and 'devilish arts,' were
freely used. Joan of Arc was declared in this preamble to be
'abominable in the eyes of God and man'; a violator of all
laws--divine, ecclesiastical and natural. To sum up all the epithets,
she was termed 'heretical, or, at any rate, strongly suspected of
being so.' This accusation, the most awful that those cruel times
held, must have sounded to all those men present as the heroine's
knell of doom.

Then followed the thirty articles of accusation. Never, indeed, had a
short but well filled career, bright with glorious deeds, undertaken
for King and fatherland--never had such a life (for no life ever
approached that of the Maid's) been so ludicrously, so violently and
wilfully misrepresented. Her most innocent words and actions were
turned into accusations of sorcery, witchcraft, vice, and every kind
of wickedness. Her harmless and pure youth was made to appear a
childhood of sorcery and idolatrous superstition; she was accused in
her earliest years of having trafficked with evil spirits: it was
alleged that she had consorted with witches; that she had frequented
places where spirits and fairies best loved to congregate; that she
had taken part in sacrilegious dancing; that she had suspended wreaths
on the trees in honour of these rural spirits; that she had carried
hidden about her person a plant called Mandragora, hoping by it to
obtain good luck; that she had left her parents against their will to
go to Neufchateau, and lived in that place among a debauched set of
people: that in consequence of all these wicked acts, a youth who
intended marrying her had not done so. Then, having left not a stage
or an act of her innocent girlhood unblasted, and covered with the
slime of the Bishop's reptile-like imagination, her acts when with the
King were reviewed. She had promised Charles to slay all the English
in France; her cruelty and love of bloodshed were insatiable; she had
influenced Charles by acts of magic; her banners and her rings were
bewitched; she was schismatic, and doubted as to which was the right
Pope; and, in spite of this, she had the wickedness to inform the Earl
of Armagnac which of the two Popes he was to believe the genuine. Of
all this long tissue of crimes laid to her charge, that of wearing a
man's dress was made the most heinous; for the Almighty had made it a
crime abominable to Himself, that woman should wear man's dress. Now,
not only had the prisoner committed this sin,