could find footing there. Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the
doublet and hose, with her short-clipped hair--no doubt looking like a
slim boy among all this dark crowd of men. The people swayed like a
sea all about and around--the throng which had gathered in her progress
through the streets pushing out the crowd already assembled with a
movement like the waves of the sea. Every step of the trial all
through had been attended by preaching, by discourses and reasoning and
admonishments, charitable and otherwise. Now she was to be "preached"
for the last time.

It was Doctor Guillaume Érard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher,
one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to hear. He
himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set
up there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of
his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more
than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential
of men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John's Gospel:
"A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine." The centre
circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of
English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the
witch should be condemned.

It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long
and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine periods
admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach
upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of
France, and the head of that House, "Charles who calls himself King."
"He has," cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of
Winchester upon him, "adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as
he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of