ind raiment for his servants." Again
and again, questions were put to her, in answering which, if she had
been tainted with the least suspicion of imposture, she would have been
tempted to pretend to powers greater than she had: "Do Saint Catherine
and Saint Margaret hate the English?" "They love what our Lord loves,
and hate what He hates."

Proof of her guilt, in the legal sense, there was none, and so much even
the lawyers of Rouen recognized; but out of her own answers the
ministers of the God of Justice were enabled, after months of juggling,
to torture proof sufficient to convict her in their own eyes. When the
wolf in AEsop's fable, seeks a pretext for devouring the lamb, we know
from the beginning that that pretext will be found: "You have muddied
the stream," cries the wolf, as he raises his head from drinking. "Nay,
good sir, I am lower down the stream than you are." "If it was not you,
it was one of your family." There was no hope for this lamb of France.
"Never from the foundations of the earth," says De Quincey, "was there
such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence
and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess,
peasant girl! Trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy
flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as God's
lightning to its mark,... confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and
making dumb the oracles of falsehood!... 'Would you examine me as a
witness against myself?' was the question by which many times she defied
their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were
irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the
ridiculous charges against her."

In the midst of the proceedings, about Palm Sunday, the poor girl fell
ill, and there was some fear that through death she might escape the
exemplary punishment they were preparing for her against the anticipated
conviction. Her illness may have been chiefly mental and nervous
exhaustion, helped on by what would have been to her one of the most
severe trials, homesickness. This is the impression left upon our minds
by Lamartine and by Michelet as well as by De Quincey: "A country girl,
born on the skirts of a forest, and having ever lived in the open air of
heaven, she was compelled to pass this fine Palm Sunday hi the depths of
a dungeon." In the general rejoicing of Easter, while the bells of Rouen
steeples rang forth the glad tidings of salva