[Footnote 102: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 117; _Perceval de Cagny_, p. 168; Marquis de Gaucourt, _Le sire de Gaucourt_, Orleans, 1855, in 8vo.] [Footnote 103: _Perceval de Cagny_, pp. 168, 170, 171; _Cronicques de Normendie_, ed. Hellot, pp. 77, 78.] Those secret intrigues on the part of the King and his captains, who are said to have plotted together the destruction of the saint, I admit having found it impossible to discover. To certain historians they appear very obvious: for my part, do what I may, I cannot discern them. The Chamberlain, the Sire de la Tremouille, had no pretensions to nobility of character; and the Chancellor Regnault de Chartres was hard-hearted, but what strikes me is that the Sire de la Tremouille refused to give up this valuable damsel to the Duke of Alencon when he asked for her, and that the Chancellor retained her in order to make use of her.[104] I am not of the opinion that Jeanne was a prisoner at Sully. I believe that when she went to join the Chancellor, who employed her until her capture by the Burgundians, she quitted the castle in estate, with trumpeters, and banners flying. After the girl saint he employed a boy saint, a shepherd who had stigmata; which proves that he did not regret having made use of a devout person to fight against the King's enemies and to recover his own archbishopric. [Footnote 104: _Perceval de Cagny_, pp. 170, 171; _Chronique de la Pucelle_, p. 313; Heraut Berry, in _Trial_, vol. iv, p. 48.] The excellent Quicherat and the magnanimous Henri Martin are very hard on the Government of 1428. According to them it was a treacherous Government. Yet the only reproach they bring against Charles VII and his councillors is that they did not understand the Maid as they themselves understood her. But such an understanding has required the lapse of four hundred years. To arrive at the illuminated ideas of a Quicherat and a Henri Martin concerning Jeanne d'Arc, three centuries of absolute monarchy, the Reformation, the Revolution, the wars of the Republic and of the Empire, and the sentimental Neo-Catholicism of '48, have all been necessary. Through all these brilliant prisms, through all these succeeding lights do romantic historians and broad-minded paleographers view the figure of Jeanne d'Arc; and we ask too much from the poor Dauphin Charles, from La Tremouille, from Regnault de Chartres, from the Lord of Treves, from old Gaucourt, when we require them to have seen Jeanne as centuries have made and moulded her.[105] [Footnote 105: H. Martin, _Jeanne d'Arc_, Paris, 1856, in 12mo; J. Quicherat, _Nouvelles preuves des trahisons essuyees par la Pucelle_ in _Revue de Normandie_, vol. vi (1866), pp. 396-401.] This, however, remains: after having made so much use of her, the Royal Council did nothing to save her.