Loiseleur actually used the means of extracting information from Joan of Arc under the seal of confession, to be afterwards employed against her by Cauchon.  While these conversations and confessions took place, Warwick and Cauchon would be concealed in a part of the dungeon from which they could overhear what passed between the two—­one of whom worthily might be called an angel, the other truthfully a devil.  With the Bishop and knight—­whose conduct as regards Joan of Arc deeply tarnished an otherwise high character—­were seated clerks, who wrote down what passed in these meetings.  The clerks, to their credit, are said to have at first refused to comply with doing such dirty work.

Cauchon gained but little by this infamy.  Nothing of any importance could be constructed out of the prisoner’s confidence and confessions; but Cauchon was, through Loiseleur, enabled to tender such advice to Joan as made her answers coincide more closely with his wishes than they otherwise could have done; especially those relating to the Church Triumphant and Militant.

When his crime had borne fruit, Loiseleur, like another Judas, was overwhelmed with an intolerable remorse; and, although he obtained his victim’s pardon, his end appears to have been as sudden as that of Judas, if not also self-inflicted.  By a lawyer named John Lohier, whom he consulted during the course of the trial, Cauchon was not so well served as he had been by Loiseleur.  This Lohier, who was a Norman and seems to have been a worthy man, had the courage to tell Cauchon that inasmuch as Joan of Arc was being tried in secret and without benefit of counsel, the proceedings were null and worthless.  Like all who showed any interest for the prisoner, Lohier was threatened by Cauchon with imprisonment, but he escaped and found refuge in Rome.

On Passion Sunday, the 18th of March, Cauchon held a meeting of a dozen of the lawyers, including the Vice-Inquisitor, and asked them to give their opinion on some of the answers of Joan of Arc.  He held a second and similar consistory on the 22nd of that month, at which it was decided to shape into the form of a series of articles the chief heads of accusation.  This, when made out, was to be submitted to the prisoner.  On the 24th, the Bishop, accompanied by the Vice-Inquisitor and some others, proceeded to the dungeon in which Joan of Arc was kept.  The day was Palm Sunday, and the great French historian Michelet has, with his accustomed skill and bright, vivid word-painting, in his short but incomparable Life of the heroine not only of France but of humanity, reminded his readers with what a longing Joan of Arc must, on that festival of joy and triumph, have yearned for the privilege ‘to breathe once again the fresh air of heaven.’  Daughter of the fields, born on the border of the woods, she who had always lived under the open sky had to pass Easter Day in a dark dungeon tower.  To her the great succour which the Church invokes upon that day did not reach—­her prison door did not fly open.