being an accomplice in the crime, making himself the leader in the persecution against the helpless girl, he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of a catspaw.  Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence, and all its hellishness of attack.  Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God’s lightning, and true as that lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!  Is it not scandalous, is it not humiliating to civilization, that, even at this day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself; seducing him, by fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own head; using the terrors of their power for extorting confessions from the frailty of hope; nay, (which is worse,) using the blandishments of condescension and snaky kindness for thawing into compliances of gratitude those whom they had failed to freeze into terror?  Wicked judges!  Barbarian jurisprudence! that, sitting in your own conceit on the summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn the first principles of criminal justice; sit ye humbly and with docility at the feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust, “Would you examine me as a witness against myself?” was the question by which many times she defied their arts.  Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her.  General questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical divinity; two-edged questions which not one of themselves could have answered without, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous expression of self-esteem.  Next came a wretched Dominican that pressed her with an objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one of its miracles with unsoundness.  The monk had the excuse of never having read the Bible.  M. Michelet has no such excuse; and it makes one blush for him, as a philosopher, to find him describing such an argument as “weighty,” whereas it is but a varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics.  Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid.  Another thought to entrap her by asking what language the angelic visitors of her solitude had talked:  as though heavenly counsels could want polyglott interpreters for every word, or that God needed language at all in whispering thoughts to a human heart.  Then came a worse devil, who asked her whether the archangel Michael had appeared naked.  Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that it might be