her own voice that she had never heard that prophecy(1); but the word of the blessed Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife’s tale; and the child’s alarm would seem to have died away as she came to her full growth.  And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions, but a robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of sense and determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the level of the crowd.  We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the making of a great general in her untutored female soul,—­which is perhaps the most wonderful thing in her career,—­and saw with the eye of an experienced and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see it, the fit order of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at her command.  This I honestly avow is to me the most incredible point in the story.  I am not disturbed by the apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable appropriateness and fitness against which the imagination, at least, has not a word to say.  The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such interpositions of heaven come, but that they come so seldom.  But that Jacques d’Arc’s daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only fault was that she went to church too often, should have the genius of a soldier, is too bewildering for words to say.  A poet, yes, an inspiring influence leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful with the rude artillery of the time, divining the better way in strategy,—­this is a wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet according to Alencon, Dunois, and other military authorities, it was true.

We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne’s long musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no longer, nor what it was which induced her at last to select the confidant she did.  No doubt she must have been considering and weighing the matter for a long time before she fixed upon the man who was her relation, yet did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a townsman for the extraordinary revelations she had to make.  One of her neighbours, her gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was godmother, had perhaps at one moment seemed to her a likely helper.  But he belonged to the opposite party.  “If you were not a Burgundian,” she said to him once, “there is something I might tell you.”  The honest fellow took this to mean that she had some thought of marriage, the most likely and natural supposition.  It was at this moment, when her heart was burning with her great secret, the voices urging her on day by day, and her power of self-constraint almost at an end, that Providence sent Durand Laxart, her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on some family visit.  She would seem to have taken advantage of the opportunity with eagerness, asking him privately to take her home with him, and to explain to her father and mother that he wanted her to take care of his wife.  No doubt the girl, devoured with so many thoughts, would have the air