Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1891 — Poor Joan Don't For. [ARTICLE]

Poor Joan Don't For.

And now they say that, instead of being a heroine, Joan of Arc belongs to that peculiar class known at the present time as cranks: that the voices she heard in the woods of Domremy were the hallucinations of a disordered intellect. Her visit to Governor Boudricourt so annoyed him that he passed her on to the court of the dauphin for the mere purpose of getting rid of her, where in turn the dauphin dressed her up in armor for the amusement of the court. The iconoclasts go so far as to assert that the consecrated sword which was found, per Joan's direction, buried in the Church of St. Catherine at Flerbois, and which was presented to her by the dauphin, had been planted there by hands of ordinary flesh and blood. They further assert that she did not lead the army to the relief of Orleans, but merely went along like a vivandiere. They scoff at the story that the soldiers who tied this abused lady to the stake in the market place at Rouen were struck dead. So the indications are that the great French heroine will have to get down off of her pedostal and follow William Tell, Cjuintius Curtius, et al. Medieval history is rapidly losing its brightest stars through the irreverent investigations of the modern quidnunc. It now looks like it was a mere matter of time until American history is attacked in the same way, and these individuals will be prepared to prove that Patrick Henry never made a speech, that no cherries grew at the Washington h.oihestead, and that the John Smith-Pocahontas story was due to the fertile imagination of some special correspondent. —miianapoUs Sentinel. Another rooted belief is violently disturbed. Instead of the mariner’s compass having been invented by the Chinese 1,100 years before Christ, it is now asserted that the earliest mention of the compass in the Chinese records is about the twelfth century of our era—a slight difference of say 2,800 years. Two men sometimes seem closely united when one is simply too gentlemanly to give a hint and the other too obtuse to take one.