-freebooter, half-monk. Moreover--"

"Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's
intervention was a good thing for France."

"Why not?"

"I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the
most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by
the very people they came to protect. The Hundred Years' War, in effect,
was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not
got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition.
Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her
knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would
have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England
and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed
one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have
been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far
as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes,
instincts, and customs were alike. On the other hand, the coronation of
a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France,
separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible
nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying
us--inseparably, alas!--with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed
munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at
all, but Spaniards and Italians. In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne
d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic,
perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race--Devil take it!"

Durtal raised his eyebrows.

"My, my," he said, laughing. "Your remarks prove to me that you are
interested in 'our own, our native land.' I should never have suspected
it of you."

"Of course you wouldn't," said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette.
"As has so often been said, 'My own, my native land is wherever I happen
to feel at home.' Now I don't feel at home except with the people of the
North. But I interrupted you. Let's get back to the subject. What were
you saying?"

"I forget. Oh, yes. I was saying that the Maid had completed her task.
Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no
answer. What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about
her death? We cannot tell. We know that he was lurking in the vicinity
of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude f