"If we shall say:From heaven,he will say,Why then believed ye him not?but if we shall say of men we fear the people."And she was only a peasant girl and the event of which they spoke had been before her little time.
Asked,if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to kill Monseigneur de Bourgogne,she answered that IT WAS A GREATMISFORTUNE FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE:but that however it might be among themselves,God had sent her to the succour of the King.
One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual changes of the subject:one of which called forth as follows her last deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
Asked,if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would answer as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done before our Holy Father the Pope,although at several points in the trial she would have had to refuse to answer,if she did not answer more plainly than before Monseigneur de Beauvais--she said that she had answered as much as she knew,and that if anything came to her memory that she had forgotten to say,she would say it willingly.
Asked,if it seemed to her that she would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope,the vicar of God,in all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience,she replied that she desired to be taken before him,and then she would answer all that she ought to answer.
Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second party among those examiners,one of which was covertly but earnestly attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope,which would have conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least,and gained time,probably deliverance for her,could Jeanne have been made to understand it.
This,however,was by no means the wish of Cauchon,whose spy and whisperer,L'Oyseleur,was working against it in the background.
Jeanne evidently failed to take up what they meant.She did not understand the distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant:that God alone was her judge,and that no tribunal could decide upon the questions which were between her Lord and herself,was too firmly fixed in her mind:and again and again the men whose desire was to make her adopt this expedient,were driven back into the ever repeated questions about St.Catherine and St.Margaret.
One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little interval that remained,in a series of useless questions about her standard.Was it true that this standard had been carried into the Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind?
"It had been through the labour and the pain,"she said,"there was good reason that it should have the honour."This last movement of a proud spirit,absolutely disinterested and without thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the word,gives a sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful wranglings in prison,in which,however,there is a softening of tone visible throughout,and evident effect of human nature bringing into immediate contact divers human creatures day after day.Jeanne is often at her best,and never so frequently as during these less formal sittings utters those flying words,simple and noble and of absolute truth to nature,which are noted everywhere,even in the most rambling records.
