as applied to this
rambling and cruel cross-examination in which was neither sense nor
decorum. The reader will understand that there were no witnesses either
for or against her, the answers of the accused herself forming the
entire evidence.

One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at
least more clear. The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left
in the usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which
the English troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and
carrying on their noisy conversation, if nothing worse and more
offensive--sometimes, as Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing
(her sole solace) the soft voices of her saintly visitors--was not her
only disturbance. Her solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive
visitors of various kinds. L'Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who
professed to be her countryman and who beguiled her into talk of her
childhood and native place, was the first of these; and it is possible
that at first his presence was a pleasure to her. One other visitor of
whom we hear accidentally, a citizen of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems to
have got in private interest and with a more or less good motive and no
evil meaning. He warned her to answer with prudence the questions put
to her, since it was a matter of life and death. She seemed to him to
be "very simple" and still to believe that she might be ransomed. Earl
Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on various occasions. He
probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and thus heard her cry for
help in her danger, executing, let us hope, summary vengeance on her
brutal assailant; but he also evidently took advantage of his power to
show his interesting prisoner to his friends on occasion. And it was he
who took her original captor, Jean de Luxembourg, now Comte de Ligny,
by whom she had been given up, to see her, along with an English lord,
sometimes named as Lord Sheffield. The Belgian who had put so many good
crowns in his pocket for her ransom, thought it good taste to enter with
a jesting suggestion that he had come to buy her back.

"Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear arms
against us again," he said. The Maid was not deceived by this mocking
suggestion. "It is well for you to jest," she said, "but I know you have
no such power. I know that the English will kill me, believing, after I
am dead, that they will be able to win all the kingdom of