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"Often have I striven with my lord that he should ride no more in the lists," she said, "for since he received the lance-thrust in the eye by the side of La Pucelle before the walls of Orleans, he sees no more aright, but bears ever in the direction of the eye which sees and away from that wherein he had his wound."
In witness whereto, my hand being guided to write, I set my name, Jehanne la Pucelle, this ninth day of May, in the year Fourteen hundred and thirty-one. "So guide my hand," she said, taking the pen from my fingers; and thus guided, while my tears fell on her hand, she wrote JEHANNE LA PUCELLE. "Now," quoth she, smiling as of old, "we must seal this missive.
He goes so far as to say that in his childhood he had an aversion, almost a hatred, for Voltaire, on account of the insult to patriotism in his famous poem of La Pucelle; and that afterwards, even while acknowledging all his admirable qualities and the services he rendered to the cause of humanity, he could acquire only a very faint taste for his writing.
From my cradle onward I was surrounded by replicas of ancient art; at ten years of age I read Gil Blas, at twelve La Pucelle. Where others had Hop-o'-my-thumb, Bluebeard, Cinderella, as childhood friends, mine were Venus and Apollo, Hercules and Lackoon. My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight.
Maimed and wounded soldiers, whom Esclairmonde relieved and tended as they returned from lost battles, gave her fearful accounts of the panic that La Pucelle inspired.
Now, it is clearly made out by the surviving evidence that D'Arc would much have preferred continuing to say, "Ma fille, as-tu donne au cochon a manger?" to saying, "Pucelle d'Orleans, as-tu sauve les fleurs-de-lys?"
It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them. Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes.
Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at Joanna, but at M. Michelet viz, to convince him that an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of La Pucelle than even her admiring countrymen I shall, in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's demeanour on the scaffold, and to one or two in that of the bystanders, which authorise me in questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness.
They quoted the text of a council held in the fourth century, which anathematized such changes of dress; not seeing that the prohibition specially applied to a period when manners had been barely retrieved from pagan impurities. The doctors belonging to the party of Charles VII, the apologists of the Pucelle, find exceeding difficulty in justifying her on this head.
Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science; his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, 'Veritas odium parit. He never, conse- quently, found himself in the false position of Voltaire, who was forced to disown his 'Pucelle' and conceal all his life the authorship of other works.
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