In a room too small for so illustrious a gathering, these men faced her, thin-lipped and grim, like rows of gray-faced toads, some skeletal and narrow, in the manner of the ascetics, others overfed, with chins that sagged to the bottom of their necks. One bishop came riding in on a mule; another, his good friend, from a neighboring city, swayed dangerously on a warhorse. Surely, she thought, the warhorse could be put to better use than as a mount for an overweight bishop.

Yet it was also a balding, liver-spotted reunion for them, these celebrated doctors of theology, who spent their days contemplating Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs of God’s existence. And now they had been asked to contemplate her.

Together they put to her questions, sometimes talking over one another, other times tripping over their own long-winded speech, so she could not hear and they had to repeat themselves. How many times a day did she pray? What prayers had she been taught? When was the last time she confessed, took Communion, fasted? Was she a good child? And if she obeyed her father and her mother—they didn’t like that her answer on this point and other points felt ambivalent—why had she left home without anyone to accompany her? Why did she travel alone? And for what reason did she mention her uncle, by all accounts an unscrupulous individual, more than any other member of her family?

She knew their aim: to uncover the stubs of the devil’s horns in her hair; to find the skin of serpent’s scales beneath her tunic and hose, the pointed tail they imagined she kept coiled and hidden between her thighs.

But le Maçon told her not to worry. The conclusion of these proceedings was already decided. She would pass. So, what was the point then? “I thought there was no time to waste,” she said, and le Maçon flushed. The proper order of things still had to be followed, he explained. Near the end of the sessions, she took to scratching shapes and patterns on the desk with her uncle’s knife. A cloud. A triangle. A unicorn’s horn. This made the priests angry, though none of them dared to take the knife away, because they had heard what she could do with a weapon, any weapon. “She is a proud woman, more arrogant than a prince,” a bishop said. She couldn’t remember which bishop; by that point, their faces had all blurred. But she would have told him, if she could, that it wasn’t anything personal. She was just bored. When the interrogations concluded, they drew up a document and circulated it. The determination: She, Joan, is a good girl who knows her prayers. We can find neither sin nor any form of demonic influence in her.