"Joan, kneel down, to receive in a humble posture the excommunication and sentence that Monseigneur the Bishop of Beauvais is to pronounce upon you."
Joan Darc kneels down in the dust at the foot of the platform that is covered with purple. Bishop Peter Cauchon rises, bows to the Cardinal of Winchester, and advances to the edge of the platform.
From the ranks of the English soldiers the cries are heard:
"The devil take any further prayers!"
"On with the execution!"
"Is it a new scheme to keep the strumpet from roasting? We have had enough dilly-dallying!"
"Look out, Bishop! You shall not cheat us this time!"
"To the pyre, without further ado! To the pyre with the sorceress! Death to the girl or to the Bishop!"
Bishop Cauchon silences the growing tumult with a significant gesture and says in a sonorous voice: "My very dear brothers, if a member suffers, the apostle said to the Corinthians, the whole body suffers. Thus when heresy infects one member of our holy Church, it is urgent to separate it from all others, lest its rottenness contaminate the mystical body of our Lord. The sacred institutions have decided, my very dear brothers, that, in order to free the faithful from the poison of the heretics, these vipers may not be allowed to devour the bosom of our mother the Church. Wherefore we, Bishop of Beauvais, by divine grace, assisted by the learned and very reverend John Lemaitre and John Graverant, Inquisitors of the faith, say to you Joan, commonly styled the Maid:—We justly pronounced you idolatrous, a soothsayer, an invoker of devils, bloodthirsty, dissolute, schismatic and heretic. You abjured your crimes and voluntarily signed this abjuration with your own hand. But you quickly returned to your damnable errors, like the dog returns to his vomit. On account of this do we now excommunicate you and pronounce you a relapsed heretic. We sentence you to be extirpated from the midst of the faithful like a rotten, leprous member, and we deliver you, and abandon you, and cast you off into the hands of secular justice, and request it that, apart from your death and the mutilation of your members, it treat you with moderation!"
The sentence is received with an explosion of shouts of ferocious joy. The English soldiers signify their satisfaction. The mob looks at Joan Darc with horror. One of the assessors descends from the platform and speaks to Isambard in a low voice, whereupon the latter turns to Joan: