round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals,
seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her
young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had gone on
reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences
all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve
her--which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread
and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English were
impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is
evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a
mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they
had desired at once to get her out of their way. But the idea of her
perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a
prisoner was more than they chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are
some things a churchman cannot do. When it was seen that Jeanne had
yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished
forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the
Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do? There was but
one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne's
natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to penitence was the only
practicable way.

Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was
that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on
the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs
of the crowd. The _cedule_ to which she put her sign "contained eight
lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and
full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration
published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; "for
the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite
different." This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged
version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined
to the necessary points and expressed in few words--was afterwards
published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions,
as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an
abjuration at all.

When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been
taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence
must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another