The eighteenth-century philosophers did not descend on France like a cloud of locusts; they were the result of two centuries of the critical spirit. If the story of Jeanne d'Arc contained too much monkish superstition for their taste, it was because they had learned their ecclesiastical history from the Baillets and the Tillemonts, who were pious indeed, but very critical of legends. Voltaire, writing of Jeanne, jeered at the rascally monks and their dupes. But if we quote the lines of _La Pucelle_, why not also the article[119] in the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, which contains three pages of profounder truth and nobler thought than certain voluminous modern works in which Voltaire is insulted in clerical jargon? [Footnote 119: Voltaire ed. Beuchot, vol. xxvi. _Cf._ also _Essai sur les moeurs_, chap. lxxx. "Finally, being accused of having once resumed man's dress, which had been left near her on purpose to tempt her, her judges ... declared her a relapsed heretic and caused to be burnt at the stake one who in heroic ages, when men erected altars to their liberators, would have had an altar raised to her for having served her King. Afterwards Charles VII rehabilitated her memory, which her death itself had sufficiently honoured."] It was precisely at the end of the eighteenth century that Jeanne began to be better known and more justly appreciated, first through a little book, which the Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy derived almost wholly from the unpublished history of old Richer,[120] then by l'Averdy's erudite researches into the two trials.[121] [Footnote 120: L'Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy, _Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc, vierge, heroine et martyre d'Etat suscitee par la Providence pour retablir la monarchie francaise, tiree des proces et pieces originales du temps_, Paris, 1753-1754, 3 vols. in 12mo.] [Footnote 121: F. de L'Averdy, _Memorial lu au comite des manuscrits concernant la recherche a faire des minutes originales des differentes affaires qui ont eu lieu par rapport a Jeanne d'Arc, appelee communement la Pucelle d'Orleans_, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1787, in 4to; _Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque du roi, lus au comite etabli par sa Majeste dans l'Academie royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres_, Paris, Imp. Royale, 1790, vol. iii.]