is.
Captain Poton and the shepherd, Guillaume, remained in the hands of
the English, who returned to Rouen in triumph.[2596]

[Footnote 2596: _Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris_, p. 272.]

Poton made sure of being ransomed in the usual manner. But the little
shepherd could not hope for such a fate; he was suspected of heresy
and magic; he had deceived Christian folk and accepted from them
idolatrous veneration. The signs of our Saviour's passion that he bore
upon him helped him not a whit; on the contrary the wounds, by the
French held to have been divinely imprinted, to the English seemed the
marks of the devil.

Guillaume, like the Maid, had been taken in the diocese of Beauvais.
The Lord Bishop of this town, Messire Pierre Cauchon, who had claimed
the right to try Jeanne, made a similar claim for Guillaume; and the
shepherd was granted what the Maid had been refused, he was cast into
an ecclesiastical prison.[2597] He would seem to have been less
difficult to guard than Jeanne and also less important. But the
English had recently learnt what was involved in a trial by the
Inquisition; they now knew how lengthy and how punctilious it was.
Moreover, they did not see how it would profit them if this shepherd
were convicted of heresy. If the French had set their hope of success
in war[2598] in Guillaume as they had done in Jeanne, then that hope
was but short-lived. To put the Armagnacs to shame by proving that
their shepherd lad came from the devil, that game was not worth the
candle. The youth was taken to Rouen and thence to Paris.[2599]

[Footnote 2597: Vallet de Viriville, _Histoire de Charles VII_, vol.
ii, p. 248. De Beaurepaire, _Recherches sur les juges_, p. 43.]

[Footnote 2598: Lea, _History of the Inquisition_, vol. iii, 377 (ed.
1905).]

[Footnote 2599: Lefevre de Saint-Remy, vol. ii, pp. 263, 264.]

He had been a prisoner for four months when King Henry VI, who was
nine years old, came to Paris to be crowned in the church of Notre
Dame with the two crowns of France and England. With high pomp and
great rejoicing he made his entrance into the city on Sunday, the 16th
of December. Along the route of the procession, in the Rue du
Ponceau-Saint-Denys, had been constructed a fountain adorned with
three sirens; and from their midst rose a tall lily stalk, from the
buds and blossoms of which flowed streams of wine and milk. Folk
flocked to drink of the fountain; and around its basin men disguised
as savages