princes and heroes, we of the humble and obscure; she held rank above all
Personages and all Puissances whatsoever in the whole earth, by right of
baring her commission direct from God. To put it in one word, she was
JOAN OF ARC--and when that is said, all is said. To us she was divine.
Between her and us lay the bridgeless abyss which that word implies. We
could not be familiar with her. No, you can see yourselves that that
would have been impossible.

And yet she was so human, too, and so good and kind and dear and loving
and cheery and charming and unspoiled and unaffected! Those are all the
words I think of now, but they are not enough; no, they are too few and
colorless and meager to tell it all, or tell the half. Those simple old
men didn't realize her; they couldn't; they had never known any people
but human beings, and so they had no other standard to measure her by. To
them, after their first little shyness had worn off, she was just a
girl--that was all. It was amazing. It made one shiver, sometimes, to see
how calm and easy and comfortable they were in her presence, and hear
them talk to her exactly as they would have talked to any other girl in
France.

Why, that simple old Laxart sat up there and droned out the most tedious
and empty tale one ever heard, and neither he nor Papa D'Arc ever gave a
thought to the badness of the etiquette of it, or ever suspected that
that foolish tale was anything but dignified and valuable history. There
was not an atom of value in it; and whilst they thought it distressing
and pathetic, it was in fact not pathetic at all, but actually
ridiculous. At least it seemed so to me, and it seems so yet. Indeed, I
know it was, because it made Joan laugh; and the more sorrowful it got
the more it made her laugh; and the Paladin said that he could have
laughed himself if she had not been there, and Noel Rainguesson said the