On the morrow, Wednesday, the 14th of March, there were two more examinations in the prison. The morning interrogatory turned on the leap from Beaurevoir. She confessed to having leapt without permission from her Voices, preferring to die rather than to fall into the hands of the English.[772]
She was accused of blasphemy against God; but that was false.[773]
The Bishop intervened: "You have said that we, the Lord Bishop, run great danger by bringing you to trial. Of what danger were you speaking? In what peril do we stand, we, your judges, and others?"
"I said to my Lord of Beauvais: 'You declare that you are my judge, I know not if you be. But take heed that ye judge not wrongly, for thus would ye run great danger; and I warn you, so that if Our Lord chastise you for it, I have done my duty by warning you.'"
"What is this peril or this danger?"
"Saint Catherine has told me that I shall have succour. I know not whether it will be my deliverance from prison, or whether, during the trial, some tumult shall arise whereby I shall be delivered. I think it will be either one or the other. My Voices most often tell me I shall be delivered by a great victory. And afterwards they say to me: 'Be thou resigned, grieve not at thy martyrdom; thou shalt come in the end to the kingdom of Paradise.' This do my Voices say unto me simply and absolutely. I mean to say without fail. And I call my martyrdom the trouble and anguish I suffer in prison. I know not whether still greater sufferings are before me, but I wait on the Lord."[774]
It would seem that thus her Voices promised the Maid at once a spiritual and a material deliverance, but the two could hardly occur together. This reply, expressive alike of fear and of illusion, was one to call forth pity from the hardest; and yet her judges regarded it merely as a means whereby they might entrap her. Feigning to understand that from her revelations she derived a heretical confidence in her eternal salvation, the examiner put to her an old question in a new form. She had already given it a saintly answer. He inquired whether her Voices had told her that she would finally come to the kingdom of Paradise if she continued in the assurance that she would be saved and not condemned in Hell. To this she replied with that perfect faith with which her Voices inspired her: "I believe what my Voices have told me touching my salvation as strongly as if I were already in Paradise."
Such a reply was heretical. The examiner, albeit he was not accustomed to discuss the Maid's replies, could not forbear remarking that this one was of great importance.[775]
Accordingly in the afternoon of that same day, she was shown a consequence of her error; to wit, that if she received from her Voices the assurance of eternal salvation she needed not to confess.[776]
On this occasion Jeanne was questioned touching the affair of Franquet d'Arras. The Bailie of Senlis had done wrong in asking the Maid for her prisoner,[777] the Lord Franquet,[778] in order to put him to death, and Jeanne's judges now incriminated her.