Excerpt from Extraordinary Women: Their Girlhood and Early Life T would be vain to search the illuminated volumes of the romance of history for a more varied, brilliant, and withal mournful page than that in which are recorded the struggle, victory, defeat, - the hero-life, the martyr-death of the young peasant maiden who had the glory of saving France at a crisis of extremest peril. The worst that can be said of La Pucelle d'orleans is, that She, a girl of fervid temperament, living in an age of unquestioning faith in supernatural manifestation S, attributed the impulses of her own earnest soul - its inner, divine voices urging her to attempt a glorious and mighty enterprise - to a less Spiritual manifestation, to less ethereal utterances. The girlhood of the heroic maid comprises her whole history, for she perished in the dawn of her nineteenth summer. Though her days were Short, she has achieved a renown that will endure as long as passionate love of country, and valiant enthusiasm in its defence, have power to enlist the sym pathies and to command the admiration of mankind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.