She replied: "I cannot tell you everything. I am not permitted. The Voice is good and worthy.... To this question I am not bound to reply."
And she asked them to give her in writing the points concerning which she had not given an immediate reply.[664]
What use did she intend to make of this writing? She did not know how to read; she had no counsel. Did she want to show the document to some false friend, like Loiseleur, who was deceiving her? Or was it her intent to present it to her saints?
Maître Beaupère asked whether her Voice had a face and eyes.
She refused to answer and quoted a saying frequently on the lips of children: "One is often hanged for having spoken the truth."[665]
Maître Beaupère asked: "Do you know whether you stand in God's grace?"
This was an extremely insidious question; it placed Jeanne in the dilemma of having to avow herself sinful or of appearing unpardonably bold. One of the assessors, Maître Jean Lefèvre of the Order of the Hermit Friars, observed that she was not bound to reply. There was murmuring throughout the chamber.
But Jeanne said: "If I be not, then may God bring me into it; if I be, then may God keep me in it."[666]
The assessors were astonished at so ready an answer. And yet no improvement ensued in their disposition towards her. They admitted that touching her King she spoke well, but for the rest she was too subtle, and with a subtlety peculiar to women.[667]
Thereafter, Maître Jean Beaupère examined Jeanne concerning her childhood in her village. He essayed to show that she had been cruel, had displayed a homicidal tendency from her earliest years, and had been addicted to those idolatrous practices which had given the folk of Domremy a bad name.[668]