Poor Joan’s chief desire was that she might be set free from the hands of the English.  Be this as it may, there is no authority given for this idea of Loiseleur having probed her on this point; and Wallon, in his history of the Maid, makes no allusion to such an interview, and only states that John Beaupere went in the morning of the 24th to the prison, and he was soon followed there by Nicolas Loiseleur, who vehemently urged on Joan to comply with the demands which the judges had made.

Nothing had been neglected to give the greatest solemnity to the cruel farce which Cauchon had prepared to be now enacted—­a solemnity by which the Bishop hoped to degrade Joan of Arc in the eyes of the people.  It was that of obliging the prisoner to make a public apology and recantation of all her deeds—­a declaration in fact to be made by her in the eyes of the whole world that all she had undertaken and accomplished had been through and by the aid of evil spirits.

By this stroke the Bishop hoped to show to France that its heroine, instead of being a sainted and holy maid sent by God to deliver her country from the invader, was, by her own open and public confession, proved to be an emanation from Satan—­a being abhorrent in the eyes of God and man.  By this device, Cauchon hoped also to deal a blow to Charles, for when once it became known that his servant and saviour was a creature in league with the fiends, all the works done through her influence, and by her prowess, including his coronation, would also be proved to have been accomplished by the powers of darkness, and therefore deeds abhorrent to all good Catholics throughout his realm.

The place chosen for the stage on which Joan of Arc was to abjure before the eyes of Rouen—­and through Rouen the rest of France—­her deeds and her words, was the cemetery in front of that most beautiful of all Gothic fanes—­the Church of Saint Ouen.

Adjacent to its southern wall the exquisitely carved portal named the Marmousets, then as now rich in statuary of royal and imperial benefactors of the Church, looks down upon what is the entrance to a fair public garden.  In the fifteenth century this space was used as a place of burial.

Here, arranged with a view to dramatic effect, were placed two huge wooden scaffolds, or rather platforms, which faced one another.  Upon one of these sat the Bishop of Beauvais in state.  He had on his right hand the Prince Cardinal of Winchester, great-uncle of the child-king Henry VI., with other notabilities of the Church; the Bishops of Norwich, of Noyon, and of Therouenne; the Vice-Inquisitor, eight abbots, and a large number of friars and doctors, clerical and lay—­in fact all those who had attended the trials of the Maid of Orleans during the two preceding months.  Upon the opposite platform stood Joan of Arc, a crowd of lawyers and priests about her.  Here, too, stood Loiseleur close by the prisoner; he never ceased urging her to conform to the commands of the clergy about her.