On May 24th she had signed her act of submission and had put aside the costume forbidden by the Church. On the morning of the 27th, when she wished to rise and dress herself, the guard had taken away her robes and left but the old forbidden garments. She expostulated, and at first refused to get up; but being at length constrained to do so, she put on the man's apparel. The wolf had made good and sufficient pretext for devouring the lamb; technically, Jeanne might be considered to have relapsed, and with the old dress to have resumed the old faults reprobated by Holy Church.
The judges were at once notified of Jeanne's disobedience, and Cauchon rejoiced that "she was caught." The next day, being Monday after Trinity, he returned to interrogate the prisoner upon the matter of the change of dress. Her courage had returned with the realization that they had not dealt fairly with her and meant to find pretexts for her destruction. She would neither excuse herself for again assuming her warrior garments nor consent to return to those prescribed by custom for her sex. As long as she was guarded by men, she said, it was more seemly and more safe that she should be dressed as a man; if they would put her in a safe and proper prison, she would submit to whatever the Church decreed. But Cauchon knew that her death was deemed requisite by his English friends, and he was determined to give her no such fair opportunity. On Tuesday a fresh tribunal was hastily constituted to pass upon the deplorable relapse into error of one for whom, to shield her from death, the Church had done all that in it lay. Needless to say, this tribunal, a mere mockery of a court, decided on the evidence submitted that Jeanne was guilty of fatal disobedience to the Church and that she must suffer death as a heretic. It was to be but a step from passing sentence to the execution of that sentence, for Cauchon's masters were already impatient at the long delay.
The next morning a priest was sent to Jeanne to notify her of the sentence. One sudden burst of feeling, half fear, half indignation, for a moment overwhelmed the courage of the girl. She wept bitterly when told that she must prepare herself to die by fire that very day: "Alas! will they treat me so cruelly and horribly! Must my body, pure as from birth, never corrupted or soiled in sin, be this day consumed and reduced to ashes! Oh, oh! I had rather be beheaded seven times over than burnt on this wise.... Oh! I appeal to God, the great Judge of all, for the wrongs and injuries done me!" And then this heretic, this sorceress, asked that she be allowed to confess and to receive the Communion, that holy symbol of the universal brotherhood of the followers of Christ. Cauchon did not, perhaps dared not, deny her this; but he wished to divest the ceremony of part of its pomp. When the Eucharist was brought to him without stole and without lights, the courageous monk Martin l'Advenu refused to administer it thus, and sent a complaint to the cathedral; whereupon the chapter, always ready to spite Cauchon, sent an escort of priests and acolytes, who chanted litanies as they passed through the streets and conjured the kneeling people to pray for Jeanne.
By nine o'clock the victim had received the Communion, and was dressed in female attire and placed on a cart, ready to start for the place of execution. Brother Martin and the merciful Austin friar Isambart accompanied her on that dreadful journey of the cart through the streets of Rouen to the old fish market. If there had been any tendency to sympathetic manifestations on the part of the crowd, the guard of eight hundred English soldiers would have sufficed to suppress them; and Jeanne, who had now given up hope of deliverance, of succor from her king, from her divine guardians, was heard only to ejaculate: "Rouen, Rouen! must I then die here?" In the market place had been erected two platforms, one for the cardinal and dignitaries, the other for the prisoner, the bailli, the judges, and the preacher who was to enhance the bitterness of death by rehearsing the particulars of her guilt. But what is that lofty scaffolding of wood and plaster standing apart? It is the altar upon which the sacrifice is to be offered, built high that all may see the tortures of an innocent maid as the flames mount rapidly up its flimsy mass. A sermon began the proceedings, the eloquent Master Nicholas Mildy outdoing himself upon the text: "When one limb of the Church is sick, the whole Church is sick." After him came that pitiful tool, the Bishop of Beauvais, who exhorted Jeanne to repentance and to forgiveness of her enemies. There was small need of this, for Jeanne knelt and prayed so humbly, so earnestly, so pitifully, that all were moved to tears, while she asked the priests to pray for her soul and to say a Mass for her. Then Cauchon, in spite of his tears, read to her the act of condemnation, concluding: "Therefore, we pronounce you to be a rotten limb, and as such to be lopped off from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power, praying it at the same time to mitigate its sentence, and to spare you death, and the mutilation of your members." The unblushing hypocrisy of this recommendation to mercy, with the pyre already reared in full sight of all, could only be surpassed by that of the diabolical fiction of ecclesiastical law as administered by the Inquisition; viz., that Holy Church executed no capital sentence, merely handed its victim over to the "secular arm."
So now Jeanne, no longer under the merciful protection of the Church, was delivered over to the civil authorities and conducted to the top of the pyre. She asked for a cross; a tender-hearted Englishman handed her two sticks which he had hastily fashioned into a rude cross, and Jeanne kissed the simple emblem and put it in her bosom. But Isambart fetched a crucifix for her from the very altar of the neighboring church of Saint-Sauveur, and this she kissed passionately, desiring him to hold it aloft where she might see it to the last as the smoke and flame mounted. Isambart ascended the pile with her, and the executioner fastened her body to the post in the centre. With her eyes fixed upon the image of Him who died for the world, mayhap she did not note the lying placard above her head: "Heretic, relapser, apostate, idolater." In this hour of supreme trial no moment of fatal weakness came to deprive her of our absolute admiration. She spoke no word of deserved reproach against her rude executioners, against the soldiers who had hustled her across the market place, against the miserable Charles for whom she suffered all these tortures and who had abandoned her. "Whether I have done well, or whether I have done ill, my King is not to blame; it was not he who counselled me." Even the miserable Cauchon was greeted, as he hovered about the foot of the pile to catch her last words, with nothing more bitter than: "Bishop! Bishop! I die through you!... Had you confined me in the prisons of the Church, this would not have happened."
While the good monk lingers by her side, pouring into that saintly ear such words of comfort and hope as faith may suggest, the executioner applies his torch and Jeanne sees the flames rush upward. "Jesus!" she cries, then exhorts the monk, "Fly, father! and when the flame shall cover me hold aloft the crucifix, that I may see it as I die, and repeat for me your holy words until the end." She thought of others, not of herself, even in this hour: who shall impugn her courage, or say she knew not how to die as nobly as she had lived? In the first spasm of pain, as the flames touched her body, she shrieked. After this but a few broken sentences came to the ears of those at the foot of the pile, sometimes appeals to the saints who had guided her, sometimes a despairing cry of anguish not to be suppressed. And then in the midst of the gathering flames they saw her head fall forward on her breast as she moaned, "Jesus!"
The voice that had aroused France from her lethargy was hushed forever; the great spirit of Jeanne d'Arc had gone to God, whence it came. Shall we stand by the smoking pyre till the last embers turn gray and cold, till Winchester orders the handful of ashes that remained to be swept into the Seine? Or shall we turn away, sick with horror, filled already with vain regret of the deed done, as did many in that dense crowd of her enemies? "We have burnt a saint!" cries one. "I saw a dove fly from her mouth and wing its way to heaven!" avers another.
Those who are actors in what the world learns to designate as great historical crises seldom realize the magnitude of the events of which they are immediate witnesses. In spite of the superstitious terror of a few and the pity of many, it is probable that not one in the great crowd hurrying away from the scene of Jeanne d'Arc's martyrdom realized that she was a martyr or that the cause for which she had died was near its hour of triumph. Their fear was but of one whom they deemed a favored ally of the powers of evil; their pity was but for one whom they deemed a simple girl, and for whose anguish they grieved as they would have grieved for that of their own daughters or sisters. The pity of it, that one so young, so gentle, so innocent of worldly taint should suffer this cruel death! After all, 'this is the truest compassion, dispensed with even justice, without regard to person or rank, without thought as to whether the sufferer be the repentant thief or the Divine Master upon the Cross, the nameless woman taken in adultery or this girl of Lorraine who was to be acknowledged as the greatest woman in French history. Yet for us the knowledge that heartless political schemers had tortured to the death a woman becomes knowledge of far more moment when we know that Jeanne d'Arc was the woman, and our indignation against her persecutors is enhanced in proportion to our estimate of the greatness and the goodness of the heroine.
In the course of our narrative we have taken occasion, from time to time, to present estimates of the character of Jeanne d'Arc; perhaps it may be well, now that her meteoric career has ended in the flames of the market place of Rouen, to consider once more the character of this heroine in its main features. The results of her activity in French history, though not in all cases immediately apparent, were so marvellous that our judgment may well be unduly influenced. On the one hand, in our desire to emphasize the extraordinary nature of her deeds, we may tend to depreciate the actual abilities of Jeanne; on the other, the glory of the deeds may blind us to the shortcomings of the woman.
In her own day, and especially after her death, her contemporaries in France had begun to regard her as a saint, and a veritable cult of Jeanne d'Arc soon grew up, encrusting the simple facts of her story with endless and fantastic arabesques of legend. Charles VII., who had abandoned the woman in her hour of need, who had made no earnest effort to succor the leader to whom he owed his crown, entered with considerable energy and enthusiasm into the cult of the saint. It was due to his initiative that, in 1455, Pope Calixtus III. gave order that Jeanne's trial be revised. It was at best but cold and tardy gratitude on Charles's part, this rehabilitation of the memory of the girl whom he had used and then dropped when she was no longer serviceable; but we must in justice say that he in every way furthered the investigation into the facts of an episode in his life which he must have now regarded with poignant regret and shame, more poignant as the glory of the lost heroine was brought into full light. In this exhaustive inquiry into the career of Jeanne d'Arc witnesses from far and near were examined and documents rescued from oblivion, and at the end of the eight months' proceedings the new court, with a mass of testimony before it which fills volumes, reversed the partisan decision of the court of Rouen, acquitted the heroine of the false charges brought against her, and not only vindicated her honor, but pronounced favorably upon her claims to sanctity. Jeanne was already canonized in popular imagination, and though the official sanction of Rome was long in the granting, in the hearts of all France she had a veneration far more precious than any ever vouchsafed to a saint.