Beaupere evaded the question, and asked her if it were true that she
had received a letter from the Count of Armagnac asking her which of
the two Popes he was bound to obey.
A copy of this letter was produced, as well as the one sent by Joan of
Arc in reply.
When she sent her answer, the Maid said, she was about to mount her
horse, and had told him she would be able better to answer his
question when at rest in Paris or elsewhere. The copy of her letter
which was now read, Joan said, did not quite agree with that she had
sent to Armagnac.
'She had not,' Joan added, 'said in her letter that what she knew was
by the inspiration of Heaven.'
Again pressed as to which of the two Popes she believed the true one,
she said that the one then in Rome was to her that one.
Questioned regarding her letter to the English before Orleans, she
acknowledged the accurateness of the copy produced, with the exception
of a slight mistake. She retracted nothing regarding this letter, and
declared that the English would, ere seven years were passed from that
time, give a more striking proof of their loss of power in France than
that which they had shown before Orleans. This prediction was
literally carried out when, in 1436, Paris opened its gates to Charles
VII., the loss of the capital being shortly after followed by the loss
of all the other English conquests, with the exception of the town of
Calais--the gains of a century of war being snatched from them in a
score of years.
'They will meet,' said Joan of Arc, 'with greater reverses than have
yet befallen them.'
When she was asked what made her speak thus, she answered that these
things had been revealed to her. The examination again turned upon her
voices and apparitions.
'Do they always appear to you in the same dress? Always in the same
form, and richly crowned?'
Similar foolish questions were then put to her. Had the saints long
hair? She did not know. And what language did they converse in with
her?
'Their language,' she replied, 'is good and beautiful.'
'What sort of voices were theirs?'
'They speak to me in soft and beautiful French voices,' she said.
'Does not Saint Margaret speak in English?'
'How should she,' was the answer, 'when she is not on the side of the
English?'
'Do they wear ear-rings?'
This Joan could not say; but the idiotic question reminded the
prisoner that Cauchon had taken a ring from her. She had worn two--one
had been taken by the Burgundians when she was captured, the other by
the Bishop. The former had been given her by her parents, the latter
by one of her brothers. This ring she asked Cauchon to give the
Church.
'Had she not,' she was asked, 'made use of these rings to heal the
sick?'
She had never done so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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