it was apparently the cry of fright. But recovering herself instantly, she no longer named any but God, his angels and his saints. She testified, "Yes, my voices were from God; my voices did not deceive me!" This vanishing of all doubt, in the flames, should make us believe that she accepted death as the deliverance promised; that she no longer understood salvation in a Judaistic and material sense, as she had done till then; that she saw clear at last, and that coming out of the shadows, she obtained that which she still lacked of light and holiness.

Ten thousand men wept. A secretary of the King of England said aloud, on returning from the execution, "We are lost: we have burned a saint!" This word escaped from an enemy is none the less grave. It will remain. The future will not contradict it. Yes, according to Religion, according to Patriotism, Jeanne d'Arc was a saint.

What legend more beautiful than this incontestable history! But we should take care not to make a legend of it: every feature, even the most human, should be piously preserved; the touching and terrible reality of it should be respected. Let the spirit of romance touch it if it dare: poetry never will do it. And what could it add? The idea which all during the Middle Ages it had followed from legend to legend - this idea was found at last to be a person; this dream was tangible. The helping Virgin of battles, upon whom the soldiers called, whom they awaited from on high-she was here below. In whom! This is the marvel. In that which was despised, in that which was of the humblest,-in a child, in a simple girl of the fields, of the poor people of France. For there was a people, there was a France. This last figure of their Past was also the first of the time that was beginning. In her appeared at the same time the Virgin and already the country.

Such is the poetry of this great fact; such is the philosophy, the high truth of it. But the historical reality is not the less certain; it was only too positively and too cruelly established. This living enigma, this mysterious creature whom all judged. to be supernatural, this angel or demon who according to some would fly away some morning, was found to be a young woman, a young girl: she had no wings, but, attached like us to a mortal body, she was to suffer, die; and what a hideous death! But it is just in this reality, which seems degrading, in this sad trial of nature, that the ideal is found again and shines out. The

contemporaries themselves recognized in it Christ among the Pharisees. Yet we should see in it still another thing: the passion of the Virgin, the martyrdom of purity.

There have been many martyrs; history cites innumerable ones, more or less pure, more or less glorious. Pride has had its own, and hatred, and the spirit of dispute. No century has lacked fighting martyrs, who no doubt died with good grace when they could not kill. These fanatics have nothing to see here. The holy maid is not of them; she had a different sign,-goodness, charity, sweetness of soul. She had the gentleness of the ancient martyrs, but with a difference. The early Christians only remained sweet and pure by fleeing from action, by sparing themselves the struggle and trial of the world. This one remained sweet in the bitterest struggle of good amid the bad; peaceful even in war,- that triumph of the Devil,-she carried into it the spirit of God. She took arms when she knew "the pity there was in the kingdom of France." She could not see French blood flow. This tenderness of heart she had for all men; she wept after victories, and nursed the wounded English. Purity, sweetness, heroic goodness-that these supreme beauties of soul should be met in a girl of France may astonish strangers, who only like to judge our nation by the lightness of its manners. Let us say

to them (and without self-partiality, since to-day all this is so far from us) that beneath this lightness of manner, amid her follies and her vices, old France was none the less the people of love and of grace.

The savior of France was to be a woman. France was a woman herself. She had the nobility of one; but also the amiable sweetness, the facile and charming pity, the excellence at least of impulse. Even when she delighted in vain elegances and exterior refinements, she still remained at the bottom nearer to nature. The Frenchman, even when vicious, kept more than any one else his good sense and good heart. May new France not forget the word of old France: "Only great hearts know how much glory there is in being good." To be and remain such, amid the injustices of men and the severities of Providence, is not only the gift of a fortunate nature, but it is strength and heroism. To keep sweetness and benevolence amid so many bitter disputes, to traverse experience without permitting it to touch this interior treasure,- this is divine. Those who persist. and go thus to the end are the true elect. And even if they

have sometimes stumbled in the difficult pathways of the world, amid their falls, their weakness, and their childishnesses they will remain none the less children of God.

Translated for A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Grace King.

MICHEL ANGELO

From The Renaissance>

HERE was the soul of Italy in the sixteenth century?

WHE

In

the placid facility of the charming Raphael? In the sublime ataraxy of the great Leonardo da Vinci, the centralizer of arts, the prophet of sciences? He who wished for insensibility, he who said to himself, "Fly from storms," he nevertheless, whether he wished it or not, left in his 'St. John,' in the Bacchus,' and even in the 'Jocunda,' in the nervous and sickly memory that all those strange heads express on their lips he has left a painful trace of the convulsing pains of the Italian mind; of the kind of Maremma fever, which was covered by a false hilarity; of the jesting, rather light than gay, of Pulci and Ariosto. There was a man in these times, a heart, a true hero. Have you seen in the 'Last Judgment,' towards the middle of the immense canvas, him who is disputing with demons and angels,-have you seen in that face and in others those swimming eyes struggling to look above; mortal anxiety of a soul in which two opposing infinities are struggling? True image of the sixteenth century, between old and new beliefs; image of Italy among nations; image of the man of the time, and of Michel Angelo himself.

It has been marvelously well said, "Michel Angelo was the conscience of Italy. From birth to death, his work was the Judgment." One must not pay attention to the first pagan sculptures of Michel Angelo, or to the Christian velleities that crossed his life. In St. Peter he had no thought of the triumph. of Catholicism; his only dream was the triumph of the new art, the completion of the great victory of his master Brunelleschi, before whose work he had his tomb placed, in order, as he said, to contemplate it throughout eternity. He proceeded from two men, Savonarola and Brunelleschi. He belongs to the religion of the Sibyls, of that of the prophet Elias, of the savage locust

eaters of the Old Testament. His one glory and his crown nothing like it before, nothing afterwards-is his having put into art that eminently novel thing, the thirst for and aspiration towards the good. Ah, how well he deserves to be called the defender of Italy! Not for having fortified the walls of Florence in his last days; but for having, in the infinite number of days that followed and will follow, showed in the Italian soul, martyred like a soul without right, the triumphant idea of a right that the world did not yet see.

To recall his origin is to tell why he alone could do these things. Born in the city of judges, Arezzo, to which all others came to get podestàs, he had a judge for a father. He descended from the counts of Canossa, relatives of the Emperor who founded at Bologna, against the popes, the school of Roman law. We must not be astonished that his family at his birth gave him the name of the angel of justice, Michael, just as the father of Raphael gave him the name of the angel of grace. It was a choleric race. Arezzo, an old Etruscan city, petty fallen republic, was despised by the great banking city; Dante gave it a knock in passing. One of the most ordinary subjects of Italian farces was the podestà, representing the powerlessness of the law in stranger cities that called him, paid him, and drove him out. Again everybody in Italy made mockery of his justice. There was needed a heroic effort, like that of Brancaleone's, to make the sword of justice respected. It needed a lion-hearted man, stranger and isolated as he was, to execute his own judgments disputed by all. Michel Angelo would have been one of these warrior judges of the thirteenth century. By heart and stature he belonged to the great Ghibellines of that time; to the one whom Dante honored on his couch of fire; to the other with the tragic face: "Lombard soul, why the slow moving of thine eyes? one would say a lion in his repose." Not wearing the sword, under the reign of men of money, in its place he took the chisel. He was the Brancaleone, the judge and podestà, of Italian art. He exercised in marble and stone the high censure of his time. For nearly a century his life was a combat, a continual contradiction. Noble and poor, he was reared in the house of the Medici, where we have seen him sculpturing statues of snow. Republican, all his life he served princes and popes. Envy disfigures him, a rival has deformed him forever. Made to love and be loved, always he will remain alone.

What was of great assistance to Michel Angelo was the fact that the Sixtine Chapel, the work of Sixtus IV., uncle of Julius IV., was only a second thought of the latter, who attached the glory of his pontificate to the construction of St. Peter's. He obtained the favor of alone having the key of the chapel, and of not having any visitors. The visits of the Pope, which he dared not refuse, he rendered difficult by leaving no access to his scaffolding save by a steep step-ladder, upon which the old Pope had to risk himself. This obscure and solitary vault, in which he passed five years, was for him the cave of Mount Carmel; and he lived in it like Elias. He had a bed suspended from the arch, upon which he painted with his head stretched back. No company but the prophets and the sermons of Savonarola. It was thus, in the absolute solitude of the years 1507, 1508, 1509, 1510, -it was during the war of the League of Cambray, when the Pope gave a last blow to Italy in killing Venice,- that the great Italian made his prophets and his sibyls, realized that work of sorrow, of sublime liberty, of obscure presentments, of interpenetrating lights.

He put four years into it. And I-I have put thirty years into interrogating it. Not a year at longest has passed without my taking up again this Bible, this Testament, which is never old nor new, but of an age still unknown. Born out of the Jewish Bible, it passes and goes far beyond it. One must take care not to go into the chapel, as is done during the solemnities of Holy Week and with the crowd. One must go there alone, slip in as the Pope sometimes did (only Michel Angelo would frighten him by throwing down a plank); one must confront it, tête-à-tête, alone. Reassure yourself: that painting, extinguished and obscured by the smoke of incense and of candles, has no longer its old trait of inspiring terror; it has lost something of its frightening power, gained in harmony and sweetness; it partakes of the long patience and equanimity of time. It appears. blackened from the depths of ages; but all the more victorious, not surpassed, not contradicted. Dante did not see these things in his last circle. But Michel Angelo saw them, foresaw them, dared to paint them in the Vatican, writing the three words of Belshazzar's feast upon the walls, soiled by the Borgias, the murderers of Robera. Happily he was not understood. They would have had it all effaced. We know how for years he defended the door of the Sixtine Chapel, and how Julius II. told him: “If