poor people who were her brethren and whom she sought everywhere, might
weep and cry out to Heaven, but they were powerless at such a moment.
And every law that might have helped her was pushed aside.

On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears
in the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and implacable
of all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an hour, a
letter was addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital. Quicherat
speaks of it as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-general of the
Inquisition, written by the officials of the University; others tell us
that an independent letter was sent from the University to second that
of the Inquisitor. The University we may add was not a university
like one of ours, or like any existing at the present day. It was an
ecclesiastical corporation of the highest authority in every cause
connected with the Church, while gathering law, philosophy, and
literature under its wing. The first theologians, the most eminent
jurists were collected there, not by any means always in alliance with
the narrower tendencies and methods of the Inquisition. It is notable,
however, that this great institution lost no time in claiming the
prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was less her career as a
warrior than her position as a sorceress. The actual facts of her life
were of secondary importance to them. Orleans, Rheims, even her attack
upon Paris were nothing in comparison with the black art which they
believed to be her inspiration. The guidance of Heaven which was not the
guidance of the Church was to them a claim which meant only rebellion
of the direst kind. They had longed to seize her and strip her of her
presumptuous pretensions from the first moment of her appearance. They
could not allow a day of her overthrow to pass by without snatching at
this much-desired victim.

No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial
for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame,
the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly
attractive to the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped
for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into
which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better
understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it is
the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to extremity
and fighting