Jeanne la Pucelle, and deceived many persons who had seen Jeanne at
the siege of Orleans.' She has lain in prison, but is let out, in
February 1457, on a five years' ticket of leave, so to speak,
'provided she bear herself honestly in dress, and in other matters,
as a woman should do.'

Probably, though 'at present the wife of Jean Douillet,' this Jeanne
still wore male costume, hence the reference to bearing herself
'honestly in dress.' She acknowledges nothing, merely says that the
charge of imposture lui a ete impose, and that she has not been
actainte d'aucun autre vilain cas.* At this date Jeanne cruised
about Anjou and the town of Saumur. And here, at the age of forty-
five, if she was of the same age as the true Maid, we lose sight for
ever of this extraordinary woman. Of course, if she was the genuine
Maid, the career of La Pucelle de France ends most ignobly. The
idea 'was nuts' (as the Elizabethans said) to a good anti-clerical
Frenchman, M. Lesigne, who, in 1889, published 'La Fin d'une
Legende.' There would be no chance of canonising a Pucelle who was
twice married and lived a life of frolic.

*Lecoy de la Marche, Le Roi Rene, ii. 281-283, 1875.

A more serious and discreet scholar, M. Gaston Save, in 1893, made
an effort to prove that Jeanne was not burned at Rouen.* He
supposed that the Duchess of Bedford let Jeanne out of prison and
bribed the two priests, Massieu and Ladvenu, who accompanied the
Maid to the scaffold, to pretend that they had been with her, not
with a substituted victim. This victim went with hidden face to the
scaffold, le visage embronche, says Percival de Cagny, a retainer of
Jeanne's 'beau duc,' d'Alencon.** The townspeople were kept apart