"Alas!" she cried, "am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated that this my body, full pure and perfect and never defiled, must to-day be consumed and reduced to ashes! Ah! I would seven times rather be beheaded than burned!" The Bishop of Beauvais at this moment came up.

"Bishop," said Joan, "you are the cause of my death; if you had put me in the prisons of the Church and in the hands of fit and proper ecclesiastical warders, this had never happened; I appeal from you to the presence of God." One of the doctors who had sat in judgment upon her, Peter Maurice, went to see her, and spoke to her with sympathy.

"Master Peter," said she to him, "where shall I be to-night ?" "Have you not good hope in God ?" asked the doctor.

"O! yes," she answered; "by the grace of God I shall be in paradise." Being left alone with the Dominican, Martin Ladvenu, she confessed and asked to communicate.

The monk applied to the Bishop of Beauvais to know what he was to do.