the
hands of the Duke of Burgundy and by the Duke into the hands of the
English. To the English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after
a year's imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of heresy
before an ecclesiastical court with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head.

[Sidenote: Death of Jeanne]

Throughout the long process which followed every art was used to entangle
her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the peasant girl foiled the
efforts of her judges. "Do you believe," they asked, "that you are in a
state of grace?" "If I am not," she replied, "God will put me in it. If I
am, God will keep me in it." Her capture, they argued, showed that God had
forsaken her. "Since it has pleased God that I should be taken," she
answered meekly, "it is for the best." "Will you submit," they demanded at
last, "to the judgement of the Church Militant?" "I have come to the King
of France," Jeanne replied, "by commission from God and from the Church
Triumphant above: to that Church I submit." "I had far rather die," she
ended passionately, "than renounce what I have done by my Lord's command."
They deprived her of mass. "Our Lord can make me hear it without your
aid," she said, weeping. "Do your voices," asked the judges, "forbid you
to submit to the Church and the Pope?" "Ah, no! our Lord first served."
Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it was no wonder that as the long
trial dragged on and question followed question Jeanne's firmness wavered.
On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed
firmly to God. "I hold to my Judge," she said, as her earthly judges gave
sentence against her, "to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always
been my Lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had power over
me." It was only with a view to be delivered from the military prison and
transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal
abjuration of heresy. She feared in fact among the soldiery those outrages
to her honour, to guard against which she had from the first assumed the
dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime and she
abandoned it; but a renewed affront forced her to resume the one safeguard
left her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy which
doomed her to death. At the close of May, 1431, a great pile was raised in
the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the brutal
soldiers who snatched th