sorceress.  Jean de Metz informs us that she bade them not to fear, that she had been sent to do what she was now doing; that her brothers in paradise would tell her how to act, and that for the last four or five years her brothers in paradise and her God had told her that she must go to the war to save the kingdom of France.  This phrase must have struck his ear, as he thus repeats it.  Her brothers in paradise!  She had not apparently talked of them to anyone as yet, but now no one could hinder her more, and she felt herself free to speak.  A great calm seems to have been in her soul.  She had at last begun her work.  How it was all to end for her she neither foresaw nor asked; she knew only what she had to do.  When they ventured into a town she insisted on stopping to hear mass, bidding them fear nothing.  “God clears the way for me,” she said; “I was born for this,” and so proceeded safe, though threatened with many dangers.  There is something that breathes of supreme satisfaction and content in her repetition of those words.

(1) She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword, that France should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards redeemed by a virgin, which she quoted to several persons on her first setting out.

     (2) I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of
     these events quite clear to myself.

(3) Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was made after she had finally left Domremy, and when she was already accompanied by the escort which was to attend her to Chinon.

(4) Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this.  He thinks the man was a mere King’s messenger with news, probably charged with the melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the Herrings):  and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her little part was entirely accidental.

(5) Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the party. La Chronique de la Pucelle says two of her brothers.  Mr. Andrew Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did not join his sister’s party till much later—­in the beginning of June:  and this is the statement of Jean de Metz.  But Quicherat is also of opinion that they both fought in the relief of Orleans.

CHAPTER III —­ BEFORE THE KING.  FEB.-APRIL, 1429.

Jeanne and her little party were eleven days on the road, but do not seem to have encountered any special peril.  They lodged sometimes in the security of a convent, sometimes in a village hostel, pursuing the long and tedious way across the great levels of midland France, which has so few features of beauty except in the picturesque towns with their castles and churches, which the escort avoided.  At length they paused in the village of Fierbois not far from Chinon where the Court was, in order to announce their arrival and ask for an audience, which was not immediately