She invoked the blessed Trinity, the blessed Virgin Mary, and all the saints of Paradise. She called pleadingly upon her own St. Michael for help and to aid her “in devotion, lamentation, and true confession of faith.” Very humbly she begged forgiveness of all men whether of her party or the other. She asked the priests present to say a mass for her soul, and all 382 whom she might have offended to forgive her, and declared that what she had done, good or bad, she alone was to answer.
And as she knelt, weeping and praying, the entire crowd, touched to the heart, broke into a burst of weeping and lamentation. Winchester wept, and the judges wept. Pierre Cauchon was overwhelmed with emotion. Here and there an English soldier laughed, and suddenly a hoarse voice cried:
“You priests, are you going to keep us here all day?”
Without any formal sentence, the Bailiff of Rouen waved his hand, saying, “Away with her.”
Jeanne was seized roughly by the soldiers and dragged to the steps of the stake. There she asked for a cross. One of the English soldiers who kept the way took a piece of staff, broke it across his knees in unequal parts, and, binding them hurriedly together, handed to her. She thanked him brokenly, took it, and kissing it pressed it against her bosom. She then prayed Massieu to bring a cross from the church that she might look upon it through the smoke.
From the church of Saint Saviour a tall cross was brought, and Brother Isambard held it before her to the end; for she said:
“Hold it high before me until the moment of death, that the cross on which God is hanging may be continually before my eyes.”
Then bravely as she had climbed the scaling ladders at Orléans and Jargeau the Maid ascended the steps of the scaffold to the stake. The good priest, Isambard, accompanied her with words of consolation. As she was being bound to the stake she looked her last upon the towers and hills of the fair city, and again the cry escaped her lips:
“Ah, Rouen! I greatly fear that you shall suffer for my death.”