If I am in it [grace], may God keep me in it, and if I am not, may it be God’s will to put me in it.

Joan of Arc, [at her trial]

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Men do not share the same spiritual rank. There are the elect ones … who are granted revelation, and then there is the great mass of mortals who would flounder about in eternal darkness if God did not from time to time set astir the ‘highest virtues’ in some individuals who become capable of steering their fellow men in the right direction.

Eric Voegelin [1]

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There have been many pretenders in history, many actors who rule through the mask of personality. These know how to imitate the good, the truthful and the just; yet they are empty shells seeking compensation through a mere increase of political power. They always strive to break down the checks and balances around them. By nature, these pretenders hate those who seek “justice and all things honorable … for their own sake.”[2]

The martyr of the Roman Republic, Marcus Cicero, wrote: “if it be true that virtue is sought for the sake of other benefits and not for its own sake, there will be only one virtue, which will most properly be called vice.” Cicero added that “all good men love fairness in itself and Justice in itself, and it is unnatural for a good man to make such a mistake as to love what does not deserve love for itself alone.”[3]

What we need more of in the world is goodness, justice, and honesty. What kind of man or woman, or what kind of ruler, cultivates Justice for its own sake? Who is kind or generous to others, without reward? “It cannot be doubted,” wrote Cicero, “that he who is called generous or kind answers the call of duty, not of gain.”[4]

In a wicked world, however, filled with the cynicism of those who merely ape goodness, everything partakes of a general corruption. In the midst of this swamp, who dares to step forward and say the truth, or do the right thing? Eric Voegelin wrote about an “elect” in history, who somehow serve justice. These are frail human beings, to be sure; yet Providence operates through them – mysteriously, inexplicably, and tragically.

“The fate of the elect,” noted Voegelin, “is miserable. They are slandered, exiled, killed, and punished as subversives. Even when their message becomes socially effective, it promptly declines into superstition as the historical-human form of revelation comes to be mistaken for its essence, and fanatical literalists obscure the function of its message….”[5]

Such was the history of the French saint, Joan of Arc. She was a good-hearted peasant who heard the voice of God, obeyed that voice, and saved her country. For that obedience she was burned alive as a heretic by Catholic clergyman in the pay of her country’s enemies. Without her intervention, France would not exist today. It would have become part of England; but Joan of Arc frightened the invading English soldiery. According to Henry Hallam. Many English soldiers “hung back in their own country, or deserted from the army, through fear of the incantations by which alone men always make sure of Providence for an ally….” Suffering one defeat after another at Joan’s hand, the superstitious English “at once ascribed [their defeats] to infernal enemies; and such bigotry may be pleaded as an excuse, though a very miserable one, for the detestable murder of this heroine.”^[6]

Joan’s story is hardly believable. It is a story attested to by dozens of sworn witnesses. She was an illiterate teenager of peasant stock who went to the King of France with a message from God. The King was to give her command of an army to break the back of the invading English. And this is exactly what she did.

The skeptical David Hume, who never read the witness testimonies described Joan’s career as “one of the most singular revolutions, that is to be met with in history.”^[7] In order to explain away Joan’s success, Hume erroneously described her as “a country girl of twenty-seven years of age … who was a servant in a small inn, and who in that station had been accustomed to tend the horses of the guests, to ride them without a saddle to the watering place, and to perform other offices … which commonly fall to the share of the men servants.”^[8]

Hume was mistaken, however. Joan was not 27, but 17; and she did not work at an Inn. She was a teenager who worked on her parents’ farm. Sworn testimonies about Joan’s life were sealed in French archives, unknown to Hume and the “enlightened” eighteenth century. Not ready to let ignorance stop him, Hume preferred to believe that she “mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations … to expel the foreign invaders. An uncommon intrepidity of temper made her overlook the dangers, which might attend her in such a path….”^[9]

According to Hume, the Middle Ages were sunk in gross superstition and ignorance. The people of that time believed in fantastical things, spiritual things. Joan of Arc may have heard voices, but they were not of God. Was Hume correct?

In military terms, Joan of Arc’s victories over the English were more than a David versus Goliath story. To defeat the English, she had to revive a France that was in complete collapse. In fact, the British military historian J.F.C. Fuller described King Charles VII of France as “a weak king and a degenerate” who was “unable to count upon the support of anyone except his Armagnac captains, who were little better than brigand chiefs….”[10] When he had the money for mercenaries, Charles used Scottish adventurers who, with his Armagnac captains, were wiped out by the English and the Burgundians on 31 July 1423 at the Battle of Cravant. The following year, noted Fuller, another of Charles’s armies was destroyed by the Duke of Bedford, who “inflicted a terrible defeat, as disastrous as Agincourt” (the latter battle famously recounted in Shakespeare’s play, Henry V).[11]

Through a political intrigue of the Duke of Brittany, King Charles lost two of his “favorites” to assassination and, to the bargain, was made into a fool. This weakened Charles further, leaving him in an untenable political position. The national party of France was paralyzed by civil war. In consequence of this weakness the English (with the approval of their Burgundian allies) decided to besiege Orleans, one of the most populous fortified cities in France. If the city fell, the last vestiges of Charles’s kingdom would have stood little chance of surviving. The English built seven forts around Orleans to starve the population. By February 1429 the city was running out of food.

This is the background to Joan’s story. The City of Orleans, at this time, became a symbol of French resistance. Every attempt to relieve the city had failed. The English seemed invincible. They had destroyed the chivalry of France. They had even destroyed the brigands and the mercenaries sent against them. The French aristocracy had failed. The monarchy had failed. Then came this seventeen-year-old girl, Joan of Arc.

J.F.C Fuller wrote, “The story of Joan of Arc is one of the most extraordinary in all history and one of the best documented. Though she did not know her own age, the probability is that she was born early in 1412 at Domrémy in the duchy of Bar on the border of Lorraine which in 1429 was commanded by Robert of Baudricourt. Her parents were peasant folk.”[12]

When Joan was thirteen years of age she began to hear voices “unheard by others.” These were accompanied by “a cloud of brilliant light.” Joan was instructed by the voices that she would go to Baudricourt and he “would provide her with the means to travel to the king’s court at Chinon. She was to inform Charles that she had been sent by God to raise the siege of Orleans and to lead him to Rheims to be consecrated king of France.”[13]

During her retrial by the Church, held in Domrémy, Joan’s Godfather, Jean Moreau, testified that Joan’s father was named Jean, and her mother was Isabelle. They were farmers. Joan had been baptized in the Saint Remy Church. They were good and pious people. According to Moreau, Joan “was well and properly brought up in the faith and in sound morals, and she was such a good girl that almost everyone in Domrémy loved her. And Joan knew her Credo, her Pater noster and the Ave Maria the way little girls of her age do.” Joan’s parents were “not very rich.” She was accomplished at sewing and spinning. She occasionally plowed and watched cattle. She went to mass and confession. Moreau made mention of a strange tree in the village, called “the Ladies’ Tree,” where fairies used to be seen. “But people do say that since they read the Gospel of Saint John … they do not come anymore.” Moreau denied that Joan ever went there alone.[14]

Joan’s godmothers gave similar testimony. They all denied that Joan had anything to do with the “Ladies’ Tree,” except that she, like all the girls and young men of the village would “go under the tree … on Laetare Jerusalem Sunday, which is called Fountains Sunday….”[15] The local priests spoke well of Joan. Her childhood friends admitted that they sometimes teased her on account of her piety. One of Joan’s friends admitted to crying bitterly at her departure from Domrémy: “I loved her very dearly, you see, because she was so kind, and I was her friend….”[16]

The testimony of Michel Lebuin is intriguing. He was about Joan’s age. He said, “All I know is that once Joan told me herself, on the eve of Saint John Baptist, that there was a maid between Coussey and Vaucouleurs who would have the King of France anointed within a year. And the very next year the King was anointed. I do not know anything else.”[17]

Durand Laxart was Joan’s “uncle” through her mother’s cousin Jeanne. He was the man who took Joan to Robert de Baudricourt, the commander of Vaucouleurs. He described Joan as everyone else did; as pious and good-natured. She told Laxart, “Was it not said that France would be ruined through a woman, and afterward restored by a virgin?” It was Laxart who conveyed her request of an escort “to the place where my lord the Dauphin was. This Robert told me several times to give her a good slapping and take her back to her father….”[18]

Here is the answer one would expect from a no-nonsense military man. But Joan was not dissuaded, according to Laxart. She went to Lord Charles, Duke of Lorraine. Somehow she had gotten a safe-conduct pass to see him. The Duke gave her four francs with which to buy “men’s clothing, breeches, gaiters, and all that she needed.” Her uncle and another man bought her a horse for twelve francs out of their own pockets.[19]

What happened next in the story is very damning to Hume’s skepticism. Returning to Vaucouleurs, Joan somehow convinced Robert de Boudricourt to provide her with an escort to Charles. From there she rode into history and changed the future. Hume wrote: “It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and the marvellous; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony, as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances.” ^[20]

This is the same David Hume whose writings caused “the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian eyes; and whose writings influenced Darwin’s theory of evolution, who woke pedants from “dogmatic slumbers,” and more. Hume explained Joan of Arc as follows: “It is pretended that Joan, immediately on her admission, knew the king, though she had never seen his face before, and though he purposely kept himself in the crowd of courtiers, and had laid aside everything in his dress and apparel which might distinguish him: That she offered him, in the name of the supreme Creator, to raise the siege of Orleans, and conduct him to Rheims to be there crowned and anointed; and on his expressing doubts of her mission, revealed to him, before some sworn confidents, a secret, which was unknown to all the world beside himself, and which nothing but a heavenly inspiration could have discovered to her: And that she demanded, as the instrument of her future victories, a particular sword, which was kept in the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois, and which, though she had never seen it, she described by all its marks, and by the place in which it had long lain neglected. This is certain, that all these miraculous stories were spread abroad, in order to captivate the vulgar.”[21]

Hume would have us believe that Joan was a pretender. The whole episode was a fraud. But the testimonies at Joan’s vindication say that she predicted her future actions and successes in advance. She said she would go to the King. She said she would relieve the siege of Orleans. She said she would see the King crowned at Rheims. These testimonies were given under oath by people who believed their souls would be damned if they lied.

This brings us to the testimony of Jean de Novelonpont, one of Robert Baudricourt’s soldiers, who spoke of his first encounter with Joan at Vaucouleurs. He said she was wearing a red bodice and skirt. The clothing, he added, was that of a poor person. Having heard what she was attempting to do, he said to her, “What are you doing here, my dear? Is it not fated that the King shall be driven from his kingdom, and that we shall all turn English?”

Joan answered him, “I have come here to the royal chamber to speak to Robert de Baudricourt, to ask him to escort me, or to have me escorted, to the King. But he pays no attention to me, or to what I say. But all the same, before mid-Lent I must be with the King, even if I have to wear my legs down to the knees. For there is no one on earth, be he king, or duke, or the King of Scotland’s daughter, or anyone else, who can restore the kingdom of France, and he will have no help except through me, although I would much prefer to stay with my poor mother and spin, for this is not my station. But I must go, and I must do it, for my Lord wishes me to perform this deed.”[22]

De Novelonpont was immediately struck by her seriousness. He was later tasked as one of Joan’s escorts to the King. He said it was an eleven-day ride, partly through enemy country. He asked her several times whether “she was going to do what she said.” She said he should not be afraid. Since she was commanded by God to do this, all would be well. She had known about her mission for four or five years. “I was in such awe of her that I would not have dared go near her,” de Novelonpont testified. “And I tell you on my oath that I never had any desire or carnal feelings for her.” This soldier was convinced by Joan. “I had great trust in what the Maid said,” he explained, “and I was on fire with what she said, and with a love for her which was, as I believe, a divine love. I believe that she was sent by God. She never swore, she loved to hear the Mass, and crossed herself with the sign of the cross. And so we escorted her to the King….”[23]

On 23 February, 1429, toward noon, Joan arrived at Chinon. She had sent a letter ahead, announcing her arrival. King Charles could not immediately decide whether to see her. De Novelonpont said, “I know that when she arrived at Chinon there had been a discussion in the Council as to whether the King should entertain her or not.”  He added that “certain of the King’s counselors said that he must put no trust whatever in Joan, and others said that since she claimed to have been sent by God and had something to say to the King, the King ought at least to hear her.”[24]

Another witness, Simon Charles, affirmed that the King had received a letter from Robert Baudricourt saying that Joan should be received by him, for she had crossed enemy territory to reach him, fording many rivers. Simon Charles said, “When the King learned she was approaching, he withdrew behind the others; Joan, however, recognized him perfectly, made him bow, and spoke to him for some minutes. And after hearing her, the King appeared to be joyous. Then, still not wanting to do anything without the advice of the churchmen, he sent Joan off to Poitiers to be examined…. When he learned that they had examined her, and was told that they had found nothing but good in her, the King had armor made for her, and she was put in command of the conduct of the war.”[25]

And now for General Fuller’s commentary on Joan’s conduct of the war: “On April 27, dressed in full armour and carrying a banner on which was blazoned ‘Jesus Maria,’ she set out for Orleans at the head of three to four thousand men and a convoy of supplies.”[26] This is not a terribly large force for storming English fortifications. Nevertheless, they had a maid in armor who was the very model of innocence. Her fame had spread throughout the country. She had addressed a letter to the King of England:

King of England, render account to the King of Heaven of your royal blood. Return the keys of all the good cities which you have seized, to the Maid. She is sent by God … and is fully prepared to make peace, if you will give her satisfaction; that is, you must render justice, and pay back all that you have taken.

Joan also addressed the English soldiers and other lords. They were warned to go home. Joan’s “voices” directed her to relieve Orleans from the north, the strongest section of the English fortifications. But the French commanders did not obey her, marching the army to the south side of the besieged city and encamping there for the night. In the morning Joan realized they had deceived her. She was angry, confronting the French commanders with their deception. Fuller recounts the following conversation between Joan and the King’s bastard cousin, the Duke of Dunois:

JOAN: Are you the Bastard of Orleans?

DUKE: Yes, and I rejoice at your arrival.

JOAN: Is it you who advised that I should come here, on this side of the river, and that I was not to go straight on to where Talbot and the other English are?

DUKE: I and the wisest among us advised that this be done, believing it to be best.

JOAN: In the name of God, the advice of the Lord is more certain and wise than yours. You thought to deceive me, but you have deceived yourselves; for I bring you the greatest help that has ever been brought to knight or city, seeing that it is the help of the King of Heaven….

Fuller then says, “Joan demanded that an attack should be made forthwith on Saint Jean le Blanc, the nearest English bastille on the south side of the river; but her companions protested….”[27] The Bastard of Orleans had assembled a flotilla along the river. They forced Joan into it, but the wind did not cooperate and they could not sail. Toward the end of the day, Joan told them the wind was about to change. Suddenly the wind changed, the sails filled, and the boats went up river. The French commanders were spooked by this, and decided to follow her next set of orders. The army circled round to relieve the city from the north, where the English were strongest. On April 29, at eight o’clock that evening, Joan led the army with her banner, riding a white horse. She entered Orleans without resistance. The English were hiding in their fortifications. They had let her through to the city. She lodged at the city treasurer’s house.

On April 30, wishing to avoid bloodshed, Joan sent a letter to the English commander, Talbot. He returned her message with an insult. She called out to one of the English units. They mocked her as a “cow girl,” saying they would burn her when they caught her. The English were making a serious tactical mistake by sticking to their fortresses. They had lost their mobility. During that day, the French mounted an attack on the weakest of the forts while Joan was sleeping. She heard the fighting and arrived in time to see the French being attacked in flank from another English fortress. In the bloody battle the English lost a key position. Orleans rang its church bells, celebrating the first French victory in a long while.

On May 5 Joan rested the army because it was Ascension Day. She fired a crossbow with a message into the English fortifications, warning them to leave the field. The English shouted, “Here comes news from that Armagnac harlot!” This reduced Joan to tears.

On May 6 the French commanders planned the battle without her. On seeing this, she admonished them, turned to her confessor and said there would be a bloody battle and that she would be wounded above the breast. And it was true. May 7 was, according to General Fuller, “the most fatal day of the war” for England. For some reason the English abandoned another of their positions, seeking the security of the strongest fort of all. The French commanders did not want to storm such a strong position. They wanted to besiege it; but Joan “would have none of this, for rightly she sensed that the psychological moment had come: enthusiasm was at its height and the populace ecstatically supported her; she was not to be gainsaid, and it was she who dominated the situation.”[28]

At seven in the morning, Joan ordered trumpets to sound the assault. The French were using scaling ladders against the English fortress. Joan was hit between the neck and shoulder with an arrow, penetrating to a depth of six inches. She pulled the arrow out and retreated to tend her wound. The French army lost heart and wanted to stop the assault. She told them to eat and rest as her wound was dressed, and she prayed for half an hour. When she returned and the assault resumed, the English lost heart entirely and began evacuating the fortress through a drawbridge. Joan saw the commander who had brought her to tears earlier and shouted, “You called me a harlot, but I have pity on your soul and the souls of your men.”[29] Immediately the draw bridge collapsed into the river. The English commander of the fort, named Glasdale, fell into the river with his men and drowned. The next day, May 8, the rest of the English army abandoned the other forts and marched away. The siege was not only lifted, but the English had been decisively defeated.

The Duke of Bedford wrote about this battle to King Henry VI sometime later: “…there fell, by the hand of God, as it seemeth, a great stroke upon your people that was assembled there [at Orleans] in great number, caused in great part … by a lack of sound faith, and unbelieving doubt that they had confronted the arm of a fiend, called the Maid; that used false enchantments and sorcery; the witch struck and discomfited … a number of your people there, but as well reduced the courage of the remnant in marvelous ways….”

Despite the alleged witchcraft of Joan, the English decided to fight a battle. According to Fuller, “The prestige of the English in the field was still so high that when, on July 19, the French caught up with Talbot, they hesitated to attack, and the Duke of Alençon asked Joan – who was not on the battlefield – what he should do. In a loud voice she answered: ‘Make use of your spurs!’ Those around her were perplexed ‘What say you?’ they asked. ‘Are we to turn our backs on the English?’ ‘No!’ Joan replied, ‘it is the English who are going to turn their backs on us. They will be unable to defend themselves, and you will have need of your good spurs to catch them up.’”[30]

It happened exactly as she predicted. The English were defeated and fled in panic. Talbot was captured. This was the Battle of Patay. Nothing could stop Joan’s Frenchmen now. Town after town fell. Joan took Rheims as she had prophesied. Charles VII was officially crowned and anointed. As Mark Twain related in an essay on Joan of Arc, “the King was grateful for once in his shabby poor life, and asked her to name her reward and have it. She asked nothing for herself, but begged that the taxes of her native village might be remitted forever.”^[31] King Charles agreed to this request, noted Twain. But in 1789 King Louis XVI forgot what was owed to Joan of Arc. He began taxing Domrémy. Coincidentally, a revolution began in that very year. On 21 January 1793 Louis was beheaded by guillotine on the Place de la Révolution.

When gratitude lapses, thrones can lapse. Did these kings of France understand what they owed the Maid of Domrémy? She had, on Divine command, returned a kingdom to a king. But also, she had preserved the nation of France. She might have asked for anything: Money, land, a princely husband. But as Cicero wrote, “if it be true that virtue is sought for the sake of other benefits and not for its own sake, there will be only one virtue, which will most properly be called vice.”

Joan had one other request of King Charles. She wanted to return home to be with her mother and childhood friends. Her mission was over. She did not like the gore of battle. But none of this mattered as Charles could not afford to let her go. And so, feeling useless, “she wanted to march on Paris, take it, and drive the English out of France.” According to Twain, “She was hampered in all the ways that treachery and the King’s vacillation could devise, but she forced her way to Paris at last, and fell badly wounded in a successful assault upon one of the gates.”[32]

Joan was dragged off the battlefield against her will. The king broke up his army and made an armistice. Joan was then kept in what Twain described as “a gilded captivity.” Finally, while leading forces on 24 May 1430, in the area of Compiègne, Joan was captured in a skirmish. Sadly, the King and the nobles of France would not raise the money to ransom her. Instead of being rescued, she was purchased by Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais. Ostensibly, noted Twain, he had purchased her “for the Church, to be tried for wearing male attire and for other impieties…. She was now shut up in the dungeons of the Castle of Rouen and kept in an iron cage, with her hands and feet and neck chained to a pillar….”[33] And yet, as Twain noted, “nothing could break that invincible spirit. From first to last she was a prisoner a year; and she spent the last three months of it on trial for her life before a formidable array of ecclesiastical judges…. The spectacle of that solitary girl, forlorn and friendless, without advocate or adviser … fighting that long battle serene and undismayed against these colossal odds, stands alone in its pathos and sublimity; it has nowhere its mate, either in the annals of fact or in the inventions of fiction.”[34]

Joan’s ecclesiastical judges were determined to find her guilty. As Twain aptly noted, “Every advantage that learning has over ignorance, age over youth, experience over inexperience, chicane over artlessness, every trick and trap and gin devisable by malice and the cunning of sharp intellects … were employed against her without shame; and when these arts were defeated by the marvelous intuitions of her alert and penetrating mind, Bishop Cauchon stooped to a final baseness which it degrades human speech to describe: a priest who pretended to come from the region of her own home and to be a pitying friend and anxious to help her in her sore need was smuggled into her cell, and he misused his sacred office to steal her confidence; she confided to him the things sealed from revealment by her Voices, and which her prosecutors had tried so long in vain to trick her into betraying.”[35]

Joan later said to Bishop Cauchon, “Ah, you set down everything that is against me, but you will not set down what is for me.” Her moral greatness, wrote Twain, “was peer to her intellect….” But more than this was “her steadfastness, her granite fortitude.” She was threatened with torture, especially of the rack; her sleep was broken. She suffered from the ingratitude of those who had abandoned her, the treachery of her judges, the chains of the prison, and all the attending discomfort. In the end, she was convicted.

As Eric Voegelin said: “The fate of the elect … is miserable. They are slandered, exiled, killed, and punished as subversives. Even when their message becomes socially effective, it promptly declines into superstition as the historical-human form of revelation comes to be mistaken for its essence, and fanatical literalists obscure the function of its message….”

Joan of Arc was burned alive at Rouen, in Normandy, on 30 May 1431. Those who watched her burn uttered such “pious lamentations” that the spectators – even the English men at arms – could not restrain their tears. It was also reported that the executioner could not reduce her heart to ash. According to Twain she “went to her martyrdom with the peace of God in her tired heart, and on her lips endearing words and loving prayers for the cur she had crowned and the nation of ingrates she had saved.”[36]

“Realistically and objectively,” wrote Régine Pernoud, “Joan was a heretic who had been duly condemned by an ecclesiastical court. She had performed some remarkable exploits, it is true, and her trial had been conducted under conditions that made the court’s decision suspect.”^[37] Twenty-five years after her death the Pope authorized a retrial. Joan was vindicated. The human condition is so miserable, noted Voegelin, that the misuse of religion will always be with us. The true ground of spirit is “unfathomable,” he added, “while the conversio remains the way to escape the dogmatomachy of the literalists….”^[38]

Did God decide that France, as a nation, would continue to exist?  Mystery though it be, and impossible by all human reckoning, the thing happened. But there is a special postscript for Americans. If not for the survival of France, and for the long enmity of France for England, the United States of America would never have come into existence. Without the French Army and Navy, Lord Cornwallis would not have surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. For America to exist, France had to exist. For France to exist, Joan of Arc had to exist.

If that is not Providence, what is?

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Links and Notes

[1] Eric Voegelin translated from the German by M.J. Hanak, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol 6, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 394.

[2] Cicero trans. Clinton Walker Keyes, De Legibus, (The Loeb Classical Library) I. xviii.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Anamnesis, p. 395.

[6] Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1880), Vol. 1, p. 88.

[7] David Hume, The History of England, Vol. II (USA: Liberty Classics, 1983), p. 397.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, p. 398.

[10] J.F.C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World Vol. I (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1954), p. 477.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, pp. 480-481.

[13] Ibid, p. 481.

[14] Regine Pernoud with a Foreword by Katherine Anne Porter, The Retrial of Joan of Arc: The Evidence for Her Vindication (Kindle Edition), pp. 70-71.

[15] Ibid, p. 74.

[16] Ibid, p. 80.

[17] Ibid, p. 83.

[18] Ibid, p. 86.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Hume, pp. 398.

[21] Ibid, p. 399.

[22] Pernoud, p. 96.

[23] Ibid, p. 97.

[24] Ibid, pp. 107-108.

[25] Ibid, p. 108.

[26] Fuller, p. 481.

[27] Ibid, pp. 482-483.

[28] Ibid, p. 487.

[29] Ibid, p. 488.

[30] Ibid, p. 490.

[31] Mark Twain, Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1891-1910 (USA: The Library of America, 1992), p. 586.

[32] Ibid, pp. 586-87.

[33] Ibid, p. 588.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid, p. 589.

[36] Twain, p. 591.

[37] Pierronne – Wikipedia

[38] Anamnesis, p. 395.

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