M. Michelet is anxious to keep us in
mind that this bishop was but an agent of the English. True. But it
does not better the case for his countryman that, being an accomplice
in the crime, making himself the leader in the persecution against the
helpless girl, he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with
the conscious vileness of a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of
the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all
its beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of
France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around
thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning,
and true as God's lightning to its mark, that ran before France and
laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the
ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood! Is it not
scandalous, is it not humiliating to civilization, that, even at this
day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examining the
prisoner against himself; seducing him, by fraud, into treacherous
conclusions against his own head; using the terrors of their power for
extorting confessions from the frailty of hope; nay (which is worse),
using the blandishments of condescension and snaky kindness for thawing
into compliances of gratitude those whom they had failed to freeze into
terror? Wicked judges! barbarian jurisprudence!--that, sitting in your
own conceit on the summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn
the first principles of criminal justice--sit ye humbly and with
docility at the feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore your webs of
cruelty into shreds and dust.
Pages:
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139