The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the dress of the saints.  But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne herself, it was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more weighty thoughts.  Presently they asked if the saints hated the English, to which she replied that they hated what God hated and loved what He loved.  She was then asked if God hated the English.  She replied that of the love or hate that God had for the English, or what God did for their souls, she knew nothing; but she knew well that they should be driven out of France, except those who died there; and that God would send victory to the French against the English.  Asked, if God was for the English so long as they were prosperous in France:  she answered, that she knew not whether God hated the French, but believed He had allowed them to be beaten because of their sins.

Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great statesman or a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the question concerning John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes.  “If we shall say:  From heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him not? but if we shall say of men we fear the people.”  And she was only a peasant girl and the event of which they spoke had been before her little time.

Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to kill Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT MISFORTUNE FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE:  but that however it might be among themselves, God had sent her to the succour of the King.

One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual changes of the subject:  one of which called forth as follows her last deliverance on the subject of the Pope.

Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would answer as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done before our Holy Father the Pope, although at several points in the trial she would have had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer more plainly than before Monseigneur de Beauvais—­she said that she had answered as much as she knew, and that if anything came to her memory that she had forgotten to say, she would say it willingly.  Asked, if it seemed to her that she would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope, the vicar of God, in all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience, she replied that she desired to be taken before him, and then she would answer all that she ought to answer.

Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained time, probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to understand it.