JOAN OF ARC
reasons for doubting him, the strongest of all being that
Joan herself repudiated the story of a supernatural sign
on the last day of her life.
Perhaps what happened was simpler, after all. Charles
of Valois—lazy, deceitful and a coward—was a pretty
poor specimen of a king, but he was no fool. If he shut
himself up with his harlots and entrusted his affairs to
dishonest and incompetent men, he at least had no
illusions either about himself or them, and he treated
them with a gratitude proportionate to their merits:
when they could no longer supply him with the money
he needed he had no scruple about deserting them to
the bloody mercies of rivals who could. Though a weary
fatalism, the inheritance from a mad father and a neuras-
thenic mother, kept him from exerting himself for long
at a time, it rarely affected his intelligence. With equal
apathy he allowed himself to be dragged into the murder
of John the Fearless by a set of worthless favourites and
to be delivered from them by the homicidal energy of
the Count of Richemont: but when Richemont presented
de la Tremoille—as worthless a character as any in the
first lot—to his notice, he gave the fat man an appraising
glance from under his heavy lids and said to the Count,
"You will regret it, for he will intrigue you out of
your place." And so it happened, because he could
read men.
He needed no "sign" to see in that ardent girl, possessed
if one likes but gloriously self-possessed as well, a being
as different from those selfish brutes in the hall outside
who battened on his weakness as he was from Charlemagne
and Saint Louis, those illustrious predecessors whom, with
her poet's imagination, she pictured to him kneeling on
either side of the throne of God on his unworthy behalf.
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