The official documents drawn up during the condemnation-trial contain quite a different account.  “On the 28th of May,” it is there said, “eight of the judges who had taken part in the sentence [their names are given in the document, t. i. p. 454] betook themselves to Joan’s prison, and seeing her clad in man’s dress, ’which she had but just given up according to our order that she should resume woman’s clothes, we asked her when and for what cause she had resumed this dress, and who had prevailed on her to do so.  Joan answered that it was of her own will, without any constraint from any one, and because she preferred that dress to woman’s clothes.  To our question as to why she had made this change, she answered, that, being surrounded by men, man’s dress was more suitable for her than woman’s.  She also said that she had resumed it because there had been made to her, but not kept, a promise that she should go to mass, receive the body of Christ, and be set free from her fetters.  She added that if this promise were kept, she would be good, and would do what was the will of the Church.  As we had heard some persons say that she persisted in her errors as to the pretended revelations which she had but lately renounced, we asked whether she had since Thursday last heard the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret; and she answered, Yes.  To our question as to what the saints had said she answered, that God had testified to her by their voices great pity for the great treason she had committed in abjuring for the sake of saving her life, and that by so doing she had damned herself.  She said that all she had thus done last Thursday in abjuring her visions and revelations she had done through fear of the stake, and that all her abjuration was contrary to the truth.  She added that she did not herself comprehend what was contained in the form of abjuration she had been made to sign, and that she would rather do penance once for all by dying to maintain the truth than remain any longer a prisoner, being all the while a traitress to it.”

We will not stop to examine whether these two accounts, though very different, are not fundamentally reconcilable, and whether Joan resumed man’s dress of her own desire or was constrained to do so by the soldiers on guard over her, and perhaps to escape from their insults.  The important points in the incident are the burst of remorse which Joan felt for her weakness and her striking retractation of the abjuration which had been wrung from her.  So soon as the news was noised abroad, her enemies cried, “She has relapsed!” This was exactly what they had hoped for when, on learning that she had been sentenced only to perpetual imprisonment, they had said, “Never you mind; we will have her up again.” “Farewell, farewell, my lord,” said the Bishop of Beauvais to the Earl of Warwick, whom he met shortly after Joan’s retractation; and in his words there was plainly an expression of satisfaction, and not a mere phrase of politeness.  On the 29th of May the tribunal met again.  Forty judges took part in the deliberation; Joan was unanimously declared a case of relapse, was found guilty, and cited to appear next day, the 30th, on the Vieux-Marche to hear sentence pronounced, and then undergo the punishment of the stake.