the costliness or suitable robes which caused the demur, asked them if they fancied God, who clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his servants.  The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tenderness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one laugh horribly.  Others succeeded by troops, who upbraided her with leaving her father; as if that greater Father, whom she believed herself to have been serving, did not retain the power of dispensing with his own rules, or had not said, that, for a less cause than martyrdom, man and woman should leave both father and mother.

On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long proceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that she had been poisoned.  It was not poison.  Nobody had any interest in hastening a death so certain.  M. Michelet, whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that one would gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the case most truly.  Joanna had a two-fold malady.  She was visited by a paroxysm of the complaint called home-sickness; the cruel nature of her imprisonment, and its length, could not but point her solitary thoughts, in darkness, and in chains, (for chained she was,) to Domremy.  And the season, which was the most heavenly period of the spring, added stings to this yearning.  That was one of her maladies—­nostalgia, as medicine calls it; the other was weariness and exhaustion from daily combats with malice.  She saw that everybody hated her, and thirsted for her blood; nay, many kind-hearted creatures that would have pitied her profoundly as regarded all political charges, had their natural feelings warped by the belief that she had dealings with fiendish powers.  She knew she was to die; that was not the misery; the misery was that this consummation could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, as if she were contending for some chance (where chance was none) of happiness, or were dreaming for a moment of escaping the inevitable.  Why, then, did she contend?  Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering her persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the superfluous contest?  It was because her quick and eager loyalty to truth would not suffer her to see it darkened by frauds, which she could expose, but others, even of candid listeners, perhaps, could not; it was through that imperishable grandeur of soul, which taught her to submit meekly and without a struggle to her punishment, but taught her not to submit—­no, not for a moment—­to calumny as to facts, or to misconstruction as to motives.  Besides, there were secretaries all around the court taking down her words.  That was meant for no good to her.  But the end does not always correspond to the meaning.  And Joanna might say to herself—­these words that will be used against me to-morrow and the next day, perhaps in some nobler generation may rise again for my justification.  Yes, Joanna, they are rising even now in Paris, and for more than justification.