and
pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the
bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all
thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison,
with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by
solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all those
crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne
expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and
downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There seems even
to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials. Some of them
congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, "You
have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul." She herself,
excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go.
She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual
imprisonment with complete faith and content. It meant to her instant
relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her
impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church--_gens de' Eglise_--lead
me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English," she
cried with feverish anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons
and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her
thought. The men about her could not answer this appeal. Some of them
no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have
seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to
Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and
the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure. But perhaps
flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the
victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop
to ask where they were to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar
of Longueville. Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing,
perhaps in Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says
this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a
"fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "_this fellow was also one of them_."
Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon
turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence
she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her abjuration, which by
no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.

Jeanne was