"Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc vol 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joan of Arc)

for burial; they were left there to rot and create plagues.

And plagues they did create. Epidemics swept away the people
like flies, and the burials were conducted secretly and by night, for
public funerals were not allowed, lest the revelation of the
magnitude of the plague's work unman the people and plunge them
into despair. Then came, finally, the bitterest winter which had
visited France in five hundred years. Famine, pestilence, slaughter,
ice, snow--Paris had all these at once. The dead lay in heaps about
the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured
them.

Ah, France had fallen low--so low! For more than three quarters of
a century the English fangs had been bedded in her flesh, and so
cowed had her armies become by ceaseless rout and defeat that it
was said and accepted that the mere sight of an English army was
sufficient to put a French one to flight.

When I was five years old the prodigious disaster of Agincourt fell
upon France; and although the English King went home to enjoy
his glory, he left the country prostrate and a prey to roving bands
of Free Companions in the service of the Burgundian party, and
one of these bands came raiding through Neufchateau one night,
and by the light of our burning roof-thatch I saw all that were dear
to me in this world (save an elder brother, your ancestor, left