now spoke more plainly and urged the continuance of the siege; and the Maid was torn in pieces between the requirements of her celestial guardians and the force of authority around her.  If she had broken out into open rebellion who would have followed her?  She had never yet done so; when the King was against her she had pleaded or forced an agreement, and received or snatched a consent from the malevolent chamberlain, as at Jargeau and Troyes.  Never yet had she set herself in public opposition to the will of her sovereign.  She had submitted to all kinds of tests and trials rather than this.  And to have lain half a day wounded outside Paris and to stand there pleading her cause with her wound still unhealed were not likely things to strengthen her powers of resistance.  “The Voices bade me remain at St. Denis,” she said afterwards at her trial, “and I desired to remain; but the seigneurs took me away in spite of myself.  If I had not been wounded I should never have left.”  Added to the force of these circumstances, it was no doubt apparent to all that to resume operations after that forced retreat, and the betrayal it gave of divided counsels, would be less hopeful than ever.  These arguments even convinced the bold La Hire, who for his part, being no better than a Free Lance, could move hither and thither as he would; and thus the first defeat of the Maid, a disaster involving all the misfortunes that followed in its train, was accomplished.

Jeanne’s last act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern reader gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a certain melancholy meaning.  Before she left, dragged almost a captive in the train of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of the cathedral the armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris.  It was not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from the wars.  And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would have been easily comprehensible.  But no such thought was in her mind.  Was it a movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the arms in which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?—­or was it done in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that defeat, too, was a part of victory, and that not without that bitterness of failure could the fame of the soldier of Christ be perfected?  I have remarked already that we hear no more of the white armour, inlaid with silver and dazzling like a mirror, in which she had begun her career; perhaps it was the remains of that panoply of triumph which she laid out before the altar of the patron saint of France, all dim now with hard work and the shadow of defeat.  It must have marked a renunciation of one kind or another, the sacrifice of some hope.  She was no longer Jeanne the invincible, the triumphant, whose very look made the enemy tremble and flee, and gave double force to every Frenchman’s arm.  Was she then and there abdicating, becoming to her own consciousness Jeanne the champion only,