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alms gladly and had the poor of the village gathered together, and she wanted to sleep beside the hearth and to let them lie in her bed,” testified Isabellette, an older girl who remained in Domrémyand married a farmer there. “One never saw her hanging about the streets, but she stayed in church to pray. She did not dance, and often we other young people used to notice that and talk about it. She was always working and spinning and digging the ground with her father,” Isabellette testified for the nullification.
    So devout she inspired gossip, Joan was derided as well.“She was deeply devoted to God and the Blessed Virgin,” Colin, a childhood friend, remembered, “so much so that some other lads and I—for I was young then—used to tease her.” One of those lads, Jean Waterin, said the same.“I and the others made fun of her,” he admitted.
    “I say my prayers, yes, Joan,” Hauviette chides her friend in Péguy’s The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc , “but you, you never leave off saying them, you say them all the time, you say them at everyone of those crosses by the roadside, the church isn’t enough for you. The crosses by the road have never had so much wear … You are our friend, but you’ll never be like we are.”
    If Joan hadn’t been a solitary soul before, she soon became one, her vision so firmly fixed on the glories and terrors of her vocation that she was immune to any pressure to conform to her peers’ expectations, unaffected by censure from any mortal source.“She liked going to church and went often,” her friend Mengette said. Joan confessed so frequently that the vicar commented on it, and others remembered seeing her on her knees at every opportunity. “She gave alms out of her father’s goods, and she was so good and simple and pious that the other girls and I used to tell her that she was too pious.” And, Mengette added, she was industrious. “She liked working and undertook all sorts of jobs.”
    She was holier, by far, than they, her only sin to evade chores so she could pray in the woods or visit a chapel“when her parents thought she was at the plough, in the fields, or somewhere else,” her godfather Jean Moreau testified.
    “When I was in the woods I easily heard the voices come to me,” she told the examiner.
    In fact, the dialogue between Joan and her voices was growing ever more urgent. Giving alms and devotedly caring for the sick were not enough for God, nor was a vow to remain a virgin for as long as he wanted. “Joan, Child of God,” her voices called her, and they toldher it would soon be time to leave her home and set out on a holy quest. And not only Joan was given presentiments of her leaving. “My mother told me several times that while I was still at home my father said he had dreamed of my going away with soldiers,” Joan testified, “and my parents took great care to keep me safely.”
    Like most men of his era, Jacques d’Arc held dreams to be oracular and prophetic, and when he dreamed more than once that his younger daughter went off with men-at-arms at a time when the only women to do so were prostitutes, he received it as not only a dire warning but also a call to action.
    “If I thought this thing would happen which I have dreamed about my daughter,” Jacques said to his sons, “I should want you to drown her; and if you would not, I would drown her myself.”
    “They held me in great subjection,” Joan testified.
    “You were crying out to someone,” Joan’s father says in The Lark , when he catches her praying aloud. “The bastard fled before I could catch him. Who was it? Who was it? Answer me. Answer me or I’ll beat you to salt marsh.”
    “I was talking to the Blessed Saint Michael.”
    Jacques strikes Joan. “That will teach you to lie to your father,” he says. “You want to start whoring like the others. Well, you can tell your Blessed Saint Michael that if I catch you together I’ll plunge my pitchfork