Militant, and threatening her with the
loss of body and soul in this world and the next if she still refused
to do so.

Joan of Arc was as unmoved and as firm when thus threatened as she had
been when placed before the instruments of torture, and she replied:--

'If I were to see the fire itself, the stake, and the executioner
ready to light the pile, and were I in the midst of the flames, I
should not say anything else than what I have already spoken during
the trial, and this is my determination, even unto my death!'

There is some probability for believing that, during the following
evening after this last meeting of Joan of Arc and her judges,
Loiseleur gained admittance to the prisoner, and, under the disguise
of a friendly and sympathetic priest, promised Joan that if she would
conform to the wishes of the judges, she should be taken out of the
prison she now lay in and the custody of the English, and transferred
to prisons belonging to the Church.

Poor Joan's chief desire was that she might be set free from the hands
of the English. Be this as it may, there is no authority given for
this idea of Loiseleur having probed her on this point; and Wallon, in
his history of the Maid, makes no allusion to such an interview, and
only states that John Beaupere went in the morning of the 24th to the
prison, and he was soon followed there by Nicolas Loiseleur, who
vehemently urged on Joan to comply with the demands which the judges
had made.

Nothing had been neglected to give the greatest solemnity to the cruel
farce which Cauchon had prepared to be now enacted--a solemnity by
which the Bishop hoped to degrade Joan of Arc in the eyes of the
people. It was that of obliging the prisoner to make a public apology
and recantation of all her deeds--a declaration in fact to be made by
her in the eyes of the whole world that all she had undertaken and
accomplished had been through and by the aid of evil spirits.

By this stroke the Bishop hoped to show to France that its heroine,
instead of being a sainted and holy maid sent by God to deliver her
country from the invader, was, by her own open and public confession,
proved to be an emanation from Satan--a being abhorrent in the eyes of
God and man. By this device, Cauchon hoped also to deal a blow to
Charles, for when once it became known that his servant and saviour
was a creature in league with the fiends, all the works done through
her influence, and by her prowess, incl