May 30, 1431
Oui, mes Voix étaient de Dieu,
mes Voix ne m’ont pas trompée!
(Jeanne’s words on the scaffold)
VERY early on the morning of the 30th May a certain Friar Martin entered the girl’s cell with the fatal message. Massieu, as we know, was to have delivered it; perhaps his heart, ever tender toward his young charge, failed him at the last.
The Maid, roughly awakened by the friar’s entrance, heard what he had to say, and forthwith broke down in a most natural outburst of grief. She loved her life as much as most girls of nineteen; what marvel is it that on this bright May morning she had no mind to die? She wept sorely, crying out:
“Alas, am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated? Alas, that my body, whole and entire, which has ever been kept in purity, should to-day be consumed and burnt to ashes! Ah, I would far rather have my head cut off, seven times over, than be thus burnt! Had I been in the prison of the Church to which I submitted myself, and guarded by the Clergy instead of by mine enemies, it would not have fallen out so unhappily for me. I appeal to God, the great judge, for the evils and injustice done me.”
The friar strove, charitably enough, to soothe her and prepare her for her end, and presently a great calm of sadness fell upon her, and “in most humble and contrite fashion” she received at length the Sacraments for which she had hungered and thirsted so long.
Even at that supreme moment they could not leave her in peace. One of the “praying men” who was present, declares that, at the moment of the administration of the Host, the friar asked her, “Do you believe that this is the Body of Christ?” To which she replied, “Yes, and He alone can deliver me; I pray you to administer.”
“Do you believe as fully in your Voices?” he persisted; and she answered, “I believe in God, but not in my Voices, for they have deceived me.”
For the moment it seemed indeed as though the steadfast spring of hope and faith had run dry, for she admitted the same to Cauchon, when that prelate hurried, with indecent haste, to see her in her forlorn condition.
“So, Jeanne, you see now your Voices have not delivered you and that they have deceived you. Tell us now the truth.”
To which she answered very sadly, “Yes, I see they have indeed deceived me.” Then with a flash of her old fiery spirit, she turns upon him with:
“Bishop, ’tis through you I die! For this I summon you before God!”
Perhaps one of those who lingered after the Bishop had departed looked with some kindness on the poor child, for she said to him, “Ah, sir, where shall I be to-night?”
He had condemned her but lately as an obstinate heretic, but now he answered, not as a prejudiced judge, but as a man in whose heart charity was not yet dead:
“Have you not good faith in your Lord?”
To which she replied fervently, “Ah yes, God helping me, I shall be in Paradise.”
They arrayed her in the long white shift of the penitent, and placed upon her head a mitre, inscribed with the words, “Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolater,” and thus they led her out to die. Massieu and the friar who had been with her in the prison sat beside her in the car, drawn by four horses, that was to take her to the Market-place.
She wept, like the child she was, as she saw the gay world of Rouen glittering in the bright May sunshine, the crowds that thronged around the car, the tower of the cathedral in the distance. “Rouen, Rouen, is it here I must die?” they heard her sob; and again, as the car creaked forward on its way, “Rouen, Rouen, I fear that you shall yet suffer because of this!”
They could not even let her die in peace. She was made to mount one of three scaffolds, on the second of which stood her judges, and on the third a mass of plaster, on which stood the faggots and the stake. There, in full sight of the hostile crowd, was fastened a great placard recounting the reasons for her condemnation; and there she was made to stand and listen to another sermon full of swelling words and harsh invective.
Those who stood nearest to her—probably Massieu and the friar—bear witness that the Maid paid no attention to all this, but “knelt on the platform, showing great signs and appearance of contrition, so that all those who looked upon her wept. She called on her knees upon the Blessed Trinity, the blessed and glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed Saints of Paradise. She begged right humbly also the forgiveness of all sorts and conditions of men, both of her own party and of her enemies; asking them for their prayers, forgiving them for the evil they had done her.”
Even the hard-hearted Bishops of Winchester and Beauvais wept; the waiting crowd shed “hot tears” at the pitiful sight; but some of the brutal English soldiers cried out in impatience, “Priests, do you want to make us dine here?”
“Do your duty!” said Cauchon to the executioner, and forthwith the Maid was led to the third scaffold and told to mount to the stake. Was it then or earlier that the loud, pitiful cry rang over the upturned heads below?
“St. Michael! St. Michael! St. Michael, help!”
Before the executioner bound her to the stake, Jeanne asked earnestly for a cross. Maître Massieu asked the Clerk of the Church of St. Saviour, close by, to fetch the Church Cross, and, meantime, an English soldier, evidently much touched at sight of her suffering, broke his bâton and fastened the two pieces together cross-wise. This she received with tears of joy and put at once into her breast. When the Church Cross was brought, says Massieu, “she embraced it closely and long, and kept it till she was fastened to the stake.”
Even then he held it up close before her that her dying eyes might rest upon the figure of her Crucified Lord; till she, ever mindful of others, bade him withdraw a little lest the fire should catch his robes.
The flames shot up, the thick black smoke hid that white figure, that sweet upturned face from the watching crowd below.
Suddenly from the midst of the awful silence her voice rang out, sweet and clear as in the old days when storming a redoubt or leading a forlorn hope:
“My Voices were of God! They have not deceived me!”
Once again they heard her speak.
“Jesus! Jesus!”
And with that cry of perfect recognition, of purest joy, the soul of the White Maid of France passed to the gates of Paradise.
They found the brave heart untouched by the fire, but this, together with her ashes, was thrown into the Seine, “for the English feared that some might believe she had escaped.”
From the moment of her martyrdom the tide of popular opinion began to turn; and one, Maître Tressart, lamented to a fellow-citizen as they left the spot:
“We are all lost; we have burnt a Saint!”
Nearly five hundred years later, the verdict of the Catholic Church, speaking by the lips of Pope Pius X, ratified those very words; for in the year 1909, in St. Peter’s at Rome, the Maid of France was declared to be one of that noble company whom for all generations men shall call Blessed.