she meant to be their leader and general, on a level not with the common
men-at-arms, but of princes and nobles? In the morning he told his dream
to his wife and also to his sons. "If I could think that the thing would
happen that I dreamed, I would wish that she should be drowned; and
if you would not do it, I should do it with my own hands." The reader
remembers with a shudder the Meuse flowing at the foot of the garden,
while the fierce peasant, mad with fear lest shame should be coming to
his family, clenched his strong fist and made this outcry of dismay.

No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so good
a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly and so
helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too willing
to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be egged
up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at Toul and
swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her childhood. So
timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic, would simply obey
the bishop's decision and would not be bold enough even to remonstrate,
though it is curious that with the spectacle of her grave determination
before them, and sorrowful sense of that necessity of her mission
which had steeled her to dispense with their consent, they should have
expected such an expedient to arrest her steps. The affair, we must
suppose, had gone through all the more usual stages of entreaty on the
lover's part, and persuasion on that of the parents, before such an
attempt was finally made. But the shy Jeanne had by this time attained
that courage of desperation which is not inconsistent with the most
gentle nature; and without saying anything to anyone, she too went to