Canon Loyseleur—"As to those voices, did you hear them?"
Joan Darc—"Yes, Father."
Canon Loyseleur (pressingly)—"You heard them, the sacred voices? With your bodily ears?"
Joan Darc—"As clearly as I hear your voice at this moment."
Canon Loyseleur—"And you saw your saints? You saw them with your own eyes?"
Joan Darc—"As I see you."
Canon Loyseleur (delighted)—"Oh, dear daughter! Hold that language before the ecclesiastical tribunal, and you are saved! You will then escape the snare that they will spread before you."
Joan Darc—"Please explain what you mean, dear Father and protector."
Canon Loyseleur—"However perverse, however iniquitous these tribunals of blood may be, they are nevertheless composed of men who are clothed with a sacred character. These priests must save appearances towards one another and the public. Your judges will tell you with a confidential and benign air: 'Joan, you claim to have seen St. Marguerite, St. Catherine and St. Michael, the archangel; you claim to have heard their voices. Can it not have been an illusion of your senses? If so, the senses, due to their grossness, are liable to error. The Church will be slow to impute to you as a crime what may be only a carnal error.' Now, then, my poor child (the canon's features are screwed into an expression of anxious concern) if, misled by such insidious language, and thinking to see in it a means of escape, you were to answer: 'Indeed, I do not affirm that I saw the saints and the archangel, I do not affirm that I heard their voices, but I believe to have seen, I believe to have heard,' if you should say that, dear and holy child, you will be lost! (Joan makes a motion of terror) This is why: To recoil before the affirmation that you have actually seen and heard, to present the fact in the form of a doubt, would be to draw upon your head the charge of falsehood, blasphemy, and heresy in the highest degree. You would be charged (in an increasingly threatening voice) with having made sport of the most sacred things! You would be charged with having, thanks to such diabolical jugglery, deceived the people by holding yourself out as inspired by God, whom you would be outraging in a most infamous, abominable, impious manner! (In a frightful hollow voice) They would then pronounce upon you a terrible excommunication cutting you off from the Church as a gangrened, rotten, infected limb! You would thereupon be delivered to the secular arm, you would be taken to the pyre and burned alive for a heretic, an apostate, an idolater! The ashes of your body will be cast to the winds!"
Joan Darc, pale with fear, utters a piercing cry. She is terrified.