442 THE TRIAL OF JEANNE DARC. of St. Remi in which she knelt, and the church-yard wall against which her abode was built, are all standing. The village is commonly called Domremy-la-Pucelle, in remembrance of her, and every object in the neighborhood speaks of her: the river Meuse gliding past, the hill of the fairies upon which her companions danced, and 'where they laughed at her for liking better to go to church, the fountain where the sick were healed by miracle, and the meadows in which she sat spinning while she watched the village herd on the days when it was her father's turn to have it in charge. These remain little changed ; but they are now part of the German Empire — part of the price France has had in our time to pay for Louis XIV and the Bonapartes. To such a people as the French it is not a thing of trifling import that France does not own the birthplace of the Maid of Orleans. Nor was Lorraine a French possession when Jeanne Dare kept the village herd on the banks of the Meuse in 1425. For a long period it had been a border-land between France and the empire, during which the inhabit- ants of that sequestered nook had been as passionately French in their feelings as the people of Eastern Tennes- see were warm for the Union in 1863. In a border-land there is no neutrality. And during the childhood of this maiden, France had fallen under the dominion of the English. She was three or four years of age when Henry V won the battle of Agincourt, and by the time she was ten, France as an independent power had ceased to be. It was not merely that Harry V and his bowmen had overthrown in battle the French armies, but, apart from this conquest of the country, there were grounds for the claim of his son to the French throne which even a patri- otic and conscientious Frenchman might have admitted. The French King himself, Charles VII, indolently doubted the right of his line to the throne, and doubted also his own legitimacy.
