Although willing to endure for the sake of her beloved country all the cruelty her enemies could inflict upon her, Joan was most anxious to return in order to continue her mission.  While in the castle of Beaulieu she made a desperate attempt to escape.  She managed to squeeze herself between two beams of wood placed across an opening in her prison, and was on the point of leaving her dungeon tower when one of the jailers caught sight of her, and she was retaken.  Probably in consequence of this attempt, Joan of Arc, after an imprisonment of four months at Beaulieu, was transferred thence by Ligny to his castle of Beaurevoir, near the town of Cambrai, a place far removed from the neighbourhood of the war, and consequently more secure than Beaulieu.  At Beaurevoir lived the wife and the aunt of Ligny; they showed some attention and compassion to the prisoner.  They offered her some of their dresses, and tried to persuade her to quit her male attire.  Joan, however, refused:  she gave as her reason for not complying with their request that the time had not yet arrived for her to cease wearing the clothes she had worn during the time of her mission.  That she had good reason not to don woman’s attire even when at Beaurevoir, and keep to her male attire as a protection, is probable, as she was not safe from wanton insult at the hands of the rough soldiery placed about her person.  This clinging to her male dress, we shall see, under similar circumstances at Rouen, was the principal indictment made against her by her executioners.

At Beaurevoir Joan of Arc was placed in a chamber at the top of a high tower, whence Ligny thought that no attempt at escape would be made, but Joan of Arc tried once again to recover her liberty.  In the course of her trial she told her judges how her voices counselled her not again to make this venture, and of her perplexity whether she should obey them, or, at the risk of her life, escape from the clutches of the English, for at this time she knew that she had been sold to her bitterest foes.

What appears to have determined her decision was hearing that Compiegne was in imminent peril of falling into the hands of the English, and that the inhabitants would be massacred.  In her desperation, feeling, like young Arthur, that

    ’The wall is high; and yet will I leap down:—­
    Good ground, be pitiful, and hurt me not!... 
    As good to die, and go, as die, and stay’

she knotted some thongs together and let herself out of a window; but the thongs broke, and she fell from a great height—­the tower is supposed to have been no less than sixty feet high.  She was found unconscious at its foot, and for several days she was not expected to recover from the injuries she had received.  But she was doomed for a far more terrible death.

For several days Joan of Arc took no nourishment.  Gradually she revived, and she told her jailers that her beloved Saint Catherine had visited and comforted her; and she also told them that she knew Compiegne would not be taken, and would be free from its enemies before the Feast of Saint Martin.