‘She had not,’ Joan added, ’said in her letter that what she knew was by the inspiration of Heaven.’

Again pressed as to which of the two Popes she believed the true one, she said that the one then in Rome was to her that one.

Questioned regarding her letter to the English before Orleans, she acknowledged the accurateness of the copy produced, with the exception of a slight mistake.  She retracted nothing regarding this letter, and declared that the English would, ere seven years were passed from that time, give a more striking proof of their loss of power in France than that which they had shown before Orleans.  This prediction was literally carried out when, in 1436, Paris opened its gates to Charles VII., the loss of the capital being shortly after followed by the loss of all the other English conquests, with the exception of the town of Calais—­the gains of a century of war being snatched from them in a score of years.

‘They will meet,’ said Joan of Arc, ’with greater reverses than have yet befallen them.’

When she was asked what made her speak thus, she answered that these things had been revealed to her.  The examination again turned upon her voices and apparitions.

’Do they always appear to you in the same dress?  Always in the same form, and richly crowned?’

Similar foolish questions were then put to her.  Had the saints long hair?  She did not know.  And what language did they converse in with her?

‘Their language,’ she replied, ‘is good and beautiful.’

‘What sort of voices were theirs?’

‘They speak to me in soft and beautiful French voices,’ she said.

‘Does not Saint Margaret speak in English?’

‘How should she,’ was the answer, ’when she is not on the side of the English?’

‘Do they wear ear-rings?’

This Joan could not say; but the idiotic question reminded the prisoner that Cauchon had taken a ring from her.  She had worn two—­one had been taken by the Burgundians when she was captured, the other by the Bishop.  The former had been given her by her parents, the latter by one of her brothers.  This ring she asked Cauchon to give the Church.

‘Had she not,’ she was asked, ’made use of these rings to heal the sick?’

She had never done so.

It is very easy throughout all these questionings to see how eager Cauchon and the other judges were to find some acknowledgment from the lips of Joan of Arc, upon which they could found a charge of heresy against her.  Her visions were distorted by them into a proof of infernal agency; even the harmless superstitions of her village home did not escape being turned into idolatrous and infernal matters of belief.

Had not her saints, questioned the Bishop, appeared to her beneath the haunted oak of Domremy?—­and what had they promised her besides the re-establishment of Charles upon the throne?

‘They promised,’ she answered, ’to take me with them to Paradise, which I had prayed them to do.’