No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and, whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way.  Isabeau most probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so good a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly and so helpful, for his wife.  At all events there was such a one, too willing to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be egged up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at Toul and swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her childhood.  So timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic, would simply obey the bishop’s decision and would not be bold enough even to remonstrate, though it is curious that with the spectacle of her grave determination before them, and sorrowful sense of that necessity of her mission which had steeled her to dispense with their consent, they should have expected such an expedient to arrest her steps.  The affair, we must suppose, had gone through all the more usual stages of entreaty on the lover’s part, and persuasion on that of the parents, before such an attempt was finally made.  But the shy Jeanne had by this time attained that courage of desperation which is not inconsistent with the most gentle nature; and without saying anything to anyone, she too went to Toul, appeared before the bishop, and easily freed herself from the pretended engagement, though whether with any reference to her very different destination we are not told.(3)

These proceedings, however, and the father’s dreams and the remonstrances of the mother, must have made troubled days in the cottage, and scenes of wrath and contradiction, hard to bear.  The winter passed distracted by these contentions, and it is difficult to imagine how Jeanne could have borne this had it not been that the period of her outset had already been indicated, and that it was only in the middle of Lent that her succour was to reach the King.  The village, no doubt, was almost as much distracted as her father’s house to hear of these strange discussions and of the incredible purpose of the bonne douce fille, whose qualities everybody knew and about whom there was nothing eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple goodness, to distinguish her above her neighbours.  In the meantime her voices called her continually to her work.  They set her free from the ordinary yoke of obedience, always so strong in the mind of a French girl.  The dreadful step of abandoning her home, not to be thought of under any other circumstances, was more and more urgently pressed upon her.  Could it indeed be saints and angels who ordained a step which was outside of all the habits and first duties of nature?  But we have no reason to believe that this nineteenth-century doubt of her visitors, and of whether their mandates were right, entered into the mind of a girl who was of her own period and not of ours.  She went on steadfastly, certain of her mission now, and inaccessible either to remonstrance or appeal.