Legend has gilded her portrait for us, and much that is told of her is not susceptible of proof, but the tendency of her influence is shown by one little incident. Charles, unable to win back his kingdom, unable to maintain himself in it north of the Loire, unable to find money to pay his troops, was yet able to build a chateau at Loches for Agnes Sorel. Here he was basking in her smiles and heedless of the distress of France, when accident gave Agnes a chance to rouse his nobler feelings. Charles had, to amuse the passing hour, called a fortune teller to the chateau, and stood by while the man told the fortune of his well-beloved Agnes. The mountebank, with the cunning of his kind, thought to flatter this vain and lovely lady by prophesying: "Some day thou shalt be the wife of the greatest king on earth." Agnes, with ready wit, rose at once to her occasion. "If that be my true fortune," said she to the dauphin, "I must leave you this instant and go marry the King of England; for I see that, in the sloth that confines you here, you will not long be King of France." The shot told, and Charles was stung into momentary activity. Throughout her life Agnes continued to exert a salutary influence upon him; and when she died,--poisoned, it was said, by the then dauphin, afterward Louis XI,--evil favorites soon replaced the wise counsellors at the king's board, and his last years were as full of misery as had been those before Jeanne came mysteriously out of the east and gave him his crown. It was not Charles, the miserable, ungrateful voluptuary whose character we have attempted to show, that was loved and saved by Jeanne d'Arc; it was France, represented to her in the person of the dauphin. For her, Charles was a symbol, a mere incarnate _patrie_ for whose salvation she was commissioned by the Lord of Hosts; the man himself was nothing; in her simple peasant's heart, she hardly thought of him as a man, rather as a sort of divinity that could do no wrong, that must be worshipped, that must first of all be saved and set up safely in its tabernacle of Rouen. Unworthier idol never was created than this insensible thing called the dauphin, with as little care for the victims crushed beneath him as if he had been in very truth a mere wooden Juggernaut or Mumbo Jumbo; but all of us worship unworthy idols and are quite unconscious of their unworthiness. And, as in the case of Jeanne, if worship and worshipper be pure, what matter if the idol be a little unsteady on the pedestal to which our blind devotion has raised it?