English king. They had vowed, it is said, to die or to dash. his crown from his head; one of them tore from it a fleurde-lys; but all perished on the spot. It was now at any rate that the Duke of Brabant hurried up to the fight. He came late enough; but he was still in good time to die. The brave prince had left his men behind him; he had not even put on his coat of arms; in its stead he took his banner, made a hole in it, passed his head through the hole, and threw himself upon the English, who slew him in an instant. Only the rear-guard now remained, and this soon melted away. A crowd of French knights, dismounted, but lifted from the ground by their serving men, had withdrawn from the battle, and given themselves up to the English. At this moment word was brought to King Henry that a body of Frenchmen were pillaging his baggage, while he saw in the French rear-guard some Bretons or Gascons, who seemed about to turn back upon him. Fear seized him for a moment, especially when he saw his followers embarrassed with so great a number of captives; and on the instant he gave orders that every man should kill his prisoner. Not a man obeyed. These soldiers without hose or shoes saw in their hands the greatest lords of France, and thought their fortunes already made. They were ordered in fact to ruin themselves. Then the King told off two hundred men to serve as butchers. It was an awful sight, says the historian, to see these poor disarmed folk, to whom quarter had just been given, and who now in cold blood were killed, beheaded, cut in pieces! . . . . After all, the alarm was a false one. It was but some pillagers of the neighbourhood, people of Agincourt, who in spite of their master, the Duke of Burgundy, had profited by the occasion. He punished them severely, although they had drawn from the spoil a rich sword for his son.

III.

JOAN OF ARC.

GREEN.

[The victory of Agincourt led Henry to a series of campaigns which finally laid all northern France at his feet. He was pushing to the conquest of the south when his sudden death left the crowns of France and England to a child, Henry the Sixth; and the factions which disputed for power in his name long hindered his brother, the Duke of Bedford, from completing his work. Meanwhile France south of the Loire held loyally to Charles the Seventh, who was not crowned as King but known as the Dauphin; but Charles showed as yet little power or activity; and when Bedford at last sent a weak force to besiege Orleans, the key of southern France, he did little for its help. Help came, however, from a peasant-maiden, Jeanne Darc, or Joan of Arc.]

JEANNE DARC was the child of a labourer of Domreiny, a little village in the neighbourhood of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the cottage where she was born began the great woods of the Vosges, where the children of Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung their flower garlands on the sacred trees, and sang songs to the "good people "1 who might not drink of the fountain because of their sins. Jeanne loved the forest; its birds and beasts came lovingly to her at her childish call. But at home men saw nothing in her but "a good girl, simple and pleasant in her ways," spinning and sewing by her mother's side while the other girls went to the fields; tender to the 1 The Fairies.

poor and sick, fond of church, and listening to the churchbell with a dreamy passion of delight which never left her. This quiet life was broken by the storm of war as it at last came home to Domremy. As the outcasts and wounded passed by the little village the young peasant girl gave them her bed and nursed them in their sickness. Her whole nature summed itself up in one absorbing passion: she 'had pity,' to use the phrase for ever on her lip, 'on the fair realm of France.' As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a maid from the Lorraine border should save the land; she saw visions; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blinding light, and bade her go to the help of the King and restore to him his realm. "Messire," answered the girl, "I am but a poor maiden; I know not how to ride to the wars, or to lead men-at-arms." The archangel returned to give her courage, and to tell her of "the pity" that there was in heaven for the fair realm of France.

The girl wept, and longed that the angels who appeared to her would carry her away, but her mission was clear. It was in vain that her father when he heard of her purpose swore to drown her ere she should go to the field with men-at-arms. It was in vain that the priest, the wise people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted, and refused to aid her. "I must go to the King," persisted the peasant girl," even if I wear my limbs to the very knees." "I had far rather rest and spin by my mother's side,” she pleaded with a touching pathos, "for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it." "And who," they asked, "is your Lord?” "He is God." Words such as these touched the rough captain at last: he took Jeanne by the hand and swore to lead her to the King. She reached Chinon2 in the opening of March, but here too

2 A castle south of the Loire, where Charles the Seventh held his Court.

she found hesitation and doubt. The theologians proved from their books that they ought not to believe her. "There is more in God's book than in yours," Jeanne answered simply. At last Charles himself received her in the midst of a throng of nobles and soldiers. "Gentle Dauphin," said the girl," my name is Jeanne the Maid. The Heavenly King sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and crowned in the town of Rheims,3 and you shall be lieutenant of the Heavenly King who is the King of France."

Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of surrender when Jeanne appeared in the French court, and a force was gathering under the Count of Dunois at Blois for a final effort at its relief. It was at the head of this force that Jeanne placed herself. The girl was in her eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all the vigour and activity of her peasant rearing, able to stay from dawn to nightfall on horseback without meat or drink. As she mounted her charger, clad in white armour from head to foot, with the great white banner studded with fleur-de-lys waving over her head, she seemed "a thing wholly divine, whether to see or hear." The ten thousand men-at-arms who followed her from Blois, rough plunderers whose only prayer was that of La Hire, "Sire Dieu, I pray you to do for La Hire what La Hire would do for you, were you captain-at-arms and he God," left off their oaths and foul living at her word and gathered round the altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humour helped her to manage the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over their camp-fires at an old warrior who had been so puzzled by her prohibition. of oaths that she suffered him still to swear by his bâton. For in the midst of her enthusiasm her good sense never

3 The crowning-place of the French kings, which was now in the hands of the foes of Charles, so that he could not be crowned there. 4 A noted captain of the time.

left her. The people crowded round her as she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and bringing crosses and chaplets to be blest by her touch. "Touch them your

self," she said to an old Dame Margaret; "your touch will be just as good as mine."

But her faith in her mission remained as firm as ever. "The Maid prays and requires you," she wrote to Bedford, "to work no more distraction in France but to come in her company to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Turk." "I bring you," she told Dunois, when he sallied out of Orleans to meet her after her two days' march from Blois, "I bring you the best aid ever sent to any one, the aid of the King of Heaven." The besiegers looked on overawed as she entered Orleans and, riding round the walls, bade the people shake off their fear of the forts which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the strongest remained, and then the council of war resolved to adjourn the attack. "You have taken your counsel," replied Jeanne, "and I take mine." Placing herself at the head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown open, and led them against the fort. Few as they were, the English fought desperately, and the Maid, who had fallen wounded while endeavouring to scale its walls, was borne into a vineyard, while Dunois sounded the retreat. "Wait a while!" the girl imperiously pleaded, "eat and drink! so soon as my standard touches the wall you shall enter the fort." It touched, and the assailants burst in. On the next day the siege was abandoned, and on the eighth of May the force which had conducted it withdrew in good order to the north.

In the midst of her triumph Jeanne still remained the