The Orleans station, like that of Tours, is a delusion and a snare, as we were suddenly landed at Les Aubrais, one of the outskirts of the old city and from thence had to make our way to Orleans as best we could. We had fortunately been able to send our small luggage directly through to Paris by putting it in the _consigne_, and paying ten centimes on each article. This convenient and economical device, which with all our travel we had never discovered, was revealed to us by the two charming Connecticut ladies whom we met at Amboise. Walter calls down blessings upon the pretty heads of these two wise New England women whenever we make a stop over between trains; and Miss Cassandra ejaculates: "It takes a Yankee, my dears, to find out the best way to do everything on the top of the earth!" Having only ourselves to dispose of, we soon found an omnibus which conveyed us to the Place du Martroi, the soul and centre of the ancient city of Orleans, where is fitly placed an equestrian statue of Jeanne d'Arc, by Foyatier. This statue does not, however, happily suggest the Maid, as the peasant girl of Domremy is here represented with a fine Greek profile, and, as Archie noticed, with his keen horseman's eye, the charger upon which she is mounted is a race-horse and not a war-horse. It is, however, a noble and dignified memorial, on the whole, in which it differs from the grotesque affair at Chinon, and Dubray's low reliefs on the sides of the pedestal, representing important scenes in the life of the Maid, are beautiful and impressive. Here in Orleans, the scene of Joan's first and most remarkable success, we live more completely in the life and spirit of that wonderful period than at Chinon. The marvel of it all impressed us more forcibly than ever before. That this peasant girl, young and ignorant of the art of war, by the power of her sublime faith in her heaven-sent mission and in herself as the divinely appointed one, should have wrested this city from the English, seems nothing short of the miracle that she and her soldiers believed it to be. Even that hard-headed and cold-hearted sovereign, Louis XI, was so overawed by the story of Joan's victories that he marked with tablets the little room at Domremy where she was born, and also the convent of Sainte Catherine de Fierbois, where she was received and where she found her sword with the five crosses. We knew that the Place du Martroi was not the scene of Joan's martyrdom, and yet this wide, noble square, with her monument in the centre, from which diverge so many streets associated with her history, stood for infinitely more to us than anything we had seen at Rouen, the actual place of her martyrdom.