It is very easy throughout all these questionings to see how eager
Cauchon and the other judges were to find some acknowledgment from the
lips of Joan of Arc, upon which they could found a charge of heresy
against her. Her visions were distorted by them into a proof of
infernal agency; even the harmless superstitions of her village home
did not escape being turned into idolatrous and infernal matters of
belief.
Had not her saints, questioned the Bishop, appeared to her beneath
the haunted oak of Domremy?--and what had they promised her besides
the re-establishment of Charles upon the throne?
'They promised,' she answered, 'to take me with them to Paradise,
which I had prayed them to do.'
'Nothing more?' queried Cauchon.
'If they made me another promise,' Joan replied, 'I am not at liberty
to say what that promise is till three months are past.'
'Did they say that you would be free in three months' time?'
That question remained unanswered, but before those three months had
passed, the heroine had been delivered by death from all earthly
sufferings.
She was again minutely questioned regarding the superstitions of her
country. Was there not growing there a certain fabulous plant, called
Mandragora? Joan of Arc knew nothing regarding such a plant--had never
seen it, and did not know the use of it. Again the apparitions were
brought forward.
'What was Saint Michel like? Was he clothed?'
'Do you think,' was the answer to this question, which could only have
occurred to a foul-minded priest, 'do you think that God cannot clothe
him?'
Other absurd questions followed--as to his hair; long or short? Had he
a pair of scales with him? As before, Joan of Arc answered these
futile, and sometimes indecent, questions with her wonderful patience.
At one moment she could not help exclaiming how supremely happy the
sight of her saints made her; it seemed as if a sudden vision of her
beloved saints had been vouchsafed her in the midst of that crowd of
persecuting priests.
She was again told to tell what the sign or secret was which she had
revealed to the King on first seeing him at Chinon; but about this she
was firm as adamant, and refused to give any information. To reveal
that sign or secret would, she felt, be not only a breach of
confidence and disloyalty between her and her King, but a crime to
divulge a sacred secret, which Charles kept sealed in his breast, and
which she was determined to utter to no one, and least of all to his
enemies.
'I have already said,' she told her judges, 'that you will have
nothing from me about that. Go and ask the King!'
Then followed questions as to the fashion of the crown that the King
had worn at Rheims: which brought the fifth day of the trial to a
close.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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