e executioners standing ready! Here you have the black
heart of Cauchon at the blackest, here you have the proof that in his
nature there was no such thing as pity. One wonders if he ever knew his
mother or ever had a sister.

Cauchon was there, and the Vice-Inquisitor and the Abbot of St.
Corneille; also six others, among them that false Loyseleur. The
guards were in their places, the rack was there, and by it stood the
executioner and his aids in their crimson hose and doublets, meet color
for their bloody trade. The picture of Joan rose before me stretched
upon the rack, her feet tied to one end of it, her wrists to the other,
and those red giants turning the windlass and pulling her limbs out of
their sockets. It seemed to me that I could hear the bones snap and the
flesh tear apart, and I did not see how that body of anointed
servants of the merciful Jesus could sit there and look so placid and
indifferent.

After a little, Joan arrived and was brought in. She saw the rack, she
saw the attendants, and the same picture which I had been seeing must
have risen in her mind; but do you think she quailed, do you think she
shuddered? No, there was no sign of that sort. She straightened herself
up, and there was a slight curl of scorn about her lip; but as for fear,
she showed not a vestige of it.

This was a memorable session, but it was the shortest one of all the
list. When Joan had taken her seat a resume of her "crimes" was read to
her. Then Cauchon made a solemn speech. It in he said that in the course
of her several trials Joan had refused to answer some of the questions
and had answered others with lies, but that now he was going to have the
truth out of her, and the whole of it.

Her manner was full of confidence this time; he was sure he had found a
way at last to break this child's stubborn spirit and make her beg
and cry. He would score a victory this time and stop the mouths of the
jokers of Rouen. You see, he was only just a man after all, and couldn't
stand ridicule any better than other people. He talked high, and his
splotchy face lighted itself up with all the shifting tints and signs
of evil pleasure and promised triumph--purple, yellow, red, green--they
were all there, with sometimes the dull and spongy blue of a drowned
man, the uncanniest of them all. And finally he burst out in a great
passion and said:

"There is the rack, and there are its ministers! You will reveal all now
or be put to the t