Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/354

 338 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE STATE. rash and unjust to suppose that it would not have been equally earnest in repressing the yet more pernicious heresies of Jean Petit. To us the result of greatest interest was its influence on the fate of Gerson himself. On the dissolution of the council he was afraid to risk the enmity of the Duke of Burgundy by return- ing to France, and gladly accepted a refuge offered him in Austria by Duke Ernest, which he repaid in a grateful poem. He never ventured nearer home than Lyons, where his brother was friar of a convent of Celestinian hermits, and where he supported himself by teaching school till his death, July 14, 1429.* Criticism would doubtless ere this have demonstrated the me- teoric career of Joan of Arc to be a myth, but for the concurrent testimony of friend and foe and the documentary evidence, which enable us with reasonable certainty to separate its marvellous vicissitudes from the legendary details with which they have been obscured. For us her story has a special interest, as affording an- other illustration of the ease w T ith which the inquisitorial process was employed for political ends. In 1429 the French monarchy seemed doomed beyond hope of resuscitation. In the fierce dissensions which marked the reign of the insane Charles VI. a generation had grown up in whom adherence to faction had replaced fidelity to the throne or to the nation ; the loyalists were known not as partisans of Charles VIL, but as Armagnacs, and the Burgundians welcomed the foreign domination of England as preferable to that of their hereditary sovereign. Paris, in spite of the fearful privations and losses en- tailed by the war, submitted cheerfully to the English through the love it bore to their ally, the Duke of Burgundy. Joan of Arc said that, in her native village, Domremy on the Lorraine border, there was but one Burgundian, and his head she wished were cut off ; but Domremy and Yaucouleurs constituted the only Armagnac spot in northeastern France, and its boys used to have frequent fights with the Burgundian boys of Marey, from which they 1092, 1192, 1513, 1531-2— D'Argentre, I. n. 187-92.— Gersoni Opp. III. 56 Q-S, 57 B.
 * Von derHardt, IH. Proleg. 13; IV. 335-6, 440, 451, 718-22, 724-8, 1087-88,