Jeanne, during her trial at Rouen, often referred to the answers she had given to her honest judges at Poitiers: "If you do not believe me, send to Poitiers, where I was questioned before.... It is written in the book at Poitiers." Cauchon might wear a miter, well she knew it was not the Church which persecuted her, though the English left no stone unturned to have it so appear. Jeanne in Poitiers lodged with Maître Jean Rabateau, advocate, and it was the duty of his good dame to spy on her night and day. Many years after she testified to Jeanne's habit of long prayer in the night-time. To test the maid's virtue the king's own mother-in-law visited her. That able Yolande of Aragon had brought up Charles VII. Her own son, the young knight René d'Anjou, was soon to fight under Jeanne, and Yolande, herself, convinced of the Maid's mission, helped with funds for the expedition to Orléans. They say that Jeanne made answer to the court ladies with such sweetness and grace that she drew tears from their eyes. The old hill city of Poitiers, so ecclesiastical, so full of national memories, has had the good sense to keep itself _très province_, and its street directory still makes a sort of calendar of saints. At Bourges, the mania to wipe out its past has reached such a pass that the rue St. Michel is now the rue Michel-Servet and the rue St. Fulgent the rue Fulton. Poitiers has no desire to blot out her high historic memories. CHAPTER VIII Gothic in the Midi The giant struggle we have witnessed is but the beginning of a long and complicated historical crisis in which men will have to make their choice between the unlimited augmentation of power (by force, riches, and success) and a forward-moving moral progress (by justice, charity, and loyalty). If we live always in exterior things, if we are always in movement, we become, little by little, incapable of recollection and fecund meditation. --GUGLIELMO FERRERO, 1917. It has been said that the Midi adhered long, if not always, to Romanesque architecture, even when employing the Gothic vault. Gothic art was not an indigenous development in the south, but was brought in the wake of political events, when central France and Languedoc became one with the royal domain. It proceeded, in part, from the architecture of southwest France, and in part from the classic Ile-de-France Picard region. The realization of the local type of Midi Gothic was Albi's fortress cathedral, which comprises a wide unaisled hall covered by twelve bays of diagonal vaults whose span is sixty feet--the width of Amiens' nave being merely forty-five feet. The buttress are disguised as walls between the side chapels, the windows are long, narrow lancets, there is no triforium, and the roof is flat. Ogival art such as this has retained all the grand simplicity of Romanesque.