shed, to find its work baffling and difficult instead
of simple and easy, but it had powerful allies in the shape of hunger,
cold, fatigue, persecution, deception, and treachery; and opposed to
this array nothing but a defenseless and ignorant girl who must some
time or other surrender to bodily and mental exhaustion or get caught in
one of the thousand traps set for her.

And had the court made no progress during these seemingly resultless
sittings? Yes. It had been feeling its way, groping here, groping there,
and had found one or two vague trails which might freshen by and by and
lead to something. The male attire, for instance, and the visions and
Voices. Of course no one doubted that she had seen supernatural beings
and been spoken to and advised by them. And of course no one doubted
that by supernatural help miracles had been done by Joan, such as
choosing out the King in a crowd when she had never seen him before, and
her discovery of the sword buried under the altar. It would have been
foolish to doubt these things, for we all know that the air is full of
devils and angels that are visible to traffickers in magic on the one
hand and to the stainlessly holy on the other; but what many and perhaps
most did doubt was, that Joan's visions, Voices, and miracles came from
God. It was hoped that in time they could be proven to have been of
satanic origin. Therefore, as you see, the court's persistent fashion
of coming back to that subject every little while and spooking around it
and prying into it was not to pass the time--it had a strictly business
end in view.

9 Her Sure Deliverance Foretold

THE NEXT sitting opened on Thursday the first of March. Fifty-eight
judges present--the others resting.

As usual, Joan was required to take an oath without reservations. She
showed no temper this time. She considered herself well buttressed by
the proces verbal compromise which Cauchon was so anxious to repudiate
and creep out of; so she merely refused, distinctly and decidedly; and
added, in a spirit of fairness and candor:

"But as to matters set down in the proces verbal, I will freely tell the
whole truth--yes, as freely and fully as if I were before the Pope."

Here was a chance! We had two or three Popes, then; only one of them
could be the true Pope, of course. Everybody judiciously shirked the
question of which was the true Pope and refrained from naming him, it
being clearly dangerous to go into particula