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THE TRIAL OF JEANNE DARC. 443 What could a Frenchman think of the rival claimants of 1428 ? Paris was in the power of the English, and apparently content to be ; two-thirds of France were strongly held by English troops, and the remainder was not safe from incursion for a day; the uncles of the English King, who ruled France in his name, were men of energy and force, capable of holding what their valiant brother had won ; and as to the King, Henry VI, boy as he was, he was a French Prince as well as English, the son of English Harry and the Princess Catherine, whose pretty courting scenes so agreeably close Shakspeare's play. " Shall not thou and 1," says blunt King Hal to the Princess, who happily understood him not, " com- pound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople, and take the Turk by the beard ? " The boy had been compounded; he was now called Henry VI, of France and England King; and many thousand Frenchmen owned him sovereign in their hearts. The person whom we commonly style Joan of Arc, and the French Jeanne d'Arc, would have written her name, if she had ever known how to write, Jehannette Rommee. " My mother," she said, upon her trial, " was named Romme'e, and in my country girls bear the surname of their mothers." Her father was a farm laborer named Jacques Dare, originally D'Arc — James of the Bow, or, as we might say, if he had been an English peasant, James Bowman. A learned descendant of the family — for she had several brothers and sisters — who has written a book on the Maid, writes her name and his own Dare; and although there is an inclination in France to give her still the aristocratic apostrophe, it is probable that history will now accept plain Jeanne Dare as the name nearest the truth. Whether her father was a free laborer or a serf was not known even to the persons who drew up her patent of nobility in 1428, and is still uncertain. We 27