Meanwhile the English soldiers began to grumble at the length of these preparations:  ‘Do they expect us to dine here?’ they growled.

As soon as the cross from the church had been placed in her hands, she devoutly kissed it, invoking God and her saints to assist her in this the heaviest of her needs, when all human help had abandoned her.

The heroine appears to have been then seized by the English sergeants-at-arms, and given by them into the charge of the executioners; and while she was being led to the foot of the high pile of clay and wood—­the instrument of her martyrdom—­the men-at-arms surrounded and roughly handled their prisoner.  The scene had become so poignant that many of the judges left their tribune, unable to endure the sight of that white-robed and helpless figure in the midst of the brutal soldiers hounding her on to her death.  It must indeed have been a ghastly spectacle, even for men accustomed to scenes of savage brutality and cruelty.  At length she was delivered from her tormentors, and, preceded by the executioner, she mounted the ladder, and was bound round the body by a chain attached to the stake.

The good priest, Isambard, closely followed her, and stood immediately beneath her, with the cross held and raised towards Joan, who but once removed her gaze from off it.

‘Keep it,’ she said to Isambard, ’keep it always before my eyes, till death.’

Then she took a last look around her—­a last look on a world which had been so harsh and cruel a world to her, poor victim of all the powers of evil on this earth!  She looked but once on the surging crowd beneath, at the old timbered houses of the town, filled from basement to high-peaked roof, with thousands of its citizens.  ’O, Rouen, Rouen!’ she cried, ’must I die here?  I have great fear lest you will suffer for my death.’  And with that she put away from her all earthly things, and gave herself up to Heaven.  In the interval the executioners had lighted the lower portion of the pile of wood, and the fire, fed by the pitch-covered fagots, mounted rapidly.

Joan of Arc gave a cry of terror, and called aloud for ’Water, holy water!’ The body had for an instant conquered the spirit—­but it was only for an instant.

At that moment Cauchon had the inconceivable and apparently devil-driven curiosity to approach the martyr, hoping, perhaps, that in the first terror at seeing the fire springing up to her, Joan of Arc would let fall some words of reproach against her King or her saints.

‘Joan,’ he cried through the crackling of the flames, ’I have come to exhort you for the last time.’

‘I die through you,’ she said, as she had said once before, and then she was allowed to die in peace, so far as Cauchon and his Church were concerned.  For her all earthly things were now over.  Till the last sign of life expired the eye-witnesses who have given us the fullest account of her last moments—­the priests Isambard and Massieu—­declared that she continued to call on her God and on her saints.  Frequently through the blinding smoke and the fierce rush of flame her face looked that of a blessed saint uplifted and radiant.