Then she would seem to have recovered in some measure her composure.  Probably her agitated brain was unable to understand the formula of recantation which was read to her amid all the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the condition she had herself stated, that the paper should be submitted to the Church, and that she should at once be transferred to an ecclesiastical prison.  Other suggestions are made, namely, that it was a very short document upon which she hastily in her despair made a cross, and that it was a long one, consisting of several pages, which was shown afterwards with Jehanne scribbled underneath.  “In fact,” says Massieu, “she abjured and made a cross with the pen which the witness handed to her:”  he, if any one must have known exactly what happened.

No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform.  But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals, seconded by many a cry from the crowd.  Such a small matter to risk her young life for!  “Sign, sign; why should you die!” Cauchon had gone on reading the sentence, half through the struggle.  He had two sentences all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry:  either to absolve her—­which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water:  or to carry her off at once to the stake.  The English were impatient for the last.  It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is evidently true.  They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they had desired at once to get her out of their way.  But the idea of her perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a prisoner was more than they chose to encounter.  Nevertheless there are some things a churchman cannot do.  When it was seen that Jeanne had yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished forth in somebody’s hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do?  There was but one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne’s natural enemy ten times over.  To admit her to penitence was the only practicable way.

Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was that Jeanne signed.  She could not write, she could only put her cross on the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs of the crowd.  The cedule to which she put her sign “contained eight lines:”  what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and full of detail.  Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; “for the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite different.”  This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined to the necessary points and expressed in few words—­was afterwards published as that bearing the sign of the penitent.  Her own admissions, as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an abjuration at all.