The name of the family was Arc, and much ink has been shed as to the
origin of that name. By some it is derived from the village of d'Arc,
in the Barrois, now in the department of the Haute Marne; and this
hypothesis is as good as any other.

Jacques d'Arc had taken to wife one Isabeau Romée, from the village of
Vouthon, near Domremy. Isabeau is said to have had some property in
her native village. The family of Jacques d'Arc and Isabella or
Isabeau consisted of five children: three sons, Jacquemin, Jean, and
Pierre, and two daughters, the elder Catherine, the younger Jeanne, or
Jennette, as she was generally called in her family, whose name was to
go through the ages as one of the most glorious in any land.

Well favoured by nature was the birthplace of Joan of Arc, with its
woods of chestnut and of oak, then in their primeval abundance. The
vine of Greux, which was famous all over the country-side as far back
as the fourteenth century, grew on the southern slopes of the hills
about Joan's birthplace. Beneath these vineyards the fields were
thickly clothed with rye and oats, and the meadow-lands washed by the
waters of the Meuse were fragrant with hay that had no rival in the
country. It was in these rich fields that, after the hay-making was
over, the peasants let out their cattle to graze, the number of each
man's kine corresponding with the number of fields which he owned and
which he had reaped.

The little maid sometimes helped her father's labourers, and the idea
has become general that Joan of Arc was a shepherdess; in reality, it
was only an occasional occupation, and probably undertaken by Joan out
of mere good-nature, seeing that her parents were well-to-do people.