Joan of Arc (15 page)

Her diction also included proverbs that indicate peasant morality and common sense: “God helps those who help themselves,” in defense of her jumping from the tower, and “People have been hung for telling the truth before now,” to defend her refusing to tell the judges what they ask.

If we think of the trial as a musical performance, Joan was constantly the only female solo, and she was confronted by a series of more or less interchangeable male singers who could share their part. They could relieve each other, and she had no relief.

No relief. She had two possible modes in which to operate: She had to answer each question as it came along, which required absolute attentiveness at all times, and she had the silence of her cell, unaccompanied and uncomforted, a silence that also required alertness, since she felt under sexual threat by her guards. If one of her judges grew tired of questioning, he would leave off, rest, and give over responsibility to one of his colleagues. She was entirely on her own. At night, the judges had the company of their fellows, good food, rest in a comfortable bed. She had a dark cell, the company of enemies; she slept in fetters. It is remarkable that she kept her composure, her good humor, her health, and her freshness of thought and diction. The source of her strength was her belief that, wherever she was, she was in company far superior to any that her judges might be enjoying. Each morning, therefore, she was ready again to meet her opponents in a battle of words.

Cauchon soon understood that he was losing the battle and that Joan was enjoying the performance aspects of it. So he changed the nature of the performance from a public to a private one. On March 10, three weeks after the trial's first session, he moved the procedure from the courtroom to her cell; after this, Joan's language lost much of its playfulness. She lapsed into half promises and apologies; she got confused. Then, occasionally, she rallied, and the moments when we see again her old assertiveness are more poignant against the background of the equivocal others. In her cell, the girl whose métier was the spectacle, the battle in open air with pennants and standards flying, was reduced to a space of a few feet and the regard of only enemies whose focus was growing narrower and more hostile. In this new situation, the judges sharpened their questions and introduced topics that were difficult for her to answer with an easy heart: her leap from the tower at Beaurevoir, the capture and execution of Franquet d'Arras, and her fighting on a feast of Our Lady.

Two of the lesser charges of which she thought she might be guilty have a comic aspect. One is the matter of the bishop of Senlis's horse, which she took and returned without paying for it, saying that it was a bad nag and not worth the money. She admitted to having done this but then said she really didn't remember and didn't think it was a mortal sin, because she claimed, untruthfully, to have paid, and if he didn't get it, it wasn't her fault. The second moment with a comic touch occurs when she's accused of having told someone who asked her which of the warring popes she should support that, in effect, “she'd get back to him later.” She said that she shouldn't have done it, but she did it when she was in a hurry, when her soldiers needed her, on her way out of town.

The issue of fighting on a feast day was more serious. When asked why she attacked Paris on a feast day and questioned as to whether it was something her voices would have urged her to do, she said, “It is good to keep the feasts of Our Lady from beginning to end.” She didn't say anything about her not having kept them. Her slipperiness on this point indicates that she knew she did wrong; she herself refused to attack on the feast of the Ascension, but that was when the military tide was in her favor.
²¹

The matter of Franquet d'Arras was more serious still. When she was asked “whether taking a man prisoner and holding him to ransom and then putting him to death is not a mortal sin,”
²²
she said she'd never done such a thing, then said that he deserved to be put to death and that the ransom was no longer valid because the prisoner she was going to exchange him for was dead. She spoke about it as a peasant would a horse trade; then she became testy when asked if she gave money to the man who had taken Franquet d'Arras prisoner.

The matters of her attempted suicide, her executing a prisoner she had promised to give up for ransom, and her going to battle on a feast day could, even by a sympathetic judge, be considered mortal sins. In waiting until she was worn down by questioning, in presenting her with these troublesome accusations not in the public courtroom but alone in her cell, in bringing up offenses that, unlike the ones of sorcery and heresy, Joan would have cause to worry about (they were, interestingly enough, faults concerned with bodies rather than ideas), the judges knew that they were playing on Joan's vulnerabilities. They were weakening her when she was already weak.

She had no hesitancy about the other crimes against living bodies of which she was accused. She asserted that she had never killed a man and that she loved her banner twenty times more than her sword.

Joan's most glaring inconsistencies have to do with the nature of the sign that she gave to the king and the way in which this sign was made known to him. For a long time, she refused to give details about the sign, saying that this was one of the things her judges had no right to know: It was between Charles and her. Her first answers about the nature of the sign were vague enough so that she could not be hurt by them. She said that the sign would exist for a thousand years, that it was in the king's treasury but that she would tell him nothing more.

But in the latter interrogations that took place in her cell, she seemed, almost out of exhaustion, to adopt not only the language but her accusers' imagery. They mentioned an angel; she agreed there was an angel. They brought up a crown; she described it. It is the one lie she admitted to, and on the day before her death, she said in her prison, “It was I who brought the message of the crown to my King. I was the angel and there was no other, and the crown was no more than the promise of the king's coronation which I made to him.”
²³

Vita Sackville-West and other scholars say that Joan's lie was not really a lie, only a confusion of metaphor for reality. Her effect on Charles was otherworldly; its goodness and power seemed angelic. Why, therefore, should she not name herself the angel? But it seems to me this confusion is a symptom of her exhaustion and one of the first signs of an intermittent series of breakages that would finally lead to her denial of everything she stood for.

In the middle of April, Joan fell ill, probably of food poisoning. The promoter d'Estivet, Joan's most intransigent enemy, went to her cell to visit her, accompanied by several physicians. One asked what was wrong with her, and Joan blamed a carp that had been sent to her by Cauchon. D'Estivet attacked her. He called her a camp follower and said that she had brought her sickness upon herself by eating herrings. When the physicians told the earl of Warwick, who was representing the British interests at the trial, that she should be bled, he advised them to be careful; she was cunning, and he didn't want the bleeding to be an excuse for another suicide attempt. He wanted her death public, and he wanted credit for it.

While she was still weak but recovering, Cauchon visited her in her cell and exhorted her. Her answers to his accusation were among her most despairing, but within two days she rallied again, and when shown the instruments of torture, she said that they could pull her limb from limb and she wouldn't change her story.

On March 27, Joan was read the seventy articles spelling out her crimes. She was offered counsel but refused it. The judge said, “Joan, my most dearly beloved, it is now time for you to think well about the end of your case and what you have said and done.”
²⁴
Putting the judges' position into terms to which Joan the soldier would be most susceptible, he continued: “Think well, Joan: if there had come some knight into the court of your king while you were there, a man of your seignory, saying, I will not obey the king and none of his officers shall make me submit to him, would you not have said he stood condemned?”
²⁵
Joan may have hesitated for a moment, but finally her courage came back: Her king was not Henry VI of England but Christ.

On April 2 the court considered Joan's answers to the seventy articles, and they were compressed to twelve. On April 5, they were submitted to the judges, who were told to give their opinions in writing by the tenth. Only a few did. On April 13, the twelve articles were taken to the University of Paris for consideration. On April 18, Joan was exhorted in prison; on the nineteenth, she was shown the instruments of torture.

After they had been considered for more than a month, Joan was read the articles that had been approved by the university, and she was “charitably admonished” before sentencing. Five days later, she was let outside for the first time in many months, to the cemetery of St. Ouen, where she would be publicly and formally excommunicated. Her head was shaved. She was dressed in women's clothes, the clothing of female penitence. It was the first time since she had begun her career that she appeared in public in women's clothes.

There were three platforms: one for Cauchon and the tribunal, the second for the bishops and clergy from Rouen and its environs, the third for Beaufort, the cardinal of England. There was a high scaffold on which Joan and the preacher would be visible to the crowd. The preacher spoke on the text: “A tree beareth not fruit of itself.” During this sermon, Charles VII was attacked, and Joan defiantly shouted: “Do not talk about the king. He is a good Christian. Talk about me.”
²⁶
Once again she appealed to the pope, asserting that she would abide by his decision, but her appeal was ignored. It may have caused Cauchon and the other judges to make a last attempt to have her recant, however. The attempt led to a delay, and it made the crowd restless. Some people from the crowd began throwing stones. From where she stood, Joan could see the executioner with his cart and the materials for the fire.

Suddenly, Joan joined her hands and said that she submitted to the authority of the Church. She prayed to St. Michael for direction. Cauchon turned to Beaufort, the cardinal of England, for advice. As representatives of the spiritual authority of the Church, they had to accept Joan's submission as the outcome they had all along been pressing for. But Warwick, the representative of the English political interests, said they had been too lenient with her; they had let the bird fly away.

There has been a great deal of dispute about the form of abjuration that Joan signed. At the rehabilitation trial, witnesses said that what Joan signed was very short, “the length of a Pater Noster.” The document that was presented was considerably longer than that:

The statement is signed—Joan knew at least how to sign her name—and her signature is followed by a cross. The cross, however, is problematic; it was the sign Joan habitually gave when she meant that what had gone before it should not be believed.
²⁸
One witness observed at the rehabilitation trial that after she had repeated the prescribed formula of abjuration, she laughed. Whether this was nervous laughter or not, whether the cross was a habit or a signal for disbelief, we cannot know. We do know that Joan believed that her abjuration would free her from prison.

Joan was led back to her cell, shamed and defeated. She had saved her life; she believed she had bought her freedom.

When she entered her cell, she was in women's clothes. The confusing explanations of how she got back into men's clothes cannot be resolved, but it is possible that the very act of putting them on renewed her courage. Or perhaps it finally dawned on her that she would spend the rest of her life in an English prison. She had said before that death was preferable to that, and perhaps the certainty of her understanding of this gave her a moment of exhilaration, and returned her heart and soul. Whatever led to her decision, on May 28, she was back in men's clothing and insisting that she had sinned in abjuring; that she had done what she had done “for fear of the fire” and now she was ready to die.

In two days, she had taken an enormous journey. She had been walked in chains from the cemetery to the prison, having given up all her heroism. She was the victim of some sort of sexual brutality or sexual trickery; either an attempted rape, or a group of louts pulling off her clothes and waiting for her to give up in order to relieve herself. Somehow in that time, she grew into a hero, not in military or spectacular terms, but in spiritual ones. She faced her death calmly, perhaps even with joy. This could have been because she had fully decided that death was preferable to betraying who she was and what her voices had said.

One of the great puzzles of Joan's last days is that Cauchon allowed her to receive Communion. If she was excommunicated, she should have been denied the sacraments. This anomaly was brought up during the rehabilitation trial as a proof that Cauchon knew he was acting in bad faith.