The Executioner's Knife; Or, Joan of ArcSue, Eugène
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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
The advice, given to Joan through the intermediary of her good saints,
comforted her. Furthermore she learned in the morning that the capture
of the bastille of St. Loup had an immense result. As that bastille
commanded at once the roads to the Sologne district and to Berry, and
the Loire above Orleans, it had rendered difficult the provisioning and
reinforcing of the town. Learning, however, of the destruction of the
formidable redoubt, the surrounding peasants promptly began to pour into
town with their products as on a market day. Thanks to these fresh
supplies, besides the convoy of the previous day, abundance succeeded
scarcity, and the inhabitants glorified Joan for the happy change of
things. There was another precious result. Numerous well armed bands,
fanaticized by the accounts that they received of the Maid, entered the
town from the side of the Sologne, and offered their help to march
against the English with the urban militia. The heroine immediately
realized that she had a powerful counterpoise to the ill will of the
captains, and was not slow in putting it to use. Accordingly, she
ordered her equerry Daulon to convoke the captains and councilmen for
the hour of noon after high mass, at the house of Master Boucher, and
she pressed upon her host to see that none of the magistrates be absent;
the Maid then requested Madeleine to procure her a dress of one of the
servants of the house and a hooded cloak, took off her male clothes,
donned the attire of her sex, carefully wrapped herself so as to be
discovered of none in the town, went to the banks of the Loire, took a
boat and ordered the boatman to cross the river and land at a good
distance from the bastille of St. John-le-Blanc situated on the opposite
bank and face to face with the still smoldering debris of the bastille
of St. Loup.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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