of a cold morning in the little church, would smile indulgent on the
faithful little worshipper when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne there
whoever might be absent. She was a shy girl, blushing and drooping her
head when a stranger spoke to her, red and shame-faced when they laughed
at her in the village as a _dévote_ before her time; but with nothing
else to blush about in all her simple record.

Neither to her parents, nor to the curé when she made her confession,
does she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though
they had lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon
them, and could keep silence no longer. She was but thirteen when the
revelations began and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to
fulfil her mission. She had no guidance from her voices, she herself
says, as to whether she should tell or not tell what had been
communicated to her; and no doubt was kept back by her shyness, and by
the dreamy confusion of childhood between the real and unreal. One
would have thought that a life in which these visions were of constant
recurrence would have been rapt altogether out of wholesome use and
wont, and all practical service. But this does not seem for a moment to
have been the case. Jeanne was no hysterical girl, living with her head
in a mist, abstracted from the world. She had all the enthusiasms even
of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding her with the intimacy of
the village, paying her visits, staying all night, sharing her room and
her bed. She was ready to be sent for by any poor woman that needed help
or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle; one would love
to know if perhaps in the _Trésor_ at Rheims there was some stole or
maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But the _Trésor_ at
Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be told, and the bottles
and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that _pauvre sire_, are
more thought of than relics of an earlier age.