Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 1 eBook

I was sent to Domremy, to the priest, whose housekeeper became a loving mother to me.  The priest, in the course of time, taught me to read and write, and he and I were the only persons in the village who possessed this learning.

At the time that the house of this good priest, Guillaume Fronte, became my home, I was six years old.  We lived close by the village church, and the small garden of Joan’s parents was behind the church.  As to that family there were Jacques d’Arc the father, his wife Isabel Romee; three sons—­Jacques, ten years old, Pierre, eight, and Jean, seven; Joan, four, and her baby sister Catherine, about a year old.  I had these children for playmates from the beginning.  I had some other playmates besides—­particularly four boys:  Pierre Morel, Etienne Roze, Noel Rainguesson, and Edmond Aubrey, whose father was maire at that time; also two girls, about Joan’s age, who by and by became her favorites; one was named Haumetter, the other was called Little Mengette.  These girls were common peasant children, like Joan herself.  When they grew up, both married common laborers.  Their estate was lowly enough, you see; yet a time came, many years after, when no passing stranger, howsoever great he might be, failed to go and pay his reverence to those to humble old women who had been honored in their youth by the friendship of Joan of Arc.

These were all good children, just of the ordinary peasant type; not bright, of course—­you would not expect that—­but good-hearted and companionable, obedient to their parents and the priest; and as they grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and prejudices got at second hand from their elders, and adopted without reserve; and without examination also—­which goes without saying.  Their religion was inherited, their politics the same.  John Huss and his sort might find fault with the Church, in Domremy it disturbed nobody’s faith; and when the split came, when I was fourteen, and we had three Popes at once, nobody in Domremy was worried about how to choose among them—­the Pope of Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no Pope at all.  Every human creature in the village was an Armagnac—­a patriot—­and if we children hotly hated nothing else in the world, we did certainly hate the English and Burgundian name and polity in that way.

Chapter 2 The Fairy Tree of Domremy

Our Domremy was like any other humble little hamlet of that remote time and region.  It was a maze of crooked, narrow lanes and alleys shaded and sheltered by the overhanging thatch roofs of the barnlike houses.  The houses were dimly lighted by wooden-shuttered windows—­that is, holes in the walls which served for windows.  The floors were dirt, and there was very little furniture.  Sheep and cattle grazing was the main industry; all the young folks tended flocks.