“And you did, I believe.”
“Yes.”
“Had your Voices counseled you to take it by storm?”
“As to that, I do not remember.”
Thus closed a weary long sitting, without result. Every device that
could be contrived to trap Joan into wrong thinking, wrong doing,
or disloyalty to the Church, or sinfulness as a little child at home
or later, had been tried, and none of them had succeeded. She had
come unscathed through the ordeal.
Was the court discouraged? No. Naturally it was very much
surprised, very much astonished, to find its work baffling and
difficult instead of simple and easy, but it had powerful allies in
the shape of hunger, cold, fatigue, persecution, deception, and
treachery; and opposed to this array nothing but a defenseless and
ignorant girl who must some time or other surrender to bodily and
mental exhaustion or get caught in one of the thousand traps set
for her.
And had the court made no progress during these seemingly
resultless sittings? Yes. It had been feeling its way, groping here,
groping there, and had found one or two vague trails which might
freshen by and by and lead to something. The male attire, for
instance, and the visions and Voices. Of course no one doubted
that she had seen supernatural beings and been spoken to and
advised by them. And of course no one doubted that by
supernatural help miracles had been done by Joan, such as
choosing out the King in a crowd when she had never seen him
before, and her discovery of the sword buried under the altar. It
would have been foolish to doubt these things, for we all know that
the air is full of devils and angels that are visible to traffickers in
magic on the one hand and to the stainlessly holy on the other; but
what many and perhaps most did doubt was, that Joan’s visions,
Voices, and miracles came from God. It was hoped that in time
they could be proven to have been of satanic origin. Therefore, as
you see, the court’s persistent fashion of coming back to that
subject every little while and spooking around it and prying into it
was not to pass the time–it had a strictly business end in view.
Chapter 9 Her Sure Deliverance Foretold
THE NEXT sitting opened on Thursday the first of March.
Fifty-eight judges present–the others resting.
As usual, Joan was required to take an oath without reservations.
She showed no temper this time. She considered herself well
buttressed by the procЉs verbal compromise which Cauchon was
so anxious to repudiate and creep out of; so she merely refused,
distinctly and decidedly; and added, in a spirit of fairness and
candor:
“But as to matters set down in the procЉs verbal, I will freely tell
the whole truth–yes, as freely and fully as if I were before the
Pope.”
Here was a chance! We had two or three Popes, then; only one of
them could be the true Pope, of course. Everybody judiciously
shirked the question of which was the true Pope and refrained
from naming him, it being clearly dangerous to go into particulars
in this matter. Here was an opportunity to trick an unadvised girl
into bringing herself into peril, and the unfair judge lost no time in
taking advantage of it. He asked, in a plausibly indolent and absent
way:
“Which one do you consider to be the true Pope?”
The house took an attitude of deep attention, and so waited to hear
the answer and see the prey walk into the trap. But when the
answer came it covered the judge with confusion, and you could
see many people covertly chuckling. For Joan asked in a voice and
manner which almost deceived even me, so innocent it seemed:
“Are there two?”
One of the ablest priests in that body and one of the best swearers
there, spoke right out so that half the house heard him, and said:
“By God, it was a master stroke!”
As soon as the judge was better of his embarrassment he came
back to the charge, but was prudent and passed by Joan’s question:
“Is it true that you received a letter from the Count of Armagnac