On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the
officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart
still high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had been
no doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with every
repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the last.
And the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very near to
her; no doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange information
about herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside of the Castle
of Rouen, rose half-comprehended from the echoing courtyard outside and
the babble of her guards within. She would hear even as she was conveyed
along the echoing stone passages something here and there of the popular
expectation:--a burning! the wonderful unheard of sight, which by hook
or by crook everyone must see; and no doubt among the English talk she
might now be able to make out something concerning this long business
which had retarded all warlike proceedings but which would soon be over
now, and the witch burnt. There must have been some, even among those
rude companions, who would be sorry, who would feel that she was no
witch, yet be helpless to do anything for her, any more than Massieu
could, or Frère Isambard: and if it was all for the sake of certain
words to be said, was the wench mad? would it not be better to say
anything, to give up anything rather than be burned at the stake?
Jeanne, notwithstanding the wonderful courage of her last speech,
must have returned to her cell with small illusion possible to her
intelligent spirit. The stake had indeed come very near, the flames
already dazzled her eyes, she must have felt her slender form shrink
together at the thought. All that long night, through the early daylight
of the May morning did she lie and ponder, as for far less reasons
so many of us have pondered as we lay wakeful through those morning
watches. God's promises are great, but where is the fulfilment? We ask
for bread and he gives us, if not a stone, yet something which we cannot
realise to be bread till after many days. Jeanne's voices had never
paused in their pledge to her of succour. "Speak boldly, God will help
you--fear nothing"; there would be aid for her before three months,
and great victory. They went on saying so, though the stake was already
being raised. What did they mean? what did they mean? Could she still
trust them? or was it possible----?
Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced
the fire. She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the
heartrending ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give
her that heroic command. Still and always, they said God will help
you, our Lord will stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean
deliverance, deliverance! What else could it mean? If she held her head
high as she returned to the horrible monotony of that prison so often
left with hope, so often re-entered in sadness, it must soon have
dropped upon her tired bosom. Slowly the clouds had settled round her.
Over and over again had she affirmed them to be true--these voices that
had guided her steps and led her to victory. And they had promised her
the aid of God if she went forward boldly, and spoke and did not fear.
But now every way of salvation was closing; all around her were fierce
soldiers thirsting for her blood, smooth priests who admonished her in
charity, threatening her with eternal fire for the soul, temporal fire
for the body. She felt that fire, already blowing towards her as if on
the breath of the evening wind, and her girlish flesh shrank. Was that
what the voices had called deliverance? was that the grand victory, the
aid of the Lord?
It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she
had reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in
bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison
became intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough
jests half through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the clang
of their arms when relieved. Early next morning a party of her usual
visitors came in upon her to give her fresh instruction and advice.
Something new was about to happen to-day. She was to be led forth, to
breathe the air of heaven, to confront the people, the raging sea of
men's faces, all the unknown world about her. The crowd had never been
unfriendly to Jeanne. It had closed about her, almost wherever she was
visible, with sweet applause and outcries of joy. Perhaps a little hope
stirred her heart in the thought of being surrounded once more by the
common folk, though probably it did not occur to her to think of these
Norman strangers as her own people. And a great day was before her, a
day in which something might still be done, in which deliverance might
yet come. L'Oyseleur, who was one of her visitors, adjured her now
to change her conduct, to accept whatever means of salvation might be
offered to her. There was no longer any mention of Pope or Council,
but only of the Church to which she ought to yield. How it was that he
preserved his influence over her, having been proved to be a member
of the tribunal that judged her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a
fellow-countryman, nor any of the things he had professed to be, no once
can tell us; but evidently he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to
have received him without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed
she seems to have been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who
professed to wish her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
It would require, however, no great persuasion on L'Oyseleur's part to
convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that
something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be
so determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but
delivered from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping of
the Church, there would be time to think of everything, even to make her
peace with her voices who would surely understand if, for the saving of
her life, and out of terror for the dreadful fire, she abandoned
them for a moment. She had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and they had
forgiven. One faltering word now, a mark of her hand upon a paper, and
she would be safe--even if still all they said was true; and if indeed
and in fact, after buoying her up from day to day, such a dreadful thing
might be as that they were not true----
The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment,
of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
Then there came into the prison a better man than L'Oyseleur, Jean
Beaupère, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of all
these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he came
in all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to warn
her. He came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor. "Jean
Beaupère entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by permission,
and advertised her that she would straightway be taken to the scaffold
to be addressed (_pour y être preschée_), and that if she was a good
Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and words under
the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and specially of the
ecclesiastical judges." "Accept the woman's dress and do all that you
are told," her other adviser had said. When the car that was to convey
her came to the prison doors, L'Oyseleur accompanied her, no doubt with
a show of supporting her to the end. What a change from the confined and
gloomy prison to the dazzling clearness of the May daylight, the air,
the murmuring streets, the throng that gazed and shouted and followed!
Life that had run so low in the prisoner's veins must have bounded up
within her in response to that sunshine and open sky, and movement and
sound of existence--summer weather too, and everything softened in the
medium of that soft breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She
had been three months in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along
the roughly paved streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange
object appeared to Jeanne's eyes in the midst of the market-place, a
lofty scaffold with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd,
the logs all arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four
horses, to bring hither the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready,
everything arranged--for whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that
she might see the preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the
great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?
In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different scene.
That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a great open
space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In this were
erected two platforms, one facing the other. On the first sat the court
of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester having a place by
the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president, with several other
bishops and dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on the other platform,
were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to which Jeanne was conducted
by Massieu, who never left her, and L'Oyseleur, who kept as near as he
could, the rest of the platform being immediately covered by lawyers,
doctors, all the camp followers, so to speak, of the black army, who
could find footing there. Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the
doublet and hose, with her short-clipped hair--no doubt looking like a
slim boy among all this dark crowd of men. The people swayed like a
sea all about and around--the throng which had gathered in her progress
through the streets pushing out the crowd already assembled with a
movement like the waves of the sea. Every step of the trial all
through had been attended by preaching, by discourses and reasoning and
admonishments, charitable and otherwise. Now she was to be "preached"
for the last time.
It was Doctor Guillaume Érard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher,
one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to hear. He
himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set
up there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of
his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more
than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential
of men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John's Gospel:
"A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine." The centre
circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of
English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the
witch should be condemned.
It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long
and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine periods
admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach
upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of
France, and the head of that House, "Charles who calls himself King."
"He has," cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of
Winchester upon him, "adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as
he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of
dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who are under his sway, and
the nobility. This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and to thee I say that thy
King is a schismatic and a heretic."
In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by that
clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the tumult of
battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used to abuse
in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this assault on her
King. And interruption to a sermon has always a dramatic and startling
effect, but when that voice arose now, when the startled speaker
stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is easy to imagine what
a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must have arisen in the midst
of the crowd. "By my faith, sire," cried Jeanne, "saving your respect,
I swear upon my life that my King is the most noble Christian of all
Christians, that he is not what you say."
The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally
the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of
animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart
overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts. "Here," said Èrard, "are my lords
the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to submit your
acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in these acts and
words there are many things which it seemed to the clergy were not good
either to say or to sustain."
To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), "I will
answer you." And as to her submission to the Church she said: "I have
told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said
may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God
first, I refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on
the part of God." She also said that no one was to blame for her acts
and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in
them, the blame was hers and no other's.
Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, "I
refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope."
It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy Father
was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in his
diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother the
Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and officers
of the Church had a right to determine in her case. And of this she was
admonished three times.
After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a
great part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she would
hold to all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in everything
their ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the above-named
and of the great multitude assembled she made her abjuration in the
manner that follows:
And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions
and revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not
sustain them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother
the Holy Church.
*****
In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made.
Manchon writes on his margin: _At the end of the sentence Jeanne,
fearing the fire, said she would obey the Church_. Even into the bare
legal document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding in
the silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation of
the previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering
submission, _timens igneum_--in fear of the fire.
The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those
eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Èrard, from his
pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that
she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called
upon Massieu to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own
deposition), "after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if
she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her to
refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not. Which
thing she did, saying to Èrard, 'I refer to the Church universal whether
I should abjure or not.' To which Èrard answered, 'You shall abjure at
once or you will be burnt.' Massieu gives further particulars in another
part of the Rehabilitation process. Èrard, he says, asked what he was
saying to the prisoner, and he answered that she would sign if the
schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that she could not write, and
then added that she wished it to be decided by the Church, and ought
not to sign unless that was done: and also required that she should be
placed in the custody of the Church, and freed from the hands of the
English. The same Èrard answered that there had been ample delay, and
that if she did not sign at once she should be burned, and forbade
Massieu to say any more."
Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from
the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to have
promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the Church.
"Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save yourself?" was
called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast, but her heart
failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering. Once she called out
over their heads, "All that I did was done for good, and it was well
to do it:"--her last cry. Then she would seem to have recovered in
some measure her composure. Probably her agitated brain was unable to
understand the formula of recantation which was read to her amid all
the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the
condition she had herself stated, that the paper should be submitted
to the Church, and that she should at once be transferred to an
ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made, namely, that it was a
very short document upon which she hastily in her despair made a cross,
and that it was a long one, consisting of several pages, which was shown
afterwards with _Jehanne_ scribbled underneath. "In fact," says Massieu,
"she abjured and made a cross with the pen which the witness handed to
her:" he, if any one must have known exactly what happened.
No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform.
But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing
round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals,
seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her
young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had gone on
reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences
all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve
her--which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread
and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English were
impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is
evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a
mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they
had desired at once to get her out of their way. But the idea of her
perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a
prisoner was more than they chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are
some things a churchman cannot do. When it was seen that Jeanne had
yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished
forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the
Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do? There was but
one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne's
natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to penitence was the only
practicable way.
Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was
that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on
the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs
of the crowd. The _cédule_ to which she put her sign "contained eight
lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and
full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration
published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; "for
the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite
different." This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged
version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined
to the necessary points and expressed in few words--was afterwards
published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions,
as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an
abjuration at all.
When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been
taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence
must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and
pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the
bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all
thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison,
with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by
solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all those
crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne
expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and
downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There seems even
to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials. Some of them
congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, "You
have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul." She herself,
excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go.
She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual
imprisonment with complete faith and content. It meant to her instant
relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her
impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church--_gens de' Église_--lead
me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English," she
cried with feverish anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons
and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her
thought. The men about her could not answer this appeal. Some of them
no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have
seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to
Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and
the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure. But perhaps
flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the
victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop
to ask where they were to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar
of Longueville. Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing,
perhaps in Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says
this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a
"fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "_this fellow was also one of them_."
Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon
turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence
she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her abjuration, which by
no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.
Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she
had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in
reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what
she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and
bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms--but for what? to escape
those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of Dionysius,
its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going back was beyond
words. We hear of no word that she said when she realised the hideous
fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter waters closed over her
head. Again the chains to be locked and double locked that bound her to
her dreadful bed, again the presence of those men who must have been
all the more odious to her from the momentary hope that she had got free
from them for ever.
The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard
upon her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor,
Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical
persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost
blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though
with a word of warning that should she change her mind and return to her
evil ways there would be no further place for repentance. As a return
for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he required her immediately
to put on the female dress which his attendants had brought. There is
something almost ludicrous, could we forget the tragedy to follow, in
the bundle of humble clothing brought by such exalted personages, with
the solemnity which became a thing upon which hung the issues of life or
death. Jeanne replied with the humility of a broken spirit. "I take them
willingly," she said, "and in everything I will obey the Church." Then
silence closed upon her, the horrible silence of the prison, full of
hidden listeners and of watching eyes.
Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It
was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain have
seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but Monseigneur de
Beauvais had to hold head against the great English authorities who were
out of all patience, fearing that the witch might still slip through
their fingers and by her spells and incantations make the heart of the
troops melt once more within them. If the mind of the Church had been as
charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if all the power of Rome could
have got the Maid now out of the English grip. They were exasperated,
and felt that they too, as well as the prisoner, had been played with.
But the Bishop had good hope in his mind, still to be able to content
his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it was true, but the more he inquired
into that act, the less secure he must have felt about it. And she might
relapse; and if she relapsed there would be no longer any place for
repentance. And it is evident that his confidence in the power of the
clothes was boundless. In any case a few days more would make all clear.
They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance,
well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One
account is given by Frère Isambard, whom she told in the presence of
several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a _Millourt
Anglois_, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again
the man's dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu
is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be released
from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards took away her
female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack containing the
other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding them that these were
forbidden to her; but got no answer except a brutal order to get up. It
is very probable that both stories are true. Frère Isambard found her
weeping and agitated, and nothing is more probable than this was the
occasion on which Warwick heard her cries, and interfered to save her.
Massieu's version, of which he is certain, was communicated to him a
day or two after when they happened to be alone together. It was on the
Thursday before Trinity Sunday that she put on the female dress, but it
would seem that rumours on the subject of a relapse had begun to spread
even before the Sunday on which that event happened: and Beaupère
and Midi were sent by the Bishop to investigate. But they were very
ill-received in the Castle, sworn at by the guards, and forced to go
back without seeing Jeanne, there being as yet, it appeared, nothing
to see. On the morning of the Monday, however, the rumours arose with
greater force; and no doubt secret messages must have informed the
Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself
accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight
of the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt
with much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle
was all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event
so trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the
visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed
once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four
days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her, and
humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an outcry of
astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes," she replied,
"she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no triumph in what she
said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of one who in the most
desperate strait has taken her resolution and must abide by it, whether
she likes it or not. She was asked why she had resumed that dress, and
who had made her do so. There was no question of anything else at first.
The tunic and _gippon_ were at once enough to decide her fate.
She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing
her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a
woman.
She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the dress
of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn or had
made any such oath.
She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more lawful
to wear a man's dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and also
that she had taken it back because the promise made to her had not been
kept, that she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour, and be
delivered from her irons.
She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to resume
it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in irons; but if
they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of her irons and put
her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she would be good, and
do whatever the Church pleased.
She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of her
voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them again.
To this she answered, recovering a little courage, "Yes."
She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God had
made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity there
was of the treason to which she had consented by making abjuration and
revocation in order to save her life: and that she had earned damnation
for herself to save her life. Also that before Thursday her voices had
told her that she should do what she did that day, that on the scaffold
they had told her to answer the preachers boldly, and that this preacher
whom she called a false preacher had accused her of many things she
never did. She also added that if she said God had not sent her she
would damn herself, for true it was that God had sent her. Also that her
voices had told her since, that she had done a great sin in confessing
that she had sinned; but that for fear of the fire she had said that
which she had said.
She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were
those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were
so; and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold
that she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St.
Margaret, she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she
never intended to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not
St. Catherine and St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of the
fire, and she had denied nothing but what was contrary to truth; and
she said that she would like better to make her penitence all at one
time--that is to say, in dying, than to endure a long penitence in
prison. Also that she had never done anything against God or the faith
whatever they might have made her say; and that for what was in the
schedule of the abjuration she did not know what it was. Also she said
that she never intended to revoke anything so long as it pleased our
Lord. At the end she said that if her judges would have her do so, she
might put on again her female dress; but for the rest she would do no
more.
"What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his
own mouth." Jeanne's protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and
defence, overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it
with questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed;
the end of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be
accomplished. No one could say she had not had full justice done her;
every formality had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried out.
Now there was but one thing before her, whose sad young voice with many
pauses thus sighed forth its last utterance; and for her judges, one
last spectacle to prepare, and the work to complete which it had taken
them three long months to do.