oan. It was a canon of Rouen, Nicholas Loiseleur, whom the
Bishop of Beauvais had placed near her, and who had abused the confidence
she had shown him. Beside himself with despair, he wished to ask pardon
of her; but the English soldiers drove him back with violence and with
the epithet of traitor, and but for the intervention of the Earl of
Warwick his life would have been in danger. Joan wept and prayed; and
the crowd, afar off, wept and prayed with her. On arriving at the place,
she listened in silence to a sermon by one of the doctors of the court,
who ended by saying, "Joan, go in peace; the Church can no longer defend
thee; she gives thee over to the secular arm." The laic judges, Raoul
Bouteillier, baillie of Rouen, and his lieutenant, Peter Daron, were
alone qualified to pronounce sentence of death; but no time was given
them. The priest Massieu was still continuing his exhortations to Joan,
but "How now! priest," was the cry from amidst the soldiery, "are you
going to make us dine here?" "Away with her! Away with her!" said the
baillie to the guards; and to the executioner, "Do thy duty." When she
came to the stake, Joan knelt down completely absorbed in prayer. She
had begged Massieu to get her a cross; and an Englishman present made one
out of a little stick, and handed it to the French heroine, who took it,
kissed it, and laid it on her breast. She begged brother Isambard de la
Pierre to go and fetch the cross from the church of St. Sauveur, the
chief door of which opened on the Vieux-Marche, and to hold it "upright
before her eyes till the coming of death, in order," she said, "that the
cross whereon God hung might, as long as she lived, be continually in her
sight;" and her wishes were fulfilled. She wept over her country and the
spectators as well as over herself. "Rouen, Rouen," she cried, "is it
here that I must die? Shalt thou be my last resting-place? I fear
greatly thou wilt have to suffer for my death." It is said that the aged
Cardinal of Winchester and the Bishop of Beauvais himself could not
stifle their emotion--and, peradventure, their tears. The executioner
set fire to the fagots. When Joan perceived the flames rising, she urged
her confessor, the Dominican brother, Martin Ladvenu, to go down, at the
same time asking him to keep holding the cross up high in front of her,
that she might never cease to see it. The same monk, when questioned
four and twenty years later, at the reh