Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/182

 H4 WORKMEN AND HEROES walls of Orleans, what little hope or courage he had left seemed to desert him, and he sank into a state of despair. And far away on the frontier, in the little village of Domremy, a young girl watched her flocks, and wept over the fate of her beloved country ; and weeping, prayed that God would save France from the oppressor. How earnestly she prayed, and how well God listened, history has recorded in a tale more wonderful than any story ever conceived by the imagination of man, and sadder than any other save the story of the Nazarene upon the Cross of Calvary. The end of France as a nation seemed at hand. The nobility had been led into captivity and sold to an invading enemy ; the clergy had seen its altars de- famed by arrogant strangers. Industry had been ruined by civil wars during the long imbecility of Charles VI., and the succeeding ravages made by the English. Villages were depopulated, homes desolated, and look where they might, the peo- ple of France saw no hope of aid, save from on high. Of this epoch Henry Martin says, "The people expected nothing from hu- man sources ; but a sentiment of indestructible nationality stirred in their hearts and told them that France could not die. Hoping nothing from earth, they lifted their souls to heaven ; an ardent religious fervor seized upon them, which had no part with clergy or creed. It rose from the extremity of their need, and fixed its root in an old oracle of the Middle Ages, which had predicted that France should be ' lost through a woman and saved by a virgin.' " France had certainly been lost through its wicked queen ; that part of the old prophecy had been fearfully fulfilled ; the remaining clause was yet to be verified. The people, excited to a religious frenzy by their desperate straits and their faith in the old superstition, prayed more fervently with each day ; and their prayers rose like great white eagles and settled upon the heart of that strange divine child, who was weeping over the fate of France while she watched her sheep on the plains of Domremy. A humbly born girl was Joan of Arc, unable to read or write ; women who could do more than that were rare in those days, so she was not despised on ac- count of her ignorance, but highly respected for her industry and piety. An en' thusiastic Catholic, she added to her church duties by active benevolence and kindness to the sick and poor in her native town. Often she was seen to kneel in the fields and pray ; and there was a chapel some miles from Domremy to which she used to make a pilgrimage every Sunday and offer prayers to the Virgia There was, too, in the forest of Bois Chemin a famous beech-tree under which a stream of clear water flowed ; and a superstition prevailed among the people of Domremy that fairies had blessed this tree and bestowed healing properties upon the waters of the stream. The priest and the villagers marched about the sacred tree once each year singing solemn chants, and the young people hung its boughs with garlands, and danced under its shading branches. Joan dearly loved this spot, and it became her favorite haunt. The echoes of war reverberated even to this quiet frontier hamlet, and in her hours ot reverie she dwelt sadly upon the stories of bloodshed and suffering which she heard her elders repeat