The sentence of the court was then amended; instead of being burned she was to be held in prison on bread and water and to wear woman’s clothes. She herself thought that she was to be put into an ecclesiastical prison and be kept in the charge of women, but there is nothing to be found of this in the official report of the first trial. As she had been wearing men’s clothes by direct command of God her sin in recanting began to loom enormous before her during the night; she had forsaken her God even as Peter had forsaken Jesus Christ in the hour of his need, and hell-fire would be her portion--a fire ten thousand times worse than anything that the executioner could devise for her. She got up in the morning and threw aside the pretty dress which the Duchess of Bedford had procured for her--all women loved Jeanne d’Arc--and put on her war-worn suit of male clothing. The English soldiers who guarded her immediately spread abroad the bruit that Jeanne had relapsed, and she was brought to trial for this contumacious offence against the Holy Church. The second trial was short and to the point; she tried to show that her jailers had not kept faith with her, but her pleadings were brushed aside, and finally she gave the _responsio mortifera_--the fatal answer--which legalized the long attempts to murder her. Thus spoke she: “God hath sent me word by St. Catherine and St. Margaret of the great pity it is, this treason to which I have consented to abjure and save my life! I have damned myself to save my life! Before last Thursday my Voices did indeed tell me what I should do and what I did then on that day. When I was on the scaffold on Thursday my Voices said to me: ‘Answer him boldly, this preacher!’ And in truth he is a false preacher; he reproached me with many things I never did. If I said that God had not sent me I should damn myself, for it is true that God has sent me; my Voices have said to me since Thursday: ‘Thou hast done great evil in declaring that what thou hast done was wrong.’ All I said and revoked I said for fear of the fire.” To me this is the most poignant thing in the whole trial, which I have read with a frightful interest many times. It seems to bring home the pathos of the poor struggling child, and her blind faith in things which could not help her in her hour of sore distress.