12th at midday, the mayor furnished every necessary for the youth, as well as his father, who constantly remained with him.

"According to the verbal process above recorded,

"Resolved, That in order to serve as a guide for the future, the same be inscribed in the Register of Resolutions.

"Executed at the Town Hall of Orleans, this tenth of

May, 1817.

"The Authentic Copy.

"The Mayor of Orleans,

"LE COMTE DE ROCHEPLATTE."

PORTRAITS

AND

HISTORICAL ENGRAVINGS

OF

JEANNE D'ARC.

FROM PICTURE GALLERIES, MUSEUMS, CABINETS, MEDALS, &c.

VOL. II.

PORTRAITS,

ETC. ETC.

If the heroic exploits of the Maid of Orleans embellish the pages of history, the sciences and arts have alike contributed to hand down her fame to future ages. The biographers of Jeanne d'Arc have certainly given an ample detail of her actions; but so materially do they vary in their accounts, that a feeling of scepticism has been engendered in the public mind. Eloquence was resorted to for the purpose of abetting the cause of her persecutors, and during the succeeding centuries it was likewise employed in order to avenge her wrongs; even poetry disputed with eloquence this latter privilege, though with more of ardour than success.

Why were not the arts, till within late years, more frequently employed in France to multiply the representations of this heroine? In that case, posterity might have possessed authentic memorials of the features of this extraordinary woman; whereas the major part of the engravings, and other representations of Jeanne d'Arc now extant, are but the offspring of imagination.

The portrait in oil preserved with the greatest care and veneration at the town-house of Orleans, although boasting antiquity, is unquestionably more modern than the time of Jeanne d'Arc, as the costume at once decides, without referring to the state of the arts in France at the time of Charles VII., which, compared with the painting in question, would be found bad in the extreme, resembling more the pictorial productions of the Chinese than the portrait of La Pucelle to which we now refer.

Wraxall, speaking of this picture, gives a faithful description of it in the following words:

"In the Hôtel de Ville is a portrait of Joan of Arc, which I studied long and attentively; though it was not done till 1581, which was near 130 years after her decease, it is yet the oldest and best picture existing. The painter seems undoubtedly to have drawn a flattering resemblance of her, and to have given his heroine imaginary charms. Her face, though long, is of exceeding beauty, heightened by an expression of intelligence and grandeur rarely united. Her hair falls loosely down her back, and she

The present Hôtel de Ville of Orleans, in which the portrait of Jeanne d'Arc is preserved, was not the town-house at the period of the siege in 1428; since it appears from the archives of the city, that when Charles duke of Orleans, at the expiration of the long captivity he had endured in England, after being made prisoner at the battle of Azincourt, conducted his newly married bride, in 1442, to the city of Orleans, he found the residence was not sufficiently commodious. In consequence of this, the city, in the ensuing year, purchased the Hôtel des Carneaux and some adjoining houses, upon the site of which they erected the present edifice, which was not completed until 1498.