"What with your attack on Paris on a holy day, your behavior in the
matter of the Bishop's hackney, your leap at Beaurevoir, and your
consent to the death of Franquet, do you really believe that you have
wrought no mortal sin?"
"I do not believe that I am in mortal sin; and if I have been it is for
God to know it, and for confession to God and the priest."[67]
She begged to be allowed to go to church. If she might hear mass she
would wear woman's dress, changing it on her return for the page's dress
which was her protection against insult. If she must die, she asked for
a woman's shift, and a cap to cover her head; she would rather die than
depart from the work for which her Lord had sent her.
"But I do not believe," she added, "that my Lord will let me be brought
so low that I shall lack help of God and miracle."
"If you dress as you do by God's command," they asked her, "why do you
ask for a shift in the hour of death?"
"It suffices me that it should be long!" said the girl.
All this was but the preliminary inquiry. Now followed a week of
respite, while the evidence was sifted and arranged, and articles of
indictment drawn up. On March 27th Joan was summoned to hear her formal
accusation, conveyed in seventy articles. The Court was asked to declare
her "a sorceress, a divineress, a false prophet, one who invoked evil
spirits, a witch, a heretic, an apostate, a seditious blasphemer,
rejoicing in blood, indecent," and I know not what else beside. These
seventy articles were presently condensed into twelve. On April 6th the
learned doctors were called to deliberate on these twelve, which
constituted the real accusation, by which the captive must live or die.
They met in the private chapel of the Archbishop, which is still
standing, in the courtyard hard by the cathedral. The articles were duly
accepted, and the Maid was summoned to hear the result. But she lay ill
in her prison, worn out with fasting and misery. Cauchon himself came to
visit her, professing himself full of tender solicitude for her soul and
body. He bade her note how kind they were to her. They desired only her
welfare; the Holy Church was ever ready to receive its erring children,
etc., etc. With her unfailing courtesy Joan thanked him. She thought
herself in danger of death; she begged for confession and the sacrament,
and burial in holy ground.
"If you desire the Holy Sacrament," said Cauchon, "you must submit to
Holy Church."
The girl turned her head wearily on her pallet. "I can say no more than
I have said!" was her only word.
But the Bishop pressed on relentless. The more she feared for her life,
he told her, the more she would resolve to amend it, and submit to those
above her. Then she said:
"If my body dies in prison I expect from you burial in holy ground; if
you do not give it, I await upon my Lord." And as they still tormented
her:
"Come what may, I will do or say no other thing. I have answered to
everything in my trial."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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