440.] One day meeting Gerardin d'Epinal, the only man at Domremy not of the Dauphin's party, whose head according to her own confession she would willingly have cut off, although she was godmother to his son, she could not refrain from announcing even to him in veiled words her mystic dealing with God: "Gossip, if you were not a Burgundian there is something I would tell you."[348] [Footnote 348: _Ibid._, p.

423.] The good man thought it must be a question of an approaching betrothal and that Jacques d'Arc's daughter was about to marry one of the lads with whom she had broken bread under _l'Arbre des Fees_ and drunk water from the Gooseberry Spring.
Alas! how greatly would Jacques d'Arc have desired the secret to be of that nature.

This upright man was very strict; he was careful concerning his children's conduct; and Jeanne's behaviour caused him anxiety.

He knew not that she heard Voices.

He had no idea that all day Paradise came down into his garden, that from Heaven to his house a ladder was let down, on which there came and went without ceasing more angels than had ever trodden the ladder of the Patriarch Jacob; neither did he imagine that for Jeannette alone, without any one else perceiving it, a mystery was being played, a thousand times richer and finer than those which on feast days were acted on platforms, in towns like Toul and Nancy.