The air overhead in
its upper chambers was _hurtling_ with the obscure sound; was dark
with sullen fermenting of storms that had been gathering for a hundred
and thirty years. The battle of Agincourt in Joanna's childhood had
reopened the wounds of France. Crecy and Poictiers, those withering
overthrows for the chivalry of France, had, before Agincourt occurred,
been tranquilised by more than half a century; but this resurrection of
their trumpet wails made the whole series of battles and endless
skirmishes take their stations as parts in one drama. The graves that
had closed sixty years ago seemed to fly open in sympathy with a sorrow
that echoed their own. The monarchy of France laboured in extremity,
rocked and reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of monsoons.
The madness of the poor king (Charles VI), falling in at such a crisis,
like the case of women labouring in child-birth during the storming of
a city, trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild story of the
incident which had immediately occasioned the explosion of this
madness--the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal
himself, coming out of a forest at noonday, laying his hand upon the
bridle of the king's horse, checking him for a moment to say, "Oh,
king, thou art betrayed," and then vanishing, no man knew whither, as
he had appeared for no man knew what--fell in with the universal
prostration of mind that laid France on her knees, as before the slow
unweaving of some ancient prophetic doom.
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