; and
without examination also--which goes without saying. Their religion was
inherited, their politics the same. John Huss and his sort might find
fault with the Church, in Domremy it disturbed nobody's faith; and when
the split came, when I was fourteen, and we had three Popes at once,
nobody in Domremy was worried about how to choose among them--the Pope of
Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no Pope at all.
Every human creature in the village was an Armagnac--a patriot--and if we
children hotly hated nothing else in the world, we did certainly hate
the English and Burgundian name and polity in that way.

Chapter 2 The Fairy Tree of Domremy

OUR DOMREMY was like any other humble little hamlet of that remote time
and region. It was a maze of crooked, narrow lanes and alleys shaded and
sheltered by the overhanging thatch roofs of the barnlike houses. The
houses were dimly lighted by wooden-shuttered windows--that is, holes in
the walls which served for windows. The floors were dirt, and there was
very little furniture. Shee