anything they could to help us.
Our plan was soon made, and was quite simple. It was to help
them drive a flock of sheep to the market of the city. One morning
early we made the venture in a melancholy drizzle of rain, and
passed through the frowning gates unmolested. Our friends had
friends living over a humble wine shop in a quaint tall building
situated in one of the narrow lanes that run down from the
cathedral to the river, and with these they bestowed us; and the
next day they smuggled our own proper clothing and other
belongings to us. The family that lodged us–the Pieroons–were
French in sympathy, and we needed to have no secrets from them.
[1] It remained there three hundred and sixty years, and then was
destroyed in a public bonfire, together with two swords, a plumed
cap, several suits of state apparel, and other relics of the Maid, by
a mob in the time of the Revolution. Nothing which the hand of
Joan of Arc is known to have touched now remains in existence
except a few preciously guarded military and state papers which
she signed, her pen being guided by a clek or her secretary, Louis
de Conte. A boulder exists from which she is known to have
mounted her horse when she was once setting out upon a
campaign. Up to a quarter of a century ago there was a single hair
from her head still in existence. It was drawn through the wax of a
seal attached to the parchment of a state document. It was
surreptitiously snipped out, seal and all, by some vandal
relic-hunter, and carried off. Doubtless it still exists, but only the
thief knows where. — TRANSLATOR.
Chapter 3 Weaving the Net About Her
IT WAS necessary for me to have some way to gain bread for No‰l
and myself; and when the Pierrons found that I knew how to write,
the applied to their confessor in my behalf, and he got a place for
me with a good priest named Manchon, who was to be the chief
recorder in the Great Trial of Joan of Arc now approaching. It was
a strange position for me–clerk to the recorder–and dangerous if
my sympathies and the late employment should be found out. But
there was not much danger. Manchon was at bottom friendly to
Joan and would not betray me; and my name would not, for I had
discarded my surname and retained only my given one, like a
person of low degree.
I attended Manchon constantly straight along, out of January and
into February, and was often in the citadel with him–in the very
fortress where Joan was imprisoned, though not in the dungeon
where she was confined, and so did not see her, of course.
Manchon told me everything that had been happening before my
coming. Ever since the purchase of Joan, Cauchon had been busy
packing his jury for the destruction of the Maid–weeks and weeks
he had spent in this bad industry. The University of Paris had sent
him a number of learned and able and trusty ecclesiastics of the
stripe he wanted; and he had scraped together a clergyman of like
stripe and great fame here and there and yonder, until he was able
to construct a formidable court numbering half a hundred
distinguished names. French names they were, but their interests
and sympathies were English.
A great officer of the Inquisition was also sent from Paris for the
accused must be tried by the forms of the Inquisition; but this was
a brave and righteous man, and he said squarely that this court had
no power to try the case, wherefore he refused to act; and the same
honest talk was uttered by two or three others.
The Inquisitor was right. The case as here resurrected against Joan
had already been tried long ago at Poitiers, and decided in her
favor. Yes, and by a higher tribunal than this one, for at the head of
it was an Archbishop–he of Rheims–Cauchon’s own metropolitan.
So here, you see, a lower court was impudently preparing to try
and redecide a cause which had already been decided by its