It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long and eloquent began.  When it was half over, in one of his fine periods admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of France, and the head of that House, “Charles who calls himself King.”  “He has,” cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of Winchester upon him, “adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who are under his sway, and the nobility.  This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and to thee I say that thy King is a schismatic and a heretic.”

In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by that clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the tumult of battle.  Jeanne could bear much, but not this.  She was used to abuse in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this assault on her King.  And interruption to a sermon has always a dramatic and startling effect, but when that voice arose now, when the startled speaker stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is easy to imagine what a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must have arisen in the midst of the crowd.  “By my faith, sire,” cried Jeanne, “saving your respect, I swear upon my life that my King is the most noble Christian of all Christians, that he is not what you say.”

The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption.  And finally the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts.  “Here,” said Erard, “are my lords the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to submit your acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in these acts and words there are many things which it seemed to the clergy were not good either to say or to sustain.”

To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), “I will answer you.”  And as to her submission to the Church she said:  “I have told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God first, I refer in all.  And as for my acts and words I have done all on the part of God.”  She also said that no one was to blame for her acts and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in them, the blame was hers and no other’s.

Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, “I refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope.”

It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy Father was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in his diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother the Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and officers of the Church had a right to determine in her case.  And of this she was admonished three times.