The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to the remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the assembly held on the Thursday after Jeanne’s death, how and when we are not told.  It consisted of “nos judices antedicti,” but neither is the place of meeting named, nor the person who presided.  Its sole testimonial is that the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous records:  but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom by responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever certifies this.  Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison, stand up and give their report of what happened there—­part of which we have quoted—­their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last acknowledged herself to be deceived.  According to their own showing it was exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed to make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” burst from his lips.  There seems no reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as substantially true.  The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne’s part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted.  She was deceived in respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart.  It was to her the bitterness of death.  But the flames of her burning showed her the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her renewed conviction.  The scene at the stake would lose something of its greatness without that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled soul.

Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions of the old.  In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given.  The proces was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman of coat armour—­against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and Lemaitre, the Deputy Inquisitor—­with other persons chiefly concerned in the judgment.  Some of these men were dead, some, wisely, not to be found.  The result was such a mass of testimony as put every incident of the life of the Maid in the fullest light from her childhood to her death, and in consequence secured a triumphant and full acquittal