Evading her jailers one day, she leapt from the tower, a height of sixty feet. Wonderful to relate, no bones were broken, but she was found insensible, and taken back to prison. For several days she could neither eat nor drink. Then, she told her judges later, St. Catherine comforted her, bidding her make confession and ask God's forgiveness for the leap. The saint told her that Compiègne would be relieved before Martinmas, as in fact came to pass.
"Then," she says, "I revived, and took food, and soon was well."
She denied having expected death from the leap: she had hoped to escape, partly to help Compiègne, partly because she was sold to the English.
"I would rather die," she said, "than fall into the hands of my English enemies."
She was to do both. English and French were of one mind. The former were headed (in this matter) by the Earl of Warwick, the latter by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. This man had been disappointed, through Joan's successes, in certain private ambitions. He pursued her from first to last with incredible fury and persistence; it was through his efforts that John of Luxembourg was enabled to sell her (despite the earnest prayers of the aged Jeanne de Luxembourg) to England for ten thousand livres; it was he who conducted her trial and brought her to her death.
From Beaurevoir she was taken to Arras; thence, after one night at the castle of Drugy, to Crotoy by the sea: and so, in November of 1430, she came to Rouen.
They took her to the old castle built by Philip Augustus in 1205; used in the days of the English occupation as a prison for "prisoners of war and treasonable felons." Of this structure, with its six towers, demi-tower and donjon, only one vestige remains, the "Tour Jeanne d'Arc," a bulk of solid masonry one hundred feet high, forty feet in diameter, with walls twelve feet thick. You may visit it to-day; may stand in the dark cell, and see the iron cage in which, according to some authorities, the Maid was at first confined. During most of the time she was chained to a log of wood, her fetters loosened only when she was taken into court. She was guarded day and night by English men-at-arms, most of them common and brutal soldiers. She had no moment of solitude, no shadow of privacy. Her days were anguish, her nights terror; yet though her gaolers jeered, bullied, baited her with every foul jest and bitter insult, she kept the virgin treasure of her soul and of her body.
One day the Earls of Stafford and Warwick came to see her, and with them John of Luxembourg who sold her, and Haimond de Macy. The latter tells of the interview, saying that Luxembourg offered to ransom her if she would swear never to bear arms again.
"In God's name, you mock me!" said the Maid. "I know well that you have neither the will nor the power."
Luxembourg repeating his offer, she put him aside with: "I know these English will put me to death, thinking to win the kingdom of France when I am no more. But were they a hundred thousand more Godons than they are, they should not have the kingdom."