Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The _procès_ was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman of coat armour--against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and Lemaître, the Deputy Inquisitor--with other persons chiefly concerned in the judgment. Some of these men were dead, some, wisely, not to be found. The result was such a mass of testimony as put every incident of the life of the Maid in the fullest light from her childhood to her death, and in consequence secured a triumphant and full acquittal of herself and her name from every reproach. This remarkable and indeed unique occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused any enthusiasm. Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the extraordinary calm of contemporary opinion which was still too near the catastrophe to see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of news which hindered the common knowledge of a trial--a thing too heavy to be blown upon the winds,--while it promulgated the legend, a thing so much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many ages, and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory, in the country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots and champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear than daily bread.