Such incidents as these alone lightened or darkened her weary days in prison.  A traitor or spy, a prophet of evil shaking his head over her danger, a contemptuous party of jeering nobles; afterwards inquisitors, for ever repeating in private their tedious questions:  these all visited her—­but never a friend.  Jeanne was not afraid of the English lord’s dagger, or of the watchful eye of Warwick over her.  Even when spying through a hole, if the English earl and knight, indeed permitted himself that strange indulgence, his presence and inspection must have been almost the only defence of the prisoner.  Our historians all quote, with an admiration almost as misplaced as their horror of Warwick’s “barbarous instincts,” the vrai galant homme of an Englishman who in the midst of the trial cried out “Brave femme!” (it is difficult to translate the words, for brave means more than brave)—­“why was she not English?” However we are not concerned to defend the English share of the crime.  The worst feature of all is that she never seems to have been visited by any one favourable and friendly to her, except afterwards, the two or three pitying priests whose hearts were touched by her great sufferings, though they remained among her judges, and gave sentence against her.  No woman seems ever to have entered that dreadful prison except those “matrons” who came officially as has been already said.  The ladies de Ligny had cheered her in her first confinement, the kind women of Abbeville had not been shut out even from the gloomy fortress of Le Crotoy.  But here no woman ever seems to have been permitted to enter, a fact which must either be taken to prove the hostility of the population, or the very vigorous regulations of the prison.  Perhaps the barbarous watch set upon her, the soldiers ever present, may have been a reason for the absence of any female visitor.  At all events it is a very distinct fact that during the whole period of her trial, five months of misery, except on the one occasion already referred to, no woman came to console the unfortunate Maid.  She had never before during all her vicissitudes been without their constant ministrations.

One woman, the only one we ever hear of who was not the partisan and lover of the Maid, does, however, make herself faintly seen amid the crowd.  Catherine of La Rochelle—­the woman who had laid claim to saintly visitors and voices like those of Jeanne, and who had been for a time received and feted at the Court of Charles with vile satisfaction, as making the loss of the Maid no such great thing—­had by this time been dropped as useless, on the appearance of the shepherd boy quoted by the Archbishop of Rheims, and had fallen into the hands of the English:  was not she too a witch, and admirably qualified to give evidence as to the other witch, for whose blood all around her were thirsting?  Catherine was ready to say anything that was evil of her sister sorceress.  “Take care of her,” she said; “if