It is not within the compass of argument to maintain that
the progress of society, the advance of civilization, and the
growth of science, have not, in some degree, affected and even
altered the standards, by which men judge of thoughts, principles,
and actions, as praiseworthy or culpable — nay! in the
abstract, as virtuous or vicious. So, if I be not in error, it is
perfectly possible and consistent that, in two different periods
of the world, two different constitutions of society, the very
same line of conduct in man or woman should call forth the
highest admiration, and acquire deathless fame, or awaken
criticism only, and be judged dubious, at the least, if not disgraceful.

I might instance the recorded hardihood of Spartan mothers,
inaccessible to the slightest touch of womanly or motherly

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feeling, a hardihood which it is still the fashion to laud in
Fourth-of-July orations as the bean-ideal of patriotism, heroism,
and a genuine love of freedom, whereas it was in truth no
more than the cold and stupid insensibility of minds unrefined
by civilization, unswerved by sentiment, and unsoftened by any
of those redeeming graces, which it is said, even among the
most barbarous and savage hordes, are observed to relieve the
primitive ruggedness of nature in the softer sex — a hardihood,
which, were it now affected or put on by maiden, wife or
mother of our race, would consign her to endless scorn and
loathing, as a woman deprived of the best attribute of womanhood,
and differing only from the lost and lowest of her sex as
inferior to them in the want of that “one touch of nature,”
which, in the words of the great English dramatist, “makes
the whole world kin.”

In the like manner, I might adduce the practice — for,
among the ancients, before the Christian era, it was a practice,
and a time-honored practice, too, among the wisest and the
best of men — of deliberate and long-premeditated suicide.
For in those days, not to die by his own hand, for one guiltlessly
sentenced to the hand of the executioner, or fallen into
the power of unrelenting enemies, was certainly regarded as
an act of cowardice and dishonor; while self-murder, in a
similar state of circumstances, was held an added title to the
immortal honor of the sage, the patriot, or the unsuccessful
hero.

At a much later period to decline the arbitration of the
sword in quarrels of a private and social nature, and, whether
in the case of receiving a wrong at the hands of another, or
inflicting it at his own, to deny the appeal to single combat,
was sufficient, nay! in some countries, to this very hour, is
sufficient, to deprive the highest member of society of all claim
to social position, to stigmatize him as a poltroon and banish

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him, deprived of caste for ever, from the companionship of men
of honor; whereas, it is now the cry of that popular voice,
which some infatuated Roman once defined as being the voice
of God, that to endure obloquy, calumny, insult, nay! but
blows without resenting them, is the best proof of manhood,
of gentlemanly bearing, and of a clear and correct sense of
honor.

Without entertaining the slightest idea of entering into the
discussion of any one of these vexed and disputed questions,
I have thought it well to dwell something at length upon the
alteration of popular sentiment in these foregoing questions,
the rather that in the very person of the heroine whom I have
selected as the subject of the following romance, we have an
instance directly in point — an instance of conduct on the part
of a young woman, which, occurring as it did, in the early part
of the fifteenth century, I can not hesitate to pronounce the offspring
of genuine patriotism, of genuine heroism, and absolved,
in consequence of the mode of thinking and acting in those
days, from any censure of indecorum or want of those feminine
attributes, to which everything else is now, and most justly,
held subservient.

I am the more especially called upon to note this discrepance,
as I might otherwise myself fall under the charge of inconsistency,
since in many recent papers, I have taken occasion
to express my abhorrence and loathing of those women,
who, in an age of gentleness, civilization, refinement, and a
thorough apportionment of their appropriate rights, duties, and
tasks, to the two sexes, have chosen, in defiance of the laws
of nature, the modesty of nature, and the wholesome prescriptions
of society, and in obedience to a morbid love of excitement,
or masculine lust for power and fame, to undertake the parts,
unsolicited and uncalled for by anything of duty or of station,
of propagandists, conspirators, patriots, and statesmen; and

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have actually so far forgotten themselves as to don, not figuratively,
but actually, the breeches, to become colonels of dragoons,
and to fight hand in hand among the shock of martial
gladiators. Of a truth! little as I can sympathize with the
executioners, the scourgers, as it is alleged, of women, quite
as little can I feel for the scourged, who, according to my
judgment, having made their election, were bound to abide by
the consequences, and having adopted the duties of manhood
had no right to complain of finding that they had thereby incurred
the responsibilities of manhood also.

It is to her gentleness, to her weakness, and to her alleged
incapacity to contend with man in braving the shocks of the
world, the inclemency of seasons, the severity of toils, and
more especially the brunt of battle, that woman is entitled to
the protection, the reverence, and even when perverse and
reprobate, to the pitiful clemency and considerate-tolerance of
man. The moment she assumes an equality of mental hardness,
of physical robustness, or of active hardihood and daring,
she forfeits the indulgences willingly conceded to the implied
weakness of her feminine organization, and having deliberately
unsexed herself, may properly and most righteously be judged
as one of those among whom she has chosen to enroll herself,
not as one of those whom she has deserted, in defiance of
every principle of decorum, decency, or nature.

An effeminate and effete, and unsexed man, the Hercules
degraded into a willing Omphale, has at all times been regarded
with scorn, abhorrence, and that disgust which is felt
for reptiles beyond and below the attributes of nature. Men
shrink from him with plainly-discovered loathing, and true
women shake the contamination of his vile presence from the
very skirts of their raiment.

Why is it, then? why should it be? How can it be? — for
it is, alas! — it is even among ourselves that the loud-tongued

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viragoes, the sword-drawing termagants, who, ashamed of
their highest attributes, the delicate sensibilities, the finer organization,
the more perfect perceptions, purer motives, holier
aspirations, and more admirable powers of their own sex, who
in love with the brute force, the fierce ambition, the fiery excitement
peculiar to us,


“Pagod things of sabre way,
With fronts of brass and feet of clay”—
who forgetful of all modesty, propriety, decorum, nature, unsex
themselves even to the putting on not the garb only, but the
feelings of the gladiator, looking on death with wolfish eyes,
nay! dealing death with gory hands. How can it be that
these, and such as these, can meet with sympathy, nay! but
with raptures of applause, triumphs of adulation, not from the
men alone — though that were bad enough — but from the
women — the sensitive, the delicate, the feminine — would that
we could add, the true-hearted women of America.

Even in men, and with a good cause to boot, heroism of the
battle-field, is it not a bloody and a beastly business? and if the
state of society may not dispense with it, nor the constitution
of the human heart deny its thrill of admiring sympathy to the
brave man, the strength and daring of whose spirit conquers the
weakness of his flesh, and in whom the love of country or of
glory is greater than the fear of death — in Heaven's high
name, let us at least limit the license of the sword to the male
hero, and doom the woman who betakes herself to so bloody
work to a sentence as disgraceful as that which in the male
attaches to the coward. It were a just doom, sanctioned by
nature and analogy — for each is alike guilty of unfitness to
rational duties, of rebellion against the veriest law of nature —
and here the woman is the worst sinner, as offences of commission
must needs be heavier than those of omission, and as

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wilfulness is at all times less the subject of pity than weakness
which can not always be controlled.

But, as I have before remarked, there have been ages of
the world in which the generally-received opinions concerning
duties, obligations, and the appropriate functions and fitnesses
of the sexes have been so different from those which now exist,
that the historian of modern days is bound to judge of the
actions and principles, the characters and conduct of the great
and good, as well as of the base and bad, in accordance with
the lights which they possessed and the views which these
obtained, not as if they had occurred under the clearer blaze
of recent knowledge, or under the better-ordered standards of
a wiser and more decorous society. So that many deeds may
have been done, nay! have been done in the troublous times
of the middle ages, which we must admire, must elaborate,
must hold aloft, as examples of splendid heroism; though they
would now-a-days be stigmatized with propriety as indecorous,
and as indicative of feeling and impulses which must be regarded
as anything rather than honorable. And again, many
deeds, which would now be recorded, with execrations on the
heads of the perpetrators; as prodigies of cruelty and honor,
must be narrated as lamentable instances of the ignorance and
semi-barbarism of general society at that period, but by no
means as examples of unusual or peculiar ferocity, or insensibility,
or ignorance of the individual. Of the former class are
many of the most highly-lauded warlike exploits of the middle
ages, many of which are tinctured with a degree of hardness,
ruthlessness, insensibility, and love of battle, if not of blood-shed,
which would be pronounced in the nineteenth century as
purely detestable. High-bred and gentle women looked upon
strife and slaughter, not with dismay and loathing, but with
applause and admiration, and rewarded the most blood-stained
homicide with renown and love. The dearest ties of affection

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were broken on trivial points of honor. Insensibility to the
death of children, parents, wives, nay, the sacrifice of near
kinsmen to small points of chivalry, were held claims for honorable
note and fame of patriotic heroism. Quarter was rarely
given on the field of battle until the victors were weary and
worn out with slaying, unless for the sake of immeasurable
ransoms, and men of the highest rank, character, and condition,
were suffered to languish miserable years in closer durance
than the worst felon of our days, if once they were so
hapless as to fall into the hands of an enemy as prisoners-of-war.

Of the second class are the judicial combats, the fearful punishments
inflicted on innocent persons for witchcraft, magic,
devil-worship, and the like, all which absurdities were then
more generally believed to be positive truths, and atrocities of
hourly occurrence, by the nations at large, from the highest
and best to the lowest intellects, than are the truths of Holy
Writ accepted as truths by the masses of even the most Christian
communities. It is much to be doubted whether down to
the fourteenth century there were even ten men living in Europe,
from the Danube to the Bay of Biscay, who disbelieved
the actual and present agency of the Supreme Being in judicial
battles, or of the Evil Being in necromancies, magical murders,
false prophecies, and all the fanciful wickednesses comprised
under the vulgar name of witchcraft.

In reviewing, therefore, the first class, we must not be detained
by the ruggedness, the hardness, the impossibility, nor
even by the fierce and sanguinary habits of the times, for attributing
the praise of true heroism to many who were in their
days, and according to their acceptance of the nature of heroism,
true heroes, whatever might be the title which should be
justly given to their deeds done now-a-days.

In like manner, recording the events of the second order,

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we must beware of attributing individual cruelty and savageness
to rulers or magistrates who ordered the infliction of
penalties which make our blood run cold, for offences which
we know to have no existence, but in the reality of which they
implicitly believed; for they were in reality no more censurable
than the judge and jury of a modern court is for pronouncing
a sentence, or finding a verdict of death, this year, for an
offence, which the milder law of another year pronounces
worthy only of a more venial penalty.

In both these classes of events and actions so long as the
actors have acted up to the standards which their own ages
considered best, highest, purest, noblest, they must be acquitted
of all blame, and entitled to all honor. It is only where
they have fallen below the spirit of their time in morality, or
clemency, or virtue, or where they have grossly exceeded it
in superstition, intolerance, bigotry, or severity, or, once
more, where being themselves endued with clearer lights,
purer perceptions, and higher talents, they have used and
perverted the less elevated spirit of the times to their own
selfish, ambitious, personal, or even patriotically political
views.

The heroine whom I have assigned to this romance presents
a remarkable case in point, under both the views in question—
under the first as regards her character, and the light in
which we are to regard her — under the second, as relates
to her lamentable and unmerited end.

The first question, as regards written history, has always
been decided in her favor, though it is quite certain that according
to existing ideas, a woman playing such a part to-day,
would receive no higher credit from the judicious or the right-minded
than a Marie Ambree, an Augustina of Saragossa, an
Apollonia Jagello, or any other high-spirited virago, whom we
puff in newspaper columns and praise in after-dinner speeches.

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yet never dream of introducing to our wives, or holding up as
objects of imitation to our daughters. The second question
has as generally been mistreated by historians, and attributed
nationally as a peculiar disgrace to England, and individually
as an act of unusual atrocity to the regent Bedford, though it
is perfectly evident that her fate would have been identical,
if her captors had been Frenchmen, and her judges Charles or
Dunois, for as the winning side really believed her mission,
inspiration, and powers, to be divine, the losers as readily supposed
them to be fiendish: and, in truth, the whole of her
career is so strange, unaccountable, and marvellous, even apart
from the supernatural wonders added to it by the one party,
and implicitly received by both, that it would be scarce surprising,
if, in much milder and more recent times, and among
more enlightened actors, such a course of success were considered
by the vulgar minds, of which by the way there are
many in every place, as the result of superhuman powers.
Nay! I believe that, could such a thing have occurred, as the
checking of the career of the French arms, after Lodi, Marengo,
Austerlitz, and Jena, the total and repeated overthrow of
Napoleon, and the rolling back the refluent tide of battle from
the Po and Danube to the Seine and Loire, by an Austrian or
Italian peasant-maiden, half the consular or imperial armies
would have cried sorcery and the other treason, and if taken,
she would unquestionably have shared the fate, if not of Joan
of Arc, at least of Hofer and a hundred Spanish partisans shot
in cold blood as brigands. Nor do I think the case would
have been much altered if Wellington had been driven from
the conquered Pyrenees to the Tagus by a French paysanne,
or the victor of Buena Vista into the Rio Grande by a black-browed
Mexicana — at least, I am sure that such events would
go further to justify the belief of supernatural agency than any
part of the performance of the Misses Fox at Rochester with

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their assistant knockers, which are believed by many, of what
some are pleased to call “the best minds in the country,” to
be, not only superhuman and divine, but the best, if not sole
convincing proofs of the immortality of the soul. Oh! Plato,
Plato, if thy reasonings were well, some of them have been
received into most ill understandings.

But to come more directly to the personality of my heroine,
it can not, I think, be doubted, whatever hypothesis we may
take of her career, that she was a very extraordinary, unusual,
and in some sort, superior person. That she was an impostor
is incredible, and if, as I doubt not to have been the case, she
was a visionary or enthusiast, and perhaps something approaching
to what we call a somnambulic or mesmeric personage,
she must have had very rare faith in her own mission as a
reality, and, what is more, very rare powers of making others
also believe in its truth and divinity, to have effected what she
did, with the means which she had at her command. For the
minds with which, and against which, she acted, were all
minds of greatly above average capacity; and yet it appears
to me to be very certain that the leaders of both hosts did believe
in her real possession of superhuman powers — indeed,
I scarcely see how at that day, and in the then state of the
human mind, they could have believed otherwise — though the
French would of course regard the supernaturalism as a divine,
the English as a diabolical agency; for such is the natural
constitution of the human mind, the partisans of any cause,
which they have once fairly adopted, under whatever views,
coming in the end to regard it as the true and Heaven-favored
cause.

But in order to get a little more nearly at this, let us see
what was the state of France at her appearance, what the circumstances
of her success, and what the real extent of her services
to her king and country.

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About fourteen years before, the tremendous battle of Agincourt,
won by the fifth Henry of England, had more than decimated
the aristocracy, and completely subdued the feudal military
power of France; all the leading princes of the blood
royal, and a fearful proportion of the nobility of the realm had
been slain on the fatal field, or still languished in English dungeons.
From that day forth, every species of calamity had
befallen the unhappy France, the queen-mother hostile to her
own son, a minor, the dauphin Charles, the furious factions of
the Armagnacs and Burgundians literally deluging the streets
of Paris with French blood, province against province, prince
against prince, and ever and anon the English profiting by the
dissensions and disasters of the enemy, to break in and overrun,
and desolate, and take possession, until it really did seem as
though the boastful pretensions of the English king were true;
and as though his utmost ambition was about to be realized,
when he replied to the cardinal des Ursins, who would have
persuaded him to peace: “Do you not see that God has led
me hither as by the hand? France has no sovereign; I have
just pretensions to the kingdom; everything here is in the utmost
confusion, no one thinks of resisting me. Can I have a
more sensible proof that the Being who disposes of empires has
determined to put the crown of France upon my head?”

And shortly afterward, though the battle of Beaugè, wherein
the duke of Clarence fell by the spear of the Scottish champion,
Allan Swinton, and Dorset, Somerset, and Huntingdon, were
made prisoners, threw a solitary gleam of lustre over the dark
affairs of France, it availed not to retard the progress of Henry,
who had, in fact, conquered all the northern provinces, and held
them in quiet possession; who was master of the capital, Paris,
wherein his son, afterward Henry VI., of most hapless memory,
was born amid general acclamations, and almost unanimously
hailed as heir to both crowns; and who had chased the

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dauphin beyond the Loire, whither he was pursued, almost in
despair, by the victorious and united arms of Burgundy and
England.

Had Henry's life been prolonged, it is difficult to conjecture
what would have been the end, for he was no less politic as a
prince, and shrewd as a man, than daring, skilful, and successful
as a leader. But the Disposer of empires, whose fiat he
had so recently anticipated, had already disposed of the tenure
of his own, much more of his half-conquered and rashly-expected
crown, and he was summoned from the captured capital of
France, before that throne, where kings and crowns are judged
equally, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, and the tenth of
his reign — a great king, a great conqueror, a brave, honorable,
and, in the main, a just and good man. Few men have performed
more splendidly, ambitious acts from less personally
selfish motives; few kings have attained such glorious greatness
through their own personal action, with less alloy of evil or
detraction.

His son, whom he left not nine months old, and “whose
misfortune in the course of his life,” to quote the language of
Hume, “surpassed all the glories and successes of his father,”
succeeded to the crown of his father, and to his claims on that
of France; nor, although minorities are proverbially weak, and
the times were turbulent and stormy, did his tenure of the one,
or his accession to the other, appear at first doubtful.

Soon after the death of Henry, his rival, Charles VI. died
also. He had for many years possessed mere nominal authority
of his France, and his life had been as unhappy to himself
as disastrous to his country. To his son he left only a disputed
crown and a divided country, and that he ever owned the one
unquestioned and the other entire, he owed in part to his own
high qualities and in part to the character and achievements
of Joan, the maid of Arc and Orleans. He was crowned at

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Poictiers, Charles VII.; his Paris, and Rheims, the sacred coronation
city, being both in the hands of the English. This
event occurred in the year 1422, and, although Henry was an
infant, and when even he arrived at manhood, little better than
imbecile, so splendid was the administration of the protector,
the duke of Bedford, and so great the talents of the renowned
generals who commanded under him, Somerset, Warwick,
Arundel, Salisbury, Suffolk, and the still greater Talbot, that
they not only held Guienne, the capital, and all the northern
provinces, but pressed the war with vigor in the south and west,
so that this position of Charles VI. had become almost desperate,
when the disastrous battle of Verneuil, second only in the
slaughter of nobility to the fields of Cressy, Poictiers, and
Agincourt, reduced him to the last extremity, and to such a
state of hopeless poverty and depression, that not only was he
compelled to abandon every effort at sustaining the parade of a
court, but was scarcely enabled to procure daily subsistence for
himself and a few faithful followers.

Just at this moment, some dissensions occurred in the English
ministry, and the duke of Bedford was recalled home, his
place being ably filled by Suffolk, and, although the duke of
Brittany was beginning to look distastefully on the English alliance,
and Montargis was relieved by the bastard of Orleans,
better known in after-days as the count of Dunois, so little
effect did the change of hands appear to have produced on the
conduct of the war, that Orleans, the most important city of
France, in the possession of Charles, was closely invested and
on the point of yielding, while the king himself was dissuaded
from retreating into the remote provinces of Dauphiny and Languedoc
by the entreaties only of the fair but frail Agnes Sorel.

At this time an incident occurred so strange, and with consequences
so extraordinary, that once can scarce wonder at
the credulity of a French historian, who, describing the first

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appearance of Joan on the scene of history, commences thus:
“But at this crisis the Lord, not desiring that France should
be entirely undone, sent a woman,” &c., &c., evidently esteeming
her mission as positive and direct as that of St. John, or
any of the holy apostles— nor, I conceive, is it all to be doubted
that she herself, and those to whom she revealed her visions,
were as confident of her divine inspiration and suprehuman
power.

She was a poor girl, of the small village of Domremi, near
Vaucouleurs, in Lorraine, of the very lowest class of society.
She is variously stated to have been a hostler-wench at an inn,
and shepherdess; but of irreproachable conduct, and undoubted
virtue. It is said that she had manifested no singularity nor
given any tokens of possessing superior genius, until she was
seized by a sudden idea that she saw visions and heard voices
commissioning her to re-establish the throne of France, and
expel the foreign invaders. She first made her way to the
presence of Baudricourt, the governor of Vancouleurs, to whom
she declared her mission, and, although he at first treated her
with neglect, she at length so far convinced him that he sent
her on with an escort to the French court, at the little town of
Chinon. Here, it is asserted, that she at once recognised the
king, though purposely disguised and surrounded by his courtiers,
and that she claimed and described, even to its minutest
ornaments, and the place where it had long lain concealed, a
curious antique sword, which was found in the church of St.
Catharine de Fierbois. Hume, who is ever skeptical, leans to
the view that all this was jugglery, not exactly on Joan's part,
but on that of the French king and Dunois, who were determined
to use her as an instrument; and to the talents and skill
of the leaders, whose tactics he supposed were followed, Joan
being merely led as a puppet through the host, he ascribes all
that follows.

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