OXFORD - POETRY - EDITH FRICKER


her country's enemies, she resolves to save France. She
meets Dunois wounded, cures him, convinces him of her
mission, and is led by him to the king at Chinon. There
she convinces also the court and clergy in the traditional
manner, leads an army to the relief of Orleans, repulses the
English, defeats them at Patay, and crowns the king in
triumph at Rheims. There Southey's interest in Joan
stopped, for from that point on her story is personal rather
than political. The French people had conquered in the
fight for liberty against the English, and that was sufficient
for his purposes at the time. It is necessary to add, how-
ever, that even if he had not been so preoccupied with this
aspect of the story, the other was little likely to have
occurred to him or to anyone, even to Shakespeare. The
reason for this was that the marvelous detailed documents
relating to Joan's sufferings and displaying her most inti-
mate nature became generally accessible only in 1790 in
the work of L'Averdy,l who made the first scholarly effort
to study the sources of Joan's history, and superseded all
other works on the subject until the monumental publica-
tions of Quicherat2 (1841-1849) made Joan a world-wide
heroine. Of the existence of L'Averdy's work, Southey was
informed, as he tells us in the preface to his first edition
(1796), but he appears never to have seen the book itself,
certainly never, in later editions, to have made use of it.
The general outline of the story, as given in the poem,
was thus easily applicable to the situation obtaining in
1793. It also offered many opportunities for pertinent and,
at the time, startling allusions to the ideas and affairs of
1 See Appendix B.
2 Jules Quicherat, Proces de condamnation et de rehabilitation de
Jeanne d'Arc dite la Pucelle d'OrMans, publies pour la premiere fois
d'apres les manuscrits de la Bibliotheque royale, suivis de tous les docu-
ments historiques qu'on a pu reunir et accompagnes de notes et d'eclair-
cissements . . . Paris, 1841-1849.


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