Although Michelet and other French writers have naturally not allowed this ‘Millourt’ (which, by the way, is quite as correct a form of spelling that title as the better known ‘Milor’) to escape the branding he deserves for his attempted villainy, it is but fair to add that Isambard de la Pierre, as well as Manchon, qualify his conduct as that not of a would-be violator, but of a tempter—­a not inconsiderable difference in the scale of infamy.

To return to Cauchon and Joan of Arc.

‘But,’ said the Bishop, ’are you not aware you have now no right to wear such a dress?’

Joan answered that she had been misled into believing that if she wore the woman’s dress she would be allowed to hear Mass and to communicate, and to be, she added, ‘delivered from these chains.’

‘But,’ replied Cauchon, ’have you not abjured, and promised never to take to wearing this dress again?’

‘I would prefer to die,’ she answered, ’than to remain on a prisoner here.  But if I were allowed to go to the Mass, and these chains were taken off me, and if I was placed in some other prison where some woman could be near me, then I should do all that is required of me by the Church.’

In all Joan of Arc’s answers it should be noticed that she never, in spite of the terrible sufferings she endured, and the gross barbarities inflicted on her, in any single instance ever made any complaint of her treatment.  There is something superhuman in this utter absence of any shade of vindictiveness, when one thinks that, by a few words, she might have saved herself from much of what she had to suffer.  Never once did she blame even those who had deceived, insulted, and ill-treated her; her life was one beautiful example, full of divine charity and forgiveness.

Cauchon, to make doubly sure of completing his work, then asked Joan:  ’Have you, since last Thursday, heard the voices of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret?’

‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘And,’ continued the Bishop, ‘what did they say?’

’They told me of the great sorrow they felt for the great treason to which I have been led, by my abjuring and revoking my deeds in order to save my life, and that by so doing I have lost my soul.’

On the margin of the original document of the MSS. of this examination, written in the prison, the original of which is in the National Library in Paris, we find alongside of this answer of Joan of Arc’s the following words:  ‘Responsio mortifera.’  Indeed it was an answer of deadliest import; for Joan in asserting that her voices had again spoken to her, and in saying that she had committed a mortal sin by recanting her deeds, had thrown away the only plank of safety left her.

It seems to us evident, however, that Joan of Arc was now quite eager and willing to meet the worst that her enemies could inflict upon her:  death itself must now have seemed more tolerable than the daily death she was undergoing in her prison.