THE INQUISITOR--"Once more and for the last time, and be careful: if you persist in your damnable error our holy mother the Church will be forced, despite her infinite mercy, to deliver you over to the secular arm, and it will then be all over with your body and soul." JOAN DARC--"It would then be all over with your own souls--with the souls of yourselves who will have condemned me unjustly. Reflect upon that." BISHOP CAUCHON--"Joan, I must charitably declare to you that if you stubbornly persist in your ways, there are torturers near who will put you to the rack.(He points to the door, Joan shivers.) There are torturers near--they are waiting--they will put you to cruel torments, for the sole purpose of drawing less damnable answers from you." JOAN DARC (yields at first to the terror of the thought of being tortured; the momentary weakness is, however, speedily overcome; she draws superhuman strength from the conviction of her innocence; sits up; casts a withering look upon the prelates and cries in an accent of indomitable resolution) --"Have my limbs torn one from the other! Have my soul leap out of my body! You shall be no further! And if the pain of the torture should draw from my distracted body aught that is contrary to what I have so far said, I take God for my witness, it will be pain alone that will have made me speak contrary to the truth!"[114] BISHOP CAUCHON--"Joan, your transport singularly aggravates your position." JOAN DARC--"Listen, Oh, ye priests of Christ; listen, Oh, ye seigneurs of the Church; you are bent upon my death. If in order to make me die, if in order to execute me my clothes are to be taken off, I ask of you but a woman's shirt to march in to the pyre." BISHOP CAUCHON (affecting astonishment)--"You pretend that you wear a man's shirt and clothes by the command of God; why should you want a woman's shirt to go to death in? This is a singular inconsistency." JOAN DARC--"Because it is longer." The infamous ecclesiastics are determined to inflict upon the wretched young woman of hardly nineteen years all the tortures, from the rack to the pyre. A tremor, nevertheless, runs through them at the sublime modesty of the virgin, who requests of her butchers as a supreme act of mercy that she be allowed a woman's shirt to go to death in because such a shirt was longer, because it could better conceal her figure from the public gaze. Bishop Cauchon alone remains unaffected. BISHOP CAUCHON (harshly addressing his accomplices)--"My very dear brothers, we shall assemble in a room of the tower in order to deliberate upon the torture that should be inflicted upon Joan." The Bishop and his fellows depart from the cell, followed by the registrars. CHAPTER V. THE SENTENCE.