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A place is chosen to enable the people to see everything, but the victim is carefully hidden from their sight." Whether otherwise explicable or not, this fact is certainly consistent with the hypothesis that some other victim was secretly substituted for Jeanne by the English authorities. We have thus far contented ourselves with presenting and re-enforcing Mr. Delepierre's statement of the case.
For those who can discover in the historian Renan and the critic Strauss nothing but the malevolence of incredulity, the case of Jeanne d'Arc, duly contemplated, may serve as a wholesome lesson. We have devoted so much space to this problem, by far the most considerable of those treated in Mr. Delepierre's book, that we have hardly room for any of the others.
Plausible evidence has been brought to prove that Jeanne d'Arc was never burnt at the stake, but lived to a ripe age, and was even happily married to a nobleman of high rank and reputation. We shall abridge Mr. Delepierre's statement of this curious case.
Why did they not parade their knowledge, to the manifest discomfiture of La Tremouille and his company? Or why did not Pierre du Lis cause it to be proclaimed that the English were liars, his sister being safely housed in Metz? In the mere interests of historical criticism, we have said all that we could in behalf of Mr. Delepierre's hypothesis.
Delepierre's "difficulties." And first, because simplest, we will take the case of the Alexandrian Library. Every one has heard how Amrou, after his conquest of Egypt, sent to Caliph Omar to know what should be done with the Alexandrian Library. "If the books agree with the Koran," said the Caliph, "they are superfluous; if they contradict it, they are damnable; in either case, destroy them."
These brief considerations seem to knock away all the main props of Mr. Delepierre's hypothesis, save that furnished by the apparent testimony of Jeanne's brothers, given at second hand in the Metz archives. And those who are familiar with the phenomena of mediaeval delusions will be unwilling to draw too hasty an inference from this alone.
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