We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long
musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no longer,
nor what it was which induced her at last to select the confidant she
did. No doubt she must have been considering and weighing the matter for
a long time before she fixed upon the man who was her relation, yet
did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a townsman for the
extraordinary revelations she had to make. One of her neighbours, her
gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was godmother, had perhaps
at one moment seemed to her a likely helper. But he belonged to the
opposite party. "If you were not a Burgundian," she said to him once,
"there is something I might tell you." The honest fellow took this to
mean that she had some thought of marriage, the most likely and natural
supposition. It was at this moment, when her heart was burning with
her great secret, the voices urging her on day by day, and her power of
self-constraint almost at an end, that Providence sent Durand Laxart,
her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on some family visit. She would seem
to have taken advantage of the opportunity with eagerness, asking him
privately to take her home with him, and to explain to her father and
mother that he wanted her to take care of his wife. No doubt the girl,
devoured with so many thoughts, would have the air of requiring "a
change" as we say, and that the mother would be very ready to accept for
her an invitation which might bring back the brightness to her child.
Laxart was a peasant like the rest, a _prud' homme_ well thought of
among his people. He lived in Burey le Petit, near to Vaucouleurs, the
chief place of the district, and Jeanne already knew that it was to the
captain of Vaucouleurs that she was to address herself. Thus she secured
her object in the simplest and most natural way.

Yet the reader cannot but hold his breath at the thought of what that