Preface

Jeanne d'Arc, during her nineteen years of life, was a cause of contention among her own countrymen, and her memory divides them to the present day. In her life she was of course detested as a witch and heretic by the French of the Burgundian faction. After her death, her memory was distasteful to all writers who disbelieved in her supernormal faculties, and in her inspiration. She had no business to possess faculties for which science could not account, and which common sense could not accept.

To-day, the quarrel over her character and career is especially bitter. If the Church canonises her, the Church is said, by the ‘Anticlericals,’ to ‘confiscate’ her, and to stultify itself. Her courage and her goodness of heart are denied by no man, but, as a set-off against the praises of the ‘clericals,’ and even of historians far from orthodox, her genius is denied, or is minimised; she is represented as a martyr, a heroine, a puzzle-pated hallucinated lass, a perplexed wanderer in a realm of dreams; the unconscious tool of fraudulent priests, herself once doubtfully honest, apt to tell great palpable myths to her own glorification, never a leader in war, but only a kind of mascotte, a ‘little saint,’ and a beguine – in breeches!

It has appeared to me that all these inconsistent views of the Maid, and several charges against her best friends, are mainly based on erroneous readings of the copious evidence concerning her; on mistakes in the translating of the very bad Latin of the documents, and, generally, are distorted by a false historical perspective, if not by an unconscious hostility, into the grounds of which we need not inquire. I have therefore written this book in the hope that grave errors, as I deem them, may be corrected; and also because, as far as I am aware, no British author has yet attempted to write a critical biography of the Maid. Of course, there no longer remains, in England, a shadow of prejudice against the stainless heroine and martyr. It has pleased the Chanoine Dunand, however, in his long biography of La Vraie Jeanne d'Arc, and in his learned but prolix series of Études Critiques, to speak of ‘the English,’ and the ‘Franco-English’ schools of History.