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When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and pronounced the prisoner's fate.
We had followed in the wake of Cauchon, the Vice-Inquisitor, and the others six or eight and when I saw Joan sitting there, despondent, forlorn, and still in chains, when I was expecting to find her situation so different, I did not know what to make of it. The shock was very great. I had doubted the relapse perhaps; possibly I had believed in it, but had not realized it.
'Some words it had said which I did not clearly comprehend; but when fully awake I understood it to tell me to answer boldly. Then, emboldened as it seemed by the recollection of that voice, she turned to Cauchon and exclaimed, 'You, Bishop, you tell me that you are my judge have a care how you act, for in truth I am sent by God, and your position is one of great peril.
That was an answer which sums up the whole folly and crime of obtaining evidence by means of torture, and recalls Galileo's famous phrase when in a somewhat similar situation. Cauchon then again ordered Joan to tell them of her revelations, and asked her if she had again sought counsel from her voices. She had, answered Joan. 'And have they, asked the Bishop, 'foretold what will now happen?
A religious lady, to whom he communicated these reflections, could see no force in them whatever. "It was God's will," said she. But he knew it was by God's will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by God's will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate.
The first move that Bedford now was obliged to take was to secure the victim; and in order to do so the Bishop of Beauvais was applied to. The name of Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, will go down to the latest posterity with the execration of humanity, for the part he played in the tragedy of the worst of judicial murders of which any record exists. Let us give even the devil his due.
Joan cut in with a nonchalant "Passez outre," and Cauchon retired from the struggle; but he retired with some credit this time, for he offered a compromise, and Joan, always clear-headed, saw protection for herself in it and promptly and willingly accepted it. She was to swear to tell the truth "as touching the matters et down in the proces verbal."
Cauchon, however, waited the arrival of Winchester, bringing with him his great-nephew, Henry VI. Winchester arrived with the boy-king on the 2nd of December.
Joan's eyes kindled, and she rose; rose and stood, fine and noble, and faced toward the Bishop and said: "Take care what you do, my lord, you who are my judge, for you take a terrible responsibility on yourself and you presume too far." It made a great stir, and Cauchon burst out upon her with an awful threat the threat of instant condemnation unless she obeyed.
If Paris was disappointed at not having so interesting a trial carried on before its courts, there was compensation in the fact that many doctors of the University were called to assist Cauchon in his examination of the Maid, and to bring her, witch, sorceress, heretic, whatever she might be, to question. These doctors were not undistinguished or unworthy men.
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