March–May 1431
Aie bon courage, prends ton martyre en gré;
tu seras bientôt délivrée, et tu viendras finalement
au royaumedu Paradis
(Les Voix in the prison)
FOR six days the public examination had dragged along its weary course. At the end of that time several significant changes had occurred in the procedure of the trial. Of the sixty-eight judges who presided on the second day, twenty-four had managed on some excuse or other to slip away altogether, as though ashamed of the part they had come to play.
In Rouen itself a change was clearly coming over public opinion. The lawyer Lohier, whom we have already seen objecting to the legality of the trial, had now openly declared that he would have nothing more to do with it. The priest, Massieu, who, as warder of the Maid, had had occasion to watch her most closely, was heard again to declare his belief in her innocence.
Moreover, from the crowd who stood by as listeners to the evidence, there had more than once risen a cry of “Well said!” and even an English knight, belonging to the most prejudiced party of all, had called out on one occasion, after a more than usually spirited reply, “Why was this brave Maid not an Englishwoman?”
It really seemed as though public opinion, which had formerly clamoured for Jeanne to be burnt as a witch, was now veering round to her side so completely as to make her condemnation a matter of difficulty if not of impossibility.
This, to the minds of the Burgundian Bishop and his English friends, was an intolerable position; and forthwith, after much consultation, the public examination was closed.
A week later, a small committee was appointed to examine her, three or four of them at a time, in prison.
Here conditions were very much harder for the Maid. She no longer had a breath of fresh air, a glance at the spring sunshine as she crossed the courtyard. No crowd of spectators sustained her with an ever-increasing sympathy. If one of her judges seemed to be favourably inclined to her, it was not difficult to exclude him for the future.
It is no wonder then that for the first time we find the splendid nerves of the Maid beginning to show signs of strain. The first symptom of this was curious enough. Her interlocutors took the opportunity to press her very hard again upon the subject of the sign she had given to the King on her first appearance at Chinon.
She had already refused several times to discuss this, saying indeed that “she would rather have her head cut off than reveal the divine communication to her sovereign.”
Now, however, when hard pressed, she suddenly let loose a flood of information, vague, mystifying, unsatisfactory to a degree. Those who have most closely studied her character and history explain the matter thus. She had been badgered beyond endurance by those who insisted that there was a sign—a matter about which she had refused to give any information whatever. Weary, bored, and possibly inspired by an impulse almost of girlish mischief, a wish to mislead and mystify these learned men, a wish also to end the matter by inventing something, anything, to satisfy them, she composed a long tale of wonder, which, while really telling them nothing definite, was full of mysterious details. If it did not satisfy them, let them try some other line. Passez-outre!
Or it may have been indeed the feverish excitement of an over-strained mind that thus drew Jeanne away from her usually calm and accurate rejoinders.
In what followed we lose also the note of hopefulness that had been so marked at the beginning of the trial.
They asked her if her Voices had spoken to her of late in her cell; and she answered gravely:
“Yes; they say to me, ‘Have good courage; take thy martyrdom cheerfully; thou shalt soon be delivered and thou shalt come at last to the kingdom of Paradise.’ ”
She added, sadly, that she knew not whether she had still more to suffer, but she waited for the will of her Lord.
Her judges then began a long and tedious examination, directed to prove that she refused to submit to the Church on the question regarding the nature of her Voices. This was the most trying part of all to Jeanne, whose faith was that of a simple child, who could be caught tripping over and over again by hostile clerics, learned in theology; and who knew, moreover, that the Church, in this sense, signified the English and Burgundian ecclesiastics.
At first, when the words “Submission to the Church” were mentioned, she brightened up and said boldly that “she ought to be allowed to go to church.”
They asked her if she did not think it unbecoming for her to hear Mass in a boy’s dress, to which she replied that she would wear a woman’s dress on that occasion, if they would promise to let her go to church.
Half teasing, they promised it, insisting on the change of attire, however, with such force and meaning that Jeanne drew back. She would not give up her tight-fitting boy’s dress altogether.
“Let me have a long skirt without a train and go to Mass. On returning I will wear my boy’s suit.”
They refused, upon which she declared she would not give up her present garb at all; and the matter dropped for the time.
The whole question of the dress was dwelt on and much exaggerated by her judges. The real explanation of the fact seems to be that Jeanne clung to her boy’s dress for two reasons.
It had been indispensable during her rough life in the camp, and even more so during those first months in prison, when she was exposed to the rude horse-play and unseemly jokes of the English archers. It had, moreover, as we have already noted, become to her the outward symbol of her Call and her Work; at the desire of the King alone had she reluctantly laid it by for a time, and she implied in one of her answers that only at his command would she relinquish it now. The dress they had tried to force upon her in prison was the short frock of a peasant girl. Humble as she was, she had no mind to degrade her high calling by unseemly attire. She had worn the robe of a noble lady at the Court, and she now demanded at least the long dress of a citizen’s daughter in which to go to church. As this was denied her, she would keep to her boy’s garb.
But a few days later the shadow had darkened in that gloomy cell, and for the first time she had a premonition of the end. They had urged her again to say if she would submit to the judgment of the Church; and she had answered, with troubled looks, “I submit myself to Our Lord and Our Lady and all the Blessed Saints in Paradise; Our Lord and the Church are one. Why do you make a difficulty as if it were not?”
They explained that they referred to the Church Militant on Earth; and she said emphatically, “I came to the King of France on the part of God and the Church Triumphant above, and to that Church I submit all my good deeds and all that I have done or shall do.”
Poor little Maid! She was no heretic, though they twisted her simple speech into something resembling heresy; but she knew that for her at that moment, the Church below meant the Bishop of Beauvais and his implacable friends, and to their judgment she would not submit her Divine Voices, her call from above. She knew, moreover, as she watched their grim faces kindle with satisfaction at her refusal, that the net was being drawn closer and closer round her girlish limbs; and when they harped again on the subject of her dress, it was with anxious eyes and troubled face that she, foreseeing shame and possible dishonour, said with trembling earnestness:
“I will not put on this woman’s dress yet—not until it shall please God. But if I am brought to death, and I must be unclothed to die, I beg of you, my lords of the Church, that you will have the charity to allow me a woman’s long shift, and a kerchief for my head.” Then she steadies her faltering voice and adds firmly, “For I would rather die than revoke what God has caused me to do; but I believe firmly that He will never let me be brought so low, and that I shall have His help, and by a miracle.”
“Why do you ask for a woman’s shift if you wear man’s dress by command of God?” they asked curiously; but she only repeated her pitiful little request.
“It is enough that it should be long.”
Surely even those hard hearts must have been touched with pity for the helpless girl, with the fire and the stake in view, whose chief dread is of the rude gaze of the soldiery upon her shrinking form, stripped of the garb that had been her protection until now.
In the afternoon of that day, she made her pathetic appeal to be judged by the Pope himself. Half jeering, they had asked her if she would feel bound to speak more fully before the Holy Father than she had done before “my lord of Beauvais.”
She leaped at the suggestion. “I demand to be taken before him! Before him I will answer all that I ought to.”
This alone was enough to prove her loyalty to the Church, but she was not thus to escape the toils that had been spread so carefully for her. They hastily turned to another subject and asked if it were true that her standard had been carried into the cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains had remained outside. Her answer rings out with the brave spirit of old:
“It had been through the labour and the pain! Reason good that it should have the honour!”
On March 17th, the eve of Passion Sunday, the long examination came to an end. For the next few days a group of learned doctors busied themselves in drawing up twelve articles containing the chief points of indictment against the Maid, and then in considering them one by one. They came to the conclusion that “the Visions and Voices were either ‘human inventions’ or the work of devils; that Jeanne’s evidence was a tissue of lies; that she was blasphemous towards God and impious towards her parents; schismatic as regarded the Church, and so forth.”9 And meantime this poor little “heretic” was pleading that she might be allowed to hear Mass on Palm Sunday, and be allowed to approach the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion at Easter.
The Bishop and four others had come to her cell very early that Palm Sunday morning, and they insisted that she must wear the peasant’s dress if she were allowed this; but by this time, to the Maid’s overstrained and weary mind, the boy’s garb had become an absolutely sacred symbol of her loyalty to God and His Saints; to give this up was to relinquish her case and to disobey her Master.
“My Voices do not advise me to do it; I cannot do it yet,” she said.
They began to entreat her with apparent kindness and good-will, to reconsider her decision.
“If it depended on me, it would soon be done,” she replied sadly.
“Will you consult your Voices as to whether you may change it, so as to have your Easter Communion?” urged the Bishop.
“I cannot change it—not even to receive my Saviour!” she said. “Let me hear Mass to-day as I am. My dress is no burden on my soul—to wear it is not against the Church.”
But they thought otherwise. By this time even to them the whole question of the garments worn by Jeanne had assumed abnormal proportions. To relinquish her boy’s dress was to “submit to the Church,” and her refusal was but another addition, in their eyes, to her list of crimes.