act of condemnation, concluding: "Therefore, we pronounce you to be a rotten limb, and as such to be lopped off from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power, _praying it at the same time to mitigate its sentence, and to spare you death_, and the mutilation of your members." The unblushing hypocrisy of this recommendation to mercy, with the pyre already reared in full sight of all, could only be surpassed by that of the diabolical fiction of ecclesiastical law as administered by the Inquisition; viz., that Holy Church executed no capital sentence, merely handed its victim over to the "secular arm." So now Jeanne, no longer under the merciful protection of the Church, was delivered over to the civil authorities and conducted to the top of the pyre. She asked for a cross; a tender-hearted Englishman handed her two sticks which he had hastily fashioned into a rude cross, and Jeanne kissed the simple emblem and put it in her bosom. But Isambart fetched a crucifix for her from the very altar of the neighboring church of Saint-Sauveur, and this she kissed passionately, desiring him to hold it aloft where she might see it to the last as the smoke and flame mounted. Isambart ascended the pile with her, and the executioner fastened her body to the post in the centre. With her eyes fixed upon the image of Him who died for the world, mayhap she did not note the lying placard above her head: "Heretic, relapser, apostate, idolater." In this hour of supreme trial no moment of fatal weakness came to deprive her of our absolute admiration. She spoke no word of deserved reproach against her rude executioners, against the soldiers who had hustled her across the market place, against the miserable Charles for whom she suffered all these tortures and who had abandoned her. "Whether I have done well, or whether I have done ill, my King is not to blame; it was not he who counselled me." Even the miserable Cauchon was greeted, as he hovered about the foot of the pile to catch her last words, with nothing more bitter than: "Bishop! Bishop! I die through you!... Had you confined me in the prisons of the Church, this would not have happened."