The trial lasted from the 21st of February to the 30th of May, 1431.  The court held forty sittings, mostly in the chapel of the castle, some in Joan’s very prison.  On her arrival there, she had been put in an iron cage; afterwards she was kept no longer in the cage, but in a dark room in a tower of the castle, wearing irons upon her feet, fastened by a chain to a large piece of wood, and guarded night and day by four or five “soldiers of low grade.”  She complained of being thus chained; but the bishop told her that her former attempts at escape demanded this precaution.  “It is true,” said Joan, as truthful as heroic, “I did wish and I still wish to escape from prison, as is the right of every prisoner.”  At her examination, the bishop required her to take an oath to tell the truth about everything as to which she should be questioned.”  “I know not what you mean to question me about; perchance you may ask me things I would not tell you; touching my revelations, for instance, you might ask me to tell something I have sworn not to tell; thus I should be perjured, which you ought not to desire.”  The bishop insisted upon an oath absolute and with-out condition.  “You are too hard on me,” said Joan; I do not like to take an oath to tell the truth save as to matters which concern the faith.”  The bishop called upon her to swear on pain of being held guilty of the things imputed to her.

[Illustration:  Joan examined in Prison——­128]

“Go on to something else,” said she.  And this was the answer she made to all questions which seemed to her to be a violation of her right to be silent.  Wearied and hurt at these imperious demands, she one day said, “I come on God’s business, and I have nought to do here; send me back to God, from whom I come.”  “Are you sure you are in God’s grace?” asked the bishop.  “If I be not,” answered Joan, “please God to bring me to it; and if I be, please God to keep me in it!” The bishop himself remained dumbfounded.

There is no object in following through all its sittings and all its twistings this odious and shameful trial, in which the judges’ prejudiced servility and scientific subtlety were employed for three months to wear out the courage or overreach the understanding of a young girl of nineteen, who refused at one time to lie, and at another to enter into discussion with them, and made no defence beyond holding her tongue or appealing to God who had spoken to her and dictated to her that which she had done.  In order to force her from her silence or bring her to submit to the Church instead of appealing from it to God, it was proposed to employ the last means of all, torture.  On the 9th of May the bishop had Joan brought into the great tower of Rouen Castle; the instruments of torture were displayed before her eyes; and the executioners were ready to fulfil their office, “for to bring her back,” said the bishop, “into the ways of truth, in order to insure the salvation of