May daylight, the air, the murmuring streets, the throng that gazed and shouted and followed!  Life that had run so low in the prisoner’s veins must have bounded up within her in response to that sunshine and open sky, and movement and sound of existence—­summer weather too, and everything softened in the medium of that soft breathing air, sound and sensation and hope.  She had been three months in her prison.  As the charrette rumbled along the roughly paved streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange object appeared to Jeanne’s eyes in the midst of the market-place, a lofty scaffold with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd, the logs all arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four horses, to bring hither the victim.  The place of sacrifice was ready, everything arranged—­for whom? for her?  They drove her noisily past that she might see the preparations.  It was all ready; and where then was the great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?

In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different scene.  That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a great open space, which afforded room for a very large assembly.  In this were erected two platforms, one facing the other.  On the first sat the court of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester having a place by the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president, with several other bishops and dignified ecclesiastics.  Opposite, on the other platform, were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to which Jeanne was conducted by Massieu, who never left her, and L’Oyseleur, who kept as near as he could, the rest of the platform being immediately covered by lawyers, doctors, all the camp followers, so to speak, of the black army, who could find footing there.  Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the doublet and hose, with her short-clipped hair—­no doubt looking like a slim boy among all this dark crowd of men.  The people swayed like a sea all about and around—­the throng which had gathered in her progress through the streets pushing out the crowd already assembled with a movement like the waves of the sea.  Every step of the trial all through had been attended by preaching, by discourses and reasoning and admonishments, charitable and otherwise.  Now she was to be “preached” for the last time.

It was Doctor Guillaume Erard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher, one whom the “copious multitude” ran after and were eager to hear.  He himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set up there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential of men.  The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John’s Gospel:  “A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine.”  The centre circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the witch should be condemned.