Chapter 8 Why the Scorners Relented

HUMAN NATURE is the same everywhere: it defies success, it has nothing
but scorn for defeat. The village considered that Joan had disgraced it
with her grotesque performance and its ridiculous failure; so all the
tongues were busy with the matter, and as bilious and bitter as they were
busy; insomuch that if the tongues had been teeth she would not have
survived her persecutions. Those persons who did not scold did what was
worse and harder to bear; for they ridiculed her, and mocked at her, and
ceased neither day nor night from their witticisms and jeerings and
laughter. Haumette and Little Mengette and I stood by her, but the storm
was too strong for her other friends, and they avoided her, being ashamed
to be seen with her because she was so unpopular, and because of the
sting of the taunts that assailed them on her account. She shed tears in
secret, but none in public. In public she carried herself with serenity,
and showed no distress, nor any resentment--conduct which should have
softened the feeling against her, but it did not. Her father was so
incensed that he could not talk in measured terms about her wild project
of going to the wars like a man. He had dreamed of her doing such a
thing, some time before, and now he remembered that dream with
apprehension and anger, and said that rather than see her unsex herself
and go away with the armies, he would require her brothers to drown her;
and that if they should refuse, he would do it with his own hands.

But none of these things shook her purpose in the least. Her parents kept
a strict watch upon her to keep her from leaving the village, but she
said her time was not yet; that when the time to go was come she should
know it, and then the keepers would watch in vain.