Well, anything to make delay. The King’s
council advised him against arriving at a decision
in our matter too precipitately. He arrive at
a decision too precipitately! So they sent a
committee of priests—always priests—into
Lorraine to inquire into Joan’s character and
history—a matter which would consume several
weeks, of course. You see how fastidious they
were. It was as if people should come to put out
the fire when a man’s house was burning down,
and they waited till they could send into another
country to find out if he had always kept the Sabbath
or not, before letting him try.
So the days poked along; dreary for us young people
in some ways, but not in all, for we had one great
anticipation in front of us; we had never seen a king,
and now some day we should have that prodigious spectacle
to see and to treasure in our memories all our lives;
so we were on the lookout, and always eager and watching
for the chance. The others were doomed to wait
longer than I, as it turned out. One day great
news came—the Orleans commissioners, with
Yolande and our knights, had at last turned the council’s
position and persuaded the King to see Joan.
Joan received the immense news gratefully but without
losing her head, but with us others it was otherwise;
we could not eat or sleep or do any rational thing
for the excitement and the glory of it. During
two days our pair of noble knights were in distress
and trepidation on Joan’s account, for the audience
was to be at night, and they were afraid that Joan
would be so paralyzed by the glare of light from the
long files of torches, the solemn pomps and ceremonies,
the great concourse of renowned personages, the brilliant
costumes, and the other splendors of the Court, that
she, a simple country-maid, and all unused to such
things, would be overcome by these terrors and make
a piteous failure.
No doubt I could have comforted them, but I was not
free to speak. Would Joan be disturbed by this
cheap spectacle, this tinsel show, with its small
King and his butterfly dukelets?—she who
had spoken face to face with the princes of heaven,
the familiars of God, and seen their retinue of angels
stretching back into the remoteness of the sky, myriads
upon myriads, like a measureless fan of light, a glory
like the glory of the sun streaming from each of those
innumerable heads, the massed radiance filling the
deeps of space with a blinding splendor? I thought
not.
Queen Yolande wanted Joan to make the best possible
impression upon the King and the Court, so she was
strenuous to have her clothed in the richest stuffs,
wrought upon the princeliest pattern, and set off with
jewels; but in that she had to be disappointed, of
course, Joan not being persuadable to it, but begging
to be simply and sincerely dressed, as became a servant
of God, and one sent upon a mission of a serious sort
