by a sense of danger always threatening, and of hatred always smouldering.
That great four-headed road was a perpetual memento to patriotic ardor.
To say, this way lies the road to Paris--and that other way to
Aix-la-Chapelle, this to Prague, that to Vienna--nourished the warfare of
the heart by daily ministrations of sense. The eye that watched for the
gleams of lance or helmet from the hostile frontier, the ear that listened
for the groaning of wheels, made the high road itself, with its relations
to centres so remote, into a manual of patriotic enmity.

The situation, therefore, _locally_ of Joanna was full of profound
suggestions to a heart that listened for the stealthy steps of change and
fear that too surely were in motion. But if the place were grand, the
times, the burthen of the times, was far more so. The air overhead in its
upper chambers were _hurtling_ with the obscure sound; was dark with sullen
fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred and thirty
years. The battle of Agincourt in Joanna's childhood had re-opened the
wounds of France. Crécy and Poictiers, those withering overthrows for the
chivalry of France, had been tranquillized by more than half a century; but
this resurrection of their trumpet wails made the whole series of battles
and endless skirmishes take their stations as parts in one drama. The
graves that had closed sixty years ago, seemed to fly open in sympathy
with a sorrow that echoed their own. The monarchy of France labored in
extremity, rocked and reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of
monsoons. The madness of the poor king (Charles VI.) falling in at such a
crisis, like the case of women laboring in childbirth during the storming
of a city, trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story of
the incident which had immediately occasioned the explosion of this
madness--the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself,
coming out of a forest at noon-day, laying his hand upon the bridle of
the king's horse, checking him for a moment to say, "Oh, King, thou art