Women of Mediaeval France Part 16

[Ill.u.s.tration 6: JEANNE D'ARC.

After the painting by Jean J. Scherrer.

Orleans went mad with joy at the advent of its heaven-sent deliverer. As she rode through the streets the crowds blocked her way, and eager admirers rudely jostled each other in the struggle but to touch the horse that bore her. With sweet kindliness, she thanked them, losing none of her humility, and exhorting them to thank not her, but G.o.d and the dauphin. For that night and the rest of her stay in Orleans she was lodged with the wife of the treasurer of Charles d'Orleans, and slept with one of the daughters of the house. St.u.r.dy and healthy as she was, the unaccustomed rough life of the camp, sleeping with her armor on and none but men about her, had occasioned her great fatigue.]

The last of the English defences south of the Loire was destroyed, and the next day, May 8, 1429, Talbot and Suffolk led their army in retreat.

As it was Sunday, Jeanne let them depart unmolested, but ere the last of the English columns had disappeared an altar was raised in the plain and the holy maid was joined by her army and by the people of Orleans in a Ma.s.s to celebrate their deliverance.

It had taken nine days only for this courageous and resolute girl to undo months of work on the part of the English. Her steadfast faith in herself, her refusal to be turned aside from her duty, had worked the miracle; and for it all she thanked G.o.d, and prayed for support in what yet remained to do. To France, indeed, she seemed a miracle herself; and learned doctors of the Church undertook to prove, forsooth, that what she had done was of G.o.d, not of the devil, while Frenchmen who had held aloof from the despised and discredited heir of France began to ask themselves whether, after all, he were not the lawful ruler of France, since G.o.d had sent this inspired leader of his armies.

Sweet is the savor of triumph; to all who are touched with ambition the mere joy of victory, with the homage of men and the flattery that follow in the train of victory, is so sweet that in vainglory they forget what yet remains to be done. But in Jeanne there was no ambition; she rejoiced and gave thanks to G.o.d that through her he had saved Orleans; but the glory was G.o.d's, not hers. Orleans, too, was but the first stage in her career, of whose brief duration she warned her friends, and of whose tragic end her earnest heart may already have had some forebodings. "You must use me quickly," she said, "for I shall last but one year." In that brief year there was much to be accomplished: yet for long she was compelled to rest, or to fret, while timid or selfish advisers held back the dauphin from granting her prayer to be allowed to march at once to Rheims. With practically all the intervening country in the hands of the English, such a march seemed the extreme of folly. It would be risking too much for the empty ceremony of consecrating the dauphin at Rheims. But to Jeanne that consecration was the one thing needed to complete her share in the rehabilitation of France, the one thing which her celestial guardians now insisted on her undertaking, and for which they promised her their support. Moreover, the English were already demoralized, filled with fear of this "witch," for whom they had nothing but words of contempt that only veneered their hearty dread of her. Whether witch or mere woman, they feared the influence of this Jeanne upon French imagination; and as aliens in the land, they exaggerated the danger of a sudden wave of national feeling that would sweep them from France, while they saw disaffection on all sides. All this the French captains could not, of course, have known; but they should have appreciated the importance of following up the advantage won at Orleans and of using the enthusiasm kindled by La Pucelle before there should be time for it to cool. It was only after much wrangling, and fresh ecclesiastical debate as to the sources of her inspiration, that Jeanne's counsel at length prevailed and she was allowed to set out for Rheims.

Before this decision was reached, however, other victories had come to crown Jeanne's banner and to make the approach to Rheims less of a military hazard. Suffolk had retired to Jargeau, on the Loire, and this place must be reduced before the French could venture northward. Jeanne led in the a.s.sault, and narrowly missed death from a huge stone that crushed her helmet. Nevertheless, Jargeau fell, and Suffolk himself was among the prisoners. De Richemont and his Bretons came to join the forces of the dauphin, and they went in search of the second English army, under Talbot and Fastolf, encamped no one knew where in that Beauce which the war had rendered almost a desert. As the French army moved cautiously forward in the wilderness, the vanguard started a deer, which ran straight into the English lines. Warned of their presence by the cries of the English soldiers, the French were enabled to come upon them suddenly, and the b.l.o.o.d.y victory of Patay (June 18th) was won: two thousand Englishmen were left dead upon the field and Talbot was carried off a prisoner.

No longer could the enthusiasm of her followers be quelled; and though old captains shook their heads, the dauphin and the court were forced to yield to the popular clamor for an immediate attempt to reach Rheims.

Marching around Paris by way of Auxerre, only Troyes blocked the way, and its garrison, panic-struck, evacuated the town after a show of resistance. On July 9th Charles entered Troyes, where, with characteristic selfishness, he would have let the English march away with their prisoners but for the intervention of Jeanne. Less than a week later he entered Rheims in triumph, with Jeanne beside him. She it was, we would fain think, whom the people welcomed with transports of joy, not the dauphin whom she was to make a king. Well might the people crowd about her, hold up their infants for her to bless, and beg but to touch the hem of her garment; for kings in plenty shall the earth know, while there may be but one Jeanne d'Arc. On July 17th Jeanne stood in the cathedral, with her blessed banner, while the ancient ceremonies of the consecration were performed, and the dauphin, now anointed from the sacred ampulla, was King of France in name and in right, let the English proclaim Henry VI. as they would.

In that gathering of the n.o.bles and chief priests of France what one was there who considered the ceremony with such unselfish purity of heart as this peasant girl of Lorraine! To some it was merely an idle spectacle, a court function like another; to some it was a political event full of promise, from which they themselves might hope for advantages more or less selfish; to Jeanne d'Arc it was the sacred fulfilment of that which G.o.d had promised her. Her task was completed now; how gladly would she have left the scene, without a thought of worldly advancement, content to have been Jeanne la Pucelle, through whom France was to be saved, content to be once more merely Jeanne the shepherdess.

When the crown was placed on the dauphin's head Jeanne knelt before him, and wept as she embraced his knees. "O gentle king," she said, "now is fulfilled the will of G.o.d, who was pleased that I should raise the siege of Orleans and should bring you to your city of Rheims to be crowned and anointed, in proof that you are true king and rightful possessor of the realm of France." She herself felt that her mission was accomplished, and besought the king to allow her to return to her home, "to my father and mother, to keep their sheep for them, as was my wont." But Jeanne was too useful to be allowed to retire, and though she no longer heard the call of her divine monitors Charles insisted on her remaining to help him to win back his kingdom; but "all that was to be done she had now accomplished; what remained was--to suffer."

As she rode through the streets of Rheims she exclaimed: "O why can I not die here!" "And where, then, will you die?" asked the archbishop. "I know not; it will be where G.o.d pleases. I have done what my Lord commanded me to do. Now I would that it might please Him to send me back to keep my sheep with my sister and my mother." Her courage was as high as ever, the brave heart faltered not, but it was no longer inspired.

"She began to hear those voices, no longer from heaven, but from the hearth, those voices that vainly call disheartened man, sick of ambition and glory, to the home of his earliest affections, to the humble occupations of his childhood, to the obscurity of his early days."

Hearken to those voices, Jeanne, and strive no longer to awaken faint echoes of thy heavenly voices:

"The oracles are dumb,...

No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."

This portion of Jeanne's life has always seemed to me the most pitiful, the period when "her G.o.d had forsaken her," when her heart warned her that her divine task was done, and when yet that heart yearned to do more for France. In the hour of supreme trial strength came to her with the thought that her suffering was the will of G.o.d; but now what was the will of G.o.d? In vain she prayed for guidance; there was nothing but the timidity and the yearning for rest of this girlish heart on the one hand, and the pleading of the king and the courtiers on the other. It was not to be expected that Jeanne, always willing to sacrifice herself, should do anything else than consent still to be, as she had been for three glorious months, the leader of France, the bodily representative of national feeling. With or without inspiration, she could serve.

Disaster followed upon disaster in her brief subsequent career; but always she was the same honest, hopeful, pure girl, striving her utmost to discipline her army, to restrain the cruelty of her soldiers, to win for the dauphin a reconciliation with his cousin of Burgundy. Some of her biographers have noted, or pretended to note, a lamentable change in her character at this time. It is said that she became less scrupulous of shedding blood, less careful in enforcing moral and religious discipline among her followers, above all, less gentle and patient in temper. But Jeanne had never been able to compel absolute obedience from soldiers little better than banditti, and when the notion of her sanct.i.ty began to fade away as the men saw her in the daily life of the camp, and saw her a mere human creature, fallible like themselves, her strongest hold on them was loosened. She had never been, since her mission was a.s.sumed, a mere dainty, meek, unresisting heroine of romance, a paragon of grace and beauty for whom knights risked their lives while she sat by and smiled and dressed the wounds of the victor after the fight. She had definitely and from the first taken an active part in the real business of fighting, had on more than one occasion displayed her prowess in the field. A generation after her death, when all France had come to regard her as a martyr, a priest testified that "she would not use her sword, nor would she slay anyone"; but this testimony is certainly at variance with all that we know of the actual behavior of Jeanne in battle, and seems sufficiently contradicted by her own statement that the sword she used at Compiegne was "excellent, either for cutting or thrusting." She made the statement frankly, without any suspicion of its apparent inconsistency with her professions of a divine mission. We have no doubt that Jeanne delivered many a good stroke in deadly earnest, and we do not respect her the less for it. We need not even sorrow, but rather rejoice, at that display of honest indignation against the unruly and immoral in her camp, when she broke her sword of Saint Catherine over one rascal's head.

Town after town had thrown open its gates at sight of the white banner and the Maid of Orleans; but Paris still remained in the hands of the English. Jeanne was averse to making any attack upon Paris; her heart misgave her, but she yielded to the will of the king. The a.s.sault that followed (September 8, 1429), in which she behaved with desperate but hopeless courage, fighting on in spite of a severe wound, resulted in a disastrous repulse, the French losing heavily. Jeanne, who had opposed making the attack, was nevertheless held responsible for the result.

Faith in her was rudely shaken, and even those courtiers who had fawned upon her now said that her impiety--they, of course, were qualified to p.r.o.nounce upon such a point--had been fitly rebuked in this defeat: had she not ventured to deliver the a.s.sault upon the anniversary of the Nativity of Our Lady? "The Armagnacs," says the journal of a pious citizen of Paris, "were so filled with wickedness and unbelief, that, on the word of a creature in the shape of a woman with them, called La Pucelle (what it might be G.o.d alone knows!), they conspired on the anniversary of the Nativity of Our Lady... to attack Paris."

Jeanne, utterly disheartened by her defeat, and half believing that she had merited this rebuke from heaven, humbled herself before G.o.d and before the king, and renounced her arms, laying her sword upon the altar of Saint-Denis. But though willing to s.h.i.+ft the blame for failures upon her, Charles was not willing to dispense with her services if there was anything more to be hoped from them. She was induced to take up arms again; but we will pa.s.s over in silence the details of her later valiant but hopeless service and speak only of her last feat of arms.

The Burgundians, though their duke was already in secret correspondence with Charles, had laid siege to Compiegne. Jeanne, with a small body of troops succeeded in forcing her way into the town, and that same day (May 23, 1430) led a sortie that at first drove back the besiegers. The Burgundians rallied, however, and Jeanne's troops were beaten back into the town. As she herself, bringing up the rear in the retreat, turned to drive back a band of the pursuers that her troops might reach the gates in safety, she was left alone; and the drawbridge of Compiegne rose, cutting her off from rescue or from escape. Surrender, Jeanne, there is no hope for thee; France is weary of thee; for hast thou not done all that France could hope from thee? Jeanne herself had said that she feared nothing but treachery. Whatever the immediate motive of those who raised the drawbridge at Compiegne, whether they were bribed by the Burgundians or merely exasperated because the heroine had not performed miracles, the act was clear treachery, and the pitiful little moat of this town was the impa.s.sable barrier that shut Jeanne d'Arc out of that France she had saved.

An archer of Picardy was her immediate captor, and he delivered her, for a price, to his commander, Jean de Luxembourg. A great prize was this witch who had all but ruined the English cause in France, and proud must have been her captor: his prisoner was a girl of eighteen. But had she not fallen into good hands? Jean de Luxembourg was not only a member of one of the most distinguished families of Europe, but he was a knight, a leader in that grand organization of chivalry whose first object and proudest boast was protection of the weak, and gentleness and courtesy toward women. As Michelet remarks: "It was a hard trial for the chivalry of the day." The age of chivalry was already gone, though the name was on the lips of all: chivalry, even if it could have withstood the phenomenal progress in the condition of the lower orders of society,--have we not said that the peasant brothers of Jeanne were enn.o.bled by royal letters patent?--and the invention of firearms, which tended to equalize all men on the field of battle, could not have withstood the debasing influence of years of guerrilla warfare. The knight had not only lost his physical superiority on the battlefield, but he had lost something infinitely more precious--his lofty ideals.

Knightly orders continued to be founded, but they were the amus.e.m.e.nts of dilettanti in honor and ancient custom. Furthermore, even had chivalry not faded from its theoretic brilliancy, it is entirely possible that Jeanne would have been deemed beyond the pale of its protection. As the leper was shunned, as the Jewish usurer was persecuted by mediaeval society, so was the witch outlawed by public sentiment; and it was as a witch that the English were resolved to treat the deliverer of Orleans.

Confined at first in the camp at Margny, near Compiegne, Jeanne was subsequently removed to the Chateau de Beaulieu, near Loches, the very place from which Agnes Sorel took her t.i.tle of Dame de Beaulieu. The Maid was removed again to Beaurevoir, and it is pleasant to record the kindly sympathy displayed by the ladies of Jean de Luxembourg's family, who ministered to her comfort, provided her with women's clothes, and did whatever charity suggested to calm her distressed mind. But nothing could reconcile Jeanne to captivity; she felt that she was in danger of falling into the hands of the English, and she yearned for an opportunity to succor Compiegne. In one of her attempted escapes she threw herself from a high tower, though her conscience warned her against the sin of self-destruction. Hurt in the fall, she was unable to make good her escape, and was taken and nursed back to health by the ladies of Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, the great ones of the earth were haggling over the price which should be paid for their victim, and Charles VII. made no effort to save her. Jean de Luxembourg sold her to Philippe de Bourgogne, and he treated with the English representative. This representative has had heaped upon his head the contemptuous anathemas of historians, both French and English; nor is he undeserving of the most severe phrases yet coined to express reprobation. Pierre Cauchon--it is a wonder so few have thought of the swinish suggestiveness of the very name--was merely a time-serving priest whose shameless policy of intrigue had already got him made Bishop of Beauvais, and would soon, he fondly hoped, give him the archbishopric of Rouen. In furtherance of his ambitious projects he had become thoroughly English, and fawned upon the rich Cardinal Winchester; but though Winchester nominated him to the archbishopric, neither the Pope nor the cathedral chapter of Rouen would consent to receive him as archbishop. Cauchon, as Bishop of Beauvais, claimed the right to try the heretical sorceress who had been captured on the borders of the diocese. In the same doc.u.ment in which he preferred this claim he made offers, on behalf of the English, to buy his victim. A king's ransom, ten thousand livres in gold, was offered for Jeanne, and as refusal would have involved not only the loss of this sum, but the loss of English friends.h.i.+p, the Duke of Burgundy sold his captive, who was delivered up to the ecclesiastical authorities and the English party in November, 1430.

Under the barbarous customs then in vogue it would not have been impossible for the English to put her to death under military law; the inviolability of prisoners of war was by no means an established principle among the nations. But La Pucelle's death alone would not suffice; she must first be discredited in the eyes of the world; it must be shown that the consecration of Charles VII. had been effected with the aid of one condemned by the laws of G.o.d and of the Church, that the consecration was, in fact, but an impious mockery of religious rites, because a sorceress had led him to the altar. For this reason it was determined to deliver Jeanne to the mercies of the ecclesiastical courts. Cauchon was rector of the University of Paris, and could command the a.s.sent of that body to whatever seemed to him expedient; the representative of the Inquisition, who seemed decidedly averse to having anything to do with the proceedings, was likewise overawed by Cauchon and by the English cardinal. All that remained to do was to const.i.tute the court and to bring the accused before it for trial.

Rouen was to be the scene of the trial, and here Cauchon began his proceedings early in January, 1431. The charge against Jeanne was to be the working of magic; but the acute and punctilious Norman lawyers picked so many flaws in the paltry charges and in the doc.u.ments presented in their support, that Cauchon was compelled to change his intention, and subst.i.tuted the charge of heresy. It was under this preposterous indictment that the pious Jeanne was brought face to face with her judges on February 21st. For months she had been kept in close confinement, loaded with fetters, and kept under the guardians.h.i.+p of men. The st.u.r.dy girl had lost much of her vigor, as, indeed, had been the intention of her captors. But though the body was weakened, the spirit was yet unbroken; and Jeanne met the accusing judges, whom she knew to be already resolved upon her destruction, with the same firmness and untutored practical sagacity that had marked her bearing in the first encounter with those who sought to entangle her in the subtleties of metaphysics and theology. Of metaphysics and theology she knew not so much as the names, but she had a clear head and a thorough understanding of the fundamental principles of justice and of faith. So long as her physical strength lasted, the most adroit and insinuating queries of the prosecution could not trap her into compromising answers. Counsel for the defendant there was none; her own wit must defend her in the contest with judges who were at the same time prosecutors.

Being admonished by the insidious Cauchon to answer truly and without evasion or subterfuge whatever should be asked, she checkmated this move at once: "I do not know what you mean to question me about; you might ask me things which I would not tell you." She would speak the truth on all things, she said, and the whole truth, except on those things concerning her king or concerning her visions. Not till she had been brought before them for the third time, worn out by their persistence and by the increasing horrors of imprisonment, did she modify this so far as to consent to tell what she knew, but not all that she knew, and to answer unreservedly on points of faith. Never would she consent to testify against herself on the points which she saw that they wished to establish: "It is a common saying, even in the mouths of children, that people are often hanged for telling the truth." Complaining of the hards.h.i.+p of being kept in irons, she was told it was because she had attempted to escape. "It is true, and it is allowable for any prisoner."

Asked to repeat those divinely sincere and simple prayers which const.i.tuted the main part of the faith she had learned as a little child, she p.r.o.nounced herself quite willing to repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary, if Bishop Cauchon would first hear her in confession, an office which he declined.

Throughout the tedious, soul-racking trial, lasting, in various forms,--now before the whole court, now in her prison, now in private inquests,--from the end of February till the end of May, the same steadfastness and caution prevailed in her answers. She told them freely of her visions, for now her saints had come back to her and inspired her, as she said, to answer boldly. If she came from G.o.d, they asked, did she think herself in a state of grace, incapable of committing a mortal sin? "If I am not in a state of grace," she replied, "may G.o.d be pleased to receive me into it; if I am, may G.o.d be pleased to keep me in it." Not one of the theologians present could have devised an answer more truly orthodox, more truly Christian in spirit, or more discomfiting to the casuists. On this occasion the judges were struck dumb, and very prudently adjourned the court for that day. Not hesitating at any meanness, one of her persecutors asked whether Saint Michael appeared to her naked? She answered him in the very spirit and almost in the very words of the Scriptures, as we learn from the record: "Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that it might be the _costliness_ of suitable robes which caused the demur, asked them if they fancied G.o.d, who clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his servants." Again and again, questions were put to her, in answering which, if she had been tainted with the least suspicion of imposture, she would have been tempted to pretend to powers greater than she had: "Do Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret hate the English?" "They love what our Lord loves, and hate what He hates."

Proof of her guilt, in the legal sense, there was none, and so much even the lawyers of Rouen recognized; but out of her own answers the ministers of the G.o.d of Justice were enabled, after months of juggling, to torture proof sufficient to convict her in their own eyes. When the wolf in aesop's fable, seeks a pretext for devouring the lamb, we know from the beginning that that pretext will be found: "You have muddied the stream," cries the wolf, as he raises his head from drinking. "Nay, good sir, I am lower down the stream than you are." "If it was not you, it was one of your family." There was no hope for this lamb of France.

"Never from the foundations of the earth," says De Quincey, "was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence and all its h.e.l.lishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! Trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy flas.h.i.+ng intellect, quick as G.o.d's lightning, and true as G.o.d's lightning to its mark,... confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!... 'Would you examine me as a witness against myself?' was the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her."

In the midst of the proceedings, about Palm Sunday, the poor girl fell ill, and there was some fear that through death she might escape the exemplary punishment they were preparing for her against the antic.i.p.ated conviction. Her illness may have been chiefly mental and nervous exhaustion, helped on by what would have been to her one of the most severe trials, homesickness. This is the impression left upon our minds by Lamartine and by Michelet as well as by De Quincey: "A country girl, born on the skirts of a forest, and having ever lived in the open air of heaven, she was compelled to pa.s.s this fine Palm Sunday hi the depths of a dungeon." In the general rejoicing of Easter, while the bells of Rouen steeples rang forth the glad tidings of salvation for all, of relief from pain and sorrow, there lay in the castle dungeon a peasant girl, sick in body, sick in mind, dreaming of the fresh green fields, and the forests just now beginning to put forth their tender leaves, hearing the bells of her own far-away church in Domremy, and the homely talk of old friends as they plodded by on their way to that church. She woke in the morning with the sound of the bells in her ears, and on that holy morning, as oh many another for many weary weeks, there were the double chains upon her limbs padlocked to a transverse beam at the foot of her rough bed. And in the room, watching every move and torturing her with coa.r.s.e jests or terrifying her with yet more cruel threats, were four or five soldiers, no woman near to minister to her wants or to s.h.i.+eld her modesty. With such torture, with the added mental torture of almost daily cross-questioning whose object was to force her into the jaws of death, is it any wonder that Jeanne was ill, well-nigh reduced to the frenzy of despair? Yet this forlorn creature, even when confronted with the threat of actual torture, never made an admission that would seriously conflict with the simple statement of her faith and of her mission which she had volunteered at the very beginning. Refusing to retract anything, she yet signified her willingness to submit to the authority of the Church. This was all that Cauchon had been able to accomplish after more than two months' labor. A highly theatrical ceremony was arranged to dignify what they called her formal abjuration.

Two scaffolds were erected in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen. On one sat Cardinal Winchester, Cauchon, and the other dignitaries. On the other, chained hand and foot and fastened at the waist to a post, surrounded by clerks who might take down any chance words and by the ministers of torture with their dread instruments, stood the poor child whom they had dragged from the prison. After a tedious and impious harangue by a famous preacher, whose false statements she would not listen to in silence, Jeanne consented to sign an abjuration which did not affect the validity of her claim. When the notary presented the pen to her unpractised fingers she smiled and blushed a little at her ignorance and awkwardness. She drew a circle upon the parchment at the place indicated, and then, the notary guiding her hand, made a cross within the circle. Then the Church admitted her to its _grace_, and the sentence was read to her: imprisonment for the rest of her life, "on the bread of grief and the water of anguish."

And so, being now received into the mercy of the Church, she was conducted back to her prison. It is a relief, in the midst of this cruel scene, to hear some expressing compa.s.sion and imploring her to sign the abjuration to save herself, though some there are who clamor loudly: "Let her be burnt!" The test of her sincerity in the new penitence was to be her willingness to wear garments befitting her s.e.x. She had clung to her man's attire as the best, and indeed the only, safeguard to her honor, constantly threatened by her keepers and even attempted, we are told, by one brutal knight. Relying upon the good faith of her ecclesiastical custodians, now that she had done what they asked, Jeanne consented to put on the women's clothes they gave her. But Cauchon had no intention of allowing her to escape the last punishment. His judges had a.s.sured the English, who complained that Jeanne would not be burned after all: "Do not fear, we shall soon have her again."

On May 24th she had signed her act of submission and had put aside the costume forbidden by the Church. On the morning of the 27th, when she wished to rise and dress herself, the guard had taken away her robes and left but the old forbidden garments. She expostulated, and at first refused to get up; but being at length constrained to do so, she put on the man's apparel. The wolf had made good and sufficient pretext for devouring the lamb; technically, Jeanne might be considered to have relapsed, and with the old dress to have resumed the old faults reprobated by Holy Church.

The judges were at once notified of Jeanne's disobedience, and Cauchon rejoiced that "she was caught." The next day, being Monday after Trinity, he returned to interrogate the prisoner upon the matter of the change of dress. Her courage had returned with the realization that they had not dealt fairly with her and meant to find pretexts for her destruction. She would neither excuse herself for again a.s.suming her warrior garments nor consent to return to those prescribed by custom for her s.e.x. As long as she was guarded by men, she said, it was more seemly and more safe that she should be dressed as a man; if they would put her in a safe and proper prison, she would submit to whatever the Church decreed. But Cauchon knew that her death was deemed requisite by his English friends, and he was determined to give her no such fair opportunity. On Tuesday a fresh tribunal was hastily const.i.tuted to pa.s.s upon the deplorable relapse into error of one for whom, to s.h.i.+eld her from death, the Church had done all that in it lay. Needless to say, this tribunal, a mere mockery of a court, decided on the evidence submitted that Jeanne was guilty of fatal disobedience to the Church and that she must suffer death as a heretic. It was to be but a step from pa.s.sing sentence to the execution of that sentence, for Cauchon's masters were already impatient at the long delay.

The next morning a priest was sent to Jeanne to notify her of the sentence. One sudden burst of feeling, half fear, half indignation, for a moment overwhelmed the courage of the girl. She wept bitterly when told that she must prepare herself to die by fire that very day: "Alas!

will they treat me so cruelly and horribly! Must my body, pure as from birth, never corrupted or soiled in sin, be this day consumed and reduced to ashes! Oh, oh! I had rather be beheaded seven times over than burnt on this wise.... Oh! I appeal to G.o.d, the great Judge of all, for the wrongs and injuries done me!" And then this heretic, this sorceress, asked that she be allowed to confess and to receive the Communion, that holy symbol of the universal brotherhood of the followers of Christ.

Cauchon did not, perhaps dared not, deny her this; but he wished to divest the ceremony of part of its pomp. When the Eucharist was brought to him without stole and without lights, the courageous monk Martin l'Advenu refused to administer it thus, and sent a complaint to the cathedral; whereupon the chapter, always ready to spite Cauchon, sent an escort of priests and acolytes, who chanted litanies as they pa.s.sed through the streets and conjured the kneeling people to pray for Jeanne.

By nine o'clock the victim had received the Communion, and was dressed in female attire and placed on a cart, ready to start for the place of execution. Brother Martin and the merciful Austin friar Isambart accompanied her on that dreadful journey of the cart through the streets of Rouen to the old fish market. If there had been any tendency to sympathetic manifestations on the part of the crowd, the guard of eight hundred English soldiers would have sufficed to suppress them; and Jeanne, who had now given up hope of deliverance, of succor from her king, from her divine guardians, was heard only to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e: "Rouen, Rouen! must I then die here?" In the market place had been erected two platforms, one for the cardinal and dignitaries, the other for the prisoner, the bailli, the judges, and the preacher who was to enhance the bitterness of death by rehearsing the particulars of her guilt. But what is that lofty scaffolding of wood and plaster standing apart? It is the altar upon which the sacrifice is to be offered, built high that all may see the tortures of an innocent maid as the flames mount rapidly up its flimsy ma.s.s. A sermon began the proceedings, the eloquent Master Nicholas Mildy outdoing himself upon the text: "When one limb of the Church is sick, the whole Church is sick." After him came that pitiful tool, the Bishop of Beauvais, who exhorted Jeanne to repentance and to forgiveness of her enemies. There was small need of this, for Jeanne knelt and prayed so humbly, so earnestly, so pitifully, that all were moved to tears, while she asked the priests to pray for her soul and to say a Ma.s.s for her. Then Cauchon, in spite of his tears, read to her the act of condemnation, concluding: "Therefore, we p.r.o.nounce you to be a rotten limb, and as such to be lopped off from the Church. We deliver you over to the secular power, _praying it at the same time to mitigate its sentence, and to spare you death_, and the mutilation of your members." The unblus.h.i.+ng hypocrisy of this recommendation to mercy, with the pyre already reared in full sight of all, could only be surpa.s.sed by that of the diabolical fiction of ecclesiastical law as administered by the Inquisition; viz., that Holy Church executed no capital sentence, merely handed its victim over to the "secular arm."

So now Jeanne, no longer under the merciful protection of the Church, was delivered over to the civil authorities and conducted to the top of the pyre. She asked for a cross; a tender-hearted Englishman handed her two sticks which he had hastily fas.h.i.+oned into a rude cross, and Jeanne kissed the simple emblem and put it in her bosom. But Isambart fetched a crucifix for her from the very altar of the neighboring church of Saint-Sauveur, and this she kissed pa.s.sionately, desiring him to hold it aloft where she might see it to the last as the smoke and flame mounted.

Isambart ascended the pile with her, and the executioner fastened her body to the post in the centre. With her eyes fixed upon the image of Him who died for the world, mayhap she did not note the lying placard above her head: "Heretic, relapser, apostate, idolater." In this hour of supreme trial no moment of fatal weakness came to deprive her of our absolute admiration. She spoke no word of deserved reproach against her rude executioners, against the soldiers who had hustled her across the market place, against the miserable Charles for whom she suffered all these tortures and who had abandoned her. "Whether I have done well, or whether I have done ill, my King is not to blame; it was not he who counselled me." Even the miserable Cauchon was greeted, as he hovered about the foot of the pile to catch her last words, with nothing more bitter than: "Bishop! Bishop! I die through you!... Had you confined me in the prisons of the Church, this would not have happened."

While the good monk lingers by her side, pouring into that saintly ear such words of comfort and hope as faith may suggest, the executioner applies his torch and Jeanne sees the flames rush upward. "Jesus!" she cries, then exhorts the monk, "Fly, father! and when the flame shall cover me hold aloft the crucifix, that I may see it as I die, and repeat for me your holy words until the end." She thought of others, not of herself, even in this hour: who shall impugn her courage, or say she knew not how to die as n.o.bly as she had lived? In the first spasm of pain, as the flames touched her body, she shrieked. After this but a few broken sentences came to the ears of those at the foot of the pile, sometimes appeals to the saints who had guided her, sometimes a despairing cry of anguish not to be suppressed. And then in the midst of the gathering flames they saw her head fall forward on her breast as she moaned, "Jesus!"

The voice that had aroused France from her lethargy was hushed forever; the great spirit of Jeanne d'Arc had gone to G.o.d, whence it came. Shall we stand by the smoking pyre till the last embers turn gray and cold, till Winchester orders the handful of ashes that remained to be swept into the Seine? Or shall we turn away, sick with horror, filled already with vain regret of the deed done, as did many in that dense crowd of her enemies? "We have burnt a saint!" cries one. "I saw a dove fly from her mouth and wing its way to heaven!" avers another.

Those who are actors in what the world learns to designate as great historical crises seldom realize the magnitude of the events of which they are immediate witnesses. In spite of the superst.i.tious terror of a few and the pity of many, it is probable that not one in the great crowd hurrying away from the scene of Jeanne d'Arc's martyrdom realized that she was a martyr or that the cause for which she had died was near its hour of triumph. Their fear was but of one whom they deemed a favored ally of the powers of evil; their pity was but for one whom they deemed a simple girl, and for whose anguish they grieved as they would have grieved for that of their own daughters or sisters. The pity of it, that one so young, so gentle, so innocent of worldly taint should suffer this cruel death! After all, 'this is the truest compa.s.sion, dispensed with even justice, without regard to person or rank, without thought as to whether the sufferer be the repentant thief or the Divine Master upon the Cross, the nameless woman taken in adultery or this girl of Lorraine who was to be acknowledged as the greatest woman in French history. Yet for us the knowledge that heartless political schemers had tortured to the death a woman becomes knowledge of far more moment when we know that Jeanne d'Arc was the woman, and our indignation against her persecutors is enhanced in proportion to our estimate of the greatness and the goodness of the heroine.

In the course of our narrative we have taken occasion, from time to time, to present estimates of the character of Jeanne d'Arc; perhaps it may be well, now that her meteoric career has ended in the flames of the market place of Rouen, to consider once more the character of this heroine in its main features. The results of her activity in French history, though not in all cases immediately apparent, were so marvellous that our judgment may well be unduly influenced. On the one hand, in our desire to emphasize the extraordinary nature of her deeds, we may tend to depreciate the actual abilities of Jeanne; on the other, the glory of the deeds may blind us to the shortcomings of the woman.

In her own day, and especially after her death, her contemporaries in France had begun to regard her as a saint, and a veritable cult of Jeanne d'Arc soon grew up, encrusting the simple facts of her story with endless and fantastic arabesques of legend. Charles VII., who had abandoned the woman in her hour of need, who had made no earnest effort to succor the leader to whom he owed his crown, entered with considerable energy and enthusiasm into the cult of the saint. It was due to his initiative that, in 1455, Pope Calixtus III. gave order that Jeanne's trial be revised. It was at best but cold and tardy grat.i.tude on Charles's part, this rehabilitation of the memory of the girl whom he had used and then dropped when she was no longer serviceable; but we must in justice say that he in every way furthered the investigation into the facts of an episode in his life which he must have now regarded with poignant regret and shame, more poignant as the glory of the lost heroine was brought into full light. In this exhaustive inquiry into the career of Jeanne d'Arc witnesses from far and near were examined and doc.u.ments rescued from oblivion, and at the end of the eight months'

proceedings the new court, with a ma.s.s of testimony before it which fills volumes, reversed the partisan decision of the court of Rouen, acquitted the heroine of the false charges brought against her, and not only vindicated her honor, but p.r.o.nounced favorably upon her claims to sanct.i.ty. Jeanne was already canonized in popular imagination, and though the official sanction of Rome was long in the granting, in the hearts of all France she had a veneration far more precious than any ever vouchsafed to a saint.

Jeanne d'Arc did not regard herself as a saint, nor was she free from human faults of temper and of conduct that accord but ill with sanct.i.ty.

Her outbursts of wholesome wrath, some one or two of which we have noted, mark her as that which she was, no patient martyr, but a strong, healthy woman, normal in many things, and blessed with much practical sense, in spite of her visions. It was this very fact in Jeanne's life that enabled her enemies to seize upon the manifestations of her likeness to other women of her cla.s.s and time and to draw Jeanne as but a common, coa.r.s.e, immodest woman. In the disgusting Joan of Shakespeare's _Henry VI._ (if it be his), and in the shameless wanton of Voltaire's _Pucelle d'Orleans_ there is just this much of truth to life, that the true Jeanne was a peasant la.s.s and, in all things not directly connected with her great deeds, spoke and acted as one of her cla.s.s would have acted and spoken, with far greater freedom than would be consistent with modesty in a more cultured society. We do not mean to say that there is the least justification or excuse for these attempts to defame Jeanne d'Arc; to condemn her as a common virago because she sometimes uttered her commands with too little regard for propriety in speech would be like condemning Was.h.i.+ngton because he could and did, on occasion, swear a good round oath. But the proper defence of Jeanne d'Arc against Shakespeare and Voltaire is neither to vilify them nor to obscure the human side of her character and exalt her to something altogether faultless and divine, something altogether "too bright and good for human nature's daily food."

With or without the poetic praises of biographers, Jeanne d'Arc deserves her place as, all things considered, one of the most remarkable figures in the world's history. In spite of human defects, she is "the one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the l.u.s.t, the selfishness and unbelief of the time." How can we draw our sketch to a conclusion better than in the words of a great Englishman, himself in some things the arch-prophet of divine enthusiasm? In his comment upon Schiller's _Jungfrau von Orleans_, Carlyle says: "Feelings so deep and earnest as hers can never be an object of ridicule: whoever pursues a purpose of any sort with such fervid devotedness is ent.i.tled to awaken emotions, at least of a serious kind, in the hearts of others. Enthusiasm puts on a different shape in every different age: always in some degree sublime, often it is dangerous; its very essence is a tendency to error and exaggeration; yet it is the fundamental quality of strong souls; the true n.o.bility of blood, in which all greatness of thought or action has its rise. Quicquid vult valde vult is ever the first and surest test of mental capability. This peasant girl, who felt within her such fiery vehemence of resolution that she could subdue the minds of kings and captains to her will and lead armies on to battle, conquering, till her country was cleared of its invaders, must evidently have possessed the elements of a majestic character.... Jeanne d'Arc must have been a creature of shadowy yet far-glancing dreams, of unutterable feelings, of 'thoughts that wandered through eternity.' Who can tell the trials and the triumphs, the splendors and the terrors, of which her simple spirit was the scene!... Hers were errors, but errors which a generous soul alone could have committed, and which generous souls would have done more than pardon. Her darkness and delusions were of the understanding only; but they make the radiance of her heart more touching and apparent; as clouds are gilded by the orient light into something more beautiful than azure itself."

Great and pure and n.o.ble was thy faith, Maid of Orleans! And of a truth it wrought miracles, for thy brave and steadfast heart divined what was to be done and faltered not by the wayside. And yet, adoring thee as a saint, let us love thee as a simple girl, "Jehanne la bonne Lorraine"!

"Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys Harembourges, qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine Qu'Anglois bruslerent a Rouen: Ou sont-ilz, Vierge Souveraine?

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

CHAPTER XIV