Still imagining myself in Rouen, in the year fourteen hundred thirty-one, I said to myself, "I must arise early in the morning and go to the old market place to catch a glimpse of the wonderful woman when she leaves the tower for the stake." As the picture of what I would see on the following day arose before my closed eyes, I trembled. "I will not let them burn her," I cried passionately. But, alas, what could one man do against king, pope, and the mob! And I tossed in my bed like one in a cage who is conscious of his helplessness against iron bars. Suddenly, a thought struck me, as the lightning strikes a tree. "This is fourteen hundred thirty-one," I repeated to myself. "I must get up at once and repair to the palace of the Bishop of Beauvais, the priest who holds in the hollow of his hand the fate of the bravest maid in history. If I could only have a half hour with him," I said, "to pour into his ears my protest, my pleadings, my scorn, my prayers; or, if I could tell him of the time when Joan will have a shrine in a Catholic Church!--he might relent and hearken unto reason?" With these thoughts in my mind I jumped out of my bed, I lit the candle, I put on my clothes. Then, in haste, I walked out into the night, seeking my way in the streets of the strange city now deserted. By the help of the moon and the stars of that night in May, _fourteen hundred thirty-one_, I traced my way to the imposing Cathedral of St. Ouen, standing like a towering shadow in the cold light of the night, and close to which lived the Bishop of Beauvais. I knocked upon the Bishop's door. "Open, open," I cried, as in the dead of night I kept pounding upon the door. "I wish to come in," I cried. "I wish to save the Church from an indelible stain, I wish to protect the honor of humanity." "Open, open," I cried, again and again, and in the stillness of the night the noise of my blows reached far and wide. Louder and louder still I cried to the Bishop to open the door. "I wish to rescue France and England from committing an act of infamy; I wish to save history from an unspeakable shame. Let me in, Bishop! I come to protect you against the execration of posterity, against eternal damnation! Open, open the door!" I shouted. I kept pounding upon the door, long and loud, on the eve of that foul day in fourteen hundred thirty-one. I grew impatient with waiting for the door to open, and my voice, which a moment before swept up and down the whole gamut of hope and despair--pleading, shouting, sobbing--now became faint and feeble.