The cemetery in Rouen outside the cathedral was crowded, so crowded you could hardly move. It was May 24, 1431. They’d come to burn Joan of Arc.
“Joan, do you submit . . .” a preacher was droning on the platform. She was standing in chains, toward the front, but gazing not at him but at the executioner, nearby with his cart. Now she turned and looked at him for the first time.
“What?” she asked, in a whisper. She had always spoken loud and bold before.
“Do you submit,” he repeated. Not bothering to make it a question—she wouldn’t submit, everyone knew it. It was simply part of the formula for burning.
But she turned to him. “Can I?” she said.
He looked up—“What?” Heads turned. A silence spread through the crowd.
Jean Massieu, the young priest closest to her, rushed over and grabbed her hand.
“Can I submit?” She searched his eyes. She couldn’t burn. She knew it only now. “Can I live?”
She was nineteen. Massieu was almost as young as she was.
“Yes,” he said.
. . .
The faces around her were shocked, all of them. It was true that they’d been asking her that same question for months, they’d even asked her yesterday. And yesterday she’d answered, as she always had, “Even if you brought me to the stake and tied me there, and the fire was lit, and I was in the fire, I would never deny my deeds and my saints!”
But that was yesterday, when she’d been safe in her cell, and today she was standing on a platform in a cemetery, with a black-hooded man at her feet. Waiting to put her in his cart and take her to the stake, right then, that morning, and suddenly none of it made sense anymore.
She was surprised herself. She’d thought till now that she loved her saints more than life. But her saints had promised that they would save her. “Saved,” they’d said, all through her captivity, never “burned.”
She looked up. She hadn’t seen the sun in five months. It was May, her favorite month. A beautiful day in May, though if a storm were to come up, suddenly, with thunder and lightning and the kind of rain that would make burning impossible, she could take it as a sign.
As her miracle—Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret had said it might be like that. Maybe you’ll be saved by a miracle, they’d whispered.
But the sky was clear, it wasn’t going to rain. The heavens wouldn’t open, and the fire could burn. Burn her feet first, and then her legs, her virgin body, untouched, till now.
Maybe by a great victory—they’d said that, too. Be brave, daughter of God, you’ll be saved. She scanned the crowd. Enough people for a great victory, but the only ones armed were the English soldiers, her enemies.
Still, if the French townspeople picked up their hoes and sticks, and used their dogs—but they wouldn’t. They weren’t looking at her that way. When men are ready to fight for you, they fasten on your face with open eyes, hungry, excited. No one was looking at her like that today.
Except maybe the henchman, in the blackest hood she’d ever seen. The black of death, and he was already thinking she was his. He’d woken up that morning and put on that hood for her. Brought out his cart, thinking she’d say, “I’ll never submit!” and then he’d have her.
They all thought that. She looked across the platform at her judges, the French priests, and English captains, her enemies, sitting there waiting—like cats, she thought, and she was their mouse. She’d never been afraid of them before. “You tell me to beware,” she’d taunted them, all through her trial, “beware yourselves! For I shall be saved, and you will all be brought low!”
They’d come to watch her burn alive this morning. The worst of all deaths—had they never believed her, then? All the times she swore to them that Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine would save her? It seemed impossible, it made no sense—nothing did, suddenly.
Where were her saints? Go, daughter of God, we are with you—where, Saint Catherine? Be brave, daughter of God, you will be saved—when, Saint Margaret?
It had to be right now. She passed her hand over her face. Her face. Her hand. “I shall be saved.” They must have believed her, her captors. They’d locked her in their deepest dungeon, surrounded her night and day with their fiercest guards, and still kept her chained hand and foot—which she took as a tribute.
“As you like,” she’d told them, “and still I shall be saved!”
. . .
Burning was the worst death. To be put alive into the fire, and wait while it rose, getting hot first, while you try desperately to get away, but you are tied fast, you can’t move, only toss your head back and forth, and then your feet burn, but you are still alive, for more burning.
“I can’t burn—” She turned to Massieu, the young priest.
“Just submit!” he whispered back.
Submit—that meant standing here today, in front of them all, and admitting that they, her enemies, were right, and she’d been wrong. Agreeing that everything, her life, her deeds, her saints, had come from the devil. Her Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret were, she’d have to say, devils who had led her to the sin of insubordination, and to the stake.
But they had, in a way, led her to the stake, and it was diabolical here.
“Yes, maybe . . .” She looked into Massieu’s eyes. They looked kind. Sympathetic. She hadn’t noticed it before, but then, she hadn’t been looking for sympathy.
“Will they take me out of the dungeon? Will they put me in a Church prison, with a woman guard?” She’d been in a state dungeon till now. The Church’s prisons were said to be “gentler.”
“Yes, yes, right away, they have to, that’s the law!” swore Massieu, who would spend the rest of his life telling the tale, in tears.
“Submit to the Church now, Joan,” he urged her, “and you’ll be the Church’s prisoner.”
Bishop Pierre Cauchon, on the opposite platform, was watching this consultation, with an unease that was turning to fury. It was all he could do to keep from snatching up a dagger and stabbing them both through the heart. What was wrong with that idiot Massieu? Advising her like that—didn’t he know that the English would burn Joan of Arc over the dead bodies of every French priest in Normandy? If not today, then tomorrow or the next day, and why drag it out?
He glanced sideways at the English cardinal, Henry Winchester, and the English captain, Richard Warwick. No longer at ease, no longer chatting. Picking it up that something was not quite right. Even the English soldiers had started looking from side to side, hands tightening on their pikes. They’d come out this morning for a celebration, but now the smiles were passing from their faces to the French crowd. Who had assembled—dutifully—to see Joan of Arc burn, but were just as happy, Cauchon knew, to watch her trounce the English one last time.
She scanned the sky, and the crowded churchyard. No miracle in sight, no great victory. As opposed to the hooded man, who was right there before her.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this today. She suddenly knew it.
“I submit.” She turned back to Massieu. “I submit.” It was simple, once she’d said it. Louder now: “I submit!” She smiled for the first time in the year since she’d been captured. Suddenly everything fell into place. She wasn’t going to burn. “I submit.” No thunder, no earthquake. On the contrary, everything was firm again. She was no longer hanging by a thread over the fire. A new life was starting. She stood there smiling. She was alive.
. . .
The English soldiers turned to each other. “Look how she mocks us, the witch! She’s laughing at us!”
Cauchon turned to Winchester—“What should I do?” Not that he didn’t know perfectly well what had to be done. They were burning her on a technicality, not as a witch but as a heretic, and a heretic had, technically, one chance to submit.
Still, there they all were, all the English, in what was left of their power and glory in France, Winchester, and Captain Warwick, even the Duke of Bedford, the regent of the realm. They and all their horses and men had come out this morning to burn this girl who’d not only disgraced them in battle, but had also, for all intents and purposes, put a decisive end to their hundred-year dream of combining the French and English crowns, by beating them to Reims Cathedral and crowning a king of her own, a French king. A hundred years of English victories, and all the careful marriages, all those miserable French princesses dragged to London to produce half-French English heirs—all turned to dust by Joan of Arc. The English had come out this morning in full regalia to return the favor. Cauchon wasn’t sure that a legal technicality would stop them.
But it did, it had to, for the English wanted not only to burn her, but to burn her legally, in an attempt to delegitimize the coronation of the king she’d crowned. Negate it, as the work of a heretic, whom the Church had legally burned.
Cauchon turned to Winchester: “What should I do?”
Winchester, cardinal of England, didn’t look at him. Just snapped, “Admit her to penance, of course.”
He didn’t say, Fool, though it was implied. His secretary took a scroll from his sleeve, with a standard recantation. Hastily written—lucky he’d brought it. They’d all thought she’d go down like a fanatic. He handed it to Cauchon.
Who took it and started forward toward Joan of Arc. “Perhaps you favor her!” one of the English lords called out to him.
Cauchon threw down the scroll. “You lie!” he cried. Favor her? He hated her! Sinned, actually, in hating her so much, for them, his friends the English.
“You insult me!” he shouted.
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, stepped in. “Gentlemen.” He was captain of the English garrison in Rouen. His soldiers had already started picking up rocks, understanding that something was wrong, and that Joan of Arc might not burn this morning. They’d been waiting for a year.
“Look how she laughs at us, the witch!” one of them had shouted to him.
Warwick turned. She did have an idiotic smile on her face.
“Look how she mocks us!”
It had been hard, almost impossible, to recruit men to fight in France once she’d taken the field. She had terrified the English soldiers, disgraced them in battle. These men had come out this morning to get even.
And now she was escaping them, as their own lives were escaping them, those promises of wealth and glory that had enticed them to France—a few rocks started flying. Warwick wasn’t entirely sure that he could stop them. The French crowd was already melting away.
And now this: “He insults me!” Cauchon was crying. “I’m a bishop of the Holy Church! Of course I seek her salvation, and not her death!”
Ha! thought Warwick. “Beg forgiveness,” he muttered to the English lord. Quickly. He picked up the scroll and handed it to Cauchon. “Proceed,” he said, glancing at his soldiers. Quickly.
. . .
Cauchon, red in the face now, stepped forward to Joan of Arc. He didn’t even look at her as he rapped out the standard formula for repenting heretics: “The Church unbinds you from the chains of excommunication. But since you have sinned rashly against God and the Church, you are finally and definitely condemned for salutary penance, to a life of perpetual imprisonment, on the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction, so that you weep for your sins and sin no more.”
Joan of Arc nodded. “Bread and water”—better than fire. “Perpetual prison”—much, much better. Someone handed her the scroll. She turned to Massieu. “I can’t read it.”
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Just sign and save your life.”
He gave her a pen, and she signed, either a cross or a circle, an X or an O, she couldn’t remember afterward. There were six or seven lines written on the paper. Someone took it from her.
Rocks were flying. One of them grazed her face, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d been so frightened this morning that she had a whole new standard for fear. She looked around—the hooded man was gone, without her. She laughed.
Cauchon looked over at her now, standing there, smiling like a monkey, or like a crazy woman and he was the monkey, he, the bishop of Beauvais.
The exiled bishop, ever since Joan of Arc had liberated his town from the English two years ago, and he, a known collaborator, had had to flee, a refugee.
“Now take me to your Church prison,” she called out to him, almost gaily.
Cauchon stared. Invincible ignorance. Impressive, really. “Church prison”—how should they get there? Fly? Over the heads of the English soldiers, half savage in the best of times, and now within an inch of falling on them both?
“Take her back where she came from,” Cauchon snapped.
“Where she came from”—for a moment she wondered if he could mean Domrémy? Where she’d been just another farm girl, straggling up and down hills after the sheep, not someone anyone would ever burn. Until her saints had come and told her, You were born to save France.
Another rock hit her, a solid blow this time. Cauchon was gone. The soldiers were shouting, pushing, but someone led her off the platform and away. She was alive.