Once only has he written an actual historic work, and that is his monumental study of Joan of Arc. It has made him more unpopular than all his works put together, from which it is easy to conclude that it is a work of worth and nobility. It is an enormous, encyclopædic study showing that he has consulted every possible source of information: archives, chronicles, diaries, private letters and reports of the merest tittle tattle; he knows almost too much about the Maid of Orleans, and this makes it difficult to read the work. But the one who perseveres will be richly rewarded, for Anatole France sheds some new light upon the _chevalière_. It is the preface and the addendum have made him hated by the clericals, for he impugns the chronicles as mostly having been written by chroniclers paid by the knights; pitilessly he shows up their discrepancies, their omissions, he depicts Joan of Arc as a hallucinated, hysterical girl, subject to visions which in those days afflicted many a girl on the threshold of womanhood. For him her sight, smell, hearing, sense of contact, all were decayed, and he inclines to think that she was influenced by priests favourable to the cause of Charles VII. Those priests were politicians and, knowing her simplicity, led her and used her. They had no difficulty in this, for the people were ignorant and believed because they wanted to believe. As he himself says: “Belief in her sanctity was as hypnotic as would be to-day a belief in aeroplanes.” It is not wonderful that, assuming an attitude such as this towards one whom M. Bergeret called a military mascot, Anatole France should have been violently attacked by the reactionaries; that was a little unfair, for all through the book Anatole France recognises the simplicity, the purity, the courage and the true enthusiasm of Joan, but he will not grant her divine inspiration. That is unpardonable in the eyes of the reactionaries, who forget that it took the popes over four hundred and fifty years to canonise her; they want to use Joan of Arc in the cause of the Church and the King, and it does not do at all to have that touching conviction disturbed: it was not the Kaiser invented the alliance of Meinself (und Gott).