Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/357

 JOAN OF ARC. 341 times came to counsel her, and she felt herself the instrument of the divine will, transmuting by a subtle psychical alchemy her own impulses into commands from on high. At length she could summon her heavenly advisers at will and obtain from them in- structions in any doubtful emergencyo In her trial great stress was laid upon an ancient beech-tree, near Domremy, known as the Ladies' Tree, or Fairies' Tree, from near the roots of which gushed forth a spring of miraculous healing virtue. A survival of tree and fountain worship was preserved in the annual dances and songs of the young girls of the village around the tree, and the garlands which they hung upon its boughs, but Joan, although she joined her comrades in these observances, usually reserved her garlands to decorate the shrine of the Virgin in the church hard by. Extreme religious sensibility was inseparable from such a character as hers, and almost at the first apparition of her celestial visitants she made a vow of virginity. She believed herself con- secrated and set apart for some high and holy purpose, to which all earthly ties must be subordinate. When she related to her judges that her parents were almost crazed at her departure, she added that if she had had a hundred fathers and mothers she would have abandoned them to fulfil her mission. To this self- concentration, reflected in her bearing, is probably to be attrib- uted the remark of several of her chroniclers, that no man could look upon her with a lascivious eye.* At first her heavenly guides merely told her to conduct herself well and to frequent the church, but as she grew to understand the desperate condition of the monarchy and to share the fierce passions of the time, it was natural that these purely moral in- structions should change into commands to bear from God the message of deliverance to the despairing people. In her ecstasies she felt herself to be the chosen instrument, and at length her Voices, as she habitually called them, urged her several times a week to hasten to France and to raise the siege of Orleans. To her parents she feared to reveal her mission ; some unguarded revelation they must have had, for, two years before her departure, • Proces, pp. 469, 470, 471, 473, 475, 476, 477, 483, 485, 487, 499.^Chron. de la Pucelle, ann. 1429, pp. 428, 435-6, 443.— L'Averdy (Academie des Inscriptions, Notices des MSS. III. 373).