Rouen (France) -- Description and travel; Rouen (France) -- History
[Footnote 56: As a matter of recorded fact no sentence was then
pronounced on her save by the impatient soldiers. The Bailli of Rouen,
Messire Raoul le Bouteiller, only said the words I have given above,
as his lieutenant swore in the second Proces, and this is why the
sentence is not recorded in the minutes of the Baillage.]
Her ashes were cast into the Seine. They were scarcely cold before the
rumour of her saintliness, and the miracles of her passing spread
through Rouen and through France. Soon afterwards Pierre Cauchon,
Bishop of Beauvais, died of apoplexy. Nicole Midi was struck with
leprosy within a few days of her death. Loyseleur died suddenly at
Bale. The corpse of d'Estivet was found in a gutter outside the gates
of Rouen.
Not a single attempt was made to rescue her in Rouen at the last, not
a solitary effort had been made before to save her by the French.
Judged by the Church, and appealing for fair hearing, Jeanne was not
supported in her trial by a single French ecclesiastic. Not a single
reference to her death occurs on subsequent occasions, when the Court
of France had official opportunity to make it. An age still so
strongly imbued with the principles of feudalism could not believe in
that intense patriotism and worship of nationality which was as
foreign to their instincts as was the doctrine of liberty of
conscience. This peasant-girl personified them both. "Il y a es livres
de nostre Seigneur plus que es vostres," she had said in her first
questioning at Chinon; and laymen and ecclesiastics alike were unable
to reconcile her with any scheme of philosophy they knew. In English
writings there is no contemporary mention of her except a line in
William of Worcester. Caxton's English Chronicles only give the lie
that Shakespeare has preserved against her tainted purity. Thomas
Fuller classed her with the Witch of Endor. It was not for twenty-four
years that the very town which saw her martyrdom was moved to declare
judicially her innocence. In the "Proces de Rehabilitation," begun on
the first of June 1456, everyone who had known her came forward--too
late--to testify to her innocence. On the seventh of July, in the
presence of her brother and her mother's representative in the great
hall of the palace of the Archbishop of Rouen, it was ordered that her
memory should be publicly reinstated both in the Cemetery of St. Ouen
and in the Vieux Marche.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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