Sieur Jacques was, as peasant farmers went, a man of substance and well connected. He had saved a goodly sum of money, and owned, perhaps, the biggest flock of sheep in the country-side. Milch cows and fattening oxen grazed his wide meadows. He was a man of probity, and had served the ancestral office of Maire of Domremy for many a year. Mère Isabelle excelled in stitchery as well as in the rearing of poultry and the cultivation of her fair garden plot. When about to be delivered of her youngest child, she dreamed three times that she should bear a girl, and that she should become famous in her country’s history. The narrative goes on to say that many unusual circumstances attended her child’s nativity: a fierce thunderstorm shook the dwelling, and mysterious voices uttered the strange cry: “_Aux secours! aux secours de la France!_” Jeanne, the little daughter, was duly christened by the curé, and from her mother’s womb she was a child of dedication--St. Catherine and St. Margaret were her spiritual sponsors. Precocious from her weaning, both in physical growth and mental development, she grew up a devotee at Mass and shrine. She sought solitude and silence, and declined to share her playmates’ games. Other children thought her odd, and old crones shook their heads and pitied Sieur Jacques and his worthy spouse. Jeanne’s favourite resort was a thicket near her parents’ home,--Le Bois Chènus it was called,--an oak-wood grove where her father’s pigs greedily sought for acorns. The Bois had, however, a weird repute; it had been, centuries before, a sacrificial site of heathen worship, and the village folk avoided it at night, for they said they saw strange figures under the trees and heard strange sounds,--in fact, the wood was haunted. [Illustration: JEANNE D’ARC From a Fresco by E. Lepenveu. Pantheon, Paris _To face page 144_] One summer’s day in July, 1424, Jeanne d’Arc was seated, as was her wont, upon an ancient fallen menhir at the verge of the coppice. She was shelling peas, and she also had her knitting by her. The hour of the day was nearly that of the “Angelus,” when the frightened damsel heard an unusual rustling of the oaken branches overhead, and somewhere out of the tree or out of the sky voices sounded faintly upon her ear. At the same time a strange lurid light gleamed between her and the church-tower across the meadow. Laying aside her occupation, she listened breathlessly, almost in a trance, to what the “Voices” said; they were pitched in soothing female treble accents.