My lords, you require me to be frank, I cannot help it if you mislike my answers. The fact remains that I was born and raised in blackness, but if blackness had been all my lot I would not find myself among you here today. I do not say, before you, because as King’s Counselor and Marshall of France I do not consider myself set below you majestic and terrible lords, nor your ecclesiastical colleagues, though you may believe me to be so.
          You deplore my misdeeds and implore my confession but to this I raise an objection. I admit to no misdeed whatever of the sort you are describing, although I do not suggest the complete innocence of my heart. I once threatened to sew up my mother-in-law in a sack and drown her, which I now regret. Such deeds as you describe may be true in themselves, a fact or two out or order perhaps, but nothing worth disputing, but deeds they were only and not evil ones, as natural as the buds of flowers opening to the dawn.
          I wish to make you understand. At the Château de Chinon, I beheld Her for the first time, and for one such as I, it seemed as if I had lived my life (I was then twenty-three or twenty-four years old) under the gloomiest of thunderclouds and for the first time now witnessed a shaft of golden light piercing them, illuminating only the smallest patch of ground on which she stood. It was only later, when my eyes cleared, that I understood it better: not an accident from Heaven, I mean to say, but Heaven in all its glory emitting from the body of a girl. Do you know what I mean when I say Diana? From that day it was my one desire to be by her side, and together we raised the siege of Orléans, and at the siege of Paris She asked for me by name. Later we attempted to free Her from Rouen, to no avail, and we know what the English did next, God be good.
          So yes, I called upon my friend Barron, a joy of my childhood, and wise, and he introduced me to certain others, and they suggested the action of recapture. The skills from war I already commanded: to cut a body, even to disassemble it and draw from it, to hang a body, to break a neck, to twist flesh in such a way as to see a fleck of light emerge from the mouth, like a firefly such as they have in Spain. To breathe in the divine light, with our lungs and eyes and privy parts. Some hundreds? I doubt there were that many, but I will not dispute. We are old, my lords, though I am barely above thirty. We were old before our birth, and what light there is in us dims daily. Many multitudes would be necessary to fill even such a vessel as mine. I pray you, when my body be destroyed, to mark the flickering and fading of it as it breaks, the spilling of its meager harvest, but as well to dedicate your observance to Her whose life, blazing, was spent in the service of God, and France.
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