“I certify you that you shall hear mass,” the examiner replied, “but you must be dressed as a woman.” “What would you say,” she answered as with a momentary doubt, “if I had sworn to my King never to change?” but she added: “Anyhow I answer for it. Find me a dress, long, touching the ground, without a train, and give it to me to go to mass; but I will return to my present dress when I come back.” She was then asked why she would not have all the parts of a female dress to go to mass in; she said, “I will take counsel upon that, and answer you,” and begged again for the honour of God and our Lady that she might be allowed to hear mass in this good town. Afterwards she was again recommended to assume the whole dress of a woman and gave a conditional assent: “Get me a dress like that of a young /bourgeoise/, that is to say, a long /houppelande/; I will wear that and a woman’s hood to go to mass.” After having promised, however, she made an appeal to them to leave her free, and to think no more of her garb, but to allow her to hear mass without changing it. This would seem to have been refused, and all at once without warning the jurisdiction of the Church was suddenly introduced again.
She was asked, whether in all she did and said she would submit herself to the Church, and replied: “All my deeds and works are in the hands of God, and I depend only on Him; and I certify that I desire to do nothing and say nothing against the Christian faith; and if I have done or said anything in the body that was against the Christian faith which our Lord has established, I should not defend it but cast it forth from me.” Asked again, if she would not submit to the laws of the Church she replied: “I can answer no more to-day on this point; but on Saturday send the clerk to me, if you do not come, and I will answer by the grace of God, and it can be put in writing.”
A great many questions followed as to her visions, but chiefly what had been asked before. One thing only we may note, since it was one of the special sayings all her own, which fell from the lips of Jeanne, during this private and almost sympathetic examination. After being questioned closely as to how she knew her first visitor to be St. Michael, etc., she was asked, how she would have known had he been “l’Anemy” himself (a Norman must surely have used this word), taking the form of an angel: and finally, what doctrine he taught her?
She answered; above all things he said that she was to be a good child and that God would help her: and among other things that she was to go to the succour of the King of France. But the greater part of what the angel taught her, she continued, was already in their book; and THE ANGEL SHOWED HER THE GREAT PITY THERE WAS OF THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
The pity of it! That which has always gone most to the tender heart: a country torn in pieces, brother fighting against brother, the invader seated at the native hearth, and blood and fire making the smiling land a desert: “/la pitie qui estoit au royaume de France/.”
Did the Inquisitor break down here? Could no one go on? or was it mere human incompetence to feel the divine touch? Some one broke into a foolish question about the height of the angel, and the sitting was hurriedly concluded. Monseigneur might well be on his mettle; that very pity, was it not stealing into the souls of his private committee deputed for so different a use?
*****
Next day the questions about St. Michael’s personal appearance were resumed, as a little feint we can only suppose, for the great question of the Church was again immediately introduced; but in the meantime Jeanne had described her visitor in terms which it is pleasant to dwell on. “He was in the form of a /tr�s vrai prud’ homme/.” The term is difficult to translate, as is the Galantuomo of Italy. The “King- Honest Man,” we used to say in English in the days of his late Majesty Victor Emmanuel of Italy; but that is not all that is meant–/un vrai prud’ homme/, a man good, honest, brave, the best man, is more like it. The girl’s honest imagination thought of no paraphernalia of wings or shining plumes. It was not the theatrical angel, not even the angel of art whom she saw–whom it would have been so easy to invent, nay to take quite truthfully from the first painted window, radiating colour and brightness through the dim, low-roofed church. But even with such material handy, Jeanne was not led into the conventional. She knew nothing about wings or emblematic scales. He was in the form of a brave and gentle man. She knew not anything greater, nor would she be seduced into fable however sacred. Then once more the true assault began.
She was asked, if she would submit all her sayings and doings, good or evil, to the judgment of our Holy Mother, the Church. She replied, that as for the Church, she loved it and would sustain it with all her might for our Christian faith; and that it was not she whom they ought to disturb and hinder from going to church or from hearing mass. As to the good things she had done, and that had happened, she must refer all to the King of Heaven, who had sent her to Charles, King of France; and it should be seen that the French would soon gain a great advantage which God would send them, so great that all the kingdom of France would be shaken. And this, she said, that when it came to pass, they might remember that she had said it. She was again asked, if she would submit to the jurisdiction of the Church, and answered, “I refer everything to our Lord who sent me, to our Lady, and to the blessed Saints of Paradise”; and added her opinion was that our Lord and the Church meant the same thing, and that difficulties should not be made concerning this, when there was no difficulty, and they were both one. She was then told that there was the Church triumphant, in which are God, the saints, the angels, and all saved souls. The Church militant is our Holy Father the Pope, vicar of God on earth, the cardinals, the prelates of the Church, and the clergy and all good Christians and Catholics, which Church properly assembled cannot err, but is guided by the Holy Spirit. And this being the case she was asked if she would refer her cause to the Church militant thus explained to her. She replied that she had come to the King of France on the part of God, on the part of the Virgin Mary, the blessed Saints of Paradise, and the Church victorious in Heaven, and at their commandment; and to that Church she submitted all her good deeds, and all that she had done and might do. And if they asked her whether she would submit to the Church militant, answered, that she would now answer no more than this.
Here again the argument strayed back to the futile subject of dress, always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges were non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and shows that dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to mingle with her hopes.
Asked, what she had to say about the woman’s dress that had been offered to her, to hear mass in: she answered, that she would not take it yet, not until the Lord pleased; but that if it were necessary to lead her out to be executed, and if she should then have to be undressed, she required of the Lords of the Church that they would give her the grace to have a long chemise, and a kerchief for her head; that she would prefer to die rather than to alter what our Lord had directed her to do, and that she firmly believed our Lord would not let her descend so low, but that she should soon be helped by God and by a miracle. She was then asked, if what she did in respect to the man’s costume was by command of God, why she asked for a woman’s chemise in case of death? answered, /It is enough that it should be long/.
The effect of these words in which so much was implied, must have made a supreme sensation among the handful of men gathered round the helpless girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror before the eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could have been suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold, the fire–and the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to every evil gaze, must have showed themselves at least for a moment against that dark background of prison wall. It was enough that it should be long–to hide her as much as was possible from those dreadful staring eyes.
The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the dress of the saints. But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne herself, it was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more weighty thoughts. Presently they asked if the saints hated the English, to which she replied that they hated what God hated and loved what He loved. She was then asked if God hated the English. She replied that of the love or hate that God had for the English, or what God did for their souls, she knew nothing; but she knew well that they should be driven out of France, except those who died there; and that God would send victory to the French against the English. Asked, if God was for the English so long as they were prosperous in France: she answered, that she knew not whether God hated the French, but believed He had allowed them to be beaten because of their sins.
Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great statesman or a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the question concerning John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes. “If we shall say: From heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him not? but if we shall say of men we fear the people.” And she was only a peasant girl and the event of which they spoke had been before her little time.
Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to kill Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT MISFORTUNE FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE: but that however it might be among themselves, God had sent her to the succour of the King.
One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual changes of the subject: one of which called forth as follows her last deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would answer as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done before our Holy Father the Pope, although at several points in the trial she would have had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer more plainly than before Monseigneur de Beauvais–she said that she had answered as much as she knew, and that if anything came to her memory that she had forgotten to say, she would say it willingly. Asked, if it seemed to her that she would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope, the vicar of God, in all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience, she replied that she desired to be taken before him, and then she would answer all that she ought to answer.
Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained time, probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to understand it.
This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and whisperer, L’Oyseleur, was working against it in the background. Jeanne evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not understand the distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant: that God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could decide upon the questions which were between her Lord and herself, was too firmly fixed in her mind: and again and again the men whose desire was to make her adopt this expedient, were driven back into the ever repeated questions about St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little interval that remained, in a series of useless questions about her standard. Was it true that this standard had been carried into the Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind? “It had been through the labour and the pain,” she said, “there was good reason that it should have the honour.”
This last movement of a proud spirit, absolutely disinterested and without thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the word, gives a sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful wranglings in prison, in which, however, there is a softening of tone visible throughout, and evident effect of human nature bringing into immediate contact divers human creatures day after day. Jeanne is often at her best, and never so frequently as during these less formal sittings utters those flying words, simple and noble and of absolute truth to nature, which are noted everywhere, even in the most rambling records.
*****
The private examination, concluding with that last answer about the banner, came to an end on the 17th March, the day before Passion Sunday. Several subsequent days were occupied with repeated consultations in the Bishop’s palace, and the reading over of the minutes of the examinations, to the judges first and afterwards to Jeanne, who acknowledged their correctness, with one or two small amendments. It is only now that Cauchon reappears in his own person. On the morning of the following Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, he and four other doctors with him had a conversation with Jeanne in her prison, very early in the morning, touching her repeated application to be allowed to hear mass and to communicate. The Bishop offered her his ultimatum: if she consented to resume her woman’s dress, she might hear mass, but not otherwise; to which Jeanne replied, sorrowfully, that she would have done so before now if she could; but that it was not in her power to do so. Thus after the long and bitter Lent her hopes of sharing in the sacred feast were finally taken from her. It remains uncertain whether she considered that her change of dress would be direct disobedience to God, which her words seem often to imply; or whether it would mean renunciation of her mission, which she still hoped against hope to be able to resume; or if the fear of personal insult weighed most with her. The latter reason had evidently something to do with it, but, as evidently, not all.
The background to these curious sittings, afterwards revealed to us, casts a hazy side-light upon them. Probably the Bishop, never present, must have been made aware by his spies of an intention on the part of those most favourable to Jeanne to support an appeal to the Pope; and L’Oyseleur, the traitor, who was all this time admitted to her cell by permission of Cauchon, and really as his tool and agent, was actively employed in prejudicing her mind against them, counselling her not to trust to those clerks, not to yield to the Church. How he managed to explain his own appearance on the other side, his official connection with the trial, and constant presence as one of her judges, it is hard to imagine. Probably he gave her to believe that he had sought that position (having got himself liberated from the imprisonment which he had represented himself as sharing) for her sake, to be able to help her.
On the other hand her friends, whose hearts were touched by her candour and her sufferings, were not inactive. Jean de la Fontaine and the two monks–l’Advenu and Fr�re Isambard–also succeeded in gaining admission to her, and pressed upon her the advantage of appealing to the Church, to the Council of B�le about to assemble, or to the Pope himself, which would have again changed the /venue/, and transferred her into less prejudiced hands. It is very likely that Jeanne in her ignorance and innocence might have held by her reference to the supreme tribunal of God in any case; and it is highly unlikely that of the English authorities, intent on removing the only thing in France of which their forces were afraid, should have given her up into the hands of the Pope, or allowed her to be transferred to any place of defence beyond their reach; but at least it is a relief to the mind to find that all these men were not base, as appears on the face of things, but that pity and justice and human feeling sometimes existed under the priest’s gown and the monk’s cowl, if also treachery and falsehood of the blackest kind. The Bishop, who remained withdrawn, we know not why, from all these private sittings in the prison (probably busy with his ecclesiastical duties as Holy Week was approaching), heard with fury of this visit and advice, and threatened vengeance upon the meddlers, not without effect, for Jean de la Fontaine, we are told–who had been deep in his councils, and indeed his deputy, as chief examiner–disappeared from Rouen immediately after, and was heard of no more. ———- [1] Compi�gne was a strong point. Had she proclaimed a promise from St. Catherine, of victory? Chastelain says so, long after date and with errors in fact. Two Anglo-Compi�gnais were at her trial. The Rehabilitation does not go into this question.–(From Mr. Lang.)
CHAPTER XV
RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431.
Upon all these contentions followed the calm of Palm Sunday, a great and touching festival, the first break upon the gloom of Lent, and a forerunner of the blessedness of Easter. We have already told how–a semblance of charity with which the reader might easily be deceived– the Bishop and four of his assessors had gone to the prison to offer to the Maid permission to receive the sacrament if she would do so in a woman’s dress: and how after pleading that she might be allowed that privilege as she was, in her male costume, and with a pathetic statement that she would have yielded if she could, but that it was impossible–she finally refused; and was so left in her prison to pass that sacred day unsuccoured and alone. The historian Michelet, in the wonderful sketch in which he rises superior to himself, and which amidst all after writings remains the most beautiful and touching memorial of Jeanne d’Arc, has made this day a central point in his tale, using with the skill of genius the service of the Church appropriate to the day, in heart-rending contrast with those doors of the prison which did not open, and the help of God which did not come to the young and solitary captive. /Le beau jour fleuri/ passed over her in darkness and desertion: her agony and passion lay before her like those of the Divine Sufferer, to whom every day of the succeeding week is specially consecrated. There is almost indeed a painful following of the Saviour’s steps in these dark days, the circumstances lending themselves in a wonderful way to the comparison which French writers love to make, but which many of us must always feel, however spotless the sufferer, to have a certain irreverence in them. But if ever martyr were worthy of being called a partaker of the sufferings of Christ it was surely this girl, free, if ever human creature was, from self-seeking, or thought of reward, or ambitious hope, in whose heart there had never been any motive but the service of God and the deliverance of her country, who had neither looked before nor after, nor put her own interests into consideration in any way. Silently the feast passed with no holy privileges of religion, no blessed token of the spring, no remembrance of the waving palms and scattered blossoms over which her Lord rode into Jerusalem to die. She had not that sweet fallacious triumph; but the darker ordeal remained for her to follow.
On Tuesday the 27th of March, her troubles began again. Before Palm Sunday, the report of the trial had been read to her. She had now to hear the formal reading of the articles founded upon it, to give a final response if she had any to give, or explanation, or addition, if she thought proper. The sitting was held in the great hall of the Castle of Rouen before a band of more than forty, all assembled for this final test. The Bishop made a prefactory speech to the prisoner, pointing out to her how benign and merciful were the judges now assembled, that they had no wish to punish, but rather to instruct and lead her in the right way; and requesting her at this late period in the proceedings to choose one or more from among them to help her. To which Jeanne replied; “In the first place concerning my good and our faith, I thank you and all the company. As for the counsellor you offer me I thank you also, but I have no need to depart from our Lord as my counsellor.”
The articles, in which the former questions put to her and answered by her, were now repeated in the form of accusations, were then read to her one by one; her sorcery, sacrilege, etc., being taken as facts. To a few she repeated, with various forcible and fine turns of phrase, her previous answers, with here and there a new explanation; but to the great majority she referred simply to her former replies, or denied the charge, as follows: “The second article concerning sortil�ge, superstitious acts and divination, she denied, and in respect to adoration (i.e. allowing herself to be adored) said: If any kissed her hands or her garments, it was not by her will, and that she kept herself from it as much as she could; and the rest of the article she denies.” This is a specimen of the manner in which she responded, with a clear-headed and undisturbed intelligence, point after point– /ipsa Johanna negat/, is the usual refrain: or else she referred with dignity to previous replies as her sole answer. But sometimes the girl was moved to indignation, sometimes added a word in her own defence: “As for fairies she knew not what they were, and as for her education she had been well and duly instructed what to believe, as a good child should.” This was her answer to the article in which all the folk-lore of Domremy, all the fairy tales, had been collected into a solemn statement of heresy. The matter of dress was once more treated in endless detail, with many interjected questions and reports of what she had already said: and at the end, answering the statement that woman’s dress was most fit for woman’s work, Jeanne added the quick /mot/: “As for the usual work of women, there are enough of other women to do it.” On another occasion when the report ran that she claimed to have done all things by the counsel of God, she interrupted and said “that it ought to be, all that I have done well.” To her former answer that she had yielded to the desire of the French knights in attacking Paris, she added the fine words, “It seemed to me that it was their duty to attack their adversaries.” In respect to her visions she added to her former answer, “that she had not asked advice of bishop, cur�, or any other before believing her revelations, but had many times prayed God to reveal them to others of her party.” About calling her saints when she required their aid she added, that she asked God and Our Lady to send her council and comfort, and immediately her heavenly visitors came; and that this was the prayer she made:
“Gentle God, in honour of Your[1] passion, I pray You, if You love me, that You would reveal to me how I ought to answer these people of the Church. I know well by what command it was that I took this dress, but I know not in what manner I ought to give it up. For this may it please You to teach me.”
In respect to the reproach that she had been a general in the war (/chef de guerre/), she explained that if she were, it was to drive out the English, repelling the accusation that she had assumed this title in pride; and to that which accused her of preferring to live among men, she explained that when she was in a lodging she generally had a woman with her; but that when engaged in war she lived in her clothes whenever there was not a woman present. In respect to her hope of escaping from prison, she was asked if her council had thrown any light on that question, and replied, “I have yet to tell you.” Manchon, the clerk, makes a note upon his margin at these words, “Proudly answered”–/superbe responsum/.
This re-examination lasted for two long days, the 27th and 28th of March. On several points Jeanne requested that she might be allowed to give an answer on Saturday, and accordingly, on Saturday, the last day of March, Easter Eve, she was visited in prison by the Bishop and seven or eight assessors. She was then asked if she would submit to the judgment of the Church on earth all that she had done and said, specially in things that concerned her trial. She answered that she would submit to the judgment of the Church militant, provided that it did not enforce anything that was impossible. She explained that what she called impossible was to acknowledge that the visions and revelations came otherwise than from God, or that what she had done was not on the part of God: these she would never deny or revoke for any power on earth: and that which our Lord had commanded or should command, she would not give up for any living man, and this would be impossible to her. And in case the Church should command her to do anything contrary to the command given her by God she would not do it for any reason whatsoever. Asked whether she would submit to the Church if the Church militant pronounced that her revelations were delusions or from the devil, or superstitious, or evil things, she answered that she would refer everything to our Lord, whose command she always obeyed; and that she knew well that everything had come to her by the commandment of God; and that what she had affirmed during this trial to have been done by the commandment of God it would be impossible for her to deny. And in case the Church militant commanded her to go against God, she would submit herself to no man in this world but to our Lord, whose good commandment she had always obeyed. She was asked if she did not believe that she was subject to the Church on earth, that is, to our Holy Father the Pope, the Cardinals, Bishops, and other prelates of the Church. She answered, “/Yes, our Lord being served first/.” Asked if she had directions from her voices not to submit to the Church militant which is on earth, nor to its judgment, she replied that she does not answer according to what comes into her head, but that when she replies it is by commandment; and that she has never been told not to obey the Church, our Lord being served first (/noster Sire premier servi/).
Other less formal particulars come to us long after, from various witnesses at the /proc�s de rehabilitation/, in which a lively picture is given of this scene. Fr�re Isambard had apparently managed, as was his wont, to get close to the prisoner, and to whisper to her to appeal to the Council of B�le. “What is this Council of B�le?” she asked in the same tone. Isambard replied that it was the “congregation of the whole Church, Catholic and Universal, and that there would be as many there on her side as on that of the English.” “Ah!” she cried, “since there will be some of our party in that place, I will willingly yield and submit to the Council of B�le, to our Holy Father the Pope, and to the sacred Council.”[2] And immediately–continues the deposition–the Bishop of Beauvais cried out, “Silence, in the devil’s name!” and told the notary to take no notice of what she said, that she would submit herself to the Council of B�le; whereupon a second cry burst from the bosom of Jeanne, “You write what is against me, but you will not write what is for me.” “Because of these things, the English and their officers threatened terribly the said Fr�re Isambard, warning him that if he did not hold his peace he would be thrown in the Seine.” No notice whatever is taken of any such interruption in the formal record. It must have been before this time that Jean de la Fontaine disappeared. He left Rouen secretly and never returned, nor does he ever appear again. Fr�re Isambard is said to have taken temporary refuge in his convent; they scattered, /de par l’diable/, according to the Christian adjuration of Mgr. De Beauvais; though l’Advenu would seem to have held his ground, and served as Confessor to Jeanne in her agony, at which Fr�re Isambard was also present. We are told that the Deputy Inquisitor Lem�itre, he who had been got to lend the aid of his presence with such difficulty, fiercely warned the authorities that he would have no harm done to those two friars, from which we may infer that he too had leanings towards the Maid; and these honest and loyal men, well deserving of their country and of mankind, should not lose their record when the tragic story of so much human treachery and baseness has to be told.
*****
After this there came a long pause, full of much business to the judges, councillors, and clerks who had to reduce the seventy articles to twelve, in order to forward a summary of the case to the University of Paris for their judgment. Jeanne in the meantime had been left, but not neglected, in her prison. The great Feast of Easter had passed without any sacred consolation of the Church; but Monseigneur de Beauvais, in his kindness, sent her a carp to keep the feast withal, if not any spiritual food. It was quite congenial to the spirit of the time to imagine that the carp had been poisoned, and such a thought seems to have crossed the mind of Jeanne, who was very ill after eating of it, and like to die. But it was not thus, poisoned in prison, that it would have suited any of her persecutors to let her die. As a matter of fact, as soon as it was known that she was ill, the best doctors procurable were sent to the prison with peremptory orders to prolong her life and cure her at any cost. But for a little time we lose sight of the sick-bed on which the unfortunate Maid lay fully dressed, never relinquishing the garb which was her protection, with her feet chained to her uneasy couch. Even at the moment when her life hung in the balance we read of no indulgence granted in this respect, no unlocking of the infamous chain, nor substitution of a gentler nurse for the attendant /houspillers/, who were her guards night and day.
When the Bishop and his court had completed their business and sent off to Paris the important document on which so much depended, they found themselves at leisure to return to Jeanne, to inquire after her health and to make her “a charitable admonition.” It was on the 18th of April, after the silence of more than a fortnight, that their visit was made with this benevolent purpose. Seven of her judges attended the Bishop into the sick-chamber. They had come, he assured her, charitably and familiarly, to visit her in her sickness and to carry her comfort and consolation. Most of these men were indeed familiar enough: she had seen their faces already through many a dreadful day, though there were one or two which were new and strange, come to stare at her in the depths of her distress. Cauchon reminded her how much and how carefully she had been questioned by the most wise and learned men; and that those there present were ready to do anything for the salvation of her soul and body in every possible way, by instructing or advising her. He added, however, that if she still refused to accept advice, and to act according to the counsel of the Church, she was in the greatest danger–to which she replied:
“It seems to me, being so ill as I am, that I am in great danger of death. And if it is thus that God pleases to decide for me, I ask of you to be allowed to confess and receive my Saviour, and to be laid in holy ground.”
“If you desire to have the rites and sacraments of the Church,” said Cauchon, “you must do as good Catholics ought to do, submit to Holy Church.” She answered, “I can say no other thing to you.” She was then told that if she was in fear of death through sickness she ought all the more to amend her life; but that she could not have the privileges of the Church as a Catholic, if she did not submit to the Church. She answered: “If my body dies in prison, I hope that you will bury me in consecrated ground: yet if not, I still hope in our Lord.”
She was then reminded that she had said in her trial–if anything had been said or done by her against our Christian faith ordained by our Lord, that she would not stand by it. She answered, “I refer to the answer I made, and to our Lord.”
It was then asked of her, since she believed herself to have had many revelations from God by St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, whether if there should appear some good creature (/sic/) who professed to have had a revelation from God in respect to her, she would believe that? She answered that there was no Christian in the world who could come to her professing to have had a revelation, of whom she should not know whether he spoke the truth or not: she would know it through St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
Asked, if she could not imagine that God might reveal something to a good creature who might be unknown to her, she answered: “Yes; but I would not believe either man or woman without a sign.”
Asked, if she believed that the Holy Scripture was revealed by God, she answered, “You know that I do, and it is good to know.”
The last answer she made in respect to submission to Holy Church was this, “Whatever may happen to me I will neither do nor say anything else, for I have answered before, during the trial.”
She was then “exhorted powerfully by the venerable doctors present” (four are mentioned by name) to submit to our Mother the Church, with many authorities and examples drawn from the Holy Scriptures; and finally, Magister Nicolas Midi made her an exhortation from Matthew xviii.: “If your brother trespass against you,” and what follows, “If he will not hear the Church, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican.” This was expounded to Jeanne in the French tongue and, finally, she was told that if she would not obey and submit to the Church she must be given up as if she was a Saracen. To which Jeanne replied that she was a good Christian and well baptised, and that she desired to die as a Christian. She was then asked whether, since she begged leave of the Church to receive her Saviour, she would submit to the Church if it were promised to her that she should receive. She answered that she would say no more than she had said; that she loved God, served Him, and was a good Christian, and would aid and uphold the Holy Church with all her power. Asked if she wished that a beautiful procession should be made for her to restore her to health, she answered that she would be glad if the Church and the Catholics would pray for her.
For another fortnight Jeanne was sent back into the silence, and to her own thoughts, which must have grown heavier and heavier as the weary days went on, and no sound of approaching deliverance came, no rumour of help at hand. All was quiet and safe at Rouen; amid the babble of the courtyard which she might hear fitfully when her guardians were quieter than usual, there was not one word which brought the hope of a French army at hand, or of any movement to rescue her. All was silent in the world around, not a breath of hope, not the whisper of a friend. It was not till the 2d of May that the dreadful blank was again broken, and she was called to the great hall of the castle for another interview with her tormentors. When she was led into the hall it was full, as in the first sitting, sixty-three judges in all being present. The interest had flagged or the pity had grown as the trial dragged its slow length along; but now, when every day the verdict was expected from Paris, the interest had risen again. On her way from her prison to the hall, it was necessary to pass the door of the castle chapel: and here once or twice Massieu, the officer of the court, had permitted her to pause and kneel down as she passed. This was all the celebration of the Paschal Feast that was permitted to Jeanne. The compassionate official, however, was discovered in this small service of charity, and sternly reprimanded and threatened. Henceforward she had to pass without even a longing look through the door at the altar on which was the holy sacrament.
She came in on the renewed sitting of the 2d May to find the assembled priests settling themselves, after the address which had been made to them, to hear another address which John de Chasteillon, Archdeacon, had prepared for herself, in which he said much that was good both for body and soul, to which she consented. He had a list of twelve articles in his hands, and explained and expounded them to her, as they were the occasion of the sitting. He then “admonished her in charity,” explaining that those who were faithful to Christ hold firmly and closely to the Christian creed, and adjuring her to consent and to amend her ways. To this Jeanne answered: “Read your book,” meaning the schedule held by Monseigneur the Archdeacon, “and then I will answer you. I refer myself to God my master in all things; and I love Him with all my heart.”
To read this book, however, was precisely what Monseigneur the Archdeacon had no intention of doing. She was never allowed to hear the twelve articles upon which the verdict against her was founded; but the speaker gave her a long discourse by way of explanation, following more or less the schedule which he held. This “monition general,” however, elicited no detailed reply from Jeanne, who answered briefly with some impatience, “I refer myself to my judge, who is the King of Heaven and earth.” The “Lord Archdeacon” then proceeded to “monitions particulares.”
It was then once more explained to her that this reference to God alone was a refusal to submit to the Church militant, and she was instructed in the authority of the Church, which it was the duty of every Christian to believe–/unam sanctam Ecclesiam/ always guided by the Holy Spirit and which could not err, to the judgment of which every question should be referred. She answered: “I believe in the Church here below; but my doings and sayings, as I have already said, I refer and submit to God. I believe that the Church militant cannot err or fail; but as for my deeds and words I put them all before God, who has made me do that which I have done”; she also said that she submitted herself to God, her Creator, who had made her do everything, and referred everything to Him, and to Him alone.
She was then asked, if she would have no judge on earth and if our Holy Father the Pope were not her judge; she answered: “I will tell you nothing more. I have a good master, that is our Lord, on whom I depend for everything, and not an any other.”
She was then told that if she would not believe the Church and the article /Ecclesiam sanctam Catholicam/, that she might be reckoned as a heretic and punished by burning: to which she answered: “I can say nothing else to you; and if I saw the fire before me, I should say only that which I say, and could do nothing else.” (Once more at this point the clerk writes on his margin, “Proud reply”–/Superba responsio/–but whether in admiration or in blame it would be hard to say.)
Asked, if the Council General, or the Holy Father, Cardinals, etc., were there–whether she would submit to them. “You shall have no other answer from me,” she said.
Asked, if she would submit to our Holy Father the Pope: she answered, “Take me to him and I will answer him,” but would say no more.
Questioned in respect to her dress, she answered, that she would willingly accept a long dress and a woman’s hood to go to church to receive her Saviour, provided that, as she had already said, she were allowed to wear it on that occasion only, and then to take back that which she at present wore. Further, when it was set before her that she wore that dress without any need, being in prison, she answered, “When I have done that for which I was sent by God, I will then take back a woman’s dress.” Asked, if she thought she did well in being dressed like a man, she answered, “I refer every thing to our Lord.”
Again, after the exhortation made to her, namely, that in saying that she did well and did not sin in wearing that dress, and in the circumstances which concerned her assuming and wearing it, and in saying that God and the saints made her do so–she blasphemed, and as is contained in this schedule, erred and did evil: she answered that she never blasphemed God or the saints.
She was then admonished to give up that dress, and no longer to think it was right, and to return to the garb of a woman; but answered that she would make no change in this respect.
Concerning her revelations: she replied in regard to them, that she referred everything to her judge, that is God, and that her revelations were from God, without any other medium.
Asked concerning the sign given to the King if she would refer to the Archbishop of Rheims, the Sire de Boussac, Charles de Bourbon, La Tremouille, and La Hire, to them or to any one of them, who, according to what she formerly said, had seen the crown, and were present when the angel brought it, and gave it to the Archbishop; or if she would refer to any others of her party who might write under their seals that it was so; she answered, “Send a messenger, and I will write to them about the whole trial”: but otherwise she was not disposed to refer to them.
In respect to her presumption in divining the future, etc., she answered, “I refer everything to my judge who is God, and to what I have already answered, which is written in the book.”
Asked, if two or three or four knights of her party were to be brought here under a safe conduct, whether she would refer to them her apparitions and other things contained in this trial; answered, “Let them come and then I will answer:” but otherwise she was not willing to refer to anyone.
Asked whether, at the Church of Poitiers where she was examined, she had submitted to the Church, she answered, “Do you hope to catch me in this way, and by that draw advantage to yourselves?”
In conclusion, “afresh and abundantly,” she was admonished to submit herself to the Church, on pain of being abandoned by the Church; for if the Church left her she would be in great danger of body and of soul; and she might well put herself in peril of eternal fire for the soul, as well as of temporal fire for the body, by the sentence of other judges. “You will not do this which you say against me, without doing injury to your own bodies and souls,” she said.
Asked, whether she could give a reason why she would not submit to the Church: but to this she would make no additional reply.
Again a week passed in busy talk and consultation without, in silence and desertion within. On the 9th of May the prisoner was again led, this time to the great tower, apparently the torture chamber of the castle, where she found nine of her judges awaiting her, and was once more adjured to speak the truth, with the threat of torture if she continued to refuse. Never was her attitude more calm, more dignified and lofty in its simplicity, than at this grim moment.
“Truly,” she replied, “if you tear the limbs from my body, and my soul out of it, I can say nothing other than what I have said; or if I said anything different, I should afterwards say that you had compelled me to do it by force.” She added that on the day of the Holy Cross, the 3d of May past, she had been comforted by St. Gabriel. She believed that it was St. Gabriel: and she knew by her voices that it was St. Gabriel. She had asked counsel of her voices whether she should submit to the Church, because the priests pressed her so strongly to submit: but it had been said to her that if she desired our Lord to help her she must depend upon Him for everything. She added that she knew well that our Lord had always been the master of all she did, and that the Enemy had nothing to do with her deeds. Also she had asked her voices if she should be burned, and the said voices had replied to her that she was to wait for the Lord and He would help her.
Afterwards in respect to the crown which had been handed by the angel to the Archbishop of Rheims, she was asked if she would refer to him. She answered: “Bring him here, that I may hear what he says, and then I shall answer you; he will not dare to say the contrary of that which I have said to you.”
The Archbishop of Rheims had been her constant enemy; all the hindrances that had occurred in her active life, and the constant attempts made to balk her even in her brief moment of triumph, came from him and his associate La Tr�mouille. He was the last person in the world to whom Jeanne naturally would have appealed. Perhaps that was the admirable reason why he was suggested in this dreadful crisis of her fate.
A few days later, it was discussed among those dark inquisitors whether the torture should be applied or not. Finally, among thirteen there were but two (let not the voice of sacred vengeance be silent on their shame though after four centuries and more), Thomas de Courcelles, first of theologians, cleverest of ecclesiastical lawyers, mildest of men, and Nicolas L’Oyseleur, the spy and traitor, who voted for the torture. One man most reasonably asked why she should be put to torture when they had ample material for judgment without it? One cannot but feel that the proceedings on this occasion were either intended to beguile the impatience of the English authorities, eager to be done with the whole business, or to add a quite gratuitous pang to the sufferings of the heroic girl. As the men were not devils, though probably possessed by this time, the more cruel among them, by the horrible curiosity, innate alas! in human nature, of seeing how far a suffering soul could go, it is probable that the first motive was the true one. The English, Warwick especially, whose every movement was restrained by this long-pending affair, were exceedingly impatient, and tempted at times to take the matter into their own hands, and spoil the perfectness of this well constructed work of art, conducted according to all the rules, the beautiful trial which was dear to the Bishop’s heart–and destined to be, though perhaps in a sense somewhat different to that which he hoped, his chief title to fame.
Ten days after, the decision of the University of Paris arrived, and a great assembly of counsellors, fifty-one in all, besides the permanent presidents, collected together in the chapel of the Archbishop’s house, to hear that document read, along with many other documents, the individual opinions of a host of doctors and eminent authorities. After an explanation of the solemn care given by the University to the consideration of every one of the twelve articles of the indictment, that learned tribunal pronounced its verdict upon each. The length of the proceedings makes it impossible to reproduce these. First as to the early revelations given to Jeanne, described in the first and second articles, they are denounced as “murderous, seductive, and pernicious fictions,” the apparitions those of “malignant spirits and devils, Belial, Satan, and Behemoth.” The third article, which concerned her recognition of the saints, was described more mildly as containing errors in faith; the fourth, as to her knowledge of future events, was characterised as “superstitious and presumptuous divination.” The fifth, concerning her dress, declared her to be “blasphemous and contemptuous of God in His Sacraments.” The sixth, by which she was accused of loving bloodshed, because she made war against those who did not obey the summons in her letters bearing the name Jhesus Maria, was declared to prove that she was cruel, “seeking the shedding of blood, seditious, and a blasphemer of God.” The tenor is the same to the end: Blasphemy, superstition, pernicious doctrine, impiety, cruelty, presumption, lying; a schismatic, a heretic, an apostate, an idolator, an invoker of demons. These are the conclusions drawn by the most solemn and weighty tribunal on matters of faith in France. The precautions taken to procure a full and trustworthy judgment, the appeal to each section in turn, the Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Law, the “Nations,” all separately and than all together passing every item in review–are set forth at full length. Every formality had been fulfilled, every rule followed, every detail was in the fullest order, signed and sealed and attested by solemn notaries, bristling with well-known names. A beautiful judgment, equal to the trial, which was beautiful too–not a rule omitted except those of justice, fairness, and truth! The doctors sat and listened with every fine professional sense satisfied.
“If the beforesaid woman, charitably exhorted and admonished by competent judges, does not return spontaneously to the Catholic faith, publicly abjure her errors, and give full satisfaction to her judges, she is hereby given up to the secular judge to receive the reward of her deeds.”
The attendant judges, each in his place, now added their adhesion. Most of them simply stated their agreement with the judgment of the University, or with that of the Bishop of Fecamp, which was a similar tenor; a few wished that Jeanne should be again “charitably admonished”; many desired that on this selfsame day the final sentence should be pronounced. One among them, a certain Raoul Sauvage (Radulphus Silvestris), suggested that she should be brought before the people in a public place, a suggestion afterwards carried out. Fr�re Isambard desired that she should be charitably admonished again and have another chance, and that her final fate should still be in the hands of “us her judges.” The conclusion was that one more “charitable admonition” should be given to Jeanne, and that the law should then take its course. The suggestion that she should make a public appearance had only one supporter.
This dark scene in the chapel is very notable, each man rising to pronounce what was in reality a sentence of death,–fifty of them almost unanimous, filled no doubt with a hundred different motives, to please this man or that, to win favour, to get into the way of promotion,–but all with a distinct consciousness of the great yet horrible spectacle, the stake, the burning:–though perhaps here and there was one with a hope that perpetual imprisonment, bread of sorrow and water of anguish, might be substituted for that terrible death. Finally, it was decided that–always on the side of mercy, as every act proved–the tribunal should once more “charitably admonish” the prisoner for the salvation of her soul and body, and that after all this “good deliberation and wholesome counsel” the case should be concluded.
Again there follows a pause of four days. No doubt the Bishop and his assessors had other things to do, their ecclesiastical functions, their private business, which could not always be put aside because one forsaken soul was held in suspense day after day. Finally on the 24th of May, Jeanne again received in her prison a dignified company, some quite new and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the reader’s mind that it was perhaps to show off the interesting prisoner to two new and powerful bishops, the first, Louis of Luxembourg, a relative of her first captor, that this last examination was held), nine men in all, crowding her chamber–/exponuntur Johann� defectus sui/, says the record–to expound to Jeanne her faults. It was Magister Peter Morice to whom this office was confided. Once more the “schedule” was gone over, and an address delivered laden with all the bad words of the University. “Jeanne, dearest friend,” said the orator at last, “it is now time, at the end of the trial, to think well what words these are.” She would seem to have spoken during this address, at least once–to say that she held to everything she had said during the trial. When Morice had finished she was once more questioned personally.
She was asked if she still thought and believed that it was not her duty to submit her deeds and words to the Church militant, or to any other except God, upon which she replied, “What I have always said and held to during the trial, I maintain to this moment”; and added that if she were in judgment and saw the fire lighted, the faggots burning, and the executioner ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the fire, she could say nothing else, but would sustain what she had said in her trial, to death.
Once more the scribe has written on his margin the words /Responsio Johann� superba/–the proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation about her, must have moved the man, thus for the third time to send down to us his distinctly human impression of the worn out prisoner before her judges. “And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more, the cause was concluded,” says the record, so formal, sustained within such purely abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb and reverberation of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the Inquisitor too all words seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid the excited crowd in the Temple the officers of the Pharisees approaching to lay hands on a greater than Jeanne, fell back, not knowing why, and could not do their office. This man was silenced also. Two bishops were present, and one a great man full of patronage; but not for the richest living in Normandy could Peter Morice find any more to say.
These are in one sense the words of Jeanne; the last we have from her in her prison, the last of her consistent and unbroken life. After, there was a deeper horror to go through, a moment when all her forces failed. Here on the verge of eternity she stands heroic and unyielding, brave, calm, and steadfast as at the outset of her career, the Maid of France. Were the fires lighted and the faggots burning, and she herself within the fire, she had no other word to say. ———- [1] It is correct in French to use the second person plural in addressing God, /thou/ being a more intimate and less respectful form of speech. Such a difference is difficult to remember, and troubles the ear. The French, even those who ought to know better, sometimes speak of it as a supreme profanity on the part of the profane English, that they address God as /thou/.
[2] The French report goes on, “et requiert —-,” but no more. It is not in the Latin. The scribe was stopped by the Bishop’s profane outcry, and forbidden to register the fact she was about to make a direct appeal to the Pope.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431.
On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart still high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had been no doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with every repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the last. And the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very near to her; no doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange information about herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside of the Castle of Rouen, rose half-comprehended from the echoing courtyard outside and the babble of her guards within. She would hear even as she was conveyed along the echoing stone passages something here and there of the popular expectation:–a burning! the wonderful unheard of sight, which by hook or by crook everyone must see; and no doubt among the English talk she might now be able to make out something concerning this long business which had retarded all warlike proceedings but which would soon be over now, and the witch burnt. There must have been some, even among those rude companions, who would be sorry, who would feel that she was no witch, yet be helpless to do anything for her, any more than Massieu could, or Fr�re Isambard: and if it was all for the sake of certain words to be said, was the wench mad? would it not be better to say anything, to give up anything rather than be burned at the stake? Jeanne, notwithstanding the wonderful courage of her last speech, must have returned to her cell with small illusion possible to her intelligent spirit. The stake had indeed come very near, the flames already dazzled her eyes, she must have felt her slender form shrink together at the thought. All that long night, through the early daylight of the May morning did she lie and ponder, as for far less reasons so many of us have pondered as we lay wakeful through those morning watches. God’s promises are great, but where is the fulfilment? We ask for bread and he gives us, if not a stone, yet something which we cannot realise to be bread till after many days. Jeanne’s voices had never paused in their pledge to her of succour. “Speak boldly, God will help you–fear nothing”; there would be aid for her before three months, and great victory. They went on saying so, though the stake was already being raised. What did they mean? what did they mean? Could she still trust them? or was it possible —-?
Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced the fire. She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the heartrending ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give her that heroic command. Still and always, they said God will help you, our Lord will stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean deliverance, deliverance! What else could it mean? If she held her head high as she returned to the horrible monotony of that prison so often left with hope, so often re-entered in sadness, it must soon have dropped upon her tired bosom. Slowly the clouds had settled round her. Over and over again had she affirmed them to be true–these voices that had guided her steps and led her to victory. And they had promised her the aid of God if she went forward boldly, and spoke and did not fear. But now every way of salvation was closing; all around her were fierce soldiers thirsting for her blood, smooth priests who admonished her in charity, threatening her with eternal fire for the soul, temporal fire for the body. She felt that fire, already blowing towards her as if on the breath of the evening wind, and her girlish flesh shrank. Was that what the voices had called deliverance? was that the grand victory, the aid of the Lord?
It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she had reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison became intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough jests half through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the clang of their arms when relieved. Early next morning a party of her usual visitors came in upon her to give her fresh instruction and advice. Something new was about to happen to-day. She was to be led forth, to breathe the air of heaven, to confront the people, the raging sea of men’s faces, all the unknown world about her. The crowd had never been unfriendly to Jeanne. It had closed about her, almost wherever she was visible, with sweet applause and outcries of joy. Perhaps a little hope stirred her heart in the thought of being surrounded once more by the common folk, though probably it did not occur to her to think of these Norman strangers as her own people. And a great day was before her, a day in which something might still be done, in which deliverance might yet come. L’Oyseleur, who was one of her visitors, adjured her now to change her conduct, to accept whatever means of salvation might be offered to her. There was no longer any mention of Pope or Council, but only of the Church to which she ought to yield. How it was that he preserved his influence over her, having been proved to be a member of the tribunal that judged her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a fellow-countryman, nor any of the things he had professed to be, no once can tell us; but evidently he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to have received him without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed she seems to have been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who professed to wish her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
It would require, however, no great persuasion on L’Oyseleur’s part to convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be so determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but delivered from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping of the Church, there would be time to think of everything, even to make her peace with her voices who would surely understand if, for the saving of her life, and out of terror for the dreadful fire, she abandoned them for a moment. She had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and they had forgiven. One faltering word now, a mark of her hand upon a paper, and she would be safe–even if still all they said was true; and if indeed and in fact, after buoying her up from day to day, such a dreadful thing might be as that they were not true —-
The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment, of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
Then there came into the prison a better man than L’Oyseleur, Jean Beaup�re, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of all these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he came in all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to warn her. He came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor. “Jean Beaup�re entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by permission, and advertised her that she would straightway be taken to the scaffold to be addressed (/pour y �tre presch�e/), and that if she was a good Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and words under the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and specially of the ecclesiastical judges.” “Accept the woman’s dress and do all that you are told,” her other adviser had said. When the car that was to convey her came to the prison doors, L’Oyseleur accompanied her, no doubt with a show of supporting her to the end. What a change from the confined and gloomy prison to the dazzling clearness of the May daylight, the air, the murmuring streets, the throng that gazed and shouted and followed! Life that had run so low in the prisoner’s veins must have bounded up within her in response to that sunshine and open sky, and movement and sound of existence– summer weather too, and everything softened in the medium of that soft breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She had been three months in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along the roughly paved streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange object appeared to Jeanne’s eyes in the midst of the market-place, a lofty scaffold with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd, the logs all arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four horses, to bring hither the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready, everything arranged–for whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that she might see the preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?
In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different scene. That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a great open space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In this were erected two platforms, one facing the other. On the first sat the court of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester having a place by the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president, with several other bishops and dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on the other platform, were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to which Jeanne was conducted by Massieu, who never left her, and L’Oyseleur, who kept as near as he could, the rest of the platform being immediately covered by lawyers, doctors, all the camp followers, so to speak, of the black army, who could find footing there. Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the doublet and hose, with her short- clipped hair–no doubt looking like a slim boy among all this dark crowd of men. The people swayed like a sea all about and around–the throng which had gathered in her progress through the streets pushing out the crowd already assembled with a movement like the waves of the sea. Every step of the trial all through had been attended by preaching, by discourses and reasoning and admonishments, charitable and otherwise. Now she was to be “preached” for the last time.
It was Doctor Guillaume �rard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher, one whom the “copious multitude” ran after and were eager to hear. He himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set up there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential of men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John’s Gospel: “A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine.” The centre circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the witch should be condemned.
It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine periods admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of France, and the head of that House, “Charles who calls himself King.” “He has,” cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of Winchester upon him, “adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who are under his sway, and the nobility. This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and to thee I say that thy King is a schismatic and a heretic.”
In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by that clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the tumult of battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used to abuse in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this assault on her King. And interruption to a sermon has always a dramatic and startling effect, but when that voice arose now, when the startled speaker stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is easy to imagine what a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must have arisen in the midst of the crowd. “By my faith, sire,” cried Jeanne, “saving your respect, I swear upon my life that my King is the most noble Christian of all Christians, that he is not what you say.”
The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts. “Here,” said �rard, “are my lords the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to submit your acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in these acts and words there are many things which it seemed to the clergy were not good either to say or to sustain.”
To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), “I will answer you.” And as to her submission to the Church she said: “I have told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God first, I refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on the part of God.” She also said that no one was to blame for her acts and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in them, the blame was hers and no other’s.
Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, “I refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope.”
It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy Father was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in his diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother the Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and officers of the Church had a right to determine in her case. And of this she was admonished three times.
After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a great part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she would hold to all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in everything their ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the above-named and of the great multitude assembled she made her abjuration in the manner that follows:
And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions and revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not sustain them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother the Holy Church.
*****
In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made. Manchon writes on his margin: /At the end of the sentence Jeanne, fearing the fire, said she would obey the Church/. Even into the bare legal document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding in the silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation of the previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering submission, /timens igneum/–in fear of the fire.
The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. �rard, from his pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called upon Massieu to explain it to her. “And he” (we quote from his own deposition), “after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her to refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not. Which thing she did, saying to �rard, ‘I refer to the Church universal whether I should abjure or not.’ To which �rard answered, ‘You shall abjure at once or you will be burnt.’ Massieu gives further particulars in another part of the Rehabilitation process. �rard, he says, asked what he was saying to the prisoner, and he answered that she would sign if the schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that she could not write, and then added that she wished it to be decided by the Church, and ought not to sign unless that was done: and also required that she should be placed in the custody of the Church, and freed from the hands of the English. The same �rard answered that there had been ample delay, and that if she did not sign at once she should be burned, and forbade Massieu to say any more.”
Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to have promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the Church. “Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save yourself?” was called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast, but her heart failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering. Once she called out over their heads, “All that I did was done for good, and it was well to do it:”–her last cry. Then she would seem to have recovered in some measure her composure. Probably her agitated brain was unable to understand the formula of recantation which was read to her amid all the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the condition she had herself stated, that the paper should be submitted to the Church, and that she should at once be transferred to an ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made, namely, that it was a very short document upon which she hastily in her despair made a cross, and that it was a long one, consisting of several pages, which was shown afterwards with /Jehanne/ scribbled underneath. “In fact,” says Massieu, “she abjured and made a cross with the pen which the witness handed to her:” he, if any one must have known exactly what happened.
No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform. But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals, seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her young life for! “Sign, sign; why should you die!” Cauchon had gone on reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve her–which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English were impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they had desired at once to get her out of their way. But the idea of her perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a prisoner was more than they chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are some things a churchman cannot do. When it was seen that Jeanne had yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished forth in somebody’s hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do? There was but one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne’s natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to penitence was the only practicable way.
Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs of the crowd. The /c�dule/ to which she put her sign “contained eight lines:” what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; “for the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite different.” This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined to the necessary points and expressed in few words– was afterwards published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions, as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an abjuration at all.
When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and pronounced the prisoner’s fate. “Seeing that thou hast returned to the bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison, with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by solitary penitence.” Whether the words reached her over all those crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There seems even to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials. Some of them congratulated Jeanne, L’Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, “You have done a good day’s work, you have saved your soul.” She herself, excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go. She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual imprisonment with complete faith and content. It meant to her instant relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her impatience and eagerness. “People of the Church –/gens de’ �glise/–lead me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English,” she cried with feverish anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her thought. The men about her could not answer this appeal. Some of them no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure. But perhaps flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop to ask where they were to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar of Longueville. Where was she to be taken? In Winchester’s hearing, perhaps in Warwick’s, what a question to put! An English bishop, says this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a “fauteur de ladite Jeanne,” “/this fellow was also one of them/.” Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her abjuration, which by no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.
Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms–but for what? to escape those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of Dionysius, its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going back was beyond words. We hear of no word that she said when she realised the hideous fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter waters closed over her head. Again the chains to be locked and double locked that bound her to her dreadful bed, again the presence of those men who must have been all the more odious to her from the momentary hope that she had got free from them for ever.
The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard upon her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor, Courcelles, and L’Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though with a word of warning that should she change her mind and return to her evil ways there would be no further place for repentance. As a return for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he required her immediately to put on the female dress which his attendants had brought. There is something almost ludicrous, could we forget the tragedy to follow, in the bundle of humble clothing brought by such exalted personages, with the solemnity which became a thing upon which hung the issues of life or death. Jeanne replied with the humility of a broken spirit. “I take them willingly,” she said, “and in everything I will obey the Church.” Then silence closed upon her, the horrible silence of the prison, full of hidden listeners and of watching eyes.
Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain have seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but Monseigneur de Beauvais had to hold head against the great English authorities who were out of all patience, fearing that the witch might still slip through their fingers and by her spells and incantations make the heart of the troops melt once more within them. If the mind of the Church had been as charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if all the power of Rome could have got the Maid now out of the English grip. They were exasperated, and felt that they too, as well as the prisoner, had been played with. But the Bishop had good hope in his mind, still to be able to content his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it was true, but the more he inquired into that act, the less secure he must have felt about it. And she might relapse; and if she relapsed there would be no longer any place for repentance. And it is evident that his confidence in the power of the clothes was boundless. In any case a few days more would make all clear.
They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance, well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne’s “relapse.” One account is given by Fr�re Isambard, whom she told in the presence of several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a /Millourt Anglois/, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again the man’s dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be released from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards took away her female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack containing the other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding them that these were forbidden to her; but got no answer except a brutal order to get up. It is very probable that both stories are true. Fr�re Isambard found her weeping and agitated, and nothing is more probable than this was the occasion on which Warwick heard her cries, and interfered to save her. Massieu’s version, of which he is certain, was communicated to him a day or two after when they happened to be alone together. It was on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday that she put on the female dress, but it would seem that rumours on the subject of a relapse had begun to spread even before the Sunday on which that event happened: and Beaup�re and Midi were sent by the Bishop to investigate. But they were very ill-received in the Castle, sworn at by the guards, and forced to go back without seeing Jeanne, there being as yet, it appeared, nothing to see. On the morning of the Monday, however, the rumours arose with greater force; and no doubt secret messages must have informed the Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight of the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt with much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle was all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event so trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her, and humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an outcry of astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? “Yes,” she replied, “she had resumed the costume of a man.” There was no triumph in what she said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of one who in the most desperate strait has taken her resolution and must abide by it, whether she likes it or not. She was asked why she had resumed that dress, and who had made her do so. There was no question of anything else at first. The tunic and /gippon/ were at once enough to decide her fate.
She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a woman.
She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the dress of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn or had made any such oath.
She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more lawful to wear a man’s dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and also that she had taken it back because the promise made to her had not been kept, that she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour, and be delivered from her irons.
She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to resume it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in irons; but if they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of her irons and put her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she would be good, and do whatever the Church pleased.
She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of her voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them again. To this she answered, recovering a little courage, “Yes.”
She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God had made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity there was of the treason to which she had consented by making abjuration and revocation in order to save her life: and that she had earned damnation for herself to save her life. Also that before Thursday her voices had told her that she should do what she did that day, that on the scaffold they had told her to answer the preachers boldly, and that this preacher whom she called a false preacher had accused her of many things she never did. She also added that if she said God had not sent her she would damn herself, for true it was that God had sent her. Also that her voices had told her since, that she had done a great sin in confessing that she had sinned; but that for fear of the fire she had said that which she had said.
She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were so; and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold that she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St. Margaret, she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she never intended to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not St. Catherine and St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of the fire, and she had denied nothing but what was contrary to truth; and she said that she would like better to make her penitence all at one time–that is to say, in dying, than to endure a long penitence in prison. Also that she had never done anything against God or the faith whatever they might have made her say; and that for what was in the schedule of the abjuration she did not know what it was. Also she said that she never intended to revoke anything so long as it pleased our Lord. At the end she said that if her judges would have her do so, she might put on again her female dress; but for the rest she would do no more.
“What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his own mouth.” Jeanne’s protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and defence, overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it with questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed; the end of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be accomplished. No one could say she had not had full justice done her; every formality had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried out. Now there was but one thing before her, whose sad young voice with many pauses thus sighed forth its last utterance; and for her judges, one last spectacle to prepare, and the work to complete which it had taken them three long months to do.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SACRIFICE. MAY 31, 1431.
It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in certain circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of Beauvais had entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew exactly, with a perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least, that, notwithstanding the effect which his theatrical /mise en sc�ne/ had produced upon the imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or earth would induce that young soul to content itself with a lie. He knew it, though lies were his daily bread; the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. He had bidden his English patrons to wait a little, and now his predictions were triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of any man that on such a certainty he could have calculated and laid his devilish plans; but there would seem to have existed in the medi�val churchman a certain horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic which was peculiar to their age and profession, and which no better principle in their own minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their delight of sensation, in distinction from the other appetites perhaps scarcely less cruel which other men indulged with no such horrified denunciation from the rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared with Cauchon that sharp sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her out; young Courcelles, so modest and unassuming and so learned, among the rest; not L’Oyseleur, it appears by the sequel. That Judas, like the greater traitor, was struck to the heart; but the less bad man who had only persecuted, not betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and only rejoiced that at last the victim was ready to drop into the flames which had been so carefully prepared.
The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried with their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the Archbishop’s house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily called together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner escaped had been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one each man rose again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of F�camp, led the tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done: to give her up to the secular justice, “praying that she might be gently dealt with.” Man after man added his voice “to that of Abbot of F�camp aforesaid”–that she might be gently dealt with! Not one of them could be under any doubt what gentle meaning would be in the execution; but apparently the words were of some strange use in salving their consciences.
The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In point of view of the law, there should have followed another trial, more evidence, pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to Monseigneur de Beauvais that he now defied law, and no longer prolonged the useless ceremonials of that mockery of justice. It is said that in coming out of the prison, through the courtyard full of Englishmen, where Warwick was in waiting to hear what news, the Bishop greeted them with all the satisfaction of success, laughing and bidding them “Make good cheer, the thing is done.” In the same spirit of satisfaction was the rapid action of the further proceedings. On Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on Wednesday morning at eight ‘clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear her sentence, and there, without even that formality, the penalty was at once carried out. No time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge of her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful scene, which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty years after by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it had become the only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest colours, and themselves as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt that so remarkable an occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a deep impression on the minds of all those who were in any way actors in or spectators of that wonderful scene. And every word of all these different reports is on oath; but notwithstanding, a touch of unconscious colour, a more favourable sentiment, influenced by the feeling of later days, may well have crept in. With this warning we may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy, all the more for the atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no way idealised, which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in which Jeanne figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified, tormented, and often trembling girl.
On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l’Advenu appeared in the cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell–first “to announce to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true contrition and penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the said l’Advenu did very carefully and charitably.” Jeanne on her part received the news with no conventional resignation or calm. Was it possible that she had been deceived and really hoped for mercy? She began to weep and to cry at the sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding the solemnity of her last declaration, that she would rather bear her punishment all at once than to endure the long punishment of her prison, her heart failed before the imminent stake, the immediate martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and earth: “My body, which has never been corrupted, must it be burned to ashes to-day!” No one but Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her perfect purity; was it good for nothing but to be burned, that young body not nineteen years old? “Ah,” she said, “I would rather be beheaded seven times than burned! I appeal to God against all these great wrongs they do me.” But after a while the passion wore itself out, the child’s outburst was stilled; calming herself, she knelt down and made her confession to the compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to “receive her Saviour” as she had so often prayed and entreated before. It would appear that this had not been within Friar Martin’s commission. He sent to ask the Bishop’s leave, and it was granted “anything she asked for”–as they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned convict. But the Host was brought into the prison without ceremony, without accompanying candles or vestment for the priest. There are always some things which are insupportable to a man. Brother Martin could bear the sight of the girl’s anguish, but not to administer to her a diminished rite. He sent again to demand what was needful, out of respect for the Holy Sacrament and the present victim. And his request had come, it would seem, to some canon or person in authority whose heart had been touched by the wonderful Maid in her long martyrdom. This nameless sympathiser did all that a man could do. He sent the Host with a train of priests chanting litanies as they went through the streets, with torches burning in the pure early daylight; some of these exhorted the people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her. She must have heard in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the clergy, the pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the voices, that sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the city was touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been sympathetic to Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was about to die: she had stood bravely against the world and answered like a true Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets, a girl just nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated for the time.
Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over, received at last “her Saviour” as she said, the consecration of that rite which He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not permitted to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the sacred commemoration. All the time she was still /presch�e/ and admonished by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop and his followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different parts in that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult to say. The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal warrant for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of mind is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it, and a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope and strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that she sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation for which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already mentioned, importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring to get from her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and was herself a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil spirits, not good,–drew from her the impatient exclamation: “Be they good spirits, or be they evil, they appeared to me.” Even in the act of giving her her last communion, Brother Martin paused with the consecrated Host in his hands.
“Do you believe,” he said, “that this is the body of Christ?” Jeanne answered: “Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer.” Then this brother said to Jeanne: “Do you believe as fully in your voices?” Jeanne answered: “I believe in God alone and not in the voices, which have deceived me.” L’Advenu himself, however, does not give this deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus, who did not live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. “So, Jeanne,” he said, “you have always told us that your ‘voices’ said you were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us the truth at last.” Then Jeanne answered: “Truly I see that they have deceived me.” The report is Cauchon’s, and therefore little to be trusted; but the sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that, even in records more trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her. The other spectators all report another portion of this conversation. “Bishop, it is by you I die,” are the words with which the Maid is said to have met him. “Oh Jeanne, have patience,” he replied. “It is because you did not keep your promise.” “If you had kept yours, and sent me to the prison of the Church, and put me in gentle hands, it would not have happened,” she replied. “I appeal from you to God.” Several of the attendants, also according to the Bishop’s account, heard from her the same sad words: “They have deceived me”; and there seems no reason why we should not believe it. Her mind was weighed down under this dreadful unaccountable fact. She was forsaken–as a greater sufferer was; and a horror of darkness had closed around her. “Ah, Sieur Pierre,” she said to Morice, “where shall I be to-night?” The man had condemned her as a relapsed heretic, a daughter of perdition. He had just suggested to her that her angels must have been devils. Nevertheless perhaps his face was not unkindly, he had not meant all the harm he did. He ought to have answered, “In Hell, with the spirits you have trusted”; that would have been the only logical response. What he did say was very different. “Have you not good faith in the Lord?” said the judge who had doomed her. Amazing and notable speech! They had sentenced her to be burned for blasphemy as an envoy of the devil; they believed in fact that she was the child of God, and going straight in that flame to the skies. Jeanne, with the sound, clear head and the “sane mind” to which all of them testified, did she perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the inconceivable contradiction? “Ah,” she said, “yes, God helping me, I shall be in Paradise.”
There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to the mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully not repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed “as if it had been a thing of small importance,” that her story of the angel bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither expected nor intended to be believed. For this we have to thank L’Oyseleur and the rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that dreadful morning in the prison.
Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy Office. She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the crowded courtyard where her “chariot” awaited her. It was her confessor’s part to remain by her side, and Fr�re Isambard and Massieu, the officer, both her friends, were also with her. It is said that L’Oyseleur rushed forward at this moment, either to accompany her also, or, as many say, to fling himself at her feet and implore her pardon. He was hustled aside by the crowd and would have been killed by the English, it is said, but for Warwick. The bystanders would seem to have been seized with a sudden disgust for all the priests about, thinking them Jeanne’s friends, the historians insinuate–more likely in scorn and horror of their treachery. And then the melancholy procession set forth.
The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part: eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cort�ge, as the car rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid attained to the calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all the high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs that gaped and gazed upon her on every side. In the midst of the consolations of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears, other words, the plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips, “Rouen! Rouen!” she said; “am I to die here?” It seemed incredible to her, impossible. She looked about still for some sign of disturbance, some rising among the crowd, some cry of “France! France!” or glitter of mail. Nothing: but the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the soldiers roughly clearing the way, the rude chariot rumbling on. “Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you shall yet suffer because of this,” she murmured in her distraction, amid her moanings and tears.
At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered with three erections–one reaching up so high that the shadow of it seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form. Two platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn. Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it matter? No sentence at all was read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which was illegal also. She was probably placed first on the same platform with her judges, where there was a pulpit from which she was to be /presch�e/ for the last time. Of all Jeanne’s sufferings this could scarcely be the least, that she was always /presch�e/, lectured, addressed, sermonised through every painful step of her career.
The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance, when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text was in St. Paul’s words: “If any of the members suffer, all the other members suffer with it.” Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her “Go in peace.” Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The narrative shows that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in her career, paid no attention to the tirade levelled at her from the president’s place. “She knelt down on the platform showing great signs and appearance of contrition, so that all those who looked upon her wept. She called on her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed saints of Paradise.” She called specially–was it with still a return towards the hoped for miracle? was it with the instinctive cry towards an old and faithful friend?–“St. Michael, St. Michael, St. Michael, help!” There would seem to have been a moment in which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying, speaking–sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen companions of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her. She asked the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say a mass for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive her. Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry of “Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?” No reason is given for the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned a campaign in Normandy with Alen�on. Had there been perhaps some special hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?
There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the profoundest pang of which nature is capable. “He trusted in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him.” That which her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon the saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of men. But as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop’s evil voice scarcely silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient –the entire crowd, touched to its heart with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and lamentation, “/� chaudes larmes/” according to the graphic French expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow and fellow-feeling and impotence to help. Winchester–withdrawn high on his platform, ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a spectator merely–wept; and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon’s cheeks. The very world stood still to see that white form of purity, and valour, and faith, the Maid, not shouting triumphant on the height of victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: “Will you keep us here all day; must we dine here?” a voice perhaps of unendurable pain that simulated cruelty. And then the executioner stepped in and seized the victim.
It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be no chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim the atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that the ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach her: the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel explanation. There was a writing set over the little platform which gave footing to the attendants below the stake, upon which were written the following words:
JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER, BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL, DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and religion branded the Maid of France–one half of her countrymen: the other half, silent, speaking no word, looking on.
Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees, asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of her disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its broken edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried, pressing it against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross to preserve as a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold and silver. This was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few remaining steps and mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high over all that sea of heads. When she was bound securely to her stake, she asked again for a cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church, to be held before her as long as her eyes could see. Fr�re Isambard and Massieu, following her closely still, sent to the nearest church, and procured probably some cross which was used for processional purposes on a long staff which could be held up before her. The friar stood upon the faggots holding it up, and calling out broken words of encouragement so long that Jeanne bade him withdraw, lest the fire should catch his robes. And so at last, as the flames began to rise, she was left alone, the good brother always at the foot of the pile, painfully holding up with uplifted arms the cross that she might still see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up with the red glow of the fire, the horrified, trembling crowd like an agitated sea around. The wild flames rose and fell in sinister gleams and flashes, the smoke blew upwards, by times enveloping that white Maid standing out alone against a sky still blue and sweet with May–Pandemonium underneath, but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came a great cry from among the black fumes that began to reach the clouds: “My voices were of God! They have not deceived me!” She had seen and recognised it at last. Here it was, the miracle: the great victory that had been promised– though not with clang of swords and triumph of rescuing knights, and “St. Denis for France!”–but by the sole hand of God, a victory and triumph for all time, for her country a crown of glory and ineffable shame.
Thus died the Maid of France–with “Jesus, Jesus,” on her lips–till the merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat; and one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the fire, wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through the air in the good monk’s trembling hands–from eyes which opened bright upon the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so long thought and dreamed.
CHAPTER XVIII
AFTER.
The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known in history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the great catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been fact and evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been recorded all the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the most innocent of all, sought out Fr�re Isambard, and confessed to him in an anguish of remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had done. An Englishman who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in which the witch should be burned, when he rushed forward to keep his word was seized with sudden compunction–believed that he saw a white dove flutter forth from amid the smoke over her head, and, almost fainting at the sight, had to be led by his comrades to the nearest tavern for refreshment, a life-like touch in which we recognise our countryman; but he too found his way that afternoon to Fr�re Isambard like the other. A horrible story is told by the /Bourgeois de Paris/, whose contemporary journal is one of the authorities for this period, that “the fire was drawn aside” in order that Jeanne’s form, with all its clothing burned away, should be visible by one last act of shameless insult to the crowd. The fifteenth century believed, as we have said, everything that is cruel and horrible, as indeed the vulgar mind does at all ages; but such brutal imaginings have seldom any truth to support them, and there is no such suggestion in the actual record. Isambard and Massieu heard from one of the officials that when every other part of her body was destroyed the heart was found intact, but was, by the order of Winchester, flung into the Seine along with all the ashes of that sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics should be kept.
Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed this dreadful scene. “When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried out for water, holy water, and called to St. Mich�l; then hung her head upon her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently died.” “Being in the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud voice the holy name of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of paradise, she gave up her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name of Jesus in sign of the fervour of her faith.” One of the Canons of Rouen, standing sobbing in the crowd, said to another: “Would that my soul were in the same place where the soul of that woman is at this moment”; which indeed is not very different from the authorised saying of Pierre Morice in the prison. Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he who wrote /superba responsio/ on his margin, and had written down every word of her long examination–his occupation for three months,– says that he “never wept so much for anything that happened to himself, and that for a whole month he could not recover his calm.” This man adds a very characteristic touch, to wit, that “with part of the pay which he had for the trial, he bought a missal, that he might have a reason for praying for her.” Jean Tressat, “secretary to the King of England” (whatever that office may have been), went home from the execution crying out, “We are all lost, for we have burned a saint.” A priest, afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, “did not believe that there was any man who could restrain his tears.”
The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none are visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be continually pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed to have bought all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges, among whom were the most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but of none of this is there any proof given. That they were anxious to procure Jeanne’s condemnation and death, is very certain. Not one among them believed in her sacred mission, almost all considered her a sorceress, the most dangerous of evil influences, a witch who had brought shame and loss to England by her incantations and evil spells. On that point there could be no doubt whatever. She alone had stopped the progress of the invaders, and broken the charm of their invariable success. But all that she had done had been in favour of Charles, who made no attempt to serve or help her, and who had thwarted her plans, and hindered her work so long as it was possible to do so, even when she was performing miracles for his sake. And Alen�on, Dunois, La Hire, where were they and all the knights? Two of them at least were at Louvins, within a day’s march, but never made a step to rescue her. We need not ask where were the statesmen and clergy on the French side, for they were unfeignedly glad to have the burden of condemning her taken from their hands. No one in her own country said a word or struck a blow for Jeanne. As for the suborning of the University of Paris /en masse/, and all its best members in particular, that is a general baseness in which it is impossible to believe. There is no appearance even of any particular pressure put upon the judges. Jean de la Fontaine disappeared, we are told, and no one ever knew what became of him: but it was from Cauchon he fled. And nothing seems to have happened to the monks who attended the Maid to the scaffold, nor to the others who sobbed about the pile. On the other side, the Doctors who condemned her were in no way persecuted or troubled by the French authorities when the King came to his own. There was at the time a universal tacit consent in France to all that was done at Rouen on the 31st of May, 1431.
One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It was two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly allied to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie existing between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the hostile indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to Jeanne, who had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of Paris and the adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much against them as against the English, and the national sentiment to which she, a patriot before her age, appealed,–bidding not only the English go home, or fight and be vanquished, which was their only alternative–but the Burgundians to be converted and to live in peace with their brothers,–did not exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards, or Normans was the daughter of far Champagne a fellow countrywoman. There was neither sympathy nor kindness in their hearts on that score. Some were humane and full of pity for a simple woman in such terrible straits; but no more in Paris than in Rouen was the Maid of Orleans a native champion persecuted by the English; she was to both an enemy, a sorceress, putting their soldiers and themselves to shame.
I have no desire to lessen our[1] guilt, whatever cruelty may have been practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much was practised–the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that she was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A prisoner of war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in her downfall was a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame is greater upon those who sold than upon those who bought; and greatest of all upon those who did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did not move a finger, to rescue. And indeed we have been the most penitent of all concerned; we have shrived ourselves by open confession and tears. We have quarrelled with our Shakespeare on account of the Maid, and do not know how we could have forgiven him, but for the notable and delightful discovery that it was not he after all, but another and a lesser hand that endeavoured to befoul her shining garments. France has never quarrelled with her Voltaire for a much fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to the remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the assembly held on the Thursday after Jeanne’s death, how and when we are not told. It consisted of “nos judices antedicti,” but neither is the place of meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole testimonial is that the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous records: but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom by responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison, stand up and give their report of what happened there–part of which we have quoted–their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last acknowledged herself to be deceived. According to their own showing it was exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed to make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” burst from his lips. There seems no reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as substantially true. The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne’s part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived in respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart. It was to her the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning showed her the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her renewed conviction. The scene at the stake would lose something of its greatness without that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled soul.
Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The /proc�s/ was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman of coat armour–against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and Lema�tre, the Deputy Inquisitor–with other persons chiefly concerned in the judgment.