And while they sat by the table in the window, with their shining silks and gold thread, the mother made the quiet hours go by with tale and legend—­of the saints first of all—­and stories from Scripture, quaintly interpreted into the costume and manners of their own time, as one may still hear them in the primitive corners of Italy:  mingled with incidents of the war, of the wounded man tended in the village, and the victors all flushed with triumph, and the defeated with trailing arms and bowed heads, riding for their lives:  perhaps little epics and tragedies of the young knight riding by to do his devoir with his handful of followers all spruce and gay, and the battered and diminished remnant that would come back.  And then the Black Burgundians, the horrible English ogres, whose names would make the children shudder!  No God-den(2) had got so far as Domremy; there was no personal knowledge to soften the picture of the invader.  He was unspeakable as the Turk to the imagination of the French peasant, diabolical as every invader is.

This was the earliest training of the little maid before whom so strange and so great a fortune lay. Autre personne que sadite mere ne lui apprint—­any lore whatsoever; and she so little—­yet everything that was wanted—­her prayers, her belief, the happiness of serving God, and also man; for when any one was sick in the village, either a little child with the measles, or a wounded soldier from the wars, Isabeau’s modest child—­no doubt the mother too—­was always ready to help.  It must have been a family de bien, in the simple phrase of the country, helpful, serviceable, with charity and aid for all.  An honest labourer, who came to speak for Jeanne at the second trial, held long after her death, gave his incontestable evidence to this.  “I was then a child,” he said, “and it was she who nursed me in my illness.”  They were all more or less devout in those days, when faith was without question, and the routine of church ceremonial was followed as a matter of course; but few so much as Jeanne, whose chief pleasure it was to say her prayers in the little dark church, where perhaps in the morning sunshine, as she made her early devotions, there would blaze out upon her from a window, a Holy Michael in shining armour, transfixing the dragon with his spear, or a St. Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with her cross in her hand.  So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to find out some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the suggestion which is unpleasing.  The little country church was in the gift of St. Remy, and some benefactor of the rural cure might well have given a painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people.  St. Margaret was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her cross, and was thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.