The chamber of audience is now in ruins.  A wild rose with long, arching, thorny branches and pale flowers, straggles over the greensward where once the floor was trod by so many gay figures.  From the broken wall you look sheer down upon the shining river; one great chimney, which at that season must have been still the most pleasant centre of the large, draughty hall, shows at the end of the room, with a curious suggestion of warmth and light which makes ruin more conspicuous.  The room must have been on the ground floor almost level with the soil towards the interior of the castle, but raised to the height of the cliffs outside.  It was evening, an evening of March, and fifty torches lighted up the ample room; many noble personages, almost as great as kings, and clothed in the bewildering splendour of the time, and more than three hundred cavaliers of the best names in France filled it to overflowing.  The peasant girl from Domremy in the hose and doublet of a servant, a little travel-worn after her tedious journey, was led in by one of those splendid seigneurs, dazzled with the grandeur she had never seen before, looking about her in wonder to see which was the King—­while Charles, perhaps with boyish pleasure in the mystification, perhaps with a little half-conviction stealing over him that there might be something more in it, stood among the smiling crowd.

The young stranger looked round upon all those amused, light-minded, sceptical faces, and without a moment’s hesitation went forward and knelt down before him.  “Gentil Dauphin,” she said, “God give you good life.”  “But it is not I that am the King; there is the King,” said Charles.  “Gentil Prince, it is you and no other,” she said; then rising from her knee:  “Gentil Dauphin, I am Jeanne the Maid.  I am sent to you by the King of Heaven to tell you that you shall be consecrated and crowned at Rheims, and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of France.”  The little masquerade had failed, the jest was over.  There would be little more laughing among the courtiers, when they saw the face of Charles grow grave.  He took the new-comer aside, perhaps to that deep recess of the window where in the darkening night the glimmer of the clear, flowing river, the great vault of sky would still be visible dimly, outside the circle of the blazing interior with all its smoky lights.

Charles VII. of France was, like many of his predecessors, a pauvre Sire enough.  He had thought more of his amusements than of the troubles of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will sometimes spring from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and after all, the dread responsibility, the sense that in all his helplessness and inability to do anything he was still the man who ought to do all, would seem to have moved him from time to time.  A secret doubt in his heart, divulged to no man, had added bitterness to the conviction of his own weakness.  Was he indeed the heir of France?  Had he any right