FullReads

At the hour of noon, on a sunny summer’s day in the year of our Lord 1425, a young girl of the little village of Domremy, France, stood with bent head and thoughtful eyes in the small garden attached to her father’s humble home. There was nothing in her appearance to attract a second glance. Her parents were peasants, her occupation was one of constant toil, her attire was of the humblest, her life had been hitherto spent in aiding her mother at home or in driving her father’s few sheep afield. None who saw her on that day could have dreamed that this simple peasant maiden was destined to become one of the most famous women whose name history records, and that this day, was that of the beginning of her career.

She had been born at a critical period in history. Her country was in extremity. For the greater part of a century the dreadful “Hundred Years’ War” had been waged, desolating France, destroying its people by the thousands, bringing it more and more under the dominion of a foreign foe. The realm of France had now reached its lowest depth of disaster, its king uncrowned, its fairest regions overrun,–here by the English, there by the Burgundians,–the whole kingdom in peril of being taken and reduced to vassalage. Never before nor since had the need of a deliverer been so vitally felt. The deliverer chosen of heaven was the young peasant girl who walked that summer noon in her father’s humble garden at Domremy.

Young as she was, she had seen the horrors of war. Four years before the village had been plundered and burnt, its defenders slain or wounded, the surrounding country devastated. The story of the suffering and peril of France was in all French ears. Doubtless little Joan’s soul burned with sympathy for her beloved land as she moved thoughtfully up and down the garden paths, asking herself if God could longer permit such wrongs and disasters to continue.

Suddenly, to her right, in the direction of the small village church, Joan heard a voice calling her, and, looking thither, she was surprised and frightened at seeing a great light. The voice, continued; her courage returned; “it was a worthy voice,” she tells us, one that could come only from angels. “I saw them with my bodily eyes,” she afterwards said. “When they departed from me I wept and would fain have had them take me with them.” Again and again came to her the voices and the forms; they haunted her; and still the burden of their exhortation was the same, that she should “go to France to deliver the kingdom.” The girl grew dreamy. She became lost in meditation, full of deep thoughts and budding purposes, wrought by the celestial voices into high hopes and noble aspirations, possessed with the belief that she had been chosen by heaven to deliver France from its woes and to disconcert its enemies.

The times were fitting for such a conception. Two forces ruled mens’ minds,–ambition and trust in the supernatural. The powerful depended upon their own arms for aid; the weak and miserable turned to Christ and the Virgin for support; there were those who looked to see God in bodily person; His angels and ministers were thought to deal directly with man; it was an age in which force and fraud alike were dominant, in which men were governed in their bodies by the sword, in their souls by their belief in and dread of the supernatural, and in which enthusiasm had higher sway than thought. It was enthusiastic belief in her divine mission that moved Joan of Arc. It was trust in her as God’s agent of deliverance that filled the soul of France with new spirit, and unnerved her foes with enfeebling fears. Joan’s mission and her age were well associated. In the nineteenth century she would have been covered with ridicule; in the fifteenth she led France to victory.