at
sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the city was
touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been sympathetic to
Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was about to die:
she had stood bravely against the world and answered like a true
Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets, a girl just
nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated for the time.

Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over, received
at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that rite which
He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not permitted
to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the sacred
commemoration. All the time she was still _preschee_ and admonished
by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop and his
followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different parts in
that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult to say.
The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal warrant
for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of mind
is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it, and
a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope and
strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that she
sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation for
which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already mentioned,
importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring to get from
her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and was herself
a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil spirits, not
good,--drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be they good spirits,
or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act of giving her her
last communion, Brother Martin paused with the consecrated Host in his
hands.

"Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer."
Then this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your
voices?" Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the voices,
which have deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not give this
deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus, who did not
live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.

The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
satisfaction, rubbing his han