I would like to begin this chapter with a dialogue:

These fragments of dialogue are spoken in the courtroom. The place: England. The interrogator: a man. On the witness stand: a woman. The subject of the cross-examination: a meeting or meetings of the woman with a non- or superhuman entity. Despite the common subject matter and the evident thematic continuity, I must confess that I myself wove these fragments together. In fact, the fragments of the dialogue belong to two separate heroines: to Joan of Arc and her interrogators in 1429 and to Rebecca Lee in 1739, as they appear in the proceedings of the trial recorded in 1996 by Willard Trask in Joan of Arc: In Her Own Words, and as described by John Fowles in his 1985novel A Maggot, respectively. My combination of the fragments was made possible by the fact that the interrogation of Joan of Arc hovers in the background of Fowles's novel, which is, in this respect, a rewrite of the original, and can therefore be called a “disguised version.”