But honour and love kept Jeanne’s lips closed.  Not a word did she say that could discredit King, or party, or friends; not a reproach to those who had abandoned her.  She still looked for the great victory in which Monseigneur, if he did not take care, might run the risk of being roughly handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court that would pitch him form his guilty seat.  It was but the fourteenth of March still, and there were six weary weeks to come.  She did not know the hour or the day, but yet she believed that this great deliverance was on its way.

And there was a great deliverance to come:  but not of this kind.  The voices of God—­how can we deny it?—­are often, though in a loftier sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise to the ear but break it to the heart.  They promised her a great victory:  and she had it, and also the fullest deliverance:  but only by the stake and the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any other girl of her age.  They did not speak to deceive her, but she was deceived; they kept their promise, but not as she understood it.  “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them.”  Jeanne too was persuaded of them, but was not to receive them—­except in the other way.

On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne fasted, whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely questioned on the subject, this time, of Franquet d’Arras, who, as has been above narrated, was taken by her in the course of some indiscriminate fighting in the north.  She was asked if it was not mortal sin to take a man as prisoner of war and then give him up to be executed.  There was evidently no perception of similarities in the minds of the judges, for this was precisely what had been done in the case of Jeanne herself; but even she does not seem to have been struck by the fact.  Their object, apparently, was by proving that she was in a state of sin, to prove also that her voices were of no authority, as being unable to discover so simple a principle as this.

When they spoke to her of “one named Franquet d’Arras, who was executed at Lagny,” she answered that she consented to his death, as he deserved it, for he had confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and a traitor.  She said that his trial lasted fifteen days, the Bailli de Senlis and the law officers of Lagny being the judges; and she added that she had wished to have Franquet, to exchange him for a man of Paris, Seigneur de Lours (corrected, innkeeper at the sign of l’Ours); but when she heard that this man was dead, and when the Bailli told her that she would go very much against justice if she set Franquet free, she said to the Bailli:  “Since my man is dead whom I wished to deliver, do with this one whatever justice demands.”  Asked, if she took the money or allowed it to be taken by him who had taken Franquet, she answered, that she was not a money changer or a treasurer of France, to deal with money.