large mass of documents which fill the five volumes of M. Quicherat's
"Proces de Jeanne d'Arc," in contemporary chronicles, and in MSS. more
recently discovered in French local or national archives. Thus Charlotte
Boucher, Barthelemy Barrette, Noiroufle, the Scottish painter, and his
daughter Elliot, Capdorat, ay, even Thomas Scott, the King's Messenger,
were all real living people, traces of whose existence, with some of
their adventures, survive faintly in brown old manuscripts. Louis de
Coutes, the pretty page of the Maid, a boy of fourteen, may have been
hardly judged by Norman Leslie, but he certainly abandoned Jeanne d'Arc
at her first failure.

So, after explaining the true position and character of our monkish
author and artist, we leave his book to the judgment which it has tarried
for so long.




CHAPTER I--HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN, AND HOW NORMAN LESLIE FLED OUT OF
FIFE


It is not of my own will, nor for my own glory, that I, Norman Leslie,
sometime of Pitcullo, and in religion called Brother Norman, of the Order
of Benedictines, of Dunfermline, indite this book. But on my coming out
of France, in the year of our Lord One thousand four hundred and fifty-
nine, it was laid on me by my Superior, Richard, Abbot in Dunfermline,
that I should abbreviate the Great Chronicle of Scotland, and continue
the same down to our own time. {1} He bade me tell, moreover, all that I
knew of the glorious Maid of France, called Jeanne la Pucelle, in whose