fter Jeanne's death, how and when we are not told.
It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is the place of
meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole testimonial is
that the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous
records: but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom
by responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever
certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all
judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison,
stand up and give their report of what happened there--part of which
we have quoted--their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last
acknowledged herself to be deceived. According to their own showing it
was exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed
to make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems
no reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as
substantially true. The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's
part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived
in respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart.
It was to her the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning
showed her the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her
renewed conviction. The scene at the stake would lose something of its
greatness without that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled
soul.

Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according
to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a
danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine
that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and
accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions
of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had
witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of
witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a
long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and
a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The _proces_
was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of
Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman
of coat armour--against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop
of Beauvais