And then, the taxes, the taxes!  Everybody thought of that.  That burden would fall heavy now in the commune’s crippled condition, and all faces grew long with the thought of it.  Joan said: 

“Paying taxes with naught to pay them with is what the rest of France has been doing these many years, but we never knew the bitterness of that before.  We shall know it now.”

And so she went on talking about it and growing more and more troubled about it, until one could see that it was filling all her mind.

At last we came upon a dreadful object.  It was the madman—­hacked and stabbed to death in his iron cage in the corner of the square.  It was a bloody and dreadful sight.  Hardly any of us young people had ever seen a man before who had lost his life by violence; so this cadaver had an awful fascination for us; we could not take our eyes from it.  I mean, it had that sort of fascination for all of us but one.  That one was Joan.  She turned away in horror, and could not be persuaded to go near it again.  There—­it is a striking reminder that we are but creatures of use and custom; yes, and it is a reminder, too, of how harshly and unfairly fate deals with us sometimes.  For it was so ordered that the very ones among us who were most fascinated with mutilated and bloody death were to live their lives in peace, while that other, who had a native and deep horror of it, must presently go forth and have it as a familiar spectacle every day on the field of battle.

You may well believe that we had plenty of matter for talk now, since the raiding of our village seemed by long odds the greatest event that had really ever occurred in the world; for although these dull peasants may have thought they recognized the bigness of some of the previous occurrences that had filtered from the world’s history dimly into their minds, the truth is that they hadn’t.  One biting little fact, visible to their eyes of flesh and felt in their own personal vitals, became at once more prodigious to them than the grandest remote episode in the world’s history which they had got at second hand and by hearsay.  It amuses me now when I recall how our elders talked then.  The fumed and fretted in a fine fashion.

“Ah, yes,” said old Jacques d’Arc, “things are come to a pretty pass, indeed!  The King must be informed of this.  It is time that he cease from idleness and dreaming, and get at his proper business.”  He meant our young disinherited King, the hunted refugee, Charles VII.

“You way well,” said the maire.  “He should be informed, and that at once.  It is an outrage that such things would be permitted.  Why, we are not safe in our beds, and he taking his ease yonder.  It shall be made known, indeed it shall—­all France shall hear of it!”

To hear them talk, one would have imagined that all the previous ten thousand sackings and burnings in France had been but fables, and this one the only fact.  It is always the way; words will answer as long as it is only a person’s neighbor who is in trouble, but when that person gets into trouble himself, it is time that the King rise up and do something.