One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at least more clear.  The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left in the usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which the English troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and carrying on their noisy conversation, if nothing worse and more offensive—­sometimes, as Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing (her sole solace) the soft voices of her saintly visitors—­was not her only disturbance.  Her solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive visitors of various kinds.  L’Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who professed to be her countryman and who beguiled her into talk of her childhood and native place, was the first of these; and it is possible that at first his presence was a pleasure to her.  One other visitor of whom we hear accidentally, a citizen of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems to have got in private interest and with a more or less good motive and no evil meaning.  He warned her to answer with prudence the questions put to her, since it was a matter of life and death.  She seemed to him to be “very simple” and still to believe that she might be ransomed.  Earl Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on various occasions.  He probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and thus heard her cry for help in her danger, executing, let us hope, summary vengeance on her brutal assailant; but he also evidently took advantage of his power to show his interesting prisoner to his friends on occasion.  And it was he who took her original captor, Jean de Luxembourg, now Comte de Ligny, by whom she had been given up, to see her, along with an English lord, sometimes named as Lord Sheffield.  The Belgian who had put so many good crowns in his pocket for her ransom, thought it good taste to enter with a jesting suggestion that he had come to buy her back.

“Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear arms against us again,” he said.  The Maid was not deceived by this mocking suggestion.  “It is well for you to jest,” she said, “but I know you have no such power.  I know that the English will kill me, believing, after I am dead, that they will be able to win all the kingdom of France:  but if there were a hundred thousand more Goddens than there are, they shall never win the kingdom of France.”  The English lord drew his dagger to strike the helpless girl, all the stories say, but was prevented by Warwick.  Warwick, however, we are told, though he had thus saved her twice, “recovered his barbarous instincts” as soon as he got outside, and indignantly lamented the possibility of Jeanne’s escape from the stake.