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For my part, when I have been where gentlemen and captains lamented the slaying of Franquet d'Arras, and justified the dealings of the English with the Maid, I have seemed to hear the clamour of the cruel Jews: "Tolle hunc, et dimitte nobis Barabbam." For Barabbas was a robber. Howbeit on this matter, as on all, I humbly submit me to the judgment of my superiors and to Holy Church.
She was asked if she paid money to the captor of Franquet. 'I am not treasurer of France, to pay such moneys, she answered haughtily. Probably Franquet deserved to die, but a trial by his enemies was not likely to be a fair trial. At Lagny the Maid left a gentler memory. She was very fond of children, and had a girl's love of babies.
Whatever the source of her Voices was, she believed in what they said. She rode to fight with far worse than death under shield before her eyes, knowing certainly that her English foes would take her, they who had often threatened to burn her. There was in these parts a robber chief on the Burgundian side named Franquet d'Arras.
"Then it was not that sword which you wore in the field of Compiegne? What sword did you wear there?" "The sword of the Burgundian Franquet d'Arras, whom I took prisoner in the engagement at Lagny. I kept it because it was a good war-sword good to lay on stout thumps and blows with."
Bigot, who was in Quebec, had occasion to go to Montreal to meet the Governor; and this official journey was turned into a pleasure excursion, of which the King paid all the costs. Those favored with invitations, a privilege highly prized, were Franquet, with seven or eight military officers and a corresponding number of ladies, including the wife of Major Pean, of whom Bigot was enamoured.
Yet men murmured against the Maid not only in their hearts, but openly, and many men-at-arms ceased to love her cause, both for the slaying of Franquet d'Arras, and because she was for putting away the leaguer-lasses, and, when she might, would suffer no plundering.
But Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted criminal, robber, and destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have departed from the military laws of right and wrong while everything in the country was under the hasty arbitration of war. No one, however, so far as we know, produces this matter of Franquet as a precedent in her own case.
M. Marin points out that, in the first place, Flavy's character was a notoriously bad one; secondly, that he was very possibly under the influence of both La Tremoïlle and the Chancellor Regnault de Chartres, bitter opponents, as we have already shown, of the Maid; thirdly, that it was in Flavy's interest that the prestige of saving Compiègne from the Burgundians and English should be entirely owing to his own conduct; and fourthly, that he, Flavy, with the majority of the French officers, was affected against Joan of Arc since the execution of Franquet d'Arras.
It was at Lagny that an incident occurred which formed one of the accusations brought against the Maid by her judges, and to which reference may now be made. A freebooter, named Franquet d'Arras, had, at the head of a band of about three hundred English freelances, held all the country-side in terror round about Lagny.
The Maid had been sent, as she said, to help the poor who were oppressed by these brigands. Hearing that Franquet, with three or four hundred men-at-arms, was near Lagny-sur-Marne, the Maid rode out to seek him with four hundred French and Scots. The fight is described in one way by Monstrelet, in another by Cagny and Joan herself.
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