case for his countryman;
that, being an accomplice in the crime, making himself the leader in the
persecution against the helpless girl, he was willing to be all this in
the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of a catspaw. Never from the
foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid
open in all its beauty of defence, and all its hellishness of attack. Oh,
child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all
around thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning,
and true as that lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard
Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and
making dumb the oracles of falsehood! Is it not scandalous, is it not
humiliating to civilization, that, even at this day, France exhibits the
horrid spectacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself; seducing
him, by fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own head; using the
terrors of their power for extorting confessions from the frailty of hope;
nay, (which is worse,) using the blandishments of condescension and snaky
kindness for thawing into compliances of gratitude those whom they had
failed to freeze into terror? Wicked judges! Barbarian jurisprudence! that,
sitting in your own conceit on the summits of social wisdom, have yet
failed to learn the first principles of criminal justice; sit ye humbly and
with docility at the feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore your webs of
cruelty into shreds and dust, "Would you examine me as a witness against
myself?" was the question by which many times she defied their arts.
Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any
business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges
against her. General questions were proposed to her on points of
casuistical divinity; two-edged questions which not one of themselves could
have answered without, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as
then interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous expression of
self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican that pressed her with an
objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would tax every one of its
miracles with unsoundness. The monk had the excuse of never having read the
Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse; and it makes one blush for him, as a
philosopher, to find him describing such an argument as "weighty," whereas
it is but a varied expression of rude