lp!" There would seem to have been a moment in
which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this
wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying,
speaking--sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen companions
of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her. She asked
the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say a mass
for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive her.
Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry of
"Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?" No reason is given for
the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned
a campaign in Normandy with Alencon. Had there been perhaps some special
hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in
the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?

There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their
fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to
the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the
deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the
profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he
would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That which
her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon
the saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of
men. But as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop's evil voice scarcely
silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient--the entire crowd, touched
to its heart with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and
lamentation, "_a chaudes larmes_" according to the graphic French
expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow
and fellow-feeling and impotence to help. Winchester--withdrawn high on
his platform, ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a
spectator merely--wept; and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was
overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon's
cheeks. The very world stood still to see that white form of purity, and
valour, and faith, the Maid, not shouting triumphant on the height of
victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature
could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us
here all day; must we dine here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain
that simulated cruelty. And then the executio