Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/389

 SAINT JOAN OF ARC

gropings and searchings of her persecutors to find out what kind of devil s witchcraft she had employed to rouse the war spirit in her timid soldiers, she burst out with, &quot;What I said was, Ride these Eng lish down and I did it myself!* and as, when in sultingly asked why it was that her standard had place at the crowning of the King in the Cathedral of Rheims rather than the standards of the other captains, she uttered that touching speech, &quot;It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor&quot; a phrase which fell from her lips without premeditation, yet whose moving beauty and simple grace it would bankrupt the arts of language to surpass.

Although she was on trial for her life, she was the only witness called on either side; the only witness summoned to testify before a packed jury commis sioned with a definite task : to find her guilty, whether she was guilty or not. She must be convicted out of her own mouth, there being no other way to accom plish it. Every advantage that learning has over ignorance, age over youth, experience over inex perience, chicane over artlessness, every trick and trap and gin devisable by malice and the cunning of sharp intellects practised in setting snares for the unwary all these were employed against her with out shame ; and when these arts were one by one de feated by the marvelous intuitions of her alert and penetrating mind, Bishop Cauchon stooped to a final baseness which it degrades human speech to de scribe: a priest who pretended to come from the region of her own home and to be a pitying friend and anxious to help her in her sore need was smug-

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