y she
had asked: "Have you good spurs?"[1909] Here she cries: "I will make
them put on their spurs." She says that soon she will be in Champagne,
that she is about to start. Surely we can no longer think of her shut
up in the Castle of La Tremouille as in a kind of gilded cage.[1910] In
conclusion, she tells her friends at Reims that she does not write
unto them all that she would like for fear lest her letter should be
captured on the road. She knew what it was to be cautious. Sometimes
she affixed a cross to her letters to warn her followers to pay no
heed to what she wrote, in the hope that the missive would be
intercepted and the enemy deceived.[1911]

[Footnote 1909: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 11.]

[Footnote 1910: Perceval de Cagny, p. 172.]

[Footnote 1911: _Trial_, vol. i, p. 83.]

It was from Sully that on the 23rd of March Brother Pasquerel sent the
Emperor Sigismund a letter intended for the Hussites of Bohemia.[1912]

[Footnote 1912: _Ibid._, vol. v, p. 156.]

The Hussites of those days were abhorred and execrated throughout
Christendom. They demanded the free preaching of God's word, communion
in both kinds, and the return of the Church to that evangelical life
which allowed neither the wealth of priests nor the temporal power of
popes. They desired the punishment of sin by the civil magistrates, a
custom which could prevail only in very holy society. They were saints
indeed and heretics too on every possible point. Pope Martin held the
destruction of these wicked persons to be salutary, and such was the
opinion of every good Catholic. But how could this armed heresy be
dealt with when it routed all the forces of the Empire and the Holy
See? The Hussites were too much for that worn-out ancient chivalry of
Christendom, for the knighthood of France and of Germany, which was
good for nothing but to be thrown on to the refuse heaps like so much
old iron. And this was precisely what the towns of the realm of France
did when over these knights of chivalry they placed a peasant
girl.[1913]

[Footnote 1913: Monstrelet, vol. iv, pp. 24, 86, 87. J. Zeller,
_Histoire d'Allemagne_, vol. vii, _La reforme_, Paris, 1891, pp. 78
_et seq._ E. Denis, _Jean Hus et la guerre des Hussites_ (1879); _Les
origines de l'Unite des Freres Bohemes_, Angers, 1885, in 8vo, pp. 5
_et seq._]

At Tachov, in 1427, the Crusaders, blessed by the Holy Father, had
fled at the mere sound of the chariot wheels of the Procops.[1914] Pope
Mar