had previously caused a hole to be bored through the wall; and he
stood with his ear to that hole and heard all. It is pitiful to think of
these things. One wonders how they could treat that poor child so.
She had not done them any harm.
Chapter 4 All Ready to Condemn
ON TUESDAY, the 20th of February, while I sat at my master’s
work in the evening, he came in, looking sad, and said it had been
decided to begin the trial at eight o’clock the next morning, and I
must get ready to assist him.
Of course I had been expecting such news every day for many
days; but no matter, the shock of it almost took my breath away
and set me trembling like a leaf. I suppose that without knowing it
I had been half imagining that at the last moment something would
happen, something that would stop this fatal trial; maybe that La
Hire would burst in at the gates with his hellions at his back;
maybe that God would have pity and stretch forth His mighty
hand. But now–now there was no hope.
The trial was to begin in the chapel of the fortress and would be
public. So I went sorrowing away and told No‰l, so that he might
be there early and secure a place. It would give him a chance to
look again upon the face which we so revered and which was so
precious to us. All the way, both going and coming, I plowed
through chattering and rejoicing multitudes of English soldiery and
English-hearted French citizens. There was no talk but of the
coming event. Many times I heard the remark, accompanied by a
pitiless laugh:
“The fat Bishop has got things as he wants them at last, and says he
will lead the vile witch a merry dance and a short one.”
But here and there I glimpsed compassion and distress in a face,
and it was not always a French one. English soldiers feared Joan,
but they admired her for her great deeds and her unconquerable
spirit.
In the morning Manchon and I went early, yet as we approached
the vast fortress we found crowds of men already there and still
others gathering. The chapel was already full and the way barred
against further admissions of unofficial persons. We took our
appointed places. Throned on high sat the president, Cauchon,
Bishop of Beauvais, in his grand robes, and before him in rows sat
his robed court–fifty distinguished ecclesiastics, men of high
degree in the Church, of clear-cut intellectual faces, men of deep
learning, veteran adepts in strategy and casuistry, practised
settersof traps for ignorant minds and unwary feet. When I looked
around upon this army of masters of legal fence, gathered here to
find just one verdict and no other, and remembered that Joan must
fight for her good name and her life single-handed against them, I
asked myself what chance an ignorant poor country-girl of
nineteen could have in such an unequal conflict; and my heart sank
down low, very low. When I looked again at that obese president,
puffing and wheezing there, his great belly distending and receding
with each breath, and noted his three chins, fold above fold, and
his knobby and knotty face, and his purple and splotchy
complexion, and his repulsive cauliflower nose, and his cold and
malignant eyes–a brute, every detail of him–my heart sank lower
still. And when I noted that all were afraid of this man, and shrank
and fidgeted in their seats when his eye smote theirs, my last poor
ray of hope dissolved away and wholly disappeared.
There was one unoccupied seat in this place, and only one. It was
over against the wall, in view of every one. It was a little wooden
bench without a back, and it stood apart and solitary on a sort of
dais. Tall men-at-arms in morion, breastplate, and steel gauntlets
stood as stiff as their own halberds on each side of this dais, but no
other creature was near by it. A pathetic little bench to me it was,
for I knew whom it was for; and the sight of it carried my mind