With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and beautiful name.  To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary.  Though she is the finest emblem to the world in general of that noble, fearless, and spotless Virginity which is one of the finest inspirations of the mediaeval mind, yet she is inherently French, though France scarcely was in her time:  and national, though as yet there were rather the elements of a nation than any indivisible People in that great country.  Was not she herself one of the strongest and purest threads of gold to draw that broken race together and bind it irrevocably, beneficially, into one?

It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of French territory that this national deliverer came.  It is a commonplace that a Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own country against the other from which but a line divides him in fact, and scarcely so much in race—­than the calmer inhabitant of the midland country who knows no such press of constant antagonism; and Jeanne is another example of this well known fact.  It is even a question still languidly discussed whether Jeanne and her family were actually on one side of the line or the other.  “Il faut opter,” says M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest biographers, as if the peasant household of 1412 had inhabited an Alsatian cottage in 1872.  When the line is drawn so closely, it is difficult to determine, but Jeanne herself does not ever seem to have entertained a moment’s doubt on the subject, and she after all is the best authority.  Perhaps Villon was thinking more of his rhyme than of absolute fact when he spoke of “Jeanne la bonne Lorraine.”  She was born on the 5th of January, 1412, in the village of Domremy, on the banks of the Meuse, one of those little grey hamlets, with its little church tower, and remains of a little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound not sufficient for the name of hill—­which are scattered everywhere through those level countries, like places which have never been built, which have grown out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity—­perhaps, one feels, only a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old—­yet always inhabitable in all the ages, with the same names lingering about, the same surroundings, the same mild rural occupations, simple plenty and bare want mingling together with as little difference of level as exists in the sweeping lines of the landscape round.

The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to the invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the universal conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak, the adjacent village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English alliance, while little Domremy was for the King.  And once at least when Jeanne was a girl at home, the family were startled in their quiet by the swoop of an armed party of Burgundians, and had to gather up babies and what portable property they might have, and flee across the frontier, where