“If I had had my freedom three years, I would have delivered him.”

“Have you the permission of your Voices to break out of prison whenever you can?”

“I have asked their leave several times, but they have not given it.”

I think it is as I have said, she expected the deliverance of death, and within the prison walls, before the three months should expire.

“Would you escape if you saw the doors open?”

She spoke up frankly and said: 

“Yes—­for I should see in that the permission of Our Lord.  God helps who help themselves, the proverb says.  But except I thought I had permission, I would not go.”

Now, then, at this point, something occurred which convinces me, every time I think of it—­and it struck me so at the time—­that for a moment, at least, her hopes wandered to the King, and put into her mind the same notion about her deliverance which Noel and I had settled upon—­a rescue by her old soldiers.  I think the idea of the rescue did occur to her, but only as a passing thought, and that it quickly passed away.

Some remark of the Bishop of Beauvais moved her to remind him once more that he was an unfair judge, and had no right to preside there, and that he was putting himself in great danger.

“What danger?” he asked.

“I do not know.  St. Catherine has promised me help, but I do not know the form of it.  I do not know whether I am to be delivered from this prison or whether when you sent me to the scaffold there will happen a trouble by which I shall be set free.  Without much thought as to this matter, I am of the opinion that it may be one or the other.”  After a pause she added these words, memorable forever—­words whose meaning she may have miscaught, misunderstood; as to that we can never know; words which she may have rightly understood, as to that, also, we can never know; but words whose mystery fell away from them many a year ago and revealed their meaning to all the world: 

“But what my Voices have said clearest is, that I shall be delivered by a great victory.”  She paused, my heart was beating fast, for to me that great victory meant the sudden bursting in of our old soldiers with the war-cry and clash of steel at the last moment and the carrying off of Joan of Arc in triumph.  But, oh, that thought had such a short life!  For now she raised her head and finished, with those solemn words which men still so often quote and dwell upon—­words which filled me with fear, they sounded so like a prediction.  “And always they say ’Submit to whatever comes; do not grieve for your martyrdom; from it you will ascend into the Kingdom of Paradise.”

Was she thinking of fire and the stake?  I think not.  I thought of it myself, but I believe she was only thinking of this slow and cruel martyrdom of chains and captivity and insult.  Surely, martyrdom was the right name for it.

It was Jean de la Fontaine who was asking the questions.  He was willing to make the most he could out of what she had said: