of Rouen and
not a sword drawn for Jeanne!--the wonder grows.

CHAPTER XI -- THE JUDGES. 1431.

The name of Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, appears to us at this
long distance as arising out of the infernal mists, into which, when his
ministry of shame was accomplished, he disappeared again, bearing with
him nothing but hatred and ill fame. Yet in his own day and to his
contemporaries, he was not an inconsiderable man. He was of Rheims,
a great student, and excellent scholar, the friend of many good men,
highly esteemed among the ranks of the learned, a good man of business,
which is not always the attribute of a scholar, and at the same time a
Burgundian of pronounced sentiments, holding for his Duke, against the
King. When Beauvais was summoned by Charles, after his coronation, at
that moment of universal triumph when all seemed open for him to march
upon Paris if he would, the city had joyfully thrown open its doors to
the royal army, and in doing so had driven out its Bishop, who was hot
on the other side. He would not seem to have been wanted in Paris at
that moment. The "triste Bedford," as Michelet calls him, had no means
of employing an ambitious priest, no dirty work for the moment to give
him. It is natural to suppose that a man so admirably adapted for that
employment went in search of it to the ecclesiastical court, not
beloved of England, which the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester held there.
Winchester was the only one of the House of Lancaster who had money to
carry on the government either at home or abroad. The two priests,
as the historians are always pleased to insinuate in respect to
ecclesiastics, soon understood each other, and Winchester became aware
that he had in Cauchon a tool ready for any shameful enterprise. It is
not, however, necessary to assume so much as this, for we have not the
least reason to believe that either one or the other of them had the
slightest doubt on the subject of Jeanne, or as to her character. She
was a pernicious witch, filling a hitherto invincible army with that
savage fright which is but too well understood among men, and which
produces cruel outrages as well as cowardly panic. The air of this very
day, while I write, is ringing with the story of a woman burnt to death
by her own family under the influence of that same horrible panic and
terror. Cauchon was the countryman, almost the _pays_--an untranslatable
expression,--of Jeanne; but he did not believ