'They speak to me in soft and beautiful French voices,' she said.
'Does not Saint Margaret speak in English?'
'How should she,' was the answer, 'when she is not on the side of the English?'
'Do they wear ear-rings?'
This Joan could not say; but the idiotic question reminded the prisoner that Cauchon had taken a ring from her. She had worn two—one had been taken by the Burgundians when she was captured, the other by the Bishop. The former had been given her by her parents, the latter by one of her brothers. This ring she asked Cauchon to give the Church.
'Had she not,' she was asked, 'made use of these rings to heal the sick?'
She had never done so.
It is very easy throughout all these questionings to see how eager Cauchon and the other judges were to find some acknowledgment from the lips of Joan of Arc, upon which they could found a charge of heresy against her. Her visions were distorted by them into a proof of infernal agency; even the harmless superstitions of her village home did not escape being turned into idolatrous and infernal matters of belief.
Had not her saints, questioned the Bishop, appeared to her beneath the haunted oak of Domremy?—and what had they promised her besides the re-establishment of Charles upon the throne?
'They promised,' she answered, 'to take me with them to Paradise, which I had prayed them to do.'