When Charles the Dauphin became Charles VII he ceased to appear merely the leader of a party discredited by its murder of the Duke of Burgundy. He became a national figure; and though his enemies might call him in derision ‘King of Bourges’ because he dared not come to Paris but ruled only from a town in central France, yet he remained in spite of all their ridicule a king and a Frenchman. Had he been less timid and selfish, more ready to run risks and exert himself rather than to idle away his time with unworthy favourites, there is no doubt that he could have hastened the English collapse. Instead he allowed those who fostered his indolence and hatred of public affairs in order to increase their own power to hinder a reconciliation with the Burgundians that might have been the salvation of France. Philip ‘the Good’, son of John ‘the Fearless’, disliked the Dauphin as his father’s murderer, but he had little love for his English allies. By marriage and skilful diplomacy he had absorbed a great part of modern Holland into his already vast inheritance and could assume the state and importance of an independent sovereign. With England he felt that he could treat as an equal, and now regarded with dismay the idea that she might permanently control both sides of the Channel. So long as John, Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V, acted as regent for his young nephew with statesmanlike moderation, an outward semblance of friendship was maintained; but Bedford could with difficulty keep in order his quarrelsome, irresponsible younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who ruled in England, and with still greater difficulty quell the sullen discontent of the people of Paris who, suffering from starvation as the result of a prolonged war, professed to regard a foreign king as the source of all their troubles. Only the prestige of English arms retained the loyalty of northern France. ‘Two hundred English would drive five hundred French before them,’ says a chronicler of the day; but salvation was to come to France from an unexpected quarter, and enable the same writer to add proudly, ‘Now two hundred French would chase and beat four hundred English.’ [Sidenote: Jeanne d’Arc] In the village of Domremy on the Upper Meuse there lived at the beginning of the fifteenth century a peasant maid, Jeanne d’Arc, who was, according to the description of a fellow villager, ‘modest, simple, devout, went gladly to Church and sacred places, worked, sewed, hoed in the fields, and did what was needful about the house.’ Up till the age of thirteen Jeanne had been like other light-hearted girls, but it was then that a change came into her life: voices seemed to draw her away from her companions and to speak to her from behind a brilliant cloud, and later she had visions of St. Catherine and of St. Michael, whose painted effigies she knew in church.