The first time that the gonfalon of St. Denis was carried against Frenchmen was in 1413, two years before the defeat at Agincourt, in the black days of the Hundred Years' War, days as fatal to the builders' art as to the civic life of France. What those dire times were that rent France to shreds, and how _la fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille_ came to the rescue, have been sung by a poet whose high destiny it was to fall in recent battle. Charles Péguy, in his poem, linked the momentous epochs of the capital: St. Denis, who brought the Light; Ste. Geneviève, the sentinel patroness of Paris, who guarded it, and Jeanne d'Arc, who lifted up the torch from the mire--the torch which the fallen heroes of the World War have passed on refulgent.
In the V century it was at Geneviève's instigation that a basilica was raised to honor St. Denis. In the XV century Jeanne d'Arc paid tribute to the first martyr of Paris. Her troops lodged in the town of St. Denis, then moved in closer to Paris, and in a shrine dedicated to St. Denis, in the village of La Chapelle, Jeanne heard Mass, the morning that she led the assault on the walls of Paris, September 8, 1429. When wounded she was carried back to La Chapelle (to-day a dense industrial faubourg of the city), and on St. Denis' altar she offered tribute. During her trial at Rouen they asked her what arms she had offered to St. Denis.[37]
"A complete knight's outfit in white, with a sword that I had won before Paris," was Jeanne's reply. "And why did you make that offering?" asked the judge, bent on twisting her every act to sorcery. Jeanne answered hardily: "For devotion, and because it is the custom for all men-of-arms when they are merely wounded thus to give thanks. Having been wounded before Paris, I offered my arms to St. Denis because his is the cry of France."
But let Charles Péguy speak, he who fell between Belgium and Paris in August, 1914:[38]
Comme Dieu ne fait rien que par miséricordes, Il fallut qu'elle [Ste. Geneviève] vît le royaume en lambeaux, Et sa filleule ville embrasée aux flambeaux, Et ravagée aux mains des plus sinistres hordes;
Et les coeurs dévorés des plus basses discordes, Et les morts poursuivis jusque dans les tombeaux, Et cent mille innocents exposés aux corbeaux, Et les pendus tiront la langue au bout des cordes;