d answered, that the King knew it by the instruction
of the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign of the crown.
Asked, how the ecclesiastics (_gens d'eglise_) knew it was an angel she
answered, "By their knowledge (science), and because they were priests."

Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind?
We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which
Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the strange
tale.

She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices
that she attacked La Charite, and afterwards Paris, her two points of
failure; the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her that
those voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no.
To Paris she went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a
skirmish, or assault of arms (_vaillance d'armes_); but she intended to
go farther, and to pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting and
make the skirmish into a serious assault; the same was the case before
La Charite. She was asked whether she had no revelation concerning Pont
l'Eveque, and said that since it was revealed to her at Melun that she
should be taken, she had had more recourse to the will of the captains
than to her own; but she did not tell them that it was revealed to her
that she should be taken. Asked, if she thought it was well done
to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity of our Lady, which was a
festival of the Church; she answered, that it was always well to keep
the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience it seemed to her that
it was and always would be a good thing to keep the feasts of our Lady,
from one end to the other.

In the afternoon the examiners returned to the attempt at escape or
suicide--they seemed to have preferred the latter explanation--made at
Beaurevoir; and as Jeanne expresses herself with more freedom as to her
personal motives in these prison examinations and opens her heart more
freely, there is much here which we give in full.

She was asked first what was the cause of her leap from the tower of
Beaurevoir. She answered that she had heard that all the people of
Compiegne, down to the age of seven, were to be put to the sword, and
that she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good
people; this was one of the reasons; the other was that she knew that
she was sold to the English and that she would rather die than fall into
th