it is but a varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics. Her answer
to this, if there were room to place the whole in a clear light, was as
shattering as it was rapid. Another thought to entrap her by asking what
language the angelic visitors of her solitude had talked: as though
heavenly counsels could want polyglott interpreters for every word, or that
God needed language at all in whispering thoughts to a human heart. Then
came a worse devil, who asked her whether the archangel Michael had
appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joanna, whose
poverty suggested to her simplicity that it might be the _costliness_ or
suitable robes which caused the demur, asked them if they fancied God,
who clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his
servants. The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tenderness, but the
disappointment of her judges makes one laugh horribly. Others succeeded
by troops, who upbraided her with leaving her father; as if that greater
Father, whom she believed herself to have been serving, did not retain the
power of dispensing with his own rules, or had not said, that, for a less
cause than martyrdom, man and woman should leave both father and mother.

On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long proceeding, the poor girl
fell so ill as to cause a belief that she had been poisoned. It was not
poison. Nobody had any interest in hastening a death so certain. M.
Michelet, whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that one would
gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the case most truly.
Joanna had a two-fold malady. She was visited by a paroxysm of the
complaint called _home-sickness_; the cruel nature of her imprisonment, and
its length, could not but point her solitary thoughts, in darkness, and in
chains, (for chained she was,) to Domrémy. And the season, which was the
most heavenly period of the spring, added stings to this yearning. That
was one of her maladies--_nostalgia_, as medicine calls it; the other was
weariness and exhaustion from daily combats with malice. She saw that