Joan herself. After brief rest from these successes, the white armour was again put on, and the black war-horse mounted, and the heroine again was on the watch for new victories. In the meantime, the envy of a royal favourite in vain endeavoured to defeat her plans: her services were too momentous to be cast aside before her projected work was done. City after city opened its gates to her either in fear or faith, and even Rheims itself dared hazard no resistance. The last impediment to the coronation of the Dauphin was cleared away by this event. On the very next day the magnificent ceremony, in all its time-honoured detail, was performed. But even there, as the archbishop placed the crown upon the monarch's head, and the acclamations of the multitude resounded and re-echoed through the glorious edifice, it was not upon the unrivalled beauty of the building itself that the eye and heart of that admiring crowd was fixed-not upon the king himself, in the new pride of his unhoped-for triumph-not upon the knightly nobles or the lordly priests who were around him, but upon her-the peasant-girl of Domremy-who had come to the Dauphin in his misery, and inspired him with hope and strength-who had fought a way for him through victory after victory to the consummation of that hour-who had stood beside him with her mysterious standard unfurled at the high altar throughout the ceremonies of the coronation, and who now, as the solemn service closed, cast herself at his feet, in a flood of tears, exclaiming,— "Gentle Dauphin, now God's will is done, which commanded me to raise the siege of Orleans, and to lead you into this city, Rheims, to receive your crown; thus shewing that you are the true king, to whom this realm of France by right belongs." After these words Joan withdrew. Amongst the brilliant guests at the royal banquet, her place was empty. Whilst the rejoicings of the court were at their height, she had retired to an obscure inn of the city, and there-in the company of a peasant bent by toil and sorrow, yet beaming for the time with an unwonted joy-was rejoicing in a better manner in the sweet effusions of her natural love. That peasant was her father, who had just arrived in Rheims in time to be, probably, the most delighted of that vast assemblage of spectators of the common glory of his king, his country, and his child. She had departed from their hamlethome a poor and friendless maiden, intent upon an enterprise of vastest import and extent; and he found her now triumphant at the right hand of princes, and the idol of a liberated land. But there was no change in her towards him she was still the same gentle, pious, loving daughter, whom he had cherished in their obscurity, unspoiled by conquest and by fame, —unaltered, in a word, except in having become even more worthy of the kisses, tears, and blessings that he lavished on her.

According to the common version of her history, it was unwillingly, and without her former confidence in a Divine support, that Joan continued with the army after the coronation of the king at Rheims. Writers as learned and exact as Michelet and Lord Mahon have adopted this view of that which she regarded as her mission; but M. Desjardins distinctly and decidedly objects to it, on the several grounds of an examination of facts, an acquaintance with the character of Joan, and the authority and evidence of witnesses. If she had been known to entertain this wish, there was, in his opinion, influence enough at court unfavourable to her to have prevented any opposition to a course so much in harmony with what her enemies desired. She was aware, too, as M. Desjardins urges, of the importance of her presence as a source of inspiration to the army of the king, and of discouragement and dread to that of the invaders. And, besides GENT. MAG. VOL. XLVII.

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this, our author refers to no fewer than five definite authorities for the design, on Joan's part, of not ceasing from her efforts till the last enemy was driven from the land she loved. The inglorious campaign in which the king approached within sight of the spires of his capital, yet would not sanction one bold stroke to win it, was not wanting in manifestations of the still living zeal and faith of the heroic maid. More than once, it is probable, the prize might have been grasped, if she had not been thwarted and opposed by craftier or more cowardly advisers. In the one assault, made without her approval, at the Porte Saint-Honoré, there was no remissness in her exertions, no falling-off from her accustomed ardour, courage, skill, or heroism. Wounded by a cross-bow shot, she still incited her followers to persist in their attack, and was unwillingly carried away from the trench when the troops retreated from it at nightfall. On the next morning, she had already completed, under better auspices, her preparations for a new assault, when a fatal order from the king commanded her division to return to Saint-Denis. Before the army had departed thence upon its backward route to the banks of the Loire, Joan deposited her armour on the altar, before the martyr's shrine; but the marvellous sword was not amongst these tributes of devotion. It had been broken previously, not in honourable warfare, but in driving off, in a fit of indignation, some disreputable camp-followers who had dared, in spite of her emphatic prohibition, to intrude amongst the troops.

From this time forth the shadow of misfortune grows and darkens over Joan's lot. The courtiers who were unfriendly to her had gained an ascendancy over the king, and it was their policy to destroy her influence by keeping her inactive. The post of danger with the duke of Bourbon was refused her. She was not even permitted to proceed with her good friend the Duke of Alençon, in his intended campaign in Normandy. One other evanescent gleam, indeed, flashed over her. The royal consent had been obtained to her accompanying the Lieutenant-General D'Albret in an expedition against some strong positions on the Loire, and, in an assault on Pierre-la-Montier, a brilliant victory again bore witness to her skill. But the conquerors, we are told, "were in such a state of destitution, that it was with great difficulty Joan could save even the church from pillage." It was on account of this destitution, which extended in a wintry season to an absolute want of food, and which the monarch was in vain solicited to give relief to, that the army was obliged, after unavailing attacks throughout a month, to retire from La Charité-to which also they had been encouraged to lay siege.

For a few months after these events Joan was an idle but impatient appendage of the French court. During this interval the king granted letters of nobility and armorial bearings to her and to her family; but the maiden herself, "whose nobility came from God," was never known to avail herself of the glittering distinction. Her desire was, not for poor and perishable honours, but for active service in the field against the enemies of France. After many fruitless efforts to infuse some energy into the king's mind, the despairing heroine departed alone to seek new scenes of usefulness. Her name was still a word of terror to the enemy, and of encouragement and hope to those she led. At Lagny she preserved the town from a Burgundian freebooter, exterminating his dreaded band, and bringing in the leader himself a captive to her countrymen. Her own captivity was near at hand. Compiègne was at that time encompassed by the armies of the Duke of Burgundy, and Joan, having made her way into

it with a few men-at-arms, roused the courage of the inhabitants to risk a sortie against one of the divisions of the army which invested the town. The Burgundian generals hastened up with their supports, and the followers of Joan were soon surrounded by a far superior force. In this emergency they became alarmed, and began to fight their way back towards the city. The utmost efforts and entreaties of Joan were ineffectual in preventing this retreat. The best that she could do was to protect it; and she accomplished this with so much heroic intrepidity, that all her partisans regained the town. Ever nearest to the enemy, she had herself approached the drawbridge, when she was dragged from her horse by an archer, and made prisoner by a man-at-arms. The tidings of this great triumph were rapidly transmitted through the land by the Duke of Burgundy. To the Burgundians, the English, and the councillors around the French king, no event within the possibilities of war could have afforded more delight: the most formidable by far of those they had to strive against, the ablest and the most earnest, was powerless in their hands, and the charm that had exercised an influence so fatal to their schemes was broken. To the sunny land she was devoted to, there could have happened nothing more calamitous or more irreparable.

No precautions were omitted by the captors to keep fast their important prize. Confined successively in the castles of Beaulieu and Beaurevoir, Joan was treated in each with quite as much courtesy as was consistent with a secure guardianship. She attempted to escape from each: from Beaulieu, by a simple artifice which failed her; and from Beaurevoir, by the desperate chance of jumping from the summit of the castle-wall. During her long imprisonment in these fortresses, her heart was constant to the cause of France, and her faith was strong that He who had given victory to her arms would not permit the cities she had freed to fall again into the power of an unrelenting foe. But no generous thought for her existed in the breast of him whose kingdom and whose crown had been redeemed by her devotion. Whilst still a ransom might have saved her, she was allowed by him whose matchless benefactress she had been, to linger in captivity unnoticed and unremembered. Not so, however, was she forgotten by her enemies. By the zealous intervention of the Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, a bargain was concluded between the captor of the heroine and the English king, and Joan was transferred in cousequence to one of the dungeons in the fortress of Rouen. The young King of England, the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Warwick, and the Bishop of Winchester assembled in the same ancient city, intent upon a process as humane as that of bloodhounds which have brought some noble game to bay.

The proceedings against Joan were admirably well contrived to secure her condemnation. The management of the process was undertaken with alacrity by that Bishop of Beauvais who had already made himself the prime agent in selling her to the English, and who was now to make himself infamous for ever as her prosecutor and her judge. Nothing in the blackest page of history-no violation of justice ever perpetrated by a timeserving miscreant on the judgment-seat-no meanness, cozenage, or cruelty that ever was resorted to by an unprincipled oppressor of the innocent-no heartlessness that ever was conspicuously acted under the venerable guise of law-exceeds in its atrocity that of this mitred scoundrel in his fierce and foul pursuance of the predetermined victim. So loathsome does the

record of his stern malignity make him, that the reader learns with a species of gratification like that which attends the final dispensation of dramatic justice to some criminal on the tragic stage, that he was at last defrauded by his employers of the stipulated wages of his sin. His misdoings on the trial shew the darker from their striking contrast to the artless and devout excellence of the acccused, more than all that had gone before in her brief and chequered life-more than the sweetness of her childish days in the pleasant valley of Domremy, where all her labours and her cares were transfigured and made beautiful by charity and holinessmore than her solitary musings, and her colloquies with angels, and the high and resolute purpose issuing from her spiritual struggles-more than the adventurous daring and the marvellous security of her journey to the Dauphin-more, even, than her courage and her conquests in the battlefield is the moral beauty of her bearing in the midst of these proceedings. unequalled, and above the nobleness that we are wont to meet with in the highest and the best of humankind. Brought, day by day, into the judg ment hall, from a dungeon where her body had been bound in chains, and her maiden delicacy wounded by the grossest wrongs; set in opposition to the ablest and most learned men her persecutor could collect around him; cajoled, ensnared, and threatened; assailed by arguments of terror and temptation, the unlettered peasant-girl, uncounselled and alone, heroically stood her ground as she had stood it in the face of axe, and bow, and sword, and so triumphed over her unjust judges in the strength of her purity and faith, that it was at last only by an outrage on their own rules of law that the condemnation of their victim was achieved.

M. Desjardins enters with considerable fulness of detail into the proceedings against Joan, and quotes largely from the inquisitorial questionings by which, according to the custom of French courts, it was endeavoured to make the defendant criminate herself. But these endeavours failed most signally. It is wonderful, indeed, how the simplicity of her strong and pure mind baffled the ingenious artifices of an experienced and unscrupulous guile. The sagest casuist could not have escaped from ensnaring questions more dexterously than this ignorant maiden was enabled to do by her instinctive honesty and piety of heart. In contemplating the invariable propriety of her replies, or of her refusals or avoidance of replies, we might in fact be almost tempted to become ourselves believers in that supernatural guidance which she laid claim to with undeviating constancy and confidence to the very end.

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But her doom, as we have already said, was fixed beforehand, and the eloquence of an angel's tongue would have been of no avail. Her signature to a form of abjuration, written hastily, and containing only seven or eight lines," was extorted from her by the threat of death amidst the flames; and then the sentence of perpetual imprisonment, feeding on the water of agony and the bread of pain, was pronounced upon her for the heresy and sorcery which it had pleased her judges to allege against her. By a wretched fraud, intended to defame her, the formula of abjuration was afterward exchanged for another containing "not fewer than fifty lines;" and the sentence of imprisonment, by means of a brutality without parallel, was made to give place to the more terrible decree of death. Amongst the sins she had been guilty of was that of wearing male clothes, which she had been at last compelled to put aside for those appropriate to her sex ; but within four days of her condemnation she was found bruised, and wounded,

and in tears, and habited again in the obnoxious garb. By what abominable outrage she had been so injured was known afterwards, but never from her lips: how she had been compelled by the machinations of her guards to resume her man's attire, she did, upon the eve of execution, tell. To the merciless Bishop of Beauvais, wanting only a pretext, this change of dress was a relapse into the heresy she had abjured, and the penalty of that relapse was death. The bleeding body was within the inhuman persecutor's power, but even then the heroic spirit was soaring immeasurably high above his grasp. There in the midst of the complicated grief, and pain, and helplessness that had been cast by the cruelty of demons round her-the suffering girl exclaimed to her tormentor,—

"As for what is in the note of abjuration, I did not understand it; what I have done is from fear of the flames. Since that day, the saints have come to me, and they have told me that the treason which I had consented was a great pity, and that to save my life I damned myself, and that it was very true that it was God who had sent me. Whatever I have been made to revoke, I affirm here that I have never done anything against God or the faith b."

The bishop's success, in this interview, had been beyond his expectation. He hurried from his victim's presence, in order to give a full vent to his delight, that she was lost without recall, and that his own wages of wickedness were at last completely earned.

Slowly the poor girl was forced to yield up her lingering hopes of intervention from the kingdom and the king she had so faithfully served. As her dependence on human gratitude died away, the higher trust that she had always clung to became, if it were possible, deeper and dearer to her, as the one solitary light amidst her grief and desolation. Her saintly voices, with their last utterance, summoned her into their own abiding-place in Paradise. Her departure was not long delayed. Within a week of the first sentence-on the 30th of May, 1431-the old market-place of Rouen was crowded, at an early hour of the morning, with a vast assemblage waiting eagerly to witness the last scene of her memorable life. The pile was ready, and the false and scandalous inscription on the stake, when, as it was just eight o'clock, the procession, with its ample escort of English soldiery, arrived. In a solemn voice the Bishop of Beauvais pronounced the sentence of expulsion from the Church; and then, humbling herself upon her knees in tears and prayers to God, the poor maiden, with her dying voice, protested that she still put confidence in her revelations, and that she had "nothing to revoke or to retract." At her request a crucifix was handed to her, and with this pressed against her heart, and the name of the immaculate Virgin, and of Jesus, on her lips, she died amidst the flames. What remained of her afterwards was cast into the Seine.

In his concluding section, M. Desjardins, formally and with admirable force, sets forth, on several grounds, the injustice of the sentence against Joan, and the barbarity of the fate she was consigned to. But what is infinitely more interesting than this, is the account he gives us of the revision of that sentence, twenty-five years afterwards, by a tribunal specially appointed to examine all the witnesses who could throw any light upon the

"Pour ce qui est en la cédulle de l'abjuration, je ne l'entendois pas; ce que j'ay faict c'est de paour du feu. Depuis ce jour, les sainctes sont venues à moy, et elles m'ont dit que c'estoit grand pitié de la trayson que j'avoie consentye, et que, pour saulver ma vie, je me damprois, et qu'il estoit bien vray que c'estoit Dieu qui m'avoit envoyée. Quelque chose qu'on m'ait fait révoquer, j'affirme icy que je n'ay jamais rien fait contre Dieu ou la foy.”—Vie die Jeanne d'Arc, p. 200.