unded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as
they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which
in themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be allowed, also,
that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless young King on the
word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to every law of reason,
madness and folly. She would seem to have had the women on her side
always and at every point. The Church did not stir, or else was hostile;
the commanders and military men about, regarded with scornful disgust
the idea that an enterprise which they considered hopeless should be
confided to an ignorant woman--all with perfect reason we are obliged to
allow. Probably it was to gain time--yet without losing the aid of such
a stimulus to the superstitious among the masses--and to retard any rash
undertaking--that it was proposed to subject Jeanne to an examination
of doctors and learned men touching her faith and the character of
her visions, which all this time had been of continual recurrence, yet
charged with no further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the
one simple, constantly repeated command.

Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops,
Jeanne was taken to Poitiers--where the university and the local
parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which were
on the side of the King, were assembled--to undergo this investigation.
It is curious that the entire history of this wildest and strangest of
all visionary occurrences is to be found in a series of processes at
law, each part recorded and certified under oath; but so it is. The
village maid was placed at the bar, before a number of acute legists,
ecclesiastics, and statesmen, to submit her to a not-too-benevolent
cross-examination. Several of these men were still alive at the time
of the Rehabilitation and gave their recollections of this examination,
though its formal records have not been preserved. A Dominican monk,
Aymer, one of an order she loved, addressed her gravely with the
severity with which that institution is always credited. "You say that
God will deliver France; if He has so determined, He has no need of
men-at-arms." "Ah!" cried the girl, with perhaps a note of irritation
in her voice, "the men must fight; it is God who gives the victory." To
another discomfited Brother, Jeanne, exasperated, answered with a little
roughness, showing that our Maid, th