“You shameful woman,” shouted D’Estivet. “You have been eating herring, and other unwholesomeness.”[29]
“I have not,” answered Jeanne, summoning all her strength to have it out with him.
The doctors felt her pulse and found some fever. They reported to Earl Warwick that she should be bled.
“Away with your bleeding,” cried he. “She is artful, and might kill herself.”
Nevertheless, they bled her and she grew better. As soon as she was somewhat recovered Cauchon proceeded with his “charitable admonitions.”
“We have come to bring you consolation in your suffering,” he said. “Wise and learned men have scrutinized your answers concerning the faith which have seemed to them perilous. But you are only a poor, illiterate woman, and we come to offer you learned and wise men, watchful and honest, who will give you, as is their duty, the knowledge which you have not. Take heed to our words, for if you be obstinate, consulting 364 only your own unschooled brain, we must abandon you. You see to what peril you expose yourself, and it is this we would avoid for you with all the power of our affection.”
“I thank you for what you say to me for my good,” answered Jeanne wearily. “It seems to me, seeing how ill I am, that I am in great danger of death. If it be that God do His pleasure on me, I ask of you that I may have my confession and my Saviour also, and that I may be put in holy ground.”
“If you desire to have the rites and Sacraments of the Church,” said Cauchon, “you must do as good Catholics ought to do, and submit to Holy Church.”
“I can say no other thing to you,” she said, turning from them. Then they exhorted her powerfully, citing chapter and verse from the Scriptures, telling her finally that if she would not obey and submit to the Church she would be abandoned as a “Saracen.”
“I am a good Christian,” she told them. “I have been baptized; I shall die a good Christian. I love God; I serve Him. I wish to help and sustain the Church with all my power.” And that being all they could get from her they left her for the time being.