All this
wrings the heart, and makes common sense shudder. One cannot conceive
how we dare, after the countless horrors of which we have been guilty,
call any nation by the name of barbarian.
Most of our historians, lovers of the so-called embellishments of
history rather than of truth, say that Joan went fearlessly to the
torture; but as the chronicles of the times bear witness, and as the
historian Villaret admits, she received her sentence with cries and
tears; a weakness pardonable in her sex, and perhaps in ours, and very
compatible with the courage which this girl had displayed amid the
dangers of war; for one can be fearless in battle, and sensitive on the
scaffold.
I must add that many persons have believed without any examination that
the Maid of Orleans was not burned at Rouen at all, although we have the
official report of her execution. They have been deceived by the account
we still have of an adventuress who took the name of the "Maid,"
deceived Joan of Arc's brothers, and under cover of this imposture,
married in Lorraine a nobleman of the house of Armoise. There were two
other rogues who also passed themselves off as the "Maid of Orleans."
All three claimed that Joan was not burned at all, and that another
woman had been substituted for her. Such stories can be admitted only by
those who want to be deceived.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Beuchot says: There was at that time in France an
Inquisitor-General, named Brother Jean or Jacques le Graverend.
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