Jeanne D'Arc: her life and death eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 397 pages of information about Jeanne D'Arc.

Jeanne D'Arc: her life and death eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 397 pages of information about Jeanne D'Arc.

When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and pronounced the prisoner’s fate.  “Seeing that thou hast returned to the bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison, with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by solitary penitence.”  Whether the words reached her over all those crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell.  There seems even to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials.  Some of them congratulated Jeanne, L’Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, “You have done a good day’s work, you have saved your soul.”  She herself, excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go.  She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual imprisonment with complete faith and content.  It meant to her instant relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her impatience and eagerness.  “People of the Church—­gens de’ Eglise—­lead me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English,” she cried with feverish anxiety.  To gain this point, to escape the irons and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her thought.  The men about her could not answer this appeal.  Some of them no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure.  But perhaps flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop to ask where they were to take her.  One of these was Pierre Miger, friar of Longueville.  Where was she to be taken?  In Winchester’s hearing, perhaps in Warwick’s, what a question to put!  An English bishop, says this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a “fauteur de ladite Jeanne,” “this fellow was also one of them.”  Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence she came.  Thus ended the last hope of the Maid.  Her abjuration, which by no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.

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Jeanne D'Arc: her life and death from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.