Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 2 by Mark Twain (psychology books to read txt) 📕

had noticed the remark at all. He slid indifferently away from it at once, and began to ask idle questions about other things, so as to slip around and spring on it from behind, so to speak: tedious and empty questions as to whether the Voice had told her she would escape from this prison; and if it had furnished answers to be used by her in to-day’s seance; if it was accompanied with a glory of light; if it had eyes, etc. That risky remark of Joan’s was this:

“Without the Grace of God I could do nothing.”

The court saw the priest’s game, and watched his play with a cruel eagerness. Poor Joan was grown dreamy and absent; possibly she was tired. Her life was in imminent danger, and she did not suspect it. The time was ripe now, and Beaupere quietly and stealthily sprang his trap:

“Are you in a state of Grace?”

Ah, we had two or three honorable brave men in that pack of judges; and Jean Lefevre was one of them. He sprang to his feet and cried out:

“It is a terrible question! The accused is not obliged to answer it!”

Cauchon’s face flushed black with anger to see this plank flung to the perishing child, and he shouted:

“Silence! and take your seat. The accused will answer the question!”

There was no hope, no way out of the dilemma; for whether she said yes or whether she said no, it would be all the same—a disastrous answer, for the Scriptures had said one cannot know this thing. Think what hard hearts they were to set this fatal snare for that ignorant young girl and be proud of such work and happy in it. It was a miserable moment for me while we waited; it seemed a year. All the house showed excitement; and mainly it was glad excitement. Joan looked out upon these hungering faces with innocent, untroubled eyes, and then humbly and gently she brought out that immortal answer which brushed the formidable snare away as it had been but a cobweb:

“If I be not in a state of Grace, I pray God place me in it; if I be in it, I pray God keep me so.”

Ah, you will never see an effect like that; no, not while you live. For a space there was the silence of the grave. Men looked wondering into each other’s faces, and some were awed and crossed themselves; and I heard Lefevre mutter:

“It was beyond the wisdom of man to devise that answer. Whence comes this child’s amazing inspirations?”

Beaupere presently took up his work again, but the humiliation of his defeat weighed upon him, and he made but a rambling and dreary business of it, he not being able to put any heart in it.

He asked Joan a thousand questions about her childhood and about the oak wood, and the fairies, and the children’s games and romps under our dear Arbre Fee Bourlemont, and this stirring up of old memories broke her voice and made her cry a little, but she bore up as well as she could, and answered everything.

Then the priest finished by touching again upon the matter of her apparel—a matter which was never to be lost sight of in this still-hunt for this innocent creature’s life, but kept always hanging over her, a menace charged with mournful possibilities:

“Would you like a woman’s dress?”

“Indeed yes, if I may go out from this prison—but here, no.”