It was a simple peasant girl—­“just the simplest peasant you could ever see”—­whom the Head of the Church thus worshipped and crowds delighted to honour.  Short and deep-chested she was, capable of a man’s endurance, and with black hair cut like a boy’s.  She could not write or read, was so ignorant as to astonish ladies, and had only the peasant arts.  The earliest description tells of her “common red frock carefully patched.”  “I could beat any woman in Rouen at spinning and stitching,” she said to her judges, who, to be sure, had no special knowledge of anything beyond theology.  “I’m only a poor girl, and can’t ride or fight,” she said when first she conceived her mission, and she had just the common instincts of the working woman.  We may suppose her fond of children, for wherever she went she held the newborn babies at the font.  She hated death and cruelty.  “The sight of French blood,” she said, “always makes my hair stand on end,” and even to the enemy she always offered peace.  “Or, if you want to fight,” she sent a message to the Duke of Burgundy, “you might go and fight the Saracens.”  She never killed anyone, she said at her trial.  Just an ordinary peasant girl she seemed—­“la plus simple bergerette qu’on veit onques”—­with no apparent distinction but a sweet and attractive voice.  To be sure, she could put that sweet voice to shrewd use when she pleased.  “What tongue do your Visions speak?” a theologian kept asking her.  “A better tongue than yours!” she answered with the retort of an open-air meeting.  But in those days there were theologians who would try the patience of a saint, and Joan of Arc is not a saint even yet, having been only Beatified on that Sunday, nearly five centuries after her death.

And she was only nineteen when they burnt her.  At least, she thought she was about nineteen, but was not quite sure.  Few years had passed since she was a child dancing under the big trees which fairies haunted still.  Her days of glory had lasted only a few months, and now she had lain week after week in prison, weighed down with chains and balls of iron, watched day and night by men in the cell, because she always claimed a prisoner’s right to escape if she could.  Her trial before the Bishop of Beauvais and all the learning and theology of Paris University lasted nearly three months.  Sometimes forty men were present, sometimes over sixty, for it was a remarkable case, and gave fine opportunity for the display of the superhuman knowledge and wisdom upon which divines exist.  Human compassion they displayed also, hurrying away just before the burning began one May morning, and shedding tears of pity over the sins of one so young.  Indeed, their preachings and exhortations to her whilst the stake and fire were being arranged continued so long that the rude English soldiers, so often deaf to the beauty of theology, asked whether they were going to be kept waiting there past dinner-time.