I wrote the letter.  You will know what it cost me, without my telling you.  I wrote it with the same wooden stylus which had put upon parchment the first words ever dictated by Joan of Arc—­that high summons to the English to vacate France, two years past, when she was a lass of seventeen; it had now set down the last ones which she was ever to dictate.  Then I broke it.  For the pen that had served Joan of Arc could not serve any that would come after her in this earth without abasement.

The next day, May 29th, Cauchon summoned his serfs, and forty-two responded.  It is charitable to believe that the other twenty were ashamed to come.  The forty-two pronounced her a relapsed heretic, and condemned her to be delivered over to the secular arm.  Cauchon thanked them.

Then he sent orders that Joan of Arc be conveyed the next morning to the place known as the Old Market; and that she be then delivered to the civil judge, and by the civil judge to the executioner.  That meant she would be burnt.

All the afternoon and evening of Tuesday, the 29th, the news was flying, and the people of the country-side flocking to Rouen to see the tragedy—­all, at least, who could prove their English sympathies and count upon admission.  The press grew thicker and thicker in the streets, the excitement grew higher and higher.  And now a thing was noticeable again which had been noticeable more than once before—­that there was pity for Joan in the hearts of many of these people.  Whenever she had been in great danger it had manifested itself, and now it was apparent again—­manifest in a pathetic dumb sorrow which was visible in many faces.

Early the next morning, Wednesday, Martin Ladvenu and another friar were sent to Joan to prepare her for death; and Manchon and I went with them—­a hard service for me.  We tramped through the dim corridors, winding this way and that, and piercing ever deeper and deeper into that vast heart of stone, and at last we stood before Joan.  But she did not know it.  She sat with her hands in her lap and her head bowed, thinking, and her face was very sad.  One might not know what she was thinking of.  Of her home, and the peaceful pastures, and the friends she was no more to see?  Of her wrongs, and her forsaken estate, and the cruelties which had been put upon her?  Or was it of death—­the death which she had longed for, and which was now so close?

Or was it of the kind of death she must suffer?  I hoped not; for she feared only one kind, and that one had for her unspeakable terrors.  I believed she so feared that one that with her strong will she would shut the thought of it wholly out of her mind, and hope and believe that God would take pity on her and grant her an easier one; and so it might chance that the awful news which we were bringing might come as a surprise to her at last.

We stood silent awhile, but she was still unconscious of us, still deep in her sad musings and far away.  Then Martin Ladvenu said, softly: