behind it rise low hills, now bare, once covered with forests of oak and beech. Its people are, as they have always been, grave and God-fearing; there is a saying about them that they "seldom die and never lie." They have always been farming people, growing corn, planting vineyards, raising cattle. In old times, as to-day, the cattle fed on the rich pastures of the river valley; the village children tended them by day, and at nightfall drove them back to the little stone-walled farms.
The houses were "small, of one or two or three rooms, and sometimes there was a low garret overhead. The furniture was simple: a few stools and benches, a table or a pair of trestles with a board to cover them, a few pots and pans of copper, and some pewter dishes. The housewife had in her chest two or three sheets for her feather-bed, two or three kerchiefs, a cloak, a piece of cloth ready to be made into whatever garment was most needed, and a few buttons and pins. Often there was a sword in the corner, or a spear or an arblast, but the peasants were peaceful, seldom waged war, and often were unable even to resist attack."6
The people of Domrémy were vassals of the lords of Bourlemont, whose castle still overlooks the Meuse valley. The relationship was a friendly one in the main. The dues were heavy, to be sure. "Twice a year a tax must be paid on each animal drawing a cart; the lord's harvest must be gathered, his hay cut and stored, firewood drawn to his house, fowls and beef and bacon furnished to his table. Those who had no carts must carry his letters."7
But this was the common lot of French peasants. In return, the lord of Bourlemont recognized certain responsibilities for them in time of trouble. His own castle was four miles distant, but in the village itself he owned a little fortress called the Castle of the Island, which the villagers guarded for him in time of peace and where they could take refuge in time of danger. Sometimes even, the Seigneur seems to have had pangs of conscience concerning his villagers, as when, in 1399, the then lord provided in his will that "if the people of Domrémy can show that they have been unjustly compelled to give him two dozen goslings, restitution shall be made."8
In one of the stone cottages (standing still, though overmuch restored) lived, early in the fifteenth century, Jacques d'Arc and Isabel his wife. Jacques was a responsible man, liked and respected by his neighbors. As dean of the village, he inspected weights and measures, commanded the watch, collected the taxes. Dame Isabel had enough learning to teach her five children their Credo, Pater and Ave, but probably little more; she spun and wove, and was doubtless a good house-mother. With four of the children we have little concern; our affair is with the fifth, a daughter born (probably) in January, 1412, and named Jeanne or Jehane. All her names are beautiful: "Jeanne la Pucelle," "the Maid of Orleans," "the Maid of France"; most familiar of all to our Anglo-Saxon ears, "Joan of Arc."
Joan was three years old when Agincourt was lost and won. It was a far cry from upper Normandy to the province of Bar where Domrémy lay; the Meuse flowed tranquilly by, but no echoes of the English war reached it at this time. Life went peacefully on; the children, as I have said, drove the cattle to the river meadows, frolicked beside the clear stream, gathering flowers, singing the immemorial songs of France; and as evening closed, drove them home again to the farm: or they tended their sheep on the Common, or followed their pigs through the oak forest that stretched behind and above it. In the forest lurked romance and adventure, possible danger. There were wolves there; no doubt about that. There were also, most people thought, fairies, both good and bad. Near the village itself stood the great beech tree known as "the Ladies' Tree," or the "Fairies' Tree," with its fountain close by, the Fountain of the Gooseberry Bushes, where people came to be healed of various diseases. Another great tree was called "Le Beau Mai," and was even more mystical. Who knows from what far Druid time came the custom of dancing around its huge trunk and hanging garlands on its gnarled boughs? They were pious garlands now, dedicated to Our Lady of Domrémy; but it was whispered that the fairies still held their revels there. The lord of Bourlemont and his lady sometimes joined the dancing; had not his ancestor loved a fairy when time was, and been loved of her? They never failed to join the rustic festival that was held under the Fairy Tree on the "Sunday in Lent called Laetere, or des Fontaines." One of Joan's godmothers said she had seen the fairies: Joan never did. She hung garlands, with the other little girls; danced with them hand in hand, singing. One would like to know the songs they sang. Was one of them the quaint ditty whose opening lines head this chapter?
"Quand j'étais chez mon père, petite Jeanneton,
La glin glon glon,
M'envôit a la fontaine pour remplir mon cruchon!"
Or was it the story of that vigneron who had a daughter whom he would give to neither poor nor rich, lon la, and whom he finally saw carried off by a cavalier of Hungary,
"La prit et l'importa,
Sur son cheval d'Hongrie, lon la!"
A warning to selfish Papas. Or did there come to Domrémy, wandering down the Meuse as the wind wanders, some of those wild, melancholy sea-songs that the Corsairs and the fishermen sang, as they sharpened their cutlasses or drew their nets in harbor?
"Il était trois mâtelots de Grois,
Embarqués sur le Saint Francois,
Tra la derida la la la!"
Olivier Basselin, of Val-de-Vire, died when Joan was six years old, but his songs are alive to-day: gay little songs, called from the place of their origin "Vaux-de-Vire," whence the modern word vaudeville. Perhaps Joan and her playmates sang his songs; I do not know.
In later, sadder years, Joan's enemies made, as we shall see, all that could be made out of these simple woodland frolics. "Le Beau Mai," which in spring was "fair as lily flowers, the leaves and branches sweeping the ground"9 became a tree of doom, a gathering-place of witches, of worse than witches. Joan herself, hanging her pretty garlands to the Virgin, as sweet a child-figure as lives in history, became a dark sorceress, ringed with flame, summoning to her aid the fiends of the pit. We need not yet turn that page; we may see her as her neighbors saw her, a grave, brown-eyed child, beloved by old and young: industrious, as all her people were; guiding the plough, watching the sheep or cattle, gathering flowers, acorns, fagots: or indoors, spinning, sewing, learning all household work under her mother's guidance. She loved to go to church, and hastened thither when the bell rang for mass; preferring it to dance or play.
"There was not a better girl," the neighbors said, "in the two villages (Domrémy and Greux). For the love of God she gave alms; and if she had money would have given it to the curé for masses to be said."
The village beadle being a trifle lax in his ways, she would bribe him with little presents to ring the church bell punctually. The children did not always understand her, would laugh sometimes when she left the games and went to kneel in the little gray church; but the sick and the poor understood her well enough. She loved nursing, and had a light hand with the sick; they never forgot her care of them; it was her way, if any poor homeless body came wandering by (there were many such in France then, almost as many as to-day) to give up her bed to the vagrant and sleep on the hearth all night.
Joan was eight years old when the Treaty of Troyes was signed, by which France virtually passed into the hands of England. Not long after, the miseries of war invaded the quiet valley of the Meuse; Burgundian and Armagnac began to burn, harry and slay here as they had long been doing elsewhere. The latter were headed by Stephen de Vignolles, better known as La Hire, a man as brave as he was brutal, and with a spark of humor which lights his name yet on the clouded page of the time. It is told how one day, starting out to relieve Montargis, besieged by the English, he met a priest on the way, and thinking it might be well to add spiritual armor to "helm and hauberk's twisted mail," demanded absolution. The priest demurred; confession must come first. "I have no time for that!" said La Hire, "I'm
Lowell. "Joan of Arc," p. 15.
Lowell. "Joan of Arc," p. 18.
Luce. "Jeanne d'Arc à Domrémy," p. 19.
Gerardin.
