It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary tenacity of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and light head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous elan, which are popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France—­at the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d’Arc.  To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful:  it is an angelic revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman’s fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of any man—­even a poet:—­for the man, even in his most uncontrolled imaginations, carries with him a certain practical limitation of what can be—­whereas the woman at her highest is absolute, and disregards all bounds of possibility.  The Maid of Orleans, the Virgin of France, is the sole being of her kind who has ever attained full expression in this world.  She can neither be classified, as her countrymen love to classify, nor traced to any system of evolution as we all attempt to do nowadays.  She is the impossible verified and attained.  She is the thing in every race, in every form of humanity, which the dreaming girl, the visionary maid, held in at every turn by innumerable restrictions, her feet bound, her actions restrained, not only by outward force, but by the law of her nature, more effectual still,—­has desired to be.  That voiceless poet, to whom what can be is nothing, but only what should be if miracle could be attained to fulfil her trance and rapture of desire—­is held by no conditions, modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers.  Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination.  She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable, alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable path:  yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are common to us all.

And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that has brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations.  This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights.  How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain, and failure of every noble faculty?  Who can tell?  By the grace of God, by the inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of nature, which is over nature, can put any trust.  No evolution, no system of development, can explain Jeanne.  There is but one of her and no more in all the astonished world.