arguing the case physiologically) “she had none of the Lorrainian asperity;” no, it seems she had only “the gentleness of Champagne, its simplicity mingled with sense and acuteness, as you find it in Joinville.”  All these things she had; and she was worth a thousand Joinvilles, meaning either the prince so called, or the fine old crusader.  But still, though I love Joanna dearly, I cannot shut my eyes entirely to the Lorraine element of “asperity” in her nature.  No; really now, she must have had a shade of that, though very slightly developed—­a mere soupcon, as French cooks express it in speaking of cayenne pepper, when she caused so many of our English throats to be cut.  But could she do less?  No; I always say so; but still you never saw a person kill even a trout with a perfectly “Champagne” face of “gentleness and simplicity,” though, often, no doubt, with considerable “acuteness.”  All your cooks and butchers wear a Lorraine cast of expression.

These disputes, however, turn on refinements too nice.  Domremy stood upon the frontiers; and, like other frontiers, produced a mixed race representing the cis and the trans.  A river (it is true) formed the boundary line at this point—­the river Meuse; and that, in old days, might have divided the populations; but in these days it did not—­there were bridges, there were ferries, and weddings crossed from the right bank to the left.  Here lay two great roads, not so much for travellers, that were few, as for armies that were too many by half.  These two roads, one of which was the great high road between France and Germany, decussated at this very point; which is a learned way of saying that they formed a St. Andrew’s cross, or letter X. I hope the compositor will choose a good large X, in which case the point of intersection, the locus of conflux for these four diverging arms, will finish the reader’s geographical education, by showing him to a hair’s breadth where it was that Domremy stood.  These roads, so grandly situated, as great trunk arteries between two mighty realms,[4] and haunted for ever by wars or rumors of wars, decussated (for anything I know to the contrary) absolutely under Joanna’s bed-room window; one rolling away to the right, past Monsieur D’Arc’s old barn, and the other unaccountably preferring (but there’s no disputing about tastes) to sweep round that odious man’s odious pigstye to the left.

Things being situated as is here laid down, viz. in respect of the decussation, and in respect of Joanna’s bed-room; it follows that, if she had dropped her glove by accident from her chamber window into the very bull’s eye of the target, in the centre of X, not one of several great potentates could (though all animated by the sincerest desires for the peace of Europe) have possibly come to any clear understanding on the question of whom the glove was meant for.  Whence the candid reader perceives at once the necessity