Part 30 (1/2)

'In 1880 the same general amnesty was proposed, and the Chamber adopted it by a very large majority. Do you wonder that thoughtful men look with horror on the current which is carrying us in such a direction as that?

At this moment two men of high personal character, Admiral Krantz and M.

Casimir Perier, are lending their support to a Government which represents this current, and yet Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Perier have recorded their deliberate conviction that the men who clamoured for an unconditional, indiscriminate amnesty for the Communards were simply abusing the name of clemency for the rehabilitation of crime.

'Look again,' he said, 'at the spirit in which the laicization of the schools is conducted. There are a hundred families we will say in a village. Ninety-nine of these families are Christian families, not families of saints--I wish I knew such a village as that!--but Christian families. Go into their homes, and you will see the crucifix hanging in the chambers, religious prints upon the walls. One family is a family of atheists. I suppose the case, for as a matter of fact I know no such family. But I will suppose it. There is a school in the village, and in that school there hangs a crucifix, the gift of some pious resident.

Ninety-nine fathers and mothers of the village desire that crucifix to be respected. One father and one mother (a bold supposition this!) desire it to be removed. The authorities send in a man who plucks it down, before the children, and throws it out of the door. I simply state what has happened over and over again! Is there any respect for equal rights--for the rule of the majority, for freedom of conscience in such proceedings? Take the case of the Virgin of Beziers. In that ancient city stood two statues of the Virgin, one in bronze and one in marble.

The civil authorities called upon the Church to suppress them. The Church authorities of course declined to do this. Thereupon the civil authorities take the money of the taxpayers and expend it in depriving the city of these two monuments. Suppose the Turkish authorities were to do a thing like this in a town full of Christians under their dominion, what would all the civilised world say about the Turks?

'And it is done in a French city by Frenchmen either to carry out their own self-will or to exasperate and insult their fellow-citizens, or for both reasons at once!

'Still another case you can see for yourself at Domremy. There under a pious and patriotic foundation to which Louis XVIII largely contributed the home of Jeanne d'Arc, religiously preserved in its original state, was confided to the keeping of some Sisters. They dwelt in a neat edifice constructed on the grounds purchased to secure the house of the Pucelle, and there the children of Domremy and the neighbouring communes came to school and were gratuitously taught. Only the other day the local authorities were instigated, I know not by whom--perhaps by the friends of M. Ferry at St.-Die, which is not very far off--to ”laicize”

instruction in Domremy. To this end they turn the Sisters out, put the home of Jeanne d'Arc under the charge of a lay guardian, who has to be paid by the State, of course, tax the commune to pay a lay teacher, and make the school a lay school at the very door of the home of the village maiden to whose religious faith France owes her freedom and her national existence!'

I made a visit to Nancy and the Department of the Meurthe et Moselle not long after I had this conversation in Reims. The Mother Superior of the great Sisterhood of Christian Doctrine at Nancy confirmed this amazing story of the performances at Domremy, and gave me many particulars of the petty persecutions to which the Sisters who conduct schools all over France are subjected. The schools are open at all hours to the invasion of Inspectors, who magnify their office too often in the eyes of the children by treating the teachers (lay as well as religious) with the sort of amiable condescension which marks the demeanour of an agent of the octroi overhauling the basket of a peasant-woman at a barrier. If a Sister has a religious book, her own property, lying on her desk, it is violently s.n.a.t.c.hed up, and the children are invited to say whether it has been used to poison their young minds with religious ideas. 'In short,' said the Mother Superior very quietly, 'our Sisters are really much better treated in Protestant countries than in Catholic France.'

Domremy-la-Pucelle is a typical agricultural village of Eastern France.

It is in the Department of the Vosges and in the verdant valley of the Meuse. I drove to it on a lovely summer's morning after visiting Vaucouleurs, where the Pucelle came before the stout Captain Robert de Beaudricourt and said to him, 'You must take me to the King. I must see him before Mid Lent, and I will see him if I walk my legs off to the knees!' This interview began her marvellous career.

From certain articles in newspapers about a drama of _Jeanne d'Arc_, now performing at Paris, I gather that Jeanne's moral conquest of France which preceded and led to her material victory over the English invaders, has at last been satisfactorily explained by the scientific believers in hypnotism! Of this I can only say, with President Lincoln on a memorable occasion, 'for those who like this kind of explanation of historical phenomena, I should suppose it would be just the kind of explanation they would like.'

The country between Vaucouleurs and Domremy is agreeably diversified, well wooded in parts, and rich in fair meadow-lands. At Montbras a little old lady dwells and looks after her affairs in one of the most picturesque chateau of the sixteenth century to be seen in this part of France, machicolated, crenellated, and dominated by lofty towers. We pa.s.sed, too, through Greux, a small village on the Meuse, the dwellers in which were astute enough to get themselves exempted by Charles VII from all talliages and subsidies 'by fabricating doc.u.ments' to prove that Jeanne d'Arc was born there. The incident is curious as going to show that the 'downtrodden serfs' and 'manacled villeins' of the middle ages had their wits about them, and could take care of themselves when an opportunity offered, as well as the 'oppressed tenantry' of modern Ireland. Domremy, which is no bigger than Greux, neither of them having three hundred inhabitants, straggles along the highway. The houses are well built--the church is a handsome, ogival building of the fifteenth century, restored in our day, but quite in keeping with the place and its a.s.sociations. Within it, under a tomb built into the wall, lie the two brothers Tiercelin, sons of the G.o.dmother of Jeanne, who bore their testimony manfully to the character of the deliverer of France, when the Church was at last compelled to intervene in the interest of truth and justice between the French Catholics who had wors.h.i.+pped her as a 'creature of G.o.d,' and the English Catholics who had burned her as an emissary of the Evil One.

Almost under the shadow of the church tower stands the house in which Jeanne was born and bred. A charming, old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, very well kept, surrounds it. If when you leave the church you pa.s.s around by the main street of the village, you soon find yourself in front of a neat iron railing which connects two modern buildings of no great size, but neat and unpretending. Entering the gateway of this railing you see before you, shaded by well-grown trees, one or two of which may possibly be of the date of the house, the quaint fifteenth-century facade of the house of Jacques d'Arc, and his wife Isabelle Vouthon, called Romee because she had made a pilgrimage to the Eternal City. A curious demi-gable gives the house the appearance of having been cut in two. But there is no reason to suppose it was ever any larger than it is now.

Probably, indeed, this facade was erected long after the martyrdom of Jeanne. Over the ogival doorway is an escutcheon showing three s.h.i.+elds, and the date, 1480, with an inscription, '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!_' This goes to confirm a local tradition that the facade was built at the cost of Louis XI., who understood much better than his father the political value to the crown and to the country of France of the marvellous career of the peasant girl of Domremy. The date of this inscription is particularly significant. In 1479 was fought the battle of Guinegate, which was lost to France by the headlong flight of the French chivalry from the field. Louis XI. turned this disaster to good account. He made it the excuse for founding, in 1480, his regular army of mercenaries, liberating the peasants from the burden of personal military service to the lords, and drawing to himself the power of the State through taxation. '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!_' was a popular cry throughout France in 1480; for Labeur in those days meant what it means now in the _Terra di Lavoro_--the tilling of the fields.

One of the three s.h.i.+elds above this doorway has a similar significance.

It is a bearing of three ploughshares. With it are emblazoned on the house of the Pucelle two other s.h.i.+elds, one bearing the three royal fleurs-de-lys of France, and the other the arms granted to the family of the heroine--_azure_, a sword _argent_ pommelled and hilted _or_, and above a crown supported by two fleurs-de-lys. With these arms, as we know, the family took the name of De Lys. The name, the arms, and the inscription over the doorway were a perpetual witness to the peasants of Champagne and Lorraine of the unity of interests established by King Louis between the spade and the sceptre. With the help of an inspired daughter of the people, King Charles had driven the English into the sea, and delivered the land. With the help of the people, King Louis had broken the power of Burgundy, and put the barons under his foot. '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Louys!_' I do not wonder this skilful craftsman 'of the empire and the rule' lamented on his death-bed in 1483, at Plessis-les-Tours, that he could not live to crown the edifice he had so well begun. We in England and America know him only in the magic mirror of the Wizard of the North. But France owes him a great debt. He was cruel, but in comparison with the cruelty of Lebon, of Barere, of Billaud-Varennes, his cruelty was tender mercy, He was a hypocrite, but his hypocrisy shows like candour beside the perfidy and the cant of Petion and of Robespierre, while in the great 'art and mystery' of government he was a master where these modern apes of despotism were clumsy apprentices.

The interior of the house of Jeanne is probably in the main what it was when Jeanne dwelt here with her parents, her sister and her brothers.

The ground floor contains a general living-room, the large chimney-place of which may perhaps be of the time of Jeanne, and three bedrooms, one of which, a chamber measuring three metres by four, and lighted only by a small dormer window looking out upon the garden, tradition a.s.signs to Jeanne and to her sister. Here, the people of Domremy believe, the maiden sate almost within the shadow of the old church-tower, and heard the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, and Michael the Archangel, patron and defender of France, mingling with the sound of the church bells, and calling upon her to arise, and leave her village home and the still forests of Domremy and her silly sheep, and go out into a world of war and confusion and violence, and rally the broken armies of her people, and lead them, like another Deborah or Judith, to victory.

That Jeanne heard these voices or believed she heard them, the doc.u.mentary evidence unearthed by Quicherat abundantly proves. It proves, too, that she was cool, clear-headed, self-possessed, thoroughly honest, and absolutely trustworthy in every relation of life. This being her character, what did she do? She made her way from her solitude in Lorraine to the court of the King at Chinon, with nothing but her faith in her voices and her mission to sustain her; put herself into the forefront of the battle of France, threw the English back into England, and saw the successor of St.-Remi put the crown of Clovis upon the head of a prince whom n.o.body but herself could have led or driven to Reims.

If anybody in Paris or elsewhere knowing all this feels quite sure that Jeanne did not hear the voices which she believed herself to have heard, he certainly is to be pitied. It may do him good to consider in his closet what Lord Macaulay has said in a certain celebrated essay concerning Sir Thomas More and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

A man may intelligently believe or disbelieve in the reality of the voices heard by Jeanne, but no man who intelligently disbelieves in them can need to be told that his disbelief rests upon no better scientific ground than the belief of the man who believes in them.

To take the home of Jeanne d'Arc out of the keeping of devout women who share the faith of Jeanne, that faith which, well or ill founded, unquestionably saved France, was simply a stupid indecency. In the keeping of the Sisters the home of Jeanne was a shrine. In any other keeping it becomes a show.

The essential vulgarity of the performance is bad enough. But a sharp-witted Domremy man who took me on to Bourlemont in his 'trap'

a.s.sured me, in a matter-of-fact way, that in the village the chief mover in the affair was commonly believed to have got a good _pot-de-vin_ for securing the position of keeper of the house for a person of his acquaintance. This may have been a bit of village scandal, but such performances naturally breed village scandals. Whether it was or was not a 'job' in this sense, it certainly marks as low a level of taste and education as the pillage by Barere and his copper 'Syndicate' of the historic tombs of France at St.-Denis in 1793.

Some years ago all France was incensed by a nocturnal desecration of the statue of Duguesclin which stands at Dinan in the very lists in which five hundred years ago the Breton hero met and vanquished 'Sir Thomas of Canterbury.' The indignation of France was righteous, and if there was any foundation for the popular impression that the outrage was perpetrated by some English lads on a vacation tour, no language could well be too strong to apply to it. But I did not observe that any Parisian journalist alluded at that time to the way in which the ashes of Duguesclin himself were treated in 1795 at St.-Denis, by Frenchmen decked in tri-coloured scarves! It did not even occur to them to remember how long ago and by what hands the column of the Grand Army was pulled down in the very heart of Paris!

While the force of Philistine fatuity can no further go than it has gone in the 'laicization' of the home of Jeanne d'Arc, I ought to say that the actual keeper of the place seemed to me to be a decent sort of fellow, not wholly dest.i.tute of respect for its traditions and its significance. The house and the garden are neatly kept. In the centre of the main room stands a fine model in bronze of the well-known statue of Jeanne d'Arc, by the Princess Mary of Orleans, with an inscription stating that it was given by the King, her father, to the Department of the Vosges, to be placed in the house where Jeanne was born.

Commemorative tablets are set here and there in the walls; and in one of the modern buildings in front of the house a collection is kept of objects ill.u.s.trating the life of the Pucelle.

The most interesting of these is a banner given by General de Charette, to the valour of whose Zouaves the French are indebted for one of the few gleams of victory which brighten up the dark record of 1870 It was at Patay that in June 1429 the English, under Sir John Fastolf, for the first time broke in a stricken field and fled under the onset of the French, led by the Maid of Orleans, leaving the great Talbot to fall a prisoner into the hands of his enemies. And at Patay, again in December 1870, the German advance was met and repulsed by the 'Volunteers of the West,' that being the name under which the silly and intolerant 'Government of the National Defence' actually compelled the Catholic Zouaves to fight for their country, just as they forced the Duc de Chartres to draw his sword and risk his life for France as 'Robert Lefort.' These puerilities really almost disarm contempt into compa.s.sion. At Patay in 1870 the Zouaves saw three of their officers, all of one family, struck down in succession, two of them to death, as they advanced on the lines of the enemy, bearing a banner of the Sacre-Coeur, which had been presented to General de Charette by some nuns of Brittany only a few days before the battle. The banner, now at Domremy, is a votive offering of General de Charette and his Zouaves in commemoration of the field on which they were permitted thus, after four centuries, to link the piety and the patriotic valour of modern France with the deathless traditions of Domremy, of Orleans, and of Reims.

This little museum contains, too, a picture given by an Englishman, of Jeanne binding up the wounds of an English soldier after the repulse of one of the English attacks. The soil has risen about the house of Jeanne, and this may have made the interior seem more gloomy than it once was. But the house is well and solidly built, and if it may be thought a fair specimen of the abodes of the well-to-do peasantry of Lorraine in the fifteenth century, they were as well lodged relatively to the general average of people at that time as those of the same cla.s.s in Eastern France now on the average appear to be. Charles de Lys in the early seventeenth century seems to have been a man of note and substance. But the parents of Jeanne were simply peasant proprietors. At the entrance of the village church there is a statue of Jeanne, the work of a native artist, in which she appears kneeling in her peasant's dress, one hand pressed upon her heart and the other lifted towards Heaven. And in a little clump of fir-trees near her house stands a sort of monumental fountain, surmounted by a bust of the Pucelle. The house itself remained in the possession of the last descendant of the family, a soldier of the Empire named Gerardin, down to the time of the Restoration. Some Englishman, it is said, then offered him a handsome price for the cottage, with the object of moving it across the Channel, as an enterprising countryman of mine once proposed to carry off the house of Shakespeare to America. Gerardin, though a poor man, or perhaps because he was a poor man, refused. The department thereupon bought the house, the King gave Gerardin the cross of the Legion, and he was made a _garde forestier_.