It is easy for us to seek to fasten the blame of all upon the English, who in the end accomplished the hideous task; but at least the English were the foes against whom she had fought, and they had the right to hold her as an adversary whose death was necessary for their success; and had the English had their way she would have met her end quickly, and without all that long-drawn-out agony and mockery of a trial, every step and process of which was an outrage upon the laws of God and of man.  No, it was Frenchmen who doomed her to this—­Frenchmen and priests.  The University of Paris, the officers of the Inquisition, the Bishops of the realm.  These it was who formed that hideous Court, whose judgments have now been set aside with contumely and loathing.  These it was who after endless formalities, against which even some of themselves were forced in honour to protest, played so base and infamous a part—­culminating in that so-called “Abjuration,” as false as those who plotted for it—­capped by their own infamous trick to render even that “Abjuration” null and void, that she might be given up into the hands of those who were thirsting for her life!

Oh, how can I write of it?  How can I think of it?  There be times yet when Bertrand, and Guy de Laval, and I, talking together of those days, feel our hearts swell, and the blood course wildly in our veins, and truly I do marvel sometimes how it was that we and others were held back from committing some desperate crime to revenge those horrid deeds, wrought by men who in blasphemous mockery called themselves the servants and consecrated priests of God.

But hold!  I must not let my pen run away too fast with me!  I am leaping to the end, before the end has come.  But, as I say, I have no heart to write of all those weary months of wearing inactivity, wherein the spirit of the Maid chafed like that of a caged eagle, whilst the counsellors of the King—­her bitter foes—­had his ear, and held him back from following the course which her spirit and her knowledge alike advocated.

And yet we made none so bad a start.

“We must march upon Paris next,” spoke the Maid at the first Council of War held in Rheims after the coronation of the King; and La Hire and the soldiers applauded the bold resolve, whilst La Tremouille and other timid and treacherous spirits sought ever to hold him back.

I often thought of the words spoken by the Maid to those friends of hers from Domremy, when she bid them farewell on the evening of which I have just written.

“Are you not afraid, Jeanne,” they asked, “of going into battle, of living so strange a life, of being the companion of the great men of the earth?”

And she, looking at them with those big grave eyes of hers, had made answer thus: 

“I fear nothing but treachery.”

I wondered when she spoke what treachery she was to meet with; but soon it became all too apparent.  The King’s ministers were treacherously negotiating with false Burgundy, some say with the Regent Bedford himself.  They cared not to save France.  They cared only to keep out of harm’s way—­to avoid all peril and danger, and to thwart the Maid, whose patriotism and lofty courage was such a foil to their pusillanimity and cowardice.