Antoine Courcy was one of those who are fitted and trained by nature
for the cure of souls. If you had spoken to him of psychiatry he
would not have understood you. The long word would have been Greek
to him. But the thing itself he knew well. The preliminary penance
which he laid upon Pierre Duval was remedial. It belonged to the
true healing art which works first in the spirit.

When the broken soldier went down the hill, in the blaze of the
mid-morning sunlight, toward Domremy, there was much misgiving and
confusion in his thoughts. He did not comprehend why he was going,
except that he had promised. He was not sure that some one might
not know him, or perhaps out of mere curiosity stop him and question
him. It was a reluctant journey.

Yet it was in effect an unconscious pilgrimage to the one health-resort
that his soul needed. For Domremy and the region round about are
saturated with the most beautiful story of France. The life of Jeanne
d'Arc, simple and mysterious, humble and glorious, most human and
most heavenly, flows under that place like a hidden stream, rising
at every turn in springs and fountains. The poor little village
lives in and for her memory. Her presence haunts the ridges and
the woods, treads the green pastures, follows the white road beside
the river, and breathes in the never-resting valley-wind that
marries the flowers in June and spreads their seed in August.

At the small basilica built to her memory on the place where her
old beech-tree, "Fair May," used to stand, there was an ancient