her influence, and that they were glad to see her a prisoner, is as certain as anything can be.  On announcing her capture to the inhabitants of Rheims, the arch-bishop said, “She would not listen to counsel, and did everything according to her pleasure.”  But there is a long distance between such expressions and a premeditated plot to deliver to the enemy the young heroine who had just raised the siege of Orleans and brought the king to be crowned at Rheims.  History must not, without proof, impute crimes so odious and so shameful to even the most depraved of men.

However that may be, Joan remained for six months the prisoner of John of Luxembourg, who, to make his possession of her secure, sent her, under good escort, successively to his two castles of Beaulieu and Beaurevoir, one in the Vermandois and the other in the Cambresis.  Twice, in July and in October, 1430, Joan attempted, unsuccessfully, to escape.  The second time she carried despair and hardihood so far as to throw herself down from the platform of her prison.  She was picked up cruelly bruised, but without any fracture or wound of importance.  Her fame, her youth, her virtue, her courage, made her, even in her prison and in the very family of her custodian, two warm and powerful friends.  John of Luxembourg had with him his wife, Joan of Bethune, and his aunt, Joan of Luxembourg, godmother of Charles VII.  They both of them took a tender interest in the prisoner; and they often went to see her, and left nothing undone to mitigate the annoyances of a prison.  One thing only shocked them about her—­her man’s clothes.  “They offered her,” as Joan herself said, when questioned upon this subject at a later period during her trial, “a woman’s dress, or stuff to make it to her liking, and requested her to wear it; but she answered that she had not leave from our Lord, and that it was not yet time for it.”  John of Luxembourg’s aunt was full of years and reverenced as a saint.  Hearing that the English were tempting her nephew by the offer of a sum of money to give up his prisoner to them, she conjured him in her will, dated September 10, 1430, not to sully by such an act the honor of his name.  But Count John was neither rich nor scrupulous; and pretexts were not wanting to aid his cupidity and his weakness.  Joan had been taken at Compiegne on the 23d of May, in the evening; and the news arrived in Paris on the 25th of May, in the morning.  On the morrow, the 26th, the registrar of the University, in the name and under the seal of the inquisition of France, wrote a citation to the Duke of Burgundy “to the end that the Maid should be delivered up to appear before the said inquisitor, and to respond to the good counsel, favor, and aid of the good doctors and masters of the University of Paris.”  Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, had been the prime mover in this step.  Some weeks later, on the 14th of July, seeing that no reply arrived from the Duke of Burgundy, he caused a renewal