Nevertheless humanism, and after humanism the Reformation, and after the Reformation Cartesianism, and after Cartesianism experimental philosophy had banished the old credulity from thoughtful minds. When the Revolution came, the bloom had already long faded from the flower of Gothic legend. It seemed as if the glory of Jeanne d'Arc, so intimately related to the traditions of the royal house of France, could not survive the monarchy, and as if the tempest which scattered the royal ashes of Saint Denys and the treasure of Reims, would also bear away the frail relics and the venerated images of the saint of the Valois. The new _regime_ did indeed refuse to honour a memory so inseparable from royalty and from religion. The festival of Jeanne d'Arc at Orleans, shorn of ecclesiastical pomp in 1791, was discontinued in 1793. Later the Maid's history appeared somewhat too Gothic even to the _emigres_; Chateaubriand did not dare to introduce her into his "Genie du Christianisme."[122] [Footnote 122: "Modern times present but two fine subjects for an epic poem, the Crusades and the Discovery of the New World" (ed. 1802, Paris, vol. ii, p. 7).] But in the year XI the First Consul, who had just concluded the Concordat and was meditating the restoration of all the pageantry of the coronation, reinstituted the festival of the Maid with its incense and its crosses. Glorified of old in Charles VII's letters to his good towns, Jeanne was now exalted in _Le Moniteur_ by Bonaparte.[123] [Footnote 123: "The illustrious Jeanne d'Arc has proved that there is no miracle which the French genius is incapable of working when national independence is at stake" (_Moniteur_ of 10 Pluviose, year XI, January 30, 1803). For the approval of the First Consul: facsimile in A. Sarrazin, _Jeanne d'Arc et la Normandie_, p. 600. [Original taken from the Reiset collection.]] Only by constant transformation do the figures of poetry and history live in the minds of nations. Humanity cannot be interested in a personage of old time unless it clothe it in its own sentiments and in its own passions. After having been associated with the monarchy of divine right, the memory of Jeanne d'Arc came to be connected with the national unity which that monarchy had rendered possible; in Imperial and Republican France she became the symbol of _la patrie_. Certainly the daughter of Isabelle Romee had no more idea of _la patrie_ as it is conceived to-day than she had of the idea of landed property which lies at its base. She never imagined anything like what we call the nation. That is something quite modern; but she did conceive of the heritage of kings and of the domain of the House of France. And it was there, in that domain and in that heritage, that the French gathered together before forming themselves into _la patrie_.