ssity, Joan was constrained to get up and take the dress."

The official documents drawn up during the condemnation-trial contain
quite a different account. "On the 28th of May," it is there said,
"eight of the judges who had taken part in the sentence [their names are
given in the document, t. i. p. 454] betook themselves to Joan's prison,
and seeing her clad in man's dress, 'which she had but just given up
according to our order that she should resume woman's clothes, we asked
her when and for what cause she had resumed this dress, and who had
prevailed on her to do so. Joan answered that it was of her own will,
without any constraint from any one, and because she preferred that dress
to woman's clothes. To our question as to why she had made this change,
she answered, that, being surrounded by men, man's dress was more
suitable for her than woman's. She also said that she had resumed it
because there had been made to her, but not kept, a promise that she
should go to mass, receive the body of Christ, and be set free from her
fetters. She added that if this promise were kept, she would be good,
and would do what was the will of the Church. As we had heard some
persons say that she persisted in her errors as to the pretended
revelations which she had but lately renounced, we asked whether she had
since Thursday last heard the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret;
and she answered, Yes. To our question as to what the saints had said
she answered, that God had testified to her by their voices great pity
for the great treason she had committed in abjuring for the sake of
saving her life, and that by so doing she had damned herself. She said
that all she had thus done last Thursday in abjuring her visions and
revelations she had done through fear of the stake, and that all her
abjuration was contrary to the truth. She added that she did not herself
comprehend what was contained in the form of abjuration she had been made
to sign, and that she would rather do penance once for all by dying to
maintain the truth than remain any longer a prisoner, being all the while
a traitress to it."

We will not stop to examine whether these two accounts, though very
different, are not fundamentally reconcilable, and whether Joan resumed
man's dress of her own desire or was constrained to do so by the soldiers
on guard over her, and perhaps to escape from their insults. The
important points in the incident are the burst of re