She forwarded to the English leaders a touching invitation to unite with the French, as brothers in a common crusade against infidels, thus opening the road for a soldierly retreat. She interposed to protect the captive or the wounded—she threw herself off her horse to kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his situation allowed. She sheltered the English, that invoked her aid, in her own quarters.
On the day when she had finished her work, she wept; for she knew that, when her triumphal task was done, her end must be approaching. Her aspirations pointed only to a place, which seemed to her more than usually full of natural piety, as one in which it would give her pleasure to die. And she uttered, between smiles and tears, as a wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, a broken prayer that God would return her to the solitudes from which he had drawn her, and suffer her to become a shepherdess once more.
It was a half fantastic prayer, because, from childhood upwards, visions that she had no power to mistrust, and the voices which sounded in her ear forever, had long since persuaded her mind that for her no such prayer could be granted.
All went wrong from this time. More than one military plan was entered upon which she did not approve. At length she was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally surrendered to the English.
Now came her trial. Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defense, and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God’s lightning, and true as God’s lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!
On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before midday, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air currents.
What else, I demand, than mere weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke the vast line of battle then arrayed against her? What else but her meek, saintly demeanor won, from the enemies that till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration? What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier—who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold, as his tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow—suddenly to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood?
What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy! And if this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers.
Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave her to God.
The shepherd girl that had delivered France—she, from her dungeon, she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her last dream—saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter festival, which man had denied to her languishing heart—that resurrection of springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests—were by God given back into her hands, as jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers.