It was from here that she went in chains in February, 1431, for six public examinations by the sixty or more doctors and lawyers. These open meetings proved too damaging to her judges. She was too truthful, too unafraid, too confident in God and her Voices. The subtlety of some of her answers confused and shamed the most relentless of her examiners. They had that overpowering quality which the direct unadulterated truth gives. What chance in the long run has a university dialectician before the truth? [Illustration: THE LAST COMMUNION OF JOAN OF ARC From the painting by Michel] They took her to closed chambers, and hardly did better. They went to her when she was ill and likely to die. But they could not touch this clean white thing. It slipped through their fingers like a ray of light. And on what unimportant matters they badgered her! Her dress, for one. The trial seems at points to have been hung on the crime of her wearing man's apparel. "Dress is but a little thing, less than nothing," she told them. [Illustration: THE JOAN OF ARC PRISON TOWER AT ROUEN] They threatened her finally with torture if she did not reply to questions she said her Voices had forbidden her to answer. In the very torture chamber with the horrid irons before her eyes she cried, "Verily, if you were to tear my limbs asunder and drive my soul out of my body, naught else would I tell you, and if I did say anything unto you, I would always maintain afterward that you dragged it from me by force." [Illustration: THE BURNING OF JOAN OF ARC AT ROUEN From the fresco in the Panthéon, Paris, by J. E. Lenepveu] For months this unbelievable torment went on, until finally, lost in the maze they had prepared for her, worn by confinement and incessant mental and physical strain, she broke under the threat of burning,--a child's horror of a fate she had persuaded herself God would not permit. Her Voices had deceived her. She signed the deed of abjuration they had prepared for her: only to find it did not mean what she thought. Back in her prison, her courage and her confidence reasserted themselves and she recanted, "All that I said I uttered through fear of fire, and I recanted nothing that was not contrary to the truth. I had liefer do my penance once and for all, to wit by dying, than endure further anguish in prison. Whatsoever abjuration I have been forced to make, I never did anything against God and religion. I did not understand what was in the deed of abjuration, wherefore I did not mean to abjure anything unless it were Our Lord's will."