heard from her the same sad words:  “They have deceived me”; and there seems no reason why we should not believe it.  Her mind was weighed down under this dreadful unaccountable fact.  She was forsaken—­as a greater sufferer was; and a horror of darkness had closed around her.  “Ah, Sieur Pierre,” she said to Morice, “where shall I be to-night?” The man had condemned her as a relapsed heretic, a daughter of perdition.  He had just suggested to her that her angels must have been devils.  Nevertheless perhaps his face was not unkindly, he had not meant all the harm he did.  He ought to have answered, “In Hell, with the spirits you have trusted”; that would have been the only logical response.  What he did say was very different.  “Have you not good faith in the Lord?” said the judge who had doomed her.  Amazing and notable speech!  They had sentenced her to be burned for blasphemy as an envoy of the devil; they believed in fact that she was the child of God, and going straight in that flame to the skies.  Jeanne, with the sound, clear head and the “sane mind” to which all of them testified, did she perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the inconceivable contradiction?  “Ah,” she said, “yes, God helping me, I shall be in Paradise.”

There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to the mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully not repeated at the Rehabilitation:  and this was that Jeanne allowed “as if it had been a thing of small importance,” that her story of the angel bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither expected nor intended to be believed.  For this we have to thank L’Oyseleur and the rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that dreadful morning in the prison.

Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice:  and the mitre was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy Office.  She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the crowded courtyard where her “chariot” awaited her.  It was her confessor’s part to remain by her side, and Frere Isambard and Massieu, the officer, both her friends, were also with her.  It is said that L’Oyseleur rushed forward at this moment, either to accompany her also, or, as many say, to fling himself at her feet and implore her pardon.  He was hustled aside by the crowd and would have been killed by the English, it is said, but for Warwick.  The bystanders would seem to have been seized with a sudden disgust for all the priests about, thinking them Jeanne’s friends, the historians insinuate—­more likely in scorn and horror of their treachery.  And then the melancholy procession set forth.