I have travelled along the smiling banks of the Loire, so full of renown; through La Beauce, with its vast horizons bordered with snow-topped mountains; through l'Ile-de-France, where the sky is serene; through La Champagne, with its stony hills covered with those low vines which, trampled upon by the coronation army, bloomed again into leaves and fruit, says the legend, and by St.Martin's Day yielded a late but rich vintage.[142] I have lingered in barren Picardy, along the Bay of the Somme so sad and bare beneath the flight of its birds of passage.

I have wandered through the fat meadows of Normandy to Rouen with its steeples and towers, its ancient charnel houses, its damp streets, its last remaining timbered houses with high gables.

I have imagined these rivers, these lands, these chateaux and these towns as they were five hundred years ago.
[Footnote 142: Germain Lefevre-Pontalis, _Les sources allemandes de l'histoire de Jeanne d'Arc_, p.

93.] I have accustomed my gaze to the forms assumed by the beings and the objects of those days.

I have examined all that remains of stone, of iron, or of wood worked by the hands of those old artisans, who were freer and consequently more ingenious than ours, and whose handicraft reveals a desire to animate and adorn everything.