BISHOP CAUCHON--"I shall answer your question, and you will see that I was not to blame. The news of Joan's capture reached us on the morning of May 25. The very next day, the registrar of Paris, acting under my orders, addressed in the name and under the seal of the Inquisitor of France a summons to Monseigneur the Duke of Burgundy, who is the suzerain of John of Luxembourg, one of whose equerries was the captor of the Maid. The summons was to the effect that the said Joan be surrendered to the jurisdiction of the said Inquisitor, to the end that she may answer, in the words of the good formula 'to the good council, favor and aid of the good doctors and masters of the University of Paris.'" CANON LOYSELEUR--"But, monseigneur, four or five months passed before the summons of the Inquisitor received an answer. The preliminaries of the process might have been shortened, and the Maid delivered to the executioner before this." BISHOP CAUCHON--"Do you not know that the decisions of the University of Paris--an ecclesiastical body, that, however, has a hand in politics--have a powerful influence not only upon the majority of the higher clergy which upholds the English rule, but also upon the bishops who have remained faithful to the royalist party? Now, then, did not the latter, yielding to popular clamor, declare through the medium of the clerics gathered at Poitiers two years ago for the purpose of interrogating Joan, that 'she is neither a heretic nor a witch, and Charles VII may without endangering his salvation, avail himself of the aid that she brought him'? Very well, then. That opinion found partisans, even in the bosom of the University of Paris, which is an enlightened body and little inclined to believe in witches. The University was at first recalcitrant to my project of itself undertaking the process of heresy against Joan. It took me a long time, many negotiations and not a little money, to convince the objectors that from a political point of view it was of the highest importance to seem to believe in the witchery of Joan, and thus to deliver her to the flames, without which her influence would continue to assert itself, despite her captivity, and that such an influence, disastrous to the English, beneficent to the French, might, as it came very near doing, make Charles VII master of Paris. What would then happen? The University would be shorn of its power, its members would be proscribed and stripped of their privileges. In order to escape such a danger, it was imperative to break the instrument that threatened it, in other words, have Joan burned as a witch. (Laughing) It is a fact, we must always go back to the fagot. The pyre is our supreme argument." CANON LOYSELEUR--"And finally, monseigneur, did the University start the process?"