1424–1428
Jeanne, soyez sage et bonne
(First Message of the Angelic Voice to Jeanne)
THE year 1424 opened ill for the land of France. It saw a terrible defeat of the Dauphin’s forces at Verneuil, where his brave Scottish allies were slaughtered almost to a man; and, though in the months that followed, the great houses of Lorraine and Anjou threw in their lot with the French rather than with Burgundy, there seemed less chance than ever of Charles VII being crowned king of France.
To little Domrémy, on the far borders of Lorraine came grim rumours of the state of Northern France, where, as we learn, “the open land from the Loire to the Somme was a desert overgrown with wood and thickets; wolves fought over the corpses in the burial grounds of Paris; towns were distracted by parties, villages destroyed; the highways ceased to exist; churches were polluted and sacked; castles burnt; commerce at a stand; tillage unknown.”
It might indeed have been said by the despairing peasants of the country-side, as in the days of our own King Stephen, that “God and His Saints were asleep,” had it not been for very striking evidence to the contrary, shown in a revelation of that year made, not to the wise men of France, not to the great soldiers or the skilled courtiers, but, as once before in the world’s history, to the pure vision of a Maid.
It was about the midday hour on one hot summer morning that Jeanne d’Arc sat in the garden of her father’s house, busy at her needlework. The sunny air, full of the song of birds and the humming of bees, had just vibrated to the sound of the Angelus bell rung from the steeple close by; for the garden and the churchyard joined, so that Jeanne sat close under the shadow of the grey walls.
Of what was she dreaming as she plied her busy needle? No doubt the “long, long thoughts” of maidenhood were hers, dim and formless enough, and still entwined, perhaps, in her devout young soul with memories of “her brothers the Saints” to whom she had prayed at Mass that morning. But with them there may have mingled deep emotions of pity for the sad condition of her native land, and vague, timid longings that one might be found, even at this eleventh hour, to come to its aid and to cause the uncrowned Dauphin to fulfil his destiny as crowned king of France. But where was that Helper to come from? And how could others, she herself perhaps, help, if only a little, to mend the great wrong that had come upon the land?
Suddenly there falls upon the shady churchyard a beam of light; and a mysterious Voice speaks to the frightened little Maid. It brings no startling message, no sudden call to arms. It is simplicity itself. “Jeanne, sois sage et bonne enfant; va souvent à l’église.” Three times she hears it, and so “she knows it for the voice of an Angel.” Let us hear her own childlike account as given to her judges a few years later:
“When I was about thirteen years old I had a Voice from God to help me in my conduct. And the first time I was in great fear. It came, that Voice, about midday, in summer time, in my father’s garden.”
Hoping to prove it to be a hallucination due to bodily weakness, they asked her if she had fasted on the previous day; to which she replied that she had not. Asked how she knew the Voice was, as she said, “for her soul’s health,” she replied, “Because it told me to be good, and to go often to church; and said that I must go to France.”
How soon the latter part of the call was given we do not know, but as Jeanne said that these Voices spoke to her twice or thrice a week it was probably not long before the two admonitions became one command—the call to prepare herself by a holy life for the salvation of her country.
It was long, however, before the child realized that the call was a real actual summons to action. The thing seemed impossible. That she, an ignorant peasant girl, who had never left her native village, could do anything to help the lost realm was too incredible for words.
“Be good!”—yes, she would make that her aim. “Go often to church”—to pray for the unhappy land—she was prepared for that. But “go to France”—how could this thing be?
Before long, however, the message became yet more definite. In the words of one to whom she confided the experience in later years, “She, with some other girls who were watching the sheep in the common meadow, ran a foot race for a bunch of flowers or some such prize. She won so easily and ran so fleetly that in the eyes of lookers-on her feet did not seem to touch the ground. When the race was over, and Jeanne, at the limit of the meadow, was, as it were, rapt and distraught, resting and recovering herself, there was near her a youth who said, ‘Jeanne, go home, for your mother says she needs you.’ Believing it to be her brother or some other boy of the neighbourhood, she went home in a hurry.
“Her mother met and scolded her, asking her why she had come home and left her sheep.
“‘Did you not send for me?’ she asked.
“‘No!’ replied her mother.
“She was about to return to her playmates, believing that some one had played a trick upon her, and may indeed have reached the secluded spot where the sheep were feeding when ‘a bright cloud passed before her eyes and from the cloud came a voice saying that she must change her course of life and do marvellous deeds, for the King of Heaven had chosen her to aid the King of France. She must wear man’s dress, take up arms, be a captain in the war, and all would be ordered by her advice.’”
The effect of such a call as this upon a normal, healthy, yet sensitively religious girl of thirteen can be easily imagined. At first blank incredulity, then wondering faith, and lastly, humble acquiescence in the Will of God.
By her own account she told no one of the Visions, neither mother nor father, nor even the priest to whom she made her confession. This is surely no matter for surprise. The shrinking from the inevitable astonishment and ridicule of her elders, indeed, from the inevitable admonitions to take a less exalted view of her lot in life, was natural enough. For Jeanne was a very human little maid; and we know that when, after the first call, she became much more devout, going oftener to church, and deserting the dance and the May Tree, she flushed with shame and annoyance when the village boys teased her for being “unco’ good.” There must, in fact, have been a long struggle in her young mind before she could bring herself to accept the call, even while she still waited for practical means to fulfil it. For three or four years she heard her Voices and almost resisted their commands. Even in 1428, when they became far more explicit and bade her go to Robert de Baudricourt, who would send her with an armed escort to raise the siege of Orleans, she replied in doubt and distress, “I am but a poor girl, who cannot ride or be a leader in war.”
For these first years, indeed, she seems to have been content to listen to her Voices without any thought of an immediate summons to action. Not always did they appear to her in bodily form—it is curious that she persistently speaks of “Mes Voix,” not of personal apparitions of the Saints, though these did actually appear at times. Three of them became familiar to her; the first being of noble appearance, with wings and a crown on his head, who told her many things concerning the sad state of France. “She had great doubts at first whether this was St. Michael, but afterwards, when he had instructed her and shown her many things, she firmly believed that it was he.” From him the message first came very clearly to the frightened girl. “Jeanne, it is necessary for you to go to the help of the King of France; for it is you who shall give him back his kingdom.”
And when the child, trembling before such a terrific task, shed tears of humility and fear, he comforted her, saying, “St. Catherine and St. Margaret will come to your aid.”
Then came the visions of these two women saints, whom she “knew because they told her who they were.”
“I saw them,” she says “with my bodily eyes as clearly as I see you; and when they departed, I used to weep and wish they would take me with them.”
Poor little weeping Maid, sad in the thought of the high destiny offered to her, ignorant of the means to fulfil it, yet never refusing, never closing her ears to the call.
Unbearable indeed might the burden have proved, borne as it was in silence and isolation, had it not been for the strong religious spirit of the girl. Like another Maid of other days, the model to all others, she was prepared to say, albeit with shrinking heart:
“Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.”4
After these Voices made themselves heard, Jeanne became still more devout and preoccupied with her religion. The village boys laughed at her, but, though she flushed with annoyance, she still left the game and the dance to steal away to the quiet little church where, perhaps, her Voices sounded more clearly than in the garden or on the hill-side. No one seems to have suspected anything, nor, beyond the fact that Jeanne was “religious enough for a nun,” dreamt that she was contemplating a step extraordinary indeed for a simple village girl. For, outwardly, she seemed what she was in fact, a strong, healthy, sensible maiden, gay and merry enough, with happy dark grey eyes and a ready smile for every one. Only in solitude were the bright eyes sometimes clouded with doubt and dismay; yet, as the years passed on, they grew ever clearer and more determined as the Voices made more distinct the Call from God.