7. There are, however, some seven or eight and twenty lives of her, I believe; into the literature of which I cannot enter, nor need, all having been ineffective in producing any clear picture of her to the modern French or English mind; and leaving one's own poor sagacities and fancy to gather and shape the sanctity of her into an intelligible, I do not say a _credible_, form; for there is no question here about belief,--the creature is as real as Joan of Arc, and far more powerful;--she is separated, just as St. Martin is, by his patience, from too provocative prelates--by her quietness of force, from the pitiable crowd of feminine martyr saints. There are thousands of religious girls who have never got themselves into any calendars, but have wasted and wearied away their lives--heaven knows why, for _we_ cannot; but here is one, at any rate, who neither scolds herself to martyrdom, nor frets herself into consumption, but becomes a tower of the Flock, and builder of folds for them all her days. 8. The first thing, then, you have to note of her, is that she is a pure native _Gaul_. She does not come as a missionary out of Hungary, or Illyria, or Egypt, or ineffable space; but grows at Nanterre, like a marguerite in the dew, the first "Reine Blanche" of Gaul. I have not used this ugly word 'Gaul' before, and we must be quite sure what it means, at once, though it will cost us a long parenthesis. 9. During all the years of the rising power of Rome, her people called everybody a Gaul who lived north of the sources of Tiber. If you are not content with that general statement, you may read the article "Gallia" in Smith's dictionary, which consists of seventy-one columns of close print, containing each as much as three of my pages; and tells you at the end of it, that "though long, it is not complete." You may however, gather from it, after an attentive perusal, as much as I have above told you. But, as early as the second century after Christ, and much more distinctly in the time with which we are ourselves concerned--the fifth--the wild nations opposed to Rome, and partially subdued, or held at bay by her, had resolved themselves into two distinct masses, belonging to two distinct _latitudes_. One, _fixed_ in habitation of the pleasant temperate zone of Europe--England with her western mountains, the healthy limestone plateaux and granite mounts of France, the German labyrinths of woody hill and winding thal, from the Tyrol to the Hartz, and all the vast enclosed basin and branching valleys of the Carpathians. Think of these four districts, briefly and clearly, as 'Britain,' 'Gaul,' 'Germany,' and 'Dacia.'