Some few would have refused; but their wishes were overruled.  The Abbot
of Jumieges, Nicholas de Houppeville, maintained that the trial was not
legal.  The Bishop of Beauvais, he said, belonged to the party which
declared itself hostile to the Maid; and, besides, he made himself judge
in a case already decided by his metropolitan, the Archbishop of Rheims,
of whom Beauvais was holden, and who had approved of Joan's conduct.  The
bishop summoned before him the recalcitrant, who refused to appear,
saying that he was under no official jurisdiction but that of Rouen.  He
was arrested and thrown into prison, by order of the bishop, whose
authority he denied.  There was some talk of banishing him, and even of
throwing him into the river; but the influence of his brethren saved him.
The sub-inquisitor himself allowed the trial in which he was to be one of
the judges to begin without him; and he only put in an appearance at the
express order of the inquisitor-general, and on a confidential hint that
he would be in danger of his life if he persisted in his refusal.  The
court being thus constituted, Joan, after it had been put in possession
of the evidence already collected, was cited, on the 20th of February,
1431, to appear on the morrow, the 21st, before her judges assembled in
the chapel of Rouen Castle.

The trial lasted from the 21st of February to the 30th of May, 1431.  The
court held forty sittings, mostly in the chapel of the castle, some in
Joan's very prison.  On her arrival there, she had been put in an iron
cage; afterwards she was kept no longer in the cage, but in a dark room
in a tower of the castle, wearing irons upon her feet, fastened by a
chain to a large piece of wood, and guarded night and day by four or five
"soldiers of low grade."  She complained of being thus chained; but the
bishop told her that her former attempts at escape demanded this
precaution.  "It is true," said Joan, as truthful as heroic, "I did wish
and I still wish to escape from prison, as is the right of every
prisoner."  At her examination, the bishop required her to take an oath
to tell the truth about everything as to which she should be questioned."
"I know not what you mean to question me about; perchance you may ask me
things I would not tell you; touching my revelations, for instance, you
might ask me to tell something I have sworn not to tell; thus I should be
perjured, which you ought not to desire."  The bishop insisted upon an
oath absolute and with-out condition.  "You are too hard on me," said
Joan; I do not like to take an oath to tell the truth save as to matters
which concern the faith."  The bishop called upon her to swear on pain of
being held guilty of the things imputed to her.

[Illustration: Joan examined in Prison----128]

"Go on to something else," said she.  And this was the answer she made to
all questions which seemed to her to be a violation of her right to be
silent.  Wearied and hurt at these imperious demands, she one day said,
"I come on God's business, and I have nought to do here; send me back to
God, from whom I come."  "Are you sure you are in God's grace?" asked the
bishop.  "If I be not," answered Joan, "please God to bring me to it; and
if I be, please God to keep me in it!"  The bishop himself remained
dumbfounded.

There is no object in following through all its sittings and all its
twistings this odious and shameful trial, in which the judges' prejudiced
servility and scientific subtlety were employed for three months to wear
out the courage or overreach the understanding of a young girl of
nineteen, who refused at one time to lie, and at another to enter into
discussion with them, and made no defence beyond holding her tongue or
appealing to God who had spoken to her and dictated to her that which she
had done.  In order to force her from her silence or bring her to submit
to the Church instead of appealing from it to God, it was proposed to
employ the last means of all, torture.  On the 9th of May the bishop had
Joan brought into the great tower of Rouen Castle; the instruments of
torture were displayed before her eyes; and the executioners were ready
to fulfil their office, "for to bring her back," said the bishop, "into
the ways of truth, in order to insure the salvation of her soul and body,
so gravely endangered by erroneous inventions."  "Verily," answered Joan,
"if you should have to tear me limb from limb, and separate soul from
body, I should not tell you aught else; and if I were to tell you aught
else, I should afterwards still tell you that you had made me tell it by
force."  The idea of torture was given up.  It was resolved to display
all the armory of science in order to subdue the mind of this young girl,
whose conscience was not to be subjugated.  The chapter of Rouen declared
that in consequence of her public refusal to submit herself to the
decision of the Church as to her deeds and her statements, Joan deserved
to be declared a heretic.  The University of Paris, to which had been
handed in the twelve heads of accusation resulting from Joan's statements
and examinations, replied that "if, having been charitably admonished,
she would not make reparation and return to union with the Catholic
faith, she must be left to the secular judges to undergo punishment for
her crime."  Armed with these documents the Bishop of Beauvais had Joan
brought up, on the 23d of May, in a hall adjoining her prison, and, after
having addressed to her a long exhortation, "Joan," said he, "if in the
dominions of your king, when you were at large in them, a knight or any
other, born under his rule and allegiance to him, had risen up, saying,
'I will not obey the king or submit to his officers,' would you not have
said that he ought to be condemned?  What then will you say of yourself,
you who were born in the faith of Christ and became by baptism a daughter
of the Church and spouse of Jesus Christ, if you obey not the officers of
Christ, that is, the prelates of the Church?" Joan listened modestly to
this admonition, and confined herself to answering, "As to my deeds and
sayings, what I said of them at the trial I do hold to and mean to abide
by."  "Think you that you are not bound to submit your sayings and deeds
to the Church militant or to any other than God?"  "The course that I
always mentioned and pursued at the trial I mean to maintain as to that.
If I were at the stake, and saw the torch lighted, and the executioner
ready to set fire to the fagots, even if I were in the midst of the
flames, I should not say aught else, and I should uphold that which I
said at the trial even unto death."

According to the laws, ideas, and practices of the time the legal
question was decided.  Joan, declared heretic and rebellious by the
Church, was liable to have sentence pronounced against her; but she had
persisted in her statements, she had shown no submission.  Although she
appeared to be quite forgotten, and was quite neglected by the king whose
coronation she had effected, by his councillors, and even by the brave
warriors at whose side she had fought, the public exhibited a lively
interest in her; accounts of the scenes which took place at her trial
were inquired after with curiosity.  Amongst the very judges who
prosecuted her, many were troubled in spirit, and wished that Joan, by an
abjuration of her statements, would herself put them at ease and relieve
them from pronouncing against her the most severe penalty.  What means
were employed to arrive at this end?  Did she really, and with full
knowledge of what she was about, come round to the adjuration which there
was so much anxiety to obtain from her?  It is difficult to solve this
historical problem with exactness and certainty.  More than once, during
the examinations and the conversations which took place at that time
between Joan and her judges, she maintained her firm posture and her
first statements.  One of those who were exhorting her to yield said to
her one day, "Thy king is a heretic and a schismatic."  Joan could not
brook this insult to her king.  "By my faith," said she, "full well dare
I both say and swear that he is the noblest Christian of all Christians,
and the truest lover of the faith and the Church."  "Make her hold her
tongue," said the usher to the preacher, who was disconcerted at having
provoked such language.  Another day, when Joan was being urged to submit
to the Church, brother Isambard de la Pierre, a Dominican, who was
interested in her, spoke to her about the council, at the same time
explaining to her its province in the church.  It was the very time when
that of Bale had been convoked.  "Ah!" said Joan, "I would fain surrender
and submit myself to the council of Bale."  The Bishop of Beauvais
trembled at the idea of this appeal.  "Hold your tongue in the devil's
name!" said he to the monk.  Another of the judges, William Erard, asked
Joan menacingly, "Will you abjure those reprobate words and deeds of
yours?"  "I leave it to the universal Church whether I ought to abjure or
not."  "That is not enough: you shall abjure at once or you shall burn."
Joan shuddered.  "I would rather sign than burn," she said.  There was
put before her a form of abjuration, whereby, disavowing her revelations
and visions from heaven, she confessed her errors in matters of faith,
and renounced them humbly.  At the bottom of the document she made the
mark of a cross.  Doubts have arisen as to the genuineness of this long
and diffuse deed in the form in which it has been published in the
trial-papers.  Twenty-four years later, in 1455, during the trial
undertaken for the rehabilitation of Joan, several of those who had been
present at the trial at which she was condemned, amongst others the usher
Massieu and the registrar Taquel, declared that the form of abjuration
read out at that time to Joan and signed by her contained only seven or
eight lines of big writing; and according to another witness of the scene
it was an Englishman, John Calot, secretary of Henry VI., King of
England, who, as soon as Joan had yielded, drew from his sleeve a little
paper which he gave to her to sign, and, dissatisfied with the mark she
had made, held her hand and guided it so that she might put down her
name, every letter.  However that may be, as soon as Joan's abjuration
had thus been obtained, the court issued on the 24th of May, 1431, a
definitive decree, whereby, after some long and severe strictures in the
preamble, it condemned Joan to perpetual imprisonment, "with the bread of
affliction and the water of affliction, in order that she might deplore
the errors and faults she had committed, and relapse into them no more
henceforth."

The Church might be satisfied; but the King of England, his councillors
and his officers, were not.  It was Joan living, even though a prisoner,
that they feared.  They were animated towards her by the two ruthless
passions of vengeance and fear.  When it was known that she would escape
with her life, murmurs broke out amongst the crowd of enemies present at
the trial.  Stones were thrown at the judges.  One of the Cardinal of
Winchester's chaplains, who happened to be close to the Bishop of
Beauvais, called him traitor.  "You lie," said the bishop.  And the
bishop was right; the chaplain did lie; the bishop had no intention of
betraying his masters.  The Earl of Warwick complained to him of the
inadequacy of the sentence.  "Never you mind, my lord," said one of Peter
Cauchon's confidants; "we will have her up again."  After the passing of
her sentence Joan had said to those about her, "Come, now, you churchmen
amongst you, lead me off to your own prisons, and let me be no more in
the hands of the English."  "Lead her to where you took her," said the
bishop; and she was conducted to the castle prison.  She had been told by
some of the judges who went to see her after her sentence, that she would
have to give up her man's dress and resume her woman's clothing, as the
Church ordained.  She was rejoiced thereat; forthwith, accordingly,
resumed her woman's clothes, and had her hair properly cut, which up to
that time she used to wear clipped round like a man's.  When she was
taken back to prison, the man's dress which she had worn was put in a
sack in the same room in which she was confined, and she remained in
custody at the said place in the hands of five Englishmen, of whom three
staid by night in the room and two outside at the door.  "And he who
speaks [John Massieu, a priest, the same who in 1431 had been present as
usher of the court at the trial in which Joan was condemned] knows for
certain that at night she had her legs ironed in such sort that she could
not stir from the spot.  When the next Sunday morning, which was Trinity
Sunday, had come, and she should have got up, according to what she
herself told to him who speaks, she said to her English guards, 'Uniron
me; I will get up.'  Then one of then took away her woman's clothes; they
emptied the sack in which was her man's dress, and pitched the said dress
to her, saying, 'Get up, then,' and they put her woman's clothes in the
same sack.  And according to what she told me she only clad herself in
her man's dress after saying, 'You know it is forbidden me; I certainly
will not take it.' Nevertheless they would not allow her any other;
insomuch that the dispute lasted to the hour of noon.  Finally, from
corporeal necessity, Joan was constrained to get up and take the dress."

The official documents drawn up during the condemnation-trial contain
quite a different account.  "On the 28th of May," it is there said,
"eight of the judges who had taken part in the sentence [their names are
given in the document, t. i. p. 454] betook themselves to Joan's prison,
and seeing her clad in man's dress, 'which she had but just given up
according to our order that she should resume woman's clothes, we asked
her when and for what cause she had resumed this dress, and who had
prevailed on her to do so.  Joan answered that it was of her own will,
without any constraint from any one, and because she preferred that dress
to woman's clothes.  To our question as to why she had made this change,
she answered, that, being surrounded by men, man's dress was more
suitable for her than woman's.  She also said that she had resumed it
because there had been made to her, but not kept, a promise that she
should go to mass, receive the body of Christ, and be set free from her
fetters.  She added that if this promise were kept, she would be good,
and would do what was the will of the Church.  As we had heard some
persons say that she persisted in her errors as to the pretended
revelations which she had but lately renounced, we asked whether she had
since Thursday last heard the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret;
and she answered, Yes.  To our question as to what the saints had said
she answered, that God had testified to her by their voices great pity
for the great treason she had committed in abjuring for the sake of
saving her life, and that by so doing she had damned herself.  She said
that all she had thus done last Thursday in abjuring her visions and
revelations she had done through fear of the stake, and that all her
abjuration was contrary to the truth.  She added that she did not herself
comprehend what was contained in the form of abjuration she had been made
to sign, and that she would rather do penance once for all by dying to
maintain the truth than remain any longer a prisoner, being all the while
a traitress to it."

We will not stop to examine whether these two accounts, though very
different, are not fundamentally reconcilable, and whether Joan resumed
man's dress of her own desire or was constrained to do so by the soldiers
on guard over her, and perhaps to escape from their insults.  The
important points in the incident are the burst of remorse which Joan felt
for her weakness and her striking retractation of the abjuration which
had been wrung from her.  So soon as the news was noised abroad, her
enemies cried, "She has relapsed!" This was exactly what they had hoped
for when, on learning that she had been sentenced only to perpetual
imprisonment, they had said, "Never you mind; we will have her up again."
"_Farewell, farewell_, my lord," said the Bishop of Beauvais to the Earl
of Warwick, whom he met shortly after Joan's retractation; and in his
words there was plainly an expression of satisfaction, and not a mere
phrase of politeness.  On the 29th of May the tribunal met again.  Forty
judges took part in the deliberation; Joan was unanimously declared a
case of relapse, was found guilty, and cited to appear next day, the
30th, on the Vieux-Marche to hear sentence pronounced, and then undergo
the punishment of the stake.

When, on the 30th of May, in the morning, the Dominican brother Martin
Ladvenu was charged to announce her sentence to Joan, she gave way at
first to grief and terror.  "Alas!" she cried, "am I to be so horribly
and cruelly treated that this my body, full pure and perfect and never
defiled, must to-day be consumed and reduced to ashes!  Ah!  I would
seven times rather be beheaded than burned!"  The Bishop of Beauvais at
this moment came up.  "Bishop," said Joan, "you are the cause of my
death; if you had put me in the prisons of the Church and in the hands of
fit and proper ecclesiastical warders, this had never happened; I appeal
from you to the presence of God."  One of the doctors who had sat in
judgment upon her, Peter Maurice, went to see her, and spoke to her with
sympathy.  "Master Peter," said she to him, "where shall I be to-night?"
"Have you not good hope in God?" asked the doctor.  "O! yes," she
answered; "by the grace of God I shall be in paradise."  Being left alone
with the Dominican, Martin Ladvenu, she confessed and asked to
communicate.  The monk applied to the Bishop of Beauvais to know what he
was to do.  "Tell brother Martin," was the answer, "to give her the
eucharist and all she asks for."  At nine o'clock, having resumed her
woman's dress, Joan was dragged from prison and driven to the Vieux-
Marche.  From seven to eight hundred soldiers escorted the car and
prohibited all approach to it on the part of the crowd, which encumbered
the road and the vicinities; but a man forced a passage and flung himself
towards Joan.  It was a canon of Rouen, Nicholas Loiseleur, whom the
Bishop of Beauvais had placed near her, and who had abused the confidence
she had shown him.  Beside himself with despair, he wished to ask pardon
of her; but the English soldiers drove him back with violence and with
the epithet of traitor, and but for the intervention of the Earl of
Warwick his life would have been in danger.  Joan wept and prayed; and
the crowd, afar off, wept and prayed with her.  On arriving at the place,
she listened in silence to a sermon by one of the doctors of the court,
who ended by saying, "Joan, go in peace; the Church can no longer defend
thee; she gives thee over to the secular arm."  The laic judges, Raoul
Bouteillier, baillie of Rouen, and his lieutenant, Peter Daron, were
alone qualified to pronounce sentence of death; but no time was given
them.  The priest Massieu was still continuing his exhortations to Joan,
but "How now! priest," was the cry from amidst the soldiery, "are you
going to make us dine here?"  "Away with her!  Away with her!" said the
baillie to the guards; and to the executioner, "Do thy duty."  When she
came to the stake, Joan knelt down completely absorbed in prayer.  She
had begged Massieu to get her a cross; and an Englishman present made one
out of a little stick, and handed it to the French heroine, who took it,
kissed it, and laid it on her breast.  She begged brother Isambard de la
Pierre to go and fetch the cross from the church of St. Sauveur, the
chief door of which opened on the Vieux-Marche, and to hold it "upright
before her eyes till the coming of death, in order," she said, "that the
cross whereon God hung might, as long as she lived, be continually in her
sight;" and her wishes were fulfilled.  She wept over her country and the
spectators as well as over herself.  "Rouen, Rouen," she cried, "is it
here that I must die?  Shalt thou be my last resting-place?  I fear
greatly thou wilt have to suffer for my death."  It is said that the aged
Cardinal of Winchester and the Bishop of Beauvais himself could not
stifle their emotion--and, peradventure, their tears.  The executioner
set fire to the fagots.  When Joan perceived the flames rising, she urged
her confessor, the Dominican brother, Martin Ladvenu, to go down, at the
same time asking him to keep holding the cross up high in front of her,
that she might never cease to see it.  The same monk, when questioned
four and twenty years later, at the rehabilitation trial, as to the last
sentiments and the last words of Joan, said that to the very latest
moment she had affirmed that her voices were heavenly, that they had not
deluded her, and that the revelations she had received came from God.
When she had ceased to live, two of her judges, John Alespie, canon of
Rouen, and Peter Maurice, doctor of theology, cried out, "Would that my
soul were where I believe the soul of that woman is!"  And Tressart,
secretary to King Henry VI., said sorrowfully, on returning from the
place of execution, "We are all lost; we have burned a saint."

A saint indeed in faith and in destiny.  Never was human creature more
heroically confident in, and devoted to, inspiration coming from God, a
commission received from God.  Joan of Arc sought nothing of all that
happened to her and of all she did, nor exploit, nor power, nor glory.
"It was not her condition," as she used to say, to be a warrior, to get
her king crowned, and to deliver her country from the foreigner.
Everything came to her from on high, and she accepted everything without
hesitation, without discussion, without calculation, as we should say in
our times.  She believed in God, and obeyed Him.  God was not to her an
idea, a hope, a flash of human imagination, or a problem of human
science; He was the Creator of the world, the Saviour of mankind through
Jesus Christ, the Being of beings, ever present, ever in action, sole
legitimate sovereign of man whom He has made intelligent and free, the
real and true God whom we are painfully searching for in our own day, and
whom we shall never find again until we cease pretending to do without
Him and putting ourselves in His place.  Meanwhile one fact may be
mentioned which does honor to our epoch and gives us hope for our future.
Four centuries have rolled by since Joan of Arc, that modest and heroic
servant of God, made a sacrifice of herself for France.  For four and
twenty years after her death, France and the king appeared to think no
more of her.  However, in 1455, remorse came upon Charles VII. and upon
France.  Nearly all the provinces, all the towns, were freed from the
foreigner, and shame was felt that nothing was said, nothing done, for
the young girl who had saved everything.  At Rouen, especially, where the
sacrifice was completed, a cry for reparation arose.  It was timidly
demanded from the spiritual power which had sentenced and delivered over
Joan as a heretic to the stake.  Pope Calixtus III. entertained the
request preferred, not by the King of France, but in the name of Isabel
Romee, Joan's mother, and her whole family.  Regular proceedings were
commenced and followed up for the rehabilitation of the martyr; and, on
the 7th of July, 1456, a decree of the court assembled at Rouen quashed
the sentence of 1431, together with all its consequences, and ordered
"a general procession and solemn sermon at St. Ouen Place and the Vieux-
Marche," where the said maid had been cruelly and horribly burned; besides
the planting of a cross of honor (crucis honestee) on the Vieux-Marche,
the judges reserving the official notice to be given of their decision
"throughout the cities and notable places of the realm."  The city of
Orleans responded to this appeal by raising on the bridge over the Loire
a group in bronze representing Joan of Arc on her knees before Our Lady
between two angels.  This monument, which was broken during the religious
wars of the sixteenth century and repaired shortly afterwards, was
removed in the eighteenth century, and, Joan of Arc then received a fresh
insult; the poetry of a cynic was devoted to the task of diverting a
licentious public at the expense of the saint whom, three centuries
before, fanatical hatred had brought to the stake.  In 1792 the council
of the commune of Orleans, "considering that the monument in bronze did
not represent the heroine's services, and did not by any sign call to
mind the struggle against the English," ordered it to be melted down and
cast into cannons, of which "one should bear the name of Joan of Arc."
It is in our time that the city of Orleans and its distinguished bishop,
Mgr. Dupanloup, have at last paid Joan homage worthy of her, not only by
erecting to her a new statue, but by recalling her again to the memory of
France with her true features, and in her grand character.  Neither
French nor any other history offers a like example of a modest little
soul, with a faith so pure and efficacious, resting on divine inspiration
and patriotic hope.

During the trial of Joan of Arc the war between France and England,
without being discontinued, had been somewhat slack: the curiosity and
the passions of men were concentrated upon the scenes at Rouen.  After
the execution of Joan the war resumed its course, though without any
great events.  By way of a step towards solution, the Duke of Bedford, in
November, 1431, escorted to Paris King Henry VI., scarcely ten years old,
and had him crowned at Notre-Dame.  The ceremony was distinguished for
pomp, but not for warmth.  The Duke of Burgundy was not present; it was
an Englishman, the Cardinal-bishop of Winchester, who anointed the young
Englander King of France; the Bishop of Paris complained of it as a
violation of his rights; the parliament, the university, and the
municipal body had not even seats reserved at the royal banquet; Paris
was melancholy, and day by day more deserted by the native inhabitants;
grass was growing in the court-yards of the great mansions; the students
were leaving the great school of Paris, to which the Duke of Bedford at
Caen, and Charles VII. himself at Poitiers, were attempting to raise up
rivals; and silence reigned in the Latin quarter.  The child-king was
considered unintelligent, and ungraceful, and ungracious.  When, on the
day after Christmas, he started on his way back to Rouen, and from Rouen
to England, he did not confer on Paris "any of the boons expected, either
by releasing prisoners or by putting an end to black-mails, gabels, and
wicked imposts."  The burgesses were astonished, and grumbled; and the
old queen, Isabel of Bavaria, who was still living at the hostel of St.
Paul, wept, it is said, for vexation, at seeing from one of her windows
her grandson's royal procession go by.

Though war was going on all the while, attempts were made to negotiate;
and in March, 1433, a conference was opened at Seineport, near Corbeil.
Everybody in France desired peace.  Philip the Good himself began to feel
the necessity of it.  Burgundy was almost as discontented and troubled as
Ile-de-France.  There was grumbling at Dijon as there was conspiracy at
Paris.  The English gave fresh cause for national irritation.  They
showed an inclination to canton themselves in Normandy, and abandon the
other French provinces to the hazards and sufferings of a desultory war.
Anne of Burgundy, the Duke of Bedford's wife and Philip the Good's
sister, died.  The English duke speedily married again without even
giving any notice to the French prince.  Every family tie between the two
persons was broken; and the negotiations as well as the war remained
without result.

An incident at court caused a change in the situation, and gave the
government of Charles a different character.  His favorite, George de la
Tremoille, had become almost as unpopular amongst the royal family as in
the country in general.  He could not manage a war, and he frustrated
attempts at peace.  The Queen of Sicily, Yolande d'Aragon, her daughter,
Mary d'Anjou, Queen of France, and her son, Louis, Count of Maine, who
all three desired peace, set themselves to work to overthrow the
favorite.  In June, 1433, four young lords, one of whom, Sire de Beuil,
was La Tremoille's own nephew, introduced themselves unexpectedly into
his room at the castle of Coudray, near Chinon, where Charles VII. was.
La Tremoille showed an intention of resisting, and received a
sword-thrust.  He was made to resign all his offices, and was sent under
strict guard to the castle of Alontresor, the property of his nephew,
Sire de Beuil.  The conspirators had concerted measures with La
Tremoille's rival, the constable De Richemont, Arthur of Brittany, a man
distinguished in war, who had lately gone to help Joan of Arc, and who
was known to be a friend of peace at the same time that he was firmly
devoted to the national cause.  He was called away from his castle of
Parthenay, and set at the head of the government as well as of the army.
Charles VII. at first showed anger at his favorite's downfall.  He asked
if Richemont was present, and was told no: where-upon he seemed to grow
calmer.  Before long he did more; he became resigned, and, continuing all
the while to give La Tremoille occasional proofs of his former favor, he
fully accepted De Richemont's influence and the new direction which the
constable imposed upon his government.

War was continued nearly everywhere, with alternations of success and
reverse which deprived none of the parties of hope without giving victory
to any.  Peace, however, was more and more the general desire.  Scarcely
had one attempt at pacification failed when another was begun.  The
constable De Richemont's return to power led to fresh overtures.  He was
a states-man as well as a warrior; and his inclinations were known at
Dijon and London, as well as at Chinon.  The advisers of King Henry VI.
proposed to open a conference, on the 15th of October, 1433, at Calais.
They had, they said, a prisoner in England, confined there ever since the
battle of Agincourt, Duke Charles of Orleans, who was sincerely desirous
of peace, in spite of his family enmity towards the Duke of Burgundy.  He
was considered a very proper person to promote the negotiations, although
he sought in poetry, which was destined to bring lustre to his name, a
refuge from politics which made his life a burden.  He, one day meeting
the Duke of Burgundy's two ambassadors at the Earl of Suffolk's, Henry
VI.'s prime minister, went up to them, affectionately took their hands,
and, when they inquired after his health, said, "My body is well, my soul
is sick; I am dying with vexation at passing my best days a prisoner,
without any one to think of me."  The ambassadors said that people would
be indebted to him for the benefit of peace, for he was known to be
laboring for it.  "My Lord of Suffolk," said he, "can tell you that I
never cease to urge it upon the king and his council; but I am as useless
here as the sword never drawn from the scabbard.  I must see my relatives
and friends in France; they will not treat, surely, without having
consulted with me.  If peace depended upon me, though I were doomed to
die seven days after swearing it, that would cause me no regret.
however, what matters it what I say?  I am not master in anything at all;
next to the two kings, it is the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of
Brittany who have most power.  Will you not come and call upon me?"  he
added, pressing the hand of one of the ambassadors.  "They will see you
before they go," said the Earl of Suffolk, in a tone which made it plain
that no private conversation would be permitted between them.  And,
indeed, the Earl of Suffolk's barber went alone to wait upon the
ambassadors in order to tell them that, if the Duke of Burgundy desired
it, the Duke of Orleans would write to him.  "I will undertake," he
added, "to bring you his letter."  There was evident mistrust; and it was
explained to the Burgundian ambassadors by the Earl of Warwick's remark,
"Your duke never once came to see our king during his stay in France.
The Duke of Bedford used similar language to them.  Why," said he, "does
my brother the Duke of Burgundy give way to evil imaginings against me?
There is not a prince in the world, after my king, whom I esteem so much.
The ill-will which seems to exist between us spoils the king's affairs
and his own too.  But tell him that I am not the less disposed to serve
him."

In March, 1435, the Duke of Burgundy went to Paris, taking with him his
third wife, Isabel of Portugal, and a magnificent following.  There were
seen, moreover, in his train, a hundred wagons laden with artillery,
armor, salted provisions, cheeses, and wines of Burgundy.  There was once
more joy in Paris, and the duke received the most affectionate welcome.
The university was represented before him, and made him a great speech on
the necessity of peace.  Two days afterwards a deputation from the city
dames of Paris waited upon the Duchess of Burgundy, and implored her to
use her influence for the re-establishment of peace.  She answered, "My
good friends, it is the thing I desire most of all in the world; I pray
for it night and day to the Lord our God, for I believe that we all have
great need of it, and I know for certain that my lord and husband has the
greatest willingness to give up to that purpose his person and his
substance."  At the bottom of his soul Duke Philip's decision was already
taken.  He had but lately discussed the condition of France with the
constable, De Richemont, and Duke Charles of Bourbon, his brother-in-law,
whom he had summoned to Nevers with that design.  Being convinced of the
necessity for peace, he spoke of it to the King of England's advisers
whom he found in Paris, and who dared not show absolute opposition to it.
It was agreed that in the month of July a general, and, more properly
speaking, a European conference should meet at Arras, that the legates of
Pope Eugenius IV. should be invited to it, and that consultation should
be held thereat as to the means of putting an end to the sufferings of
the two kingdoms.

Towards the end of July, accordingly, whilst the war was being prosecuted
with redoubled ardor on both sides at the very gates of Paris, there
arrived at Arras the pope's legates and the ambassadors of the Emperor
Sigismund, of the Kings of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Naples, Sicily,
Cyprus, Poland, and Denmark, and of the Dukes of Brittany and Milan.  The
university of Paris and many of the good towns of France, Flanders, and
even Holland, had sent their deputies thither.  Many bishops were there
in person.  The Bishop of Liege came thither with a magnificent train,
mounted, says the chroniclers, on two hundred white horses.  The Duke of
Burgundy made his entrance on the 30th of July, escorted by three hundred
archers wearing his livery.  All the lords who happened to be in the city
went to meet him at a league's distance, except the cardinal-legates of
the pope, who confined themselves to sending their people.  Two days
afterwards arrived the ambassadors of the King of France, having at their
head the Duke of Bourbon and the constable De Richemont, together with
several of the greatest French lords, and a retinue of four or five
hundred persons.  Duke Philip, forewarned of their coming, issued from
the city with all the princes and lords who happened to be there.  The
English alone refused to accompany him, wondering at his showing such
great honor to the ambassadors of their common enemy.  Philip went
forward a mile to meet his two brothers-in-law, the Duke of Bourbon and
the Count de Richemont, embraced them affectionately, and turned back
with them into Arras, amidst the joy and acclamations of the populace.
Last of all arrived the Duchess of Burgundy, magnificently dressed, and
bringing with her her young son, the Count of Charolais, who was
hereafter to be Charles the Rash.  The Duke of Bourbon, the constable De
Richemont, and all the lords were on horseback around her litter; but the
English, who had gone, like the others, to meet her, were unwilling, on
turning back to Arras, to form a part of her retinue with the French.

Grand as was the sight, it was not superior in grandeur to the event on
the eve of accomplishment.  The question was whether France should remain
a great nation, in full possession of itself and of its independence
under a French king, or whether the King of England should, in London and
with the title of King of France, have France in his possession and under
his government.  Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was called upon to
solve this problem of the future, that is to say, to decide upon the fate
of his lineage and his country.

[Illustration: Philip the Good of Burgundy----144]

As soon as the conference was opened, and no matter what attempts were
made to veil or adjourn the question, it was put nakedly.  The English,
instead of peace, began by proposing a long truce, and the marriage of
Henry VI. with a daughter of King Charles.  The French ambassadors
refused, absolutely, to negotiate on this basis; they desired a
definitive peace; and their conditions were, that the King and people of
England making an end of this situation, so full of clanger for the whole
royal house, and of suffering for the people.  Nevertheless, the duke
showed strong scruples.  The treaties he had sworn to, the promises he
had made, threw him into a constant fever of anxiety; he would not have
any one able to say that he had in any respect forfeited his honor.  He
asked for three consultations, one with the Italian doctors connected
with the pope's legates, another with English doctors, and another with
French doctors.  He was granted all three, though they were more
calculated to furnish him with arguments, each on their own side, than
to dissipate his doubts, if he had any real ones.  The legates ended by
solemnly saying to him, "We do conjure you, by the bowels of our Lord
Jesus Christ, and by the authority of our holy father, the pope, of the
holy council assembled at Bale, and of the universal Church, to renounce
that spirit of vengeance whereby you are moved against King Charles in
memory of the late Duke John, your father; nothing can render you more
pleasing in the eyes of God, or further augment your fame in this world."
For three days Duke Philip remained still undecided; but he heard that
the Duke of Bedford, regent of France on behalf of the English, who was
his brother-in-law, had just died at Rouen, on the 14th of September.  He
was, besides the late King of England, Henry V., the only English-man who
had received promises from the duke, and who lived in intimacy with him.
Ten days afterwards, on the 21th of September, the queen, Isabel of
Bavaria, also died at Paris; and thus another of the principal causes of
shame to the French kingship, and misfortune to France, disappeared from
the stage of the world.  Duke Philip felt himself more free and more at
rest in his mind, if not rightfully, at any rate so far as political and
worldly expedience was concerned.  He declared his readiness to accept
the proposals which had been communicated to him by the ambassadors of
Charles VII.; and on the 21st of September, 1435, peace was signed at
Arras between France and Burgundy, without any care for what England
might say or do.

There was great and general joy in France.  It was peace, and national
reconciliation as well; Dauphinizers and Burgundians embraced in the
streets; the Burgundians were delighted at being able to call themselves
Frenchmen.  Charles VII. convoked the states-general at Tours, to
consecrate this alliance.  On his knees, upon the bare stone, before the
Archbishop of Crete, who had just celebrated mass, the king laid his
hands upon the Gospels, and swore the peace, saying that "It was his duty
to imitate the King of kings, our divine Saviour, who had brought peace
amongst men."  At the chancellor's order, the princes and great lords,
one after the other, took the oath; the nobles and the people of the
third estate swore the peace all together, with cries of "Long live the
king!  Long live the Duke of Burgundy!"  "With this hand," said Sire de
Lannoy, "I have thrice sworn peace during this war; but I call God to
witness that, for my part, this time it shall be kept, and that never
will I break it (the peace)."  Charles VII., in his emotion, seized the
hands of Duke Philip's ambassadors, saying, "For a long while I have
languished for this happy day; we must thank God for it."  And the Te
Deum was intoned with enthusiasm.

Peace was really made amongst Frenchmen; and, in spite of many internal
difficulties and quarrels, it was not broken as long as Charles VII. and
Duke Philip the Good were living.  But the war with the English went on
incessantly.  They still possessed several of the finest provinces of
France; and the treaty of Arras, which had weakened them very much on the
Continent, had likewise made them very angry.  For twenty-six years, from
1435 to 1461, hostilities continued between the two kingdoms, at one time
actively and at another slackly, with occasional suspension by truce, but
without any formal termination.  There is no use in recounting the
details of their monotonous and barren history.  Governments and people
often persist in maintaining their quarrels and inflicting mutual
injuries by the instrumentality of events, acts, and actors that deserve
nothing but oblivion.  There is no intention here of dwelling upon any
events or persons save such as have, for good or for evil, to its glory
or its sorrow, exercised a considerable influence upon the condition and
fortune of France.

The peace of Arras brought back to the service of France and her king the
constable De Richemont, Arthur of Brittany, whom the jealousy of George
de la Tremoille and the distrustful indolence of Charles VII. had so long
kept out of it.  By a somewhat rare privilege, he was in reality, there
is reason to suppose, superior to the name he has left behind him in
history; and it is only justice to reproduce here the portrait given of
him by one of his contemporaries who observed him closely and knew him
well.  "Never a man of his time," says William Gruet, "loved justice more
than he, or took more pains to do it according to his ability.  Never was
prince more humble, more charitable, more compassionate, more liberal,
less avaricious, or more open-handed in a good fashion and without
prodigality.  He was a proper man, chaste and brave as prince can be; and
there was none of his time of better conduct than lie in conducting a
great battle, or a great siege, and all sorts of approaches in all sorts
of ways.  Every day, once at least in the four and twenty hours, his
conversation was of war, and he took more pleasure in it than in aught
else.  Above all things he loved men of valor and good renown, and he
more than any other loved and supported the people, and freely did good
to poor mendicants and others of God's poor."

Nearly all the deeds of Richemont, from the time that he became powerful
again, confirm the truth of this portrait.  His first thought and his
first labor were to restore Paris to France and to the king.  The unhappy
city in subjection to the English was the very image of devastation and
ruin.  "The wolves prowled about it by night, and there were in it," says
an eye-witness, "twenty-four thousand houses empty."  The Duke of
Bedford, in order to get rid of these public tokens of misery, attempted
to supply the Parisians with bread and amusements (panem et circenses);
but their very diversions were ghastly and melancholy.  In 1425, there
was painted in the sepulchre of the Innocents a picture called the Dance
of Death: Death, grinning with fleshless jaws, was represented taking by
the hand all estates of the population in their turn, and making them
dance.  In the Hotel Armagnac, confiscated, as so many others were, from
its owner, a show was exhibited to amuse the people.  "Four blind men,
armed with staves, were shut up with a pig in a little paddock.  They had
to see whether they could kill the said pig, and when they thought they
were belaboring it most they were belaboring one another."  The constable
resolved to put a stop to this deplorable state of things in the capital
of France.  In April, 1433, when he had just ordered for himself
apartments at St. Denis, he heard that the English had just got in there
and plundered the church.  He at once gave orders to march.  The
Burgundians, who made up nearly all his troop, demanded their pay, and
would not mount.  Richemont gave them his bond; and the march was begun
to St.  Denis.  "You know the country?" said the constable to Marshal
Isle-Adam.  "Yes, my lord," answered the other; "and by my faith, in the
position held by the English, you would do nothing to harm or annoy them,
though you had ten thousand fighting men."  "Ah! but we will," replied
Richemont; "God will help us.  Keep pressing forward to support the
skirmishers."  And he occupied St. Denis, and drove out the English.  The
population of Paris, being informed of this success, were greatly moved
and encouraged.  One brave burgess of Paris, Michel Laillier, master of
the exchequer, notified to the constable, it is said, that they were
ready and quite able to open one of the gates to him, provided that an
engagement were entered into in the king's name for a general amnesty and
the prevention of all disorder.  The constable, on the king's behalf,
entered into the required engagement, and presented himself the next day,
the 13th of April, with a picked force before the St. Michel gate.  The
enterprise was discovered.  A man posted on the wall made signs to them
with his hat, crying out, "Go to the other gate; there's no opening this;
work is going on for you in the Market-quarter."  The picked force
followed the course of the ramparts up to the St. Jacques gate.  "Who
goes there?" demanded some burghers who had the guard of it.  "Some of
the constable's people."  He himself came up on his big charger, with
satisfaction and courtesy in his mien.  Some little time was required for
opening the gate; a long ladder was let down; and Marshal Isle-Adam was
the first to mount, and planted on the wall the standard of France.  The
fastenings of the drawbridge were burst, and when it was let down, the
constable made his entry on horseback, riding calmly down St. Jacques
Street, in the midst of a joyous and comforted crowd.  "My good friends,"
he said to them, "the good King Charles, and I on his behalf, do thank
you a hundred thousand times for yielding up to him so quietly the chief
city of his kingdom.  If there be amongst you any, of whatsoever
condition he may be, who hath offended against my lord 'the king, all is
forgiven, in the case both of the absent and the present."

[Illustration: The Constable Made his Entry on Horseback----150]

Then he caused it to be proclaimed by sound of trumpet throughout the
streets that none of his people should be so bold, on pain of hanging, as
to take up quarters in the house of any burgher against his will, or to
use any reproach whatever, or do the least displeasure to any.  At sight
of the public joy, the English had retired to the Bastille, where the
constable was disposed to besiege them.  "My lord," said the burghers to
him, "they will surrender; do not reject their offer; it is so far a fine
thing enough to have thus recovered Paris; often, on the contrary, many
constables and many marshals have been driven out of it.  Take
contentedly what God hath granted you."  The burghers' prediction was not
unverified.  The English sallied out of the Bastille by the gate which
opened on the fields, and went and took boat in the rear of the Louvre.
Next day abundance of provisions arrived in Paris; and the gates were
opened to the country folks.  The populace freely manifested their joy at
being rid of the English.  "It was plain to see," was the saving, "that
they were not in France to remain; not one of them had been seen to sow a
field with corn or build a house; they destroyed their quarters without a
thought of repairing them; they had not restored, peradventure, a single
fireplace.  There was only their regent, the Duke of Bedford, who was
fond of building and making the poor people work; he would have liked
peace; but the nature of those English is to be always at war with their
neighbors, and accordingly they all made a bad end; thank God there have
already died in France more than seventy thousand of them."

Up to the taking of Paris by the constable the Duke of Burgundy had kept
himself in reserve, and had maintained a tacit neutrality towards
England; he had merely been making, without noisy demonstration,
preparations for an enterprise in which he, as Count of Flanders, was
very much interested.  The success of Richemont inspired him with a hope,
and perhaps with a jealous desire, of showing his power and his
patriotism as a Frenchman by making war, in his turn, upon the English,
from whom he had by the treaty of Arras effected only a pacific
separation.  In June, 1436, he went and besieged Calais.  This was
attacking England at one of the points she was bent upon defending most
obstinately.  Philip had reckoned on the energetic cooperation of the
cities of Flanders, and at the first blush the Flemings did display a
strong inclination to support him in his enterprise.  "When the
English," they said, "know that my lords of Ghent are on the way to
attack them with all their might they will not await us; they will leave
the city and flee away to England."  Neither the Flemings nor Philip had
correctly estimated the importance which was attached in London to the
possession of Calais.  When the Duke of Gloucester, lord-protector of
England, found this possession threatened, he sent a herald to defy the
Duke of Burgundy and declare to him that, if he did not wait for battle
beneath the walls of Calais, Humphrey of Gloucester would go after him
even into his own dominions.  "Tell your lord that he will not need to
take so much trouble, and that he will find me here," answered Philip
proudly.  His pride was over-confident.  Whether it were only a people's
fickleness or intelligent appreciation of their own commercial interests
in their relations with England, the Flemings grew speedily disgusted
with the siege of Calais, complained of the tardiness in arrival of the
fleet which Philip had despatched thither to close the port against
English vessels, and, after having suffered several reverses by sorties
of the English garrison, they ended by retiring with such precipitation
that they abandoned part of their supplies and artillery.  Philip,
according to the expression of M. Henri Martin, was reduced to covering
their retreat with his cavalry; and then he went away sorrowfully to
Lille, to advise about the means of defending his Flemish lordships
exposed to the reprisals of the English.

Thus the fortune of Burgundy was tottering whilst that of France was
recovering itself.  The constable's easy occupation of Paris led the
majority of the small places in the neighborhood, St. Denis, Chevreuse,
Marcoussis, and Montlhery to decide either upon spontaneous surrender or
allowing themselves to be taken after no great resistance.  Charles VII.,
on his way through France to Lyon, in Dauphiny, Languedoc, Auvergne, and
along the Loire, recovered several other towns, for instance, Chateau-
Landon, Nemours, and Charny.  He laid siege in person to Montereau, an
important military post with which a recent and sinister reminiscence was
connected.  A great change now made itself apparent in the king's
behavior and disposition.  He showed activity and vigilance, and was
ready to expose himself without any care for fatigue or danger.  On the
day of the assault (10th of October, 1437) he went down into the