Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/386

 370 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE STATE. On the 21th preparations for an auto defe were completed in the cemetery of St. Ouen. The pile was ready for lighting, and on two scaffolds were assembled the Cardinal of Beaufort and other dignitaries, while on a third were Pierre Cauchon, Jean le Maitre, Joan, and Maitre Guillaume Erard, who preached the cus- tomary sermon. In his eloquence he exclaimed that Charles VII. had been proved a schismatic heretic, when Joan interrupted him, " Speak of me, but not of the king ; he is a good Christian !" She maintained her courage until the sentence of relaxation was part- ly read, when she yielded to the incessant persuasion mingled with threats and promises to which she had been exposed since the previous night, and she signified her readiness to submit. A formula of abjuration was read to her, and after some discussion she allowed her hand to be guided in scratching the sign of the cross, which represented her signature. Then another sentence, prepared in advance, was pronounced, imposing on her, as a mat- ter of course, the customary penance of perpetual imprisonment on bread and water. Vainly she bested for an ecclesiastical prison. Had Cauchon wished it he was powerless, and he ordered the guards to conduct her back whence she came.* The English were naturally furious on finding that they had overreached themselves. They could have tried Joan summarily in a secular court for sorcerv and burned her out of hand, but to spiritual excitability of the Middle Ages brought the supernatural world into close relations with the material. For a choice collection of such stories see the Dialogues of Caesarius of Heisterbach. As a technical point of ecclesiastical law, moreover, Joan's visions had already been examiued and approved by the prel- ates and doctors at Chinon and Poitiers, including Pierre Cauchon's metropolitan, Renaud, Archbishop of Reims. de Charmettes, IV. 110-41. There are two forms of abjuration recorded as subscribed by Joan; one brief and simple, the other elaborate (Proces, p. 508; Le Brun de Charmettes, IV. 135-7). Cauchon has been accused of duplicity in reading to her the shorter one and substituting the other for her signature. She subsequently complained that she had never promised to abandon her male attire — a promise which was contained in the longer but not in the shorter one. Much has been made of this, but without reason. The short abjuration is an unconditional admission of her errors, a revocation and submission to the Church, and was as binding and effective as the other.
 * Proces, pp. 508-9. — Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, an 1431. — Le Brun