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.