A few steps behind them, and sustained by two penitents whose grey robes, covering them from head to foot, are pierced with two holes at the elevation of their eyes, Joan advances slowly. Her weakness is extreme, and although her eyes are wide open she does not seem to be wholly awake; she still seems under the effect of the soporific and tonic of the night before. She seems to look without seeing, and to hear with indifference the hisses of the mob that, incited by the example of the English soldiers, makes hostile demonstrations against the victim. On Joan's head is a high mitre of black pasteboard which bears in large letters the following words: "Heretic," "Idolater," "Apostate." A long robe of coarse black wool envelops her from the neck down to her bare feet. She halts for a moment before the scaffold, while the Cardinal, the Bishop and other prelates take their seats upon it. At a signal from one of the registrars, the two penitents, holding Joan under the arms, help her to ascend the stairs of the scaffold. The sky is this day of an admirable clearness; the sun shines brilliantly; the pleasant warmth of its rays penetrates and gradually warms Joan Darc, who still shivers from the dampness of the subterraneous dungeon in which she has so long lain buried night and day. She inhales the bracing and pure air with delight, and in full draughts. The atmosphere of her cell was so heavy, so fetid! She seems to revive; her chilled and clogged blood courses anew with the delight of life; she experiences an indescribable sense of happiness at the contemplation of that azure sky bathed in light, and at the sight of the green grass of the cemetery, studded here and there with spring flowers. At a little distance stands a clump of trees, near the abbey. The birds chirp in their foliage, the insects hum--everything seems to sing and express delight on that sweet May morning. The sight of nature that Joan has so long been deprived of--she who was from early infancy accustomed to live on the meadows and in the woods--transports her into a sort of ecstasy. She forgets her sufferings, her martyrdom, her sentence and even the abjuration that she is about to pronounce. If her thoughts at all fall upon these topics, the only effect is the pleasurable reminder that she is soon to be free. Oh, free! to be free! To see her village again! the oak forest, the Fountain of the Fairies, the smiling and shady banks of the Meuse! To see again her family, her friends, and, renouncing the bitter illusions of glory, escaping the royal ingratitude, the hypocrisy, the hatred and the envy of men, quietly spend her days in Domremy at her rustic labors as in the happy days of yore! And that, all that at the price of a few words pronounced before her butcher-judges, those monsters of iniquity! Oh, at this moment of physical exaltation Joan would sign her abjuration with her own blood. Her heart-beats, pulsating with hope, smother within her the