The bishop ordered a citation to be drawn up, summoning Joan to appear next morning in the Old Market Place of Rouen, to receive her final sentence. She did not hear her doom that night (May 30, 1431), but the grave faces and grave words of the monks showed her the dreadful reality, and for a little while youth and womanhood and human weakness had their own way with her. She wept piteously.
"Alas," she cried, "will they treat me so horribly and cruelly? Must my body be consumed to-day and turned to ashes? Ah! I would sooner seven times be beheaded than be burnt! Oh, I appeal to God, the great Judge, against the wrong and injustice done to me!"
While she was thus lamenting Cauchon came in, with Pierre Maurice, and two or three others. Seeing him, she cried:
"Bishop, I die by you!"
Maurice looked kindly at her as he went, and she said to him:
"Master Pierre, where shall I be to-night?"
"Have you not a good hope in God?" he asked.
"Ah, yes, and by God's grace, I shall be in Paradise."
She received the sacrament with tears, and with deep penitence and devotion. Thenceforth her faith was unshaken, and she failed no more.
Next morning at nine o'clock she left the prison, clothed now in a woman's long gown, and wearing a mitre, inscribed with the words, Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolatress. A cart was waiting for her, and she got into it, accompanied by Brother Martin and the usher Massieu. A guard of about eight hundred soldiers surrounded her to keep off the crowd, but suddenly there rushed through their ranks a haggard and miserable figure. It was Nicolaus Loyseleur, who, seized by late and vain remorse, had come to ask forgiveness of her whom he had betrayed. But before he could reach her, the soldiers drove him back, and Joan probably neither saw nor heard him, for she was weeping and praying, her head bowed upon her hands.