The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part:  eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortege, as the car rumbled along over the rough stones.  Not yet had the Maid attained to the calm of consent.  She looked wildly about her at all the high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs that gaped and gazed upon her on every side.  In the midst of the consolations of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears, other words, the plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips, “Rouen!  Rouen!” she said; “am I to die here?” It seemed incredible to her, impossible.  She looked about still for some sign of disturbance, some rising among the crowd, some cry of “France!  France!” or glitter of mail.  Nothing:  but the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the soldiers roughly clearing the way, the rude chariot rumbling on.  “Rouen, Rouen!  I fear that you shall yet suffer because of this,” she murmured in her distraction, amid her moanings and tears.

At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered with three erections—­one reaching up so high that the shadow of it seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form.  Two platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn.  Without this form the execution was illegal:  what did it matter?  No sentence at all was read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which was illegal also.  She was probably placed first on the same platform with her judges, where there was a pulpit from which she was to be preschee for the last time.  Of all Jeanne’s sufferings this could scarcely be the least, that she was always preschee, lectured, addressed, sermonised through every painful step of her career.

The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance, when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd.  The preacher was Nicolas Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text was in St. Paul’s words:  “If any of the members suffer, all the other members suffer with it.”  Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence the next.  It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of invective.  At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her “Go in peace.”  Even then,