When, on the 30th of May, in the morning, the Dominican brother Martin Ladvenu was charged to announce her sentence to Joan, she gave way at first to grief and terror.  “Alas!” she cried, “am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated that this my body, full pure and perfect and never defiled, must to-day be consumed and reduced to ashes!  Ah!  I would seven times rather be beheaded than burned!” The Bishop of Beauvais at this moment came up.  “Bishop,” said Joan, “you are the cause of my death; if you had put me in the prisons of the Church and in the hands of fit and proper ecclesiastical warders, this had never happened; I appeal from you to the presence of God.”  One of the doctors who had sat in judgment upon her, Peter Maurice, went to see her, and spoke to her with sympathy.  “Master Peter,” said she to him, “where shall I be to-night?” “Have you not good hope in God?” asked the doctor.  “O! yes,” she answered; “by the grace of God I shall be in paradise.”  Being left alone with the Dominican, Martin Ladvenu, she confessed and asked to communicate.  The monk applied to the Bishop of Beauvais to know what he was to do.  “Tell brother Martin,” was the answer, “to give her the eucharist and all she asks for.”  At nine o’clock, having resumed her woman’s dress, Joan was dragged from prison and driven to the Vieux-Marche.  From seven to eight hundred soldiers escorted the car and prohibited all approach to it on the part of the crowd, which encumbered the road and the vicinities; but a man forced a passage and flung himself towards Joan.  It was a canon of Rouen, Nicholas Loiseleur, whom the Bishop of Beauvais had placed near her, and who had abused the confidence she had shown him.  Beside himself with despair, he wished to ask pardon of her; but the English soldiers drove him back with violence and with the epithet of traitor, and but for the intervention of the Earl of Warwick his life would have been in danger.  Joan wept and prayed; and the crowd, afar off, wept and prayed with her.  On arriving at the place, she listened in silence to a sermon by one of the doctors of the court, who ended by saying, “Joan, go in peace; the Church can no longer defend thee; she gives thee over to the secular arm.”  The laic judges, Raoul Bouteillier, baillie of Rouen, and his lieutenant, Peter Daron, were alone qualified to pronounce sentence of death; but no time was given them.  The priest Massieu was still continuing his exhortations to Joan, but “How now! priest,” was the cry from amidst the soldiery, “are you going to make us dine here?” “Away with her!  Away with her!” said the baillie to the guards; and to the executioner, “Do thy duty.”  When she came to the stake, Joan knelt down completely absorbed in prayer.  She had begged Massieu to get her a cross; and an Englishman present made one out of a little stick, and handed it to the French heroine, who took it, kissed it, and laid it on her breast.  She begged brother Isambard de la Pierre