Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/453

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THE TRIAL OF JEANNE DARC. 441 day to day with a minuteness which only a short-hand report could have surpassed, and when the last scene was over, the record was translated into official Latin by members of the University of Paris. Five copies of this translation were made, in the most beautiful writing of the period — one for Henry VI, King of England, one for the Pope, one for the English cardinal, uncle to Henry VI, and one for each of the two presiding ecclesiastics. Three of these manuscript copies exist to-day in Paris, as well as a considerable portion of the original draft — le plumitif, as the French lawyers term it — written in the French of 1430. The very copy designed for the boy King of England, the ill-starred child of Henry V and Catherine of France, has remained at Paris, where its presence attests the reality of the Maid's exploits, and recalls her prophetic words, uttered often in the hearing of the English nobles : " You will not hold the kingdom of France. In seven years you will be gone." This report, edited with care and learning by M. Jules Qui- cherat, has been printed verbatim in five volumes octavo, and these have been since reduced to two volumes by the omission of repetitions, under the Zealous editorship of Mr. E. Reilly, a distinguished lawyer of Rouen, where the trial took place. The record is therefore ineffaceable. The Church could not canonize in 1876 a personage whom the Church is known to have cast beyond her pale in 1430 to be mercifully burned alive. She was abandoned to "the secular arm," which was besought to act toward her with sweetness — avec douceur. In thirty minutes the secular arm bound her to a stake in the market' place of Rouen, and sweetly wreathed about her virgin form a shroud of flame. France no longer possesses Domremy, the remote and obscure hamlet of Lorraine where the Maid first saw the light. The house in which she was born, the little church