'Nothing more?' queried Cauchon.
'If they made me another promise,' Joan replied, 'I am not at liberty to say what that promise is till three months are past.'
'Did they say that you would be free in three months' time?'
That question remained unanswered, but before those three months had passed, the heroine had been delivered by death from all earthly sufferings.
She was again minutely questioned regarding the superstitions of her country. Was there not growing there a certain fabulous plant, called Mandragora? Joan of Arc knew nothing regarding such a plant—had never seen it, and did not know the use of it. Again the apparitions were brought forward.
'What was Saint Michel like? Was he clothed?'
'Do you think,' was the answer to this question, which could only have occurred to a foul-minded priest, 'do you think that God cannot clothe him?'
Other absurd questions followed—as to his hair; long or short? Had he a pair of scales with him? As before, Joan of Arc answered these futile, and sometimes indecent, questions with her wonderful patience. At one moment she could not help exclaiming how supremely happy the sight of her saints made her; it seemed as if a sudden vision of her beloved saints had been vouchsafed her in the midst of that crowd of persecuting priests.
She was again told to tell what the sign or secret was which she had revealed to the King on first seeing him at Chinon; but about this she was firm as adamant, and refused to give any information. To reveal that sign or secret would, she felt, be not only a breach of confidence and disloyalty between her and her King, but a crime to divulge a sacred secret, which Charles kept sealed in his breast, and which she was determined to utter to no one, and least of all to his enemies.
'I have already said,' she told her judges, 'that you will have nothing from me about that. Go and ask the King!'