Chapter M: BERGERET: “Then you believe, monsieur l’abbé, that Jeanne

d’Arc received her mission from God Himself? That will land you in numberless difficulties. I will only submit to you one of these, because it is inherent in the nature of your beliefs. It relates to the voices and apparitions which manifested themselves to the peasant of Domremy. Those who grant that Saint Catherine really appeared to Jacquot d’Arc’s daughter, in company with Saint Michael and Saint Marguerite, will find themselves, I fancy, much embarrassed when it has been proved to them that this Saint Catherine of Alexandria never existed, and that her history is in reality only a rather poor Greek romance. Now this fact was proved as early as the seventeenth century, not by the freethinkers of the period, but by a learned doctor of the Sorbonne, Jean de Launoy, a man of piety and good life. The judicious Tillemont, although so submissive to the Church, rejected the biography of Saint Catherine as an absurd fable. Is not that a difficulty, monsieur l’abbé, for those who believe that the Voices of Jeanne d’Arc came from Heaven?”