To the best of my ability I have studied figures carved and painted, not exactly in France--for there, in those days of misery and death, art was little practised--but in Flanders, in Burgundy, in Provence, where the workmanship is often in a style at once affected and _naif_, and frequently beautiful.

As I gazed at the old miniatures, they seemed to live before me, and I saw the nobles in the absurd magnificence of their _etoffes a tripes_,[143] the dames and the damoiselles somewhat devilish with their horned caps and their pointed shoes; clerks seated at the desk, men-at-arms riding their chargers and merchants their mules, husbandmen performing from April till March all the tasks of the rural calendar; peasant women, whose broad coifs are still worn by nuns.

I drew near to these folk, who were our fellows, and who yet differed from us by a thousand shades of sentiment and of thought; I lived their lives; I read their hearts.
[Footnote 143: Imitation velvet.] It is hardly necessary to say that there exists no authentic representation of Jeanne.

In the art of the fifteenth century all that relates to her amounts to very little: hardly anything remains--a small piece of _bestion_ tapestry, a slight pen-and-ink figure on a register, a few illuminations in manuscripts of the reigns of Charles VII, Louis XI, and Charles VIII, that is all.

I have found it necessary to contribute to this very meagre iconography of Jeanne d'Arc, not because I had anything to add to it, but in order to expunge the contributions of the forgers of that period.