early tourists on the Continent were taught to fear
in every chamber door, the idea has descended to our
own times. It would seem, however, to be beyond
doubt that this odious means of acquiring information
was in full operation during the trial of Jeanne, and
various spies were permitted to peep at her, and to
watch for any unadvised word she might say in her
most private moments. We are told that the Duke
of Bedford made use of the opportunity in a still more
revolting way, and was present, a secret spectator,
at the fantastic scene when Jeanne was visited by
a committee of matrons who examined her person to
prove or to disprove one of the hateful insinuations
which were made about her. The imagination, however,
refuses to conceive that a man of serious age and
of high functions should have degraded himself to
the level of a Peeping Tom in this way; all the French
historians, nevertheless, repeat the story though
on the merest hearsay evidence. And they also
relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery
was committed upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing
two secretaries at these openings, to take down her
conversation with a spy who had been sent to her in
the guise of a countryman of her own; and that not
only Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion,
listening, while their plot was carried out by the
vile traitor inside. The clerks, we are glad
to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but
Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The
Englishmen indeed shrank from no ignominy; nor did
the great French savants assembled under the presidency
of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin
with that they were neither ignorant nor base men,
yet from the beginning of the trial almost every step
taken by them appears base, as well as marked, in
the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning,
by the profoundest ignorance of human nature.
The spy of whom we have spoken, L’Oyseleur (bird-snarer,
a significant name), was sent, and consented to be
sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner,
a pays, like herself from Lorraine, to invite
her confidence: but his long conversations with
the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by the
secretaries, elicited nothing from her that she did
not say in the public examination. She had no
secret devices to betray to a traitor. She would
not seem, indeed, to have suspected the man at all,
not even when she saw him among her judges taking
part against her. Jeanne herself suspected no
falsehood, but made her confession to him, when she
found that he was a priest, and trusted him fully.
The bewildering and confusing fact, turning all the
contrivances of her judges into foolishness, was,
that she had nothing to confess that she was not ready
to tell in the eye of day.