The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which in themselves they had no power to cope.  It may easily be allowed, also, that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless young King on the word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to every law of reason, madness and folly.  She would seem to have had the women on her side always and at every point.  The Church did not stir, or else was hostile; the commanders and military men about, regarded with scornful disgust the idea that an enterprise which they considered hopeless should be confided to an ignorant woman—­all with perfect reason we are obliged to allow.  Probably it was to gain time—­yet without losing the aid of such a stimulus to the superstitious among the masses—­and to retard any rash undertaking—­that it was proposed to subject Jeanne to an examination of doctors and learned men touching her faith and the character of her visions, which all this time had been of continual recurrence, yet charged with no further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the one simple, constantly repeated command.

Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops, Jeanne was taken to Poitiers—­where the university and the local parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which were on the side of the King, were assembled—­to undergo this investigation.  It is curious that the entire history of this wildest and strangest of all visionary occurrences is to be found in a series of processes at law, each part recorded and certified under oath; but so it is.  The village maid was placed at the bar, before a number of acute legists, ecclesiastics, and statesmen, to submit her to a not-too-benevolent cross-examination.  Several of these men were still alive at the time of the Rehabilitation and gave their recollections of this examination, though its formal records have not been preserved.  A Dominican monk, Aymer, one of an order she loved, addressed her gravely with the severity with which that institution is always credited.  “You say that God will deliver France; if He has so determined, He has no need of men-at-arms.”  “Ah!” cried the girl, with perhaps a note of irritation in her voice, “the men must fight; it is God who gives the victory.”  To another discomfited Brother, Jeanne, exasperated, answered with a little roughness, showing that our Maid, though gentle as a child to all gentle souls, was no piece of subdued perfection, but a woman of the fields, and lately much in the company of rough-spoken men.  He was of Limoges, a certain Brother Seguin, “bien aigre homme,” and disposed apparently to weaken the trial by questions without importance:  he asked her what language her celestial visitors spoke?  “Better than yours,” answered the peasant girl.  He could not have been, as we say in Scotland, altogether “an