The Executioner's Knife; Or, Joan of ArcSue, Eugène
General
The Executioner's Knife; Or, Joan of Arc
Sue, Eugène
Biographical fiction; Christian fiction; Christian women saints -- Fiction; Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431 -- Fiction
During her sojourn in the Castle of Ile Jeannette had been the prey of
severe attacks of fever. At times during her delirium she invoked St.
Catherine and St. Marguerite, her good saints, believing that she saw
them near her, and beseeching them with her hands clasped to put an end
to the atrocities of the English. At other times the shocking scene of
the hamlet of St. Pierre would rise in her troubled brain and she would
cry out aloud or would sob at the sight of the victims that rose before
her, livid and blood-bespattered. At still other times, her eyes
shooting fire and her cheeks aflame she spoke of a martial virgin clad
in white armor and mounted on a milk white steed whom, she said, she saw
falling upon and exterminating the English. At such times Jeannette
repeated with a quivering voice the refrain of Merlin's prophecy--
"Gaul, lost by a woman, will be saved by a virgin
From the borders of Lorraine and a forest of old oaks."
Isabelle sat up night and day nursing her daughter, imputing the ravings
of the poor child to the violence of the fever and to the recollections
of the horrible spectacle at St. Pierre. Great dejection of spirit and
extreme feebleness succeeded Jeannette's malady. Back in Domremy, she
was compelled to remain in bed several weeks; but her dreams reflected
the identical pictures of her delirium. Moreover a deep sorrow had
fallen upon her, for, strangely, her god-mother was one of the few
victims of the English raid into Domremy. Her corpse was found riddled
with wounds; and Jeannette wept for Sybille as much on account of her
tender affection for her god-mother as on account of her regret at being
separated forever from her who told such marvelous legends.
Two months passed and Jeannette was now nearly fourteen. She seemed to
have regained her normal health, but the symptoms of puberty had
disappeared and she frequently suffered from intolerable headaches
followed by severe attacks of vertigo.
Feeling all the more uneasy as she remembered the words of the
physician, Isabelle once more consulted him and he answered that the
violent emotion caused by the invasion of the English and the spectacle
of their cruelty must have deeply disturbed the girl's organization and
checked her sexual development; but that her ailments would cease and
the laws of nature resume their course in her physical being as the
mental effects of her deeply stirred emotion wore off.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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