How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 39

The choir of Rouen Cathedral showed more the regional characteristics; the arches were more acute and the moldings multiple. The circular piers about the sanctuary have Norman round capitals. We know that in 1235 a bishop was buried in the choir, which must have been entirely finished when, in 1255, St. Louis spent Easter in Rouen as the guest of his friend and counselor, Archbishop Eudes Rigaud (1247-74), a Franciscan, who was to accompany the king on his fatal crusade. The choir's upper windows were reconstructed during the XV century.

About 1280, architect Jean Davy began the south facade of the transept, the Portail de la Calende, so called because there was carved there a mythical animal of that name, considered in ancient times as a symbol of the Saviour, since the superst.i.tion was that the sight of a Calende cured illness. The transept facades of Rouen are among the best works of the Rayonnant phase. Their sculpture, says M. Enlart, has not yet the fluid indecision of XIV-century draperies. A p.r.o.nounced feature of that period are the openwork gables, which, though they may be superbly decorative, are none the less a step away from constructive sincerity, since drip stones made of lacework masonry fail to fulfill their practical function.

The northern door of the transept was named from the canon's library beside it. It, too, like the earlier Calende portal, was paneled with medallions over which many a pharisee has shaken his head. The Middle Ages were neither pharisaic nor prudish. Rouen's little sculptured groups are merely fantastic and popular. They embody no satire against the clergy, as some would intimate; nor are they obscene. To place a centaur or an acrobat in proximity to a scriptural group seemed then no more profane than to illuminate the margins of missals with meaningless frolics. Leeway was allowed the artistic imagination, which here ran largely to grotesques. The medallions of the Calende door were in better sequence and of more vigorous character than those of the Portail des Libraires. Beside this latter entrance is the courtroom of the archepiscopal palace adorned with statues representing Solomon's judgment, in souvenir of the old usage of rendering justice before church doors.

From 1302 to 1320 rose the Rayonnant Gothic Lady chapel of impeccable mechanical skill but not inspired. Long centuries later, during the Revolution, its tomb of the cardinals d'Amboise,[343] in which Gothic sculpture culminated, escaped destruction because the axis chapel served as a granary. Clement V, the builder of Bordeaux' Rayonnant choir, arranged that his nephew, who was archbishop of Rouen and had got into difficulties with the Norman n.o.bles, should exchange his see with Gilles Aycelin, the prelate who was erecting Narbonne Cathedral, brother of the bishop-builder of Clermont's nave. A little later another archbishop of Rouen became the Avignon pontiff who built the audience hall and the chief chapel of the palace on the Rhone. Other XIV-century additions to Rouen Cathedral are the side chapels; every guild and corporation craved thus to honor its own particular patron.

Those contemporary works, Rouen's Lady chapel, the choirs of Bordeaux and Narbonne, Avignon's halls, belong to the phase of the national genius which we call Rayonnant because of its geometric window tracery, a phase aptly designated as metallic by M. Gonse. Artists were fast losing their exquisite feeling for the silhouette; the vertical line was over-accentuated; triforium and clearstory had become one composition. Pitiless logic was drying up the spring of inspiration.

When the cathedral of Rouen remade three bays of the nave's triforium, the model taken was the geometric design of that masterpiece of Rayonnant Gothic, the abbatial of St. Ouen. Before the XIV century closed the facade of the cathedral was redressed with arcatures and statues like the west frontispieces of Wells, Salisbury, and Litchfield.

The XV century carried through the chief supplementary works of Sainte-Marie of Rouen in a style frankly florid. Normandy, Artois, and Picardy reveled in the last development of the national art, regions all of them having close links with England. For if much of Flamboyant Gothic was indigenous, as M. Anthyme Saint-Paul contends, if it enveloped and absorbed Rayonnant Gothic, it seems fairly well proved that its two most p.r.o.nounced traits, the flamelike window tracery and arches of double curvature, came from England. M. Enlart says that ramified vaults were built at Ely, Lincoln, and Litchfield, during the XIII century. By 1304 accolade arches were used; at Merton College, Oxford, is a flame-tracery window of 1310, features not to be found in France before 1375.[344] In the Rayonnant phase lines break; in the Flamboyant they undulate. Rayonnant capitals were diminished; capitals disappeared altogether in the later period, and molds melted into the piers.

Normandy expressed her renewed national dignity with enthusiasm in the flowery, happy architecture we call Flamboyant:

Le Temps a laissie son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye, Et s'est vestu de broderye De soleil raiant, cler, et beau.

So sang Charles, Duke of Orleans, come back from twenty years in English prisons to witness the expulsion of the invader from Normandy:

Il n'y a beste ne oiseau Que en son jargon ne chante ou crye; Le Temps a laissie son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye.[345]

How they built in Rouen! With what vim and emanc.i.p.ated energy! St. Ouen carried forward its nave and raised a central tower. From 1437 to 1480 was built the gallant little church of St. Maclou with a central tower that is one of the best in Normandy, and whose curving front of five arcades is profusely elegant. Similarly large, ornate portals became the vogue in late-Gothic Norman construction. St. Maclou is to the Gothic art of the XIII century what the reel is to the minuet, said an English architect.[346]

In the cathedral of Rouen one noted master succeeded another. Guillaume Pontifs put the belfry on St. Romain's tower (1463-77); built the canon's library, to which he made a staircase from the cathedral's transept; and made the decorated portico leading from the rue St. Romain to the court before the Portail des Libraires. No approach to a church possesses more entirely the atmosphere of the Middle Ages than that.

Pontifs began a masterpiece of Flamboyant architecture, the Tour de Beurre (1485-1509), that, as it rises, grows more and more sumptuous, though it never loses its architectural lines. Unfortunately the stone used was of poor quality, which necessitated a coa.r.s.e sculpture. The transition from square to octagon was gracefully achieved by the one constructive arrangement which originated during the final stage of the national art: to unify the design, flying b.u.t.tresses were sprung from the corner turrets and the face-shafts to the octagon.[347]

From 1497 to 1507 the master-of-works at Rouen Cathedral was Jacques Le Roux, who continued the Tour de Beurre, finished by his nephew, Rouland Le Roux (1507-20), an artist of the first order. He redressed the upper part of the main frontispiece in order to put it into character with the Tour de Beurre and St. Romain's belfry. After completing the middle portal of the facade he reconstructed the central tower, whose platform he raised a story higher. When Rouen's lantern tower was burned in 1822 the present iron skeleton was contrived, a structure too mechanical to be architecture, but of good effect in the distant views of the city.

The oft repeated renewals of the famous frontispiece of Rouen Cathedral account for its failure to express the interior church structurally, but though merely a screen, it is deservedly popular, "one of the dreams of the Middle Ages," M. emile Lambin has called it. By moonlight its effect is romantic, almost spectacular. Most popular, too, is another work of Rouland Le Roux, the Palais de Justice which he built with Roger Ango, from 1493 to 1507, for the parliament of Normandy. A pomp and a pageantry carried almost to folly distinguished the generations that raised monuments such as these. In 1520, when Francis I met Henry VIII, not far from Rouen, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, many a lord, says the chronicler, carried on his back his mills and his forests and his meadows. One of the most curious houses in France, Rouen's Hotel du Bourgtherould, now a bank near the Old Market, is decorated exteriorly by reliefs of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.[348] M. Leon Pal.u.s.tre discovered that the sculpture on its tower, originally polychrome, was a copy of a Flemish tapestry in the possession of that prince of pageantry, Philippe le Hardi of Burgundy.

The archbishop of Rouen from 1493 to 1510 was none other than the Maecenas of his age, Cardinal George I d'Amboise, chief minister of Louis XII. All over France we have traced the work of that art-loving family--at Paris, Cluny, Clermont, Chaumont, Albi. A nephew of the same name held the see here until 1545, and saw to the erection of his uncle's tomb, designed by Rouland Le Roux, with sculpture by artists of the Michel Colombe tradition as well as those of the Italian Renaissance.

Rouen was so active a center for gla.s.smaking that, in 1317, Exeter obtained windows here, as did Gloucester and Merton College, Oxford.

Next to Troyes, Rouen contained the richest collection of colored gla.s.s in France. Until the Revolution her eighty lesser churches were filled with it. The best windows left are six lancets in the ambulatory of the cathedral. They belong to the XIII-century school of Chartres and are exceptional in being the only signed windows; "Clement of Chartres" was their maker. The first, given by a company of boatmen, relates the legend of St. Julian Hospitator, who ferried strangers day and night over the river, a story recounted by Gustave Flaubert, a son of Rouen.[349] The other five lancets are of the _Biblia pauperum_ type, teaching dogma to the people. The cold, limpid hues of the XIV century appear in the Lady chapel, and in the chapel of St. Jeanne d'Arc is an interesting Pentecost window of that century; contemporary are the apse lights in the upper choir, where the unsuccessful experiment was tried of continuing the subject from one panel to another--here the arms of the Crucified Lord extend into the lateral lights. The cathedral's west rose is of the XV century; in the transept is a XVI-century window devoted to the ancient bishop Roma.n.u.s. The abbatial of St. Ouen has, with the choir of evreux, the best array extant of XIV-century canopy gla.s.s figures. So loath were the vitrine artists to give up an architectural design in gla.s.s that when the XV century composed scenes instead of single figures for each panel, even those small groups were set in grisaille frames.

The iconoclastic 1562 worked havoc in Rouen. For twenty-four hours a Huguenot mob wrecked tombs, altars, and windows in the cathedral, to such an extent that it lay unused during half a year. One mourns the loss of the cenotaph of good Charles V, made in 1369 by the same Jean de Marville who designed the famous Dijon tomb of the king's brother. Ten years later, in 1572, the Rouen Catholics retaliated by ma.s.sacring some eight hundred Calvinists in the city on St. Bartholomew's Day.

In the World War Rouen became almost an English city again. This time, however, England, the ancient combatant of France, came not as a detested invader, but as her ally in dire years of distress. It is pleasant to learn that devotion to the Maid of Orleans was not infrequent among the English troops of 1914-18.

JEANNE D'ARC'S TRIAL IN ROUEN[350]

De ma part, je repute son histoire un vrai miracle le Dieu. La pudicite que je vois l'avoir accompagnee jusques a sa mort, meme au milieu des troupes; la juste querelle qu'elle prit; la prouesse qu'elle y apporta; les heureux succes de ses affaires; la sage simplicite que je recueille de ses reponses au interrogatoires qui lui furent faits par les juges du tout voues a sa ruine; ses predictions qui, depuis, sortirent effet; la mort cruelle qu'elle choisit dont elle se pouvoit garantir s'il y et de la feintise en son fait; tout cela dis-je, me fait croire (joint les voyes du ciel quelle oyoit) que toute sa vie et histoire fut un vrai martyre de Dieu.--Testimony of eTIENNE PASQUIER (1529-1615).

So swiftly followed the fruitage of the sacrifice offered up in the Vieux-Marche on May 21, 1431, that in every part of the ancient city of Rouen sprang up exuberant, vigorous, Flamboyant monuments. The most momentous and the saddest happening in the history of Normandy's capital was the burning at the stake of Jeanne la Pucelle whose relief of Orleans, only two short years before, had saved the nation in its last gasp.

From the church of St. Saviour on the market place they brought her the cross for which she begged on that tragic morning, that the pillory on which her Lord had hung might be held up before her eyes, to strengthen her in her last hour. Long afterward, in 1450, Ma.s.sieu, the priest-sheriff of her trial, a weak man but less unsympathetic than many in that grim gathering of rascals, testified: "The English feared her more than the whole army of the king of France.... It was they who held the trial and paid its costs. She was taken to the Viel-Marche, having beside her Brother Martin and me, and accompanied by more than eight hundred men at arms, with spears and swords. On the way she made pious lamentation so touchingly that my companion and I could not keep back our tears. She recommended her soul to G.o.d and the saints with such devotion that those who heard her wept. All distressed, she exclaimed, 'Rouen, Rouen, must I die here!'"

When the Old Market was reached Jeanne heard herself sermonized as a limb of Satan, a blasphemer guilty of diabolical malice, of pernicious crimes, and infected with the leprosy of heresy. Her sentence read, she fell on her knees and addressed to G.o.d prayers so ardent that even the foreign masters of Rouen were moved. Her dear St. Michael she pet.i.tioned, too. "As soon as the flames reached her," relates an eyewitness, "she cried out more than six times, '_Jhesus!_' and then a final time, in a loud voice, with her last breath, '_Jhesus!_' And her cry was heard from end to end of the market place, and almost everyone was weeping.... A s.h.i.+ver pa.s.sed over the a.s.sembly.... The people pointed at her judges and said that Jeanne was the victim of a great injustice.... They murmured that such an evil deed should have taken place in their city.... That evening the executioner went to the Dominican convent and confessed in fear, 'I have burned a saint!'... The secretary of the English king turned away from the lamentable spectacle, muttering: 'We are lost. We have burned a saint!" Surrounded by her brutal jailers, at dawn that May morning, Jeanne had said, with confidence, "With G.o.d's aid, I shall be this night in His Kingdom of Paradise." As her final cry to her Redeemer rang out, a canon of Rouen Cathedral prayed aloud, "Would to G.o.d my soul were where I believe is the soul of this Maid."

The young priest-secretary, the clerk of the court, Manchon, who took down her trial (and let his irresistible admiration for her run over in marginal notes, "_Superba responsio!_"), testified later: "Never did I weep so much over any grief that has come to me, and for a month I could not be appeased. I bought a little missal with the money that came to me from the trial, that I might have cause to remember her in my prayers."

The verdict of all impartial men in Rouen, that somber May morning of 1431, was that the whole business from beginning to end had been violence and injustice.[351]

A packed jury had judged her. The president of the tribunal, the renegade selected to prove a saint a sorceress, was Bishop Pierre Cauchon, driven from his see of Beauvais by loyal Frenchmen, as the enemy of his own country. Because the see of Rouen was unoccupied, the English preferred to hold Jeanne's trial there rather than at Paris, where the bishop was not their creature. How abject a tool Cauchon was is to-day shown by old receipts which prove that he was the recipient, on each day of the trial, of a hundred _sols tournois_. For the same ign.o.ble reason many a learned professor "charged his soul."

There was not the faintest shadow of fair play in the process. After Maitre Jean Lohier had said to Cauchon that the proceedings were not valid because Jeanne was allowed no counsel, nor were the hearings in public court, and those present had not freedom to express their true opinion, that honest Norman lawyer saw that his only safety lay in quitting the city. "It is an affair of hate," he said to young Secretary Manchon one day as they stood together in Rouen Cathedral.

"Deliberately they try to trap her. If only she would not say in regard to her apparitions, 'I know for certain,' but, 'It seems to me,' I do not see how she could be condemned."

Some canons of the cathedral who criticized the trial were thrown into prison, and the English locked up a citizen who remarked that since Jeanne had been judged innocent by the doctors at Poitiers, in a court presided over by the archbishop of Rheims, a second trial was illegal.

Three of the younger judges who at first dared to give their true opinion were berated by Cauchon, who bade them quit their ecclesiastical quibbling and let the jurists decide the matter. The testimony of the aged bishop of Avranches, then a resident of Rouen, was set aside because he advised that in matters doubtful touching the faith the case should be referred to a council or to the pope. Because Ma.s.sieu, the humble court usher, said to a townsman, "I can see nothing but goodness and honor in her," he was threatened with a prison cell where never again would he see sun or moon. The secretaries, Manchon and Boisguillaume, were beaten by the English. A man on the street who spoke well of Jeanne was chased by Lord Warwick with a drawn sword and almost killed. Pa.s.sions ran high. Lord Stafford drew his dagger on Jeanne in her cell one day because she said that the English would be driven out of France. Even after her execution, when a Dominican in the city spoke kindly of her, he was flung into prison for a year.

Her judges sought to tire Jeanne out by long hours of interrogation; the lawyers themselves came away exhausted from the sessions. Virulent against her was Beaupere, rector of Paris University, who, when routed by the young girl's replies, called her sly. When Cauchon wished to have it appear that she refused to submit to the Church, he made the scribes omit her statement that gladly she appealed to a general council or to the pope. "Ah," cried Jeanne, "you write all that is against me, but you do not write anything for me." The lawyers' subtle questions rained on her thick and fast till she would call them to order with admirable courtesy, "_Beaux seigneurs, faites l'un apres l'autre_." Whenever she wished to make no reply to a question came her concise, "_Pa.s.sez outre_." Secretary Manchon testified before an inquest, twenty years later, "Never could Jeanne have defended herself as she did in so difficult a cause, against so many and such learned doctors, if she had not been inspired."

Sublime to tears are some of the answers made by this young country girl not yet twenty, who could barely read and write, who knew only _Pater_ and _Ave_. When sheeringly asked were she in a state of grace, she replied: "A serious question to answer. If I am, may G.o.d keep me so; if I am not, may G.o.d put me in his grace. I would rather die than not have G.o.d's love." Awe fell on the a.s.semblage and for that day the session broke up.[352]

Yet Jeanne was very human at her trial, too. It was just the well-brought-up country maid, the Jeannette they all loved in Domremy, who boasted before those callous men: "For sewing and for spinning, I fear no woman in Rouen." Those housewives of Rouen, the "little people of the Lord," to whom Jeanne's thoughts turned in homely fas.h.i.+on, dared only murmur beneath their breath that her process was "a crying injustice," and shame it was that so evil a _cause celebre_ should take place in their good town. Rouen was terrorized into silence by her foreign master.

Jeanne's five months' imprisonment and final execution at Rouen was a political crime covered with the cloak of religious zeal by a very genius of hypocrisy. John Plantagenet, Duke of Bedford, together with the boy king's great-uncle, the cardinal of Winchester, were the movers behind the scenes. Jeanne never quitted her prison in the castle built by Philippe-Auguste--only a tower of which is extant to-day. From that stronghold the English governed Normandy. Since the opening of the World War an erroneous inscription, placed by partisan politicians in the wall of the episcopal palace of Rouen, has been changed, for it sought to convey the idea that from the prelate's court of justice Jeanne was led forth to her death. Never did she set foot in that officiality building; she was held from the first day to the last in an English prison. From a dark cell in the tower fortress she was conducted through corridors of the same castle to the hall where sat her judges.

Ma.s.sieu, the usher, used to let her slip into the castle chapel for an _Ave_ as she pa.s.sed its open door, but even that solace was stopped by Estivet. That venomous agent of Cauchon accused Jeanne of ironic replies ill suited to a woman.[353]

Cauchon tried to coerce the young priest-secretaries of the trial, Manchon and Boisguillaume, to falsify their notes, but they proved incorruptible. And twenty years later they, with Ma.s.sieu, became the chief vindicators of the Maid when the inquests for her rehabilitation were started. Jeanne had felt their unspoken sympathy. Once with pleasant humor she told them not to ask her the same question twice or she would pull their ears. We know from contemporaries that Jeanne's way of intercourse was natural and friendly, _enjouee_, that her att.i.tude was modesty itself, that her voice had a feminine note of sweetness, that she was strong and comely and well shaped, that her hair was dark.

Born in 1412, by the Meuse, in Domremy, on the old Roman road from Langres to Verdun, in French territory, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine, she was not yet eighteen when she crossed the ravaged land in the winter of 1429 to rouse Charles VII, then in Chinon Castle. In March of that year she raised the siege of Orleans; in July she witnessed the coronation of her "_gentil dauphin_" at Rheims; in September occurred the a.s.sault on Paris, from which siege Charles VII, counseled by traitors, retired, and all winter Jeanne was kept in semiactivity, though chafing to free the land from the foreign yoke. Especially she longed to go to the aid of the besieged Mont-Saint-Michel, and to liberate from his English prison the poet-duke of Orleans, even, she said, if it meant going to London Tower itself. In May, 1430, she was captured by her enemies, the Burgundians. Jeanne's active mission covered only a year. "Several times in my presence," testified the Duke d'Alencon,[354] her companion in arms, "Jeanne told the king she would last but a year, and to look well that he made right use of her." But Charles VII failed her.

After her capture Jeanne spent some months in prisons in northern France, and finally she was sold to the English for a king's ransom.

Never in their minds was there any mistake as to who had turned the tide against them. "They had for her a mortal hate," said, in later years, Pierre Minier, one of the judges cowed by the Duke of Bedford; "they thirsted to bring about her death, no matter by what means."

From December, 1430, to May, 1431, Jeanne's martyrdom at Rouen endured.

"An iron cage was made for her, and at night she was chained up,"

declared Secretary Boisguillaume, at the inquest of 1450. "She was incarcerated in Rouen Castle; her guardians were English soldiery of the lowest type; day and night they kept watch ... they made her the object of their mockeries; often she reproached them for it. Her feet were held in irons which were attached to a post." There were scenes in that dark cell, vouched for by witnesses, which are too painful to transcribe.[355] Only when she fell ill was the severity with which she was treated relaxed, lest by a natural death she escape public burning.

One day Estivet so vilified her that she had a relapse of fever. Every detail is set down in the process for her rehabilitation, for which the Dominican Brehal traveled from end to end of France, gathering testimony from those who had known Jeanne. But the chief instrument of her vindication is the word-for-word record of her trial at Rouen in 1431.

Not in all history is there a more personal and appealing doc.u.ment. One can hear Jeanne's very accent in her valiant replies to her tormentors.

"_Repondes hardiment_," her voices admonished her.

Why did Charles VII, who, before Jeanne appeared, was about to pa.s.s into foreign exile, strike no blow to rescue her who had given him back his kingdom? A difficult question to answer. Charles was no hero, though his quality of perseverance was ultimately to make him the instrument that ended the centuries-old Capet-Plantagenet duel. Charles was surrounded by counselors who were jealous of Jeanne's leaders.h.i.+p, who represented her captivity as the result of her headstrong character.

In 1449 Charles, _le bien servi_, but not the duly grateful, entered Rouen "in triumph and magnificence as never king in city." Bells rang out and children cried, "_Noel!_" in welcome. In the cathedral the festal throng gathered. Beside the king stood Jacques Coeur, the merchant-prince, who had provided the funds for the reconquest of Normandy, and whose splendor of apparel on this triumphal entry was so to excite the barons' envy that within four years their machinations had him impeached, despoiled, and banished. He who was building at Bourges the finest bourgeois mansion in France, must have observed with interest the host of Flamboyant monuments then arising in Rouen. With Charles VII came, too, his commander in chief, the great Dunois, who had fought with Jeanne, the half brother of the Duke of Orleans, who that day was singing:

"Resjoys-toy, franc royaume de France!

a present Dieu pour toy se combat."

When Normandy was again French, not many years were to pa.s.s before Rouen exonerated herself of the crime of Jeanne's execution. The chief mover of the rehabilitation was the archbishop of the city, the Norman, Guillaume d'Estouteville, son of the hero who in 1415 held Harfleur against the entire army of Henry V, brother of the knight who led the defense of Mont-Saint-Michel, and nephew of Archbishop d'Harcourt, who gave up his see of Rouen to live in exile, rather than swear fealty to a non-French master. Cardinal d'Estouteville saw the propriety of clearing not only Normandy but France and the Church of what had been the political crime of foreigners. Through his efforts Pope Calixtus III, in 1456, revoked the legal decision of 1431, as "iniquitous, malicious, calumnious, and fraudulent." The unworthy Cauchon was excommunicated. A formal reading of the sentence of rehabilitation took place in the big hall of Rouen's episcopal palace: "Considering the quality of the judges and of those who directed the trial, considering that her abjuration was extorted by fraud and violence, in presence of the executioner and under threat of fire, without the accused understanding its full content and terms, considering finally that the crimes charged against her are not proven whatsoever by the process"--thus runs the decree declaring Jeanne's two sentences of condemnation in 1431 to be the work of iniquity. It was ordered that the rehabilitation be read publicly, not alone in Rouen, but in all the chief towns of France.

Rouen celebrated with gladness the justice rendered to the Maid who had saved France in her darkest hour. A solemn procession, in which marched Jeanne's brothers, who had been enn.o.bled by the king, proceeded to the graveyard beside St. Ouen's abbatial, where, twenty-five years earlier, Jeanne had sat alone on a platform above the crowd, just a week before her execution. They had there read to her the twelve accusations--dubbing her witch and wanton--which a doctor of Paris University had drawn up, and then a preacher thundered in vituperation.

Jeanne listened gently till she heard Charles VII abused, whereupon she, who had the mystic cult of royalty, lifted up her head bravely: "By my faith, sire," she cried, "my king is a n.o.ble Christian. Say what you will of me, but leave my king alone." "Hush her up!" angrily cried Cauchon.

In that cemetery of St. Ouen occurred what now is called proper self-defense on Jeanne's part. She could write her name, but with a smile she signed with a circle, emblem of mockery, and a cross, meaning negation. She hoped to be transferred to the prisons of the Church, where she clamored to be placed. Jeanne signed a paper consisting of seven lines, and afterward they produced an abjuration of fifty lines.

Her judge might be a bishop, but never once did she confuse the Church she revered and the unworthy clerics who sat in judgment on her. During the ceremonies of the rehabilitation at Rouen, a great procession marched to the Old Market where had stood Jeanne's funeral pyre, and with solemnity the twelve accusations against her were torn into shreds and burned. Rouen felt happier after rendering that justice, and her renewed self-respect found natural expression in her Flamboyant Gothic monuments.

However, many a long year was to go by before France fully comprehended the martyr of Rouen. Voltaire libeled Jeanne as vilely as the XV-century savants of Paris University. The rationalists of a later day have patronized her as self-hallucinated. But the tide has mounted. "The day that all the bells of the world ring in honor of Jeanne d'Arc, they will sound abroad the glory of France," said Leo XIII, in 1896. The Maid of Domremy-on-the-Meuse was declared Venerable in 1904, Blessed in 1909, and canonized a saint in 1920. _St. Jeanne d'Arc, ora pro n.o.bis!_