At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered with three erections—one reaching up so high that the shadow of it seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form. Two platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn. Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it matter? No sentence at all was read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which was illegal also. She was probably placed first on the same platform with her judges, where there was a pulpit from which she was to be preschée for the last time. Of all Jeanne's sufferings this could scarcely be the least, that she was always preschée, lectured, addressed, sermonised through every painful step of her career.
The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance, when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all the other members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace." Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The narrative shows that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in her career, paid no attention to the tirade levelled at her from the president's place. "She knelt down on the platform showing great signs and appearance of contrition, so that all those who looked upon her wept. She called on her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She called specially—was it with still a return towards the hoped for miracle? was it with the instinctive cry towards an old and faithful friend?—"St. Michael, St. Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would seem to have been a moment in which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying, speaking—sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen companions of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her. She asked the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say a mass for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive her. Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry of "Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?" No reason is given for the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned a campaign in Normandy with Alençon. Had there been perhaps some special hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?
There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That which her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon the saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of men. But as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop's evil voice scarcely silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient—the entire crowd, touched to its heart with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and lamentation, "à chaudes larmes" according to the graphic French expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow and fellow-feeling and impotence to help. Winchester—withdrawn high on his platform, ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a spectator merely—wept; and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon's cheeks. The very world stood still to see that white form of purity, and valour, and faith, the Maid, not shouting triumphant on the height of victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us here all day; must we dine here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain that simulated cruelty. And then the executioner stepped in and seized the victim.
It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be no chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim the atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that the ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach her: the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel explanation. There was a writing set over the little platform which gave footing to the attendants below the stake, upon which were written the following words:
JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER, BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL, DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and religion branded the Maid of France—one half of her countrymen: the other half, silent, speaking no word, looking on.
Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees, asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of her disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its broken edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried, pressing it against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross to preserve as a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold and silver. This was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few remaining steps and mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high over all that sea of heads. When she was bound securely to her stake, she asked again for a cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church, to be held before her as long as her eyes could see. Frère Isambard and Massieu, following her closely still, sent to the nearest church, and procured probably some cross which was used for processional purposes on a long staff which could be held up before her. The friar stood upon the faggots holding it up, and calling out broken words of encouragement so long that Jeanne bade him withdraw, lest the fire should catch his robes. And so at last, as the flames began to rise, she was left alone, the good brother always at the foot of the pile, painfully holding up with uplifted arms the cross that she might still see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up with the red glow of the fire, the horrified, trembling crowd like an agitated sea around. The wild flames rose and fell in sinister gleams and flashes, the smoke blew upwards, by times enveloping that white Maid standing out alone against a sky still blue and sweet with May—Pandemonium underneath, but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came a great cry from among the black fumes that began to reach the clouds: "My voices were of God! They have not deceived me!" She had seen and recognised it at last. Here it was, the miracle: the great victory that had been promised—though not with clang of swords and triumph of rescuing knights, and "St. Denis for France!"—but by the sole hand of God, a victory and triumph for all time, for her country a crown of glory and ineffable shame.
Thus died the Maid of France—with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips—till the merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat; and one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the fire, wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through the air in the good monk's trembling hands—from eyes which opened bright upon the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so long thought and dreamed.