Extraordinary Women.

THE MAID OF ORLEANS.

T would be vain to search the illuminated volumes of the

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romance of history for a more varied, brilliant, and withal mournful page than that in which are recorded the struggle, victory, defeat, the hero-life, the martyr-death of the young peasant maiden who had the glory of saving France at a crisis of extremest peril. The worst that can be said of La Pucelle d'Orléans is, that she, a girl of fervid temperament, living in an age of unquestioning faith in supernatural manifestations, attributed the impulses of her own earnest soul-its inner, divine voices urging her to attempt a glorious and mighty enterprise-to a spiritual manifestation, to less ethereal utterances. The girlhood of the heroic maid comprises her whole history, for she perished in the dawn of her nineteenth summer. Though her days were short, she has achieved a renown that will endure as long as passionate love of country, and valiant enthusiasm in its defence, have power to enlist the sympathies and to command the admiration of mankind.

Jeanne Darc-Joan of Arc her name is commonly rendered, as if Arc were her birthplace or a locality in which she had become famous-was the fifth child and second

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daughter of Jacques Darc and Isabelle Romée. Her father was a small farmer living at Domremy, a village on the borders of Lorraine, about equidistant from Neufchâteau and Vaucouleurs, and there Jeanne, in 1412, was born. She had no school education whatever, and could neither read nor write. Few children of her station obtained any in those days, unless they happened to be received into a nunnery, but the quick intelligence, the enthusiastic, imaginative tone of mind for which she was early remarkable, readily acquired cultivation, and that too of a more stimulating kind than books can supply. Even in childhood she manifested a strong religious feeling, and when her daily drudgery in house or field, always diligently performed, was over, generally betook herself to the village church. There she recited her orisons, it is essential to note, before two portraits or representations of the Saints Catherine and Margaret, to whom the chapel was dedicated. To her these pictures were miracles of art; and the poetry of the Roman Catholic religion, so to speak, strongly excited and impressed her. Once at least in each week Joan would light a votive taper or hang a garland of fresh flowers before the image of the Mother of Christ, niched in a rustic shrine called the Hermitage of the Virgin. "Jeanne Darc," said the aged curé of Domremy, when questioned in after days respecting her character by the envoys of the Parliament of Poictiers,― "Jeanne Darc was the only girl I have known who always attended, and never needed confession." Local traditions helped to nourish her superstitious fancies. An ancient beech-tree in the neighbourhood of Domremy was supposed to be haunted by fairies that on moonlit nights danced beneath its wide-spreading branches, and cast elfin gifts into the stream which flowed close by its root; and the water

of the stream was believed to possess marvellous medicinal properties, derived, it was said, from coming in contact with the roots of this sacred tree. One of Joan's brothers declared that it was upon this enchanted spot his sister pris son fait; meaning, that here the conviction first flashed upon her that a local tradition, according to which "there would come from Bois Chenu (oak-forest, in the vicinage of Domremy, often resorted to by Joan) a virgin destined to save France," applied to herself; a statement, however, solemnly denied by Joan when defending her life before her judges at Rouen. France, by the time Jeanne Darc attained her sixteenth birthday, never stood in more pressing need of the promised champion. Henry the Fifth's victory at Agincourt, his subsequent successes, and his marriage with a French princess, transferred the succession of the crown of France to the English monarchs. The resistance which, after Henry the Fifth's death, Charles, the Dauphin of France, opposed to the pretensions of the infant son of the deceased king of England-our Henry the Sixth, was not very formidable. His armies were overborne by the energy of the Duke of Bedford and his warlike lieutenants, Salisbury, Talbot, Suffolk, and others, aided by their allies the Burgundians. With the daily-expected fall of the beleaguered city of Orleans-the only place of importance that then held out against the intrusive strangers-the last chance remaining to Charles of vindicating the independence of France and his own right to the crown would, it was generally concluded, pass away. In medieval, as in modern Gaul, the spirit of patriotic nationality, irrespective of forms of government, burned fiercest in the veins of her gallant peasantry. It thus happened, that whilst Rouen and other northern towns were essentially English strongholds, and the

populace of Paris, oddly as it sounds, furious partisans of the Anglo-Burgundian confederacy, the hamlets of France continued an unwavering defiance. They replied proudly to the exultant cries of triumph which rang over their trampled, desolated country; and none more enthusiastically than the villagers of Domremy, amongst whom there was but one partisan of the foreigners-an old man whom Jeanne Darc "often wished might die, if God so pleased."

Mendicant friars, soldiers disabled in the wars, impostors trading upon fictitious hurts, pedlers, travellers, and wanderers of various conditions and pursuits, were the peripatetic newsmen of those days; and when one of these halted at the hamlet to exchange his budget of true or simulated tidings for the hospitality or alms of the villagers, Joan was ever amongst the auditory, listening with suspended breath to the sad details of national calamity and humiliation, and at length eliminating from the mass of confused, contradictory intelligence, the one paramount fact that Charles's hope of being crowned at Rheims by the consecrating hand of the Church, after the custom of his ancestors, depended entirely upon the successful defence of the city of Orleans! One Sunday evening, whilst sitting in her father's garden, after having listened to the exciting narrative of a disabled soldier till she could bear it no longer, a brilliant light shone round about her, and a voice, announcing itself to be that of the Archangel Michael, bade her continue to be good and virtuous, and she would be called to the performance of great deeds. This was all the voice then uttered; but not long afterwards, whilst tending her father's sheep, at about noon, on a sultry day, she again heard the voice, and, moreover, saw the form of the Angel of Battle, who on this occasion was accompanied by the two saints Catherine and Mar