Joan of Arc (16 page)

On the thirtieth of May, Joan walked in chains to the marketplace. She was executed by the secular arm of the English government, although her trial was ecclesiastical. Since the time she had left Vaucouleurs, she had been surrounded by adoring crowds; now a jeering mob lined the side of the road, clamoring for her death. She walked in silence, barefoot, her head down. When she arrived at the marketplace and saw the pyre, she wept. She was led up some stairs to the stake to which she was tied. She asked to have a crucifix held in front of her, and an English soldier put together two sticks and gave them to her. Her loyal confessor, Martin Ladvenu, rushed to the church and brought a golden crucifix, which he held in front of her eyes. The fire was lit; soon she was invisible within the flames.

The executioner reported: “Once in the fire she cried out more than six times ‘Jesus!' and especially in her last breath she cried with a strong voice ‘Jesus!' so that everyone present could hear it; almost all wept with pity.”
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Her end was a slow one. The executioners had been told to keep her a distance from the flames so that the death would be as difficult as possible.

After Joan died in the fire built for her in the market square at Rouen, her body, charred, but still recognizable, and still tied to the stake, was displayed so that the crowd who had come to see her execution could examine it. They were looking in order to certify that she was, in fact, female. Our knowledge of this comes from an enemy of Joan's, the Bourgeois of Paris, who records it in his journal. The Bourgeois was Burgundian in his sympathies, and intensely critical of everything having to do with Joan. But his enmity is short-circuited for a moment by the horrifying spectacle of strolling observers:

“She was soon dead and her clothes all burned. Then the fire was raked back and her naked body shown to all the people and all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubts from people's minds. When they had stared long enough at her dead body bound to the stake, the executioner got a big fire going again round her poor carcass, which was soon burned, both flesh and bone reduced to ashes.”
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Eighteen years after Joan's death, on December 10, 1449, Charles VII solemnly entered the city of Rouen. It had been under foreign occupation for thirty years.

Charles had done nothing to help Joan while she was in danger; now, understanding that his authority was importantly tied to her legitimacy, he made it his business to right the wrong, which he was happy to lay exclusively at the feet of his enemies. His own negligence was never mentioned. One of his first acts after his entry to Rouen, however, was to order one of his counselors, Guillaume Bouillé, former rector of the University of Paris, to start an inquiry into what had happened to Joan.

Although Joan had been officially declared a heretic, the people had already begun creating myths about her. Her heart would not burn to ashes; a dove had been seen flying over the pyre, in the direction of France. The city of Orléans provided for the support of her mother and brothers. It was noted that the three men most responsible for her death met suspicious ends. Cauchon died suddenly while his beard was being trimmed; d'Estivet disappeared mysteriously, and his body was found in a gutter; Nicholas Midi, the inquisitor, was stricken with leprosy.

The year 1450 saw many dramatic events. The English king was rapidly losing Normandy. Nicholas V, elected pope in 1447, was a strong leader who was able to restore order to the papacy. He was sympathetic to Charles because Charles had supported him against the antipopes. The party of the University of Paris, Joan's enemies, had been on the other side, the side of the Council of Basel, which opted for a weaker papacy and a stronger episcopate.

It was during this year that Charles appointed Guillaume Bouillé to investigate Joan's trial. He was as sympathetic to Joan's cause as Cauchon had been hostile. He called only seven witnesses; the first was Guillaume Machon, the notary who had taken down the proceedings and had, even at the time of the first trial, noted irregularities. There were two Dominicans, Martin Ladvenu and Isambert de la Pierre, who had been sympathetic to Joan in her last days. There were rumors that Ladvenu had tried to signal his advice to her during the trial. He had been her confessor, and de la Pierre had ministered to her. Two other priests, Guillaume Duval and Jean Toutmouile, had been present at some hearings; the latter had accompanied Ladvenu when he gave Joan the last sacraments. Jean Massieu, who had accompaniedJoan from her cell to the trial, was called. He had been twice sentenced for doubtful behavior having no connection to Joan; it was he who had allowed her to look into the chapel for a glimpse at the altar on her way from her cell to the courtroom.

The only truly hostile witness was Jean Beaupère, who had been one of Joan's fiercest antagonists, and to whom Joan had made her famous answer about being in the state of grace. He was unrepentant and pitiless toward her, telling the examiners that “she was very subtle with a woman's subtlety.”
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His obvious spite did his case no good.

The result of the inquiry was brought to the king in letters under cover and seal. The inquiry found the trial prejudicial to the point where it should be counted void. But the king had no power to undo the official trial. His inquiry had no real weight; Joan had been tried by the Inquisition, and only the Inquisition could vindicate her.

In August 1451, the pope sent his legate to Charles. He was shocked by Charles's coldness and reluctance. It would appear that although Charles knew it was inevitable, he was uncomfortable with the Inquisition's having asserted its authority in a way over which he had no power. Nevertheless, it was in his interest to have an official rehabilitation trial set in place, and the inquiry opened in 1452. The examiners drew up an official questionnaire; they would have to examine far more than the seven witnesses the king's inquiry had called. Three years elapsed between the findings of this hearing and the pope's order that the procedures be officially begun. But the pope had had other distractions. In July 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks. At this time, the Eastern and Roman branches of the Church were attempting to work together to defeat the Turkish enemy. But the attempts failed. Understandably, Joan's hearing held a low priority for the pope, but after a three-year delay, the official hearing began, in November 1455.

In a move designed to play on the popular sentiment that surrounded Joan, the pope's legate arranged that the case be introduced by Joan's mother, Isabelle Romée. Isabelle was of very advanced age and was brought out of years of retirement in Orléans to confront the learned doctors, this time in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Like her daughter, female and illiterate, she confronted the all-male assembly. Unlike her daughter, however, she was flocked by supporters and well-wishers. The crowd was carried on waves of emotion when she repeated her petition:

Unlike her daughter's, Isabelle's words proceeded from someone else, learned doctors and lawyers who used their learning to help rather than undo her.

After Isabelle presented her petition, she fell to the ground in a faint.

This Mater Dolorosa raises an interesting issue about Joan. Of all the images that have been created about her, there is none that takes away our surprise that she was someone with a mother.

Like the original trial, this one was limited by the concepts and language of the judicial form. And like the first trial, it was formally impeccable and entirely biased. The bias this time was in Joan's direction. What was proved was that the first trial was improper and prejudiced. Its inconsistencies and irregularities were pointed out: Joan should have been held in an ecclesiastical, not a secular, prison; she should have been given a secular trial before she was executed by the state. Cauchon's sincerity was called into question, and his decision to allow Joan to receive Communion was cited as evidence that he knew she was innocent; otherwise, he would have been participating in a sin of sacrilege. The witnesses to Joan's childhood in Domrémy, whose testimony had been suppressed in the original trial, were recalled.

Questions that would have put Joan in a bad light were now passed over, the very ones that were emphasized in the original trial. Joan's cross-dressing was never mentioned. Her voices were deemed authentic because “every word of them testifies to the most devout piety . . . she had very good reason to trust in her voices, for in very truth she was delivered, as they promised, from the prison of the body by martyrdom and a great victory; the victory of patience.”
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This is, to say the least, a defense that skirts the difficult issues of inspiration and its verification. If death can be interpreted as delivery, then we will all be delivered.

Joan's refusal to obey the duly established arm of the Church is glossed over; she is said to be pious and loyal; it is asserted that no one explained to her the difference between the Church triumphant and the Church militant, which is demonstrably untrue.

In July 1456, the documents of Joan's original trial— the articles of condemnation and the sentence—were burned formally and publicly in Rouen, in the
Vieux Marche,
the very spot where Joan had been executed.

A directive was given that no images or epitaphs to Joan be set up at Rouen or elsewhere. The directive was ignored.

Two years later, Isabelle Romée died in Orléans.

CHAPTER VI

VIRGIN BODY

THE DISPLAY of Joan's charred body to gawking passersby in Rouen ranks high in the annals of brutal exposure. It is impossible to imagine a male hero for whom such display would be required as a proof of any kind of authenticity.

Of all the offenses heaped on Joan, this posthumous one is arguably the cruelest. Her virginity was one of the most important ways that she knew herself. Her transvestism, which was one of the major accusations leveled against her, was something she took on in large part to prevent herself from being looked at as a woman and to protect herself from the vulnerability that could follow upon such looking. The integrity of her body was of primary importance to her, an integrity for which virginity was a metonymic part, if not the whole story. Her horror at being burned arose because it was, for her, an unclean death. One of her last statements was a cry of outrage about the manner of her death: “Alas! Am I so horribly and cruelly used, that my clean body, never yet defiled, must this day be burnt and turn to ashes! Ha! Ha! I would rather be beheaded seven times than suffer burning.”
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It is not the painfulness of the death that appalls her but its unclean-ness, its “defilement,” as if the consumption by flames that would be the mode of her death had, for her, a sexual component. She would be devoured, and above all, she had wished to be intact: recognizable as whole.

Perhaps the only thing that Joan and her accusers agreed upon wholeheartedly was the importance of her virginity. They agreed on its importance, but did they agree upon its meaning? What, in fact, did it mean?

It is difficult to define the meaning of something whose distinction is the refusal of participation, a willed lack of experience, an insistence upon not joining in one of the species' major projects, a state whose national anthem is “no.”

What is the “no” a resistance to, and what does the resistance buy? In our age, when the consequences of loss of virginity are slight, it requires an effort of imagination to understand the importance of virginity in the past both literally, as a means of safeguarding life and health, and secondarily, as the only possible hope a woman had of autonomy. Until very recently in the history of the world, it was unlikely that a woman would make a mark or a name for herself in any place outside the traditional roles of wife, mistress, or mother; for her to break free from those roles, she had to be untouched, literally, by the phallus, but also by its associations. It was only by refraining from the most easily understood avenues to pleasure and fleshly connection that the possibility of autonomy could, however tentatively, exist.

At its least potent, virginity was the minimum condition for a woman entering a traditionally male sphere; at its most powerful, it invested its possessor with an aura that traveled between the sacred, the mystical, and the magical. Joan understood this well, and so did her accusers.

The first recorded act that involves the preservation of her virginity was also her first conflict with both parental authority and the law. In 1428 she was involved in a breach-of-promise suit. A young man claimed that she had promised to marry him and then reneged. This means that she must have been pledged to a young man, probably by her father, and her refusal to carry through the commitment had to be adjudicated by a civil court. It was only the first of four trials with which she was associated, two of which—her rehabilitation and canonization trials—took place after her death.

But a breach-of-promise trial was, it seems, an appropriate beginning to her public career, and not only the litigious aspects of it. She had to stand up in court for the right to refuse the normal lot of women, and perhaps—if we believe that she did once consent to marry the young man or at least didn't oppose the prospect—she had to stand up for the right to change her mind. Either way we understand the case, it is a portent of the shape of the rest of her public history. Either she was misinterpreted (she did not consent to the marriage but was perceived to have consented), or she shifted her ground. Because both are characteristic of later events, either interpretation is possible. But the area of contention in the breach-of-promise suit is the intersection of her fate with her bodily life, more particularly its sexual aspects.