![]() ![]() ![]() Jeanne was sixth in the family of four boys and four girls. Her mother came of a clerical Walloon family, and was the divorced wife of a professor in Leyden University. She was born in 1839, in Batavia, because her father was Viceroy of the Dutch East Indies. That, now, was a girl, one of the most engaging figures in the margin of the nineteenth century, sad proof of what happens to Jeanne d'Arc if she is unlucky enough not to be burned. They raise a white finger and say only, ‘This is a community of human beings, and, look you, we are not beasts of the field.’ But I kept my eyes on the mountain, wondering which gully had seen the military exploits of my admired Jeanne Merkus. They do not publicly declare the relationship of man to God, like a Christian tower or spire. These are among the most pleasing architectural gestures ever made by urbanity. We saw the town suddenly in a parting between showers, handsome and couchant, and, like all Turkish towns, green with trees and refined by the minarets of many mosques. We found ourselves slipping down the side of a broad and fertile valley that lay voluptuously under the guard of a closed circle of mountains, the plump grey-green body of a substantial river, running its whole length, marked by poplars and birches. Trebinje is the nearest town to the Dalmatian coast that exhibits what life was like for the Slavs who were conquered by the Turks. ![]()
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