On Wednesday, May 30th, in the morning there came to Joan in her cell Brother Martin Ladvenu, chosen by Cauchon to inform her of the fate in store for her. A young Brother of Ladvenu’s convent, Brother Jean Toutmouillé, went with him and he has left us an account of the scene:
“The day that Joan was abandoned to secular justice and delivered up to be burned, I went in the morning to the prison with Brother Martin Ladvenu, whom the Bishop of Beauvais had sent to her to announce her imminent death and to induce in her true contrition and penitence, and also to hear her confession. The which the said Ladvenu did very thoroughly and charitably. And when he announced to the poor woman the death which she must die that day, that so had her judges ordained, and understood and heard the hard and cruel death which was almost upon her, she began to cry out grievously and pitiably pulled and tore out her hair. ‘Alas! Do they treat me thus horribly and cruelly, so that my body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted, must be this day consumed and reduced to ashes! Ah! I had rather seven times be decapitated than to be thus burned. Alas! Had I been in the ecclesiastical prison to which I submitted myself, and been guarded by men of the Church and not by my enemies and adversaries, it had not so wretchedly happened to me as now it has! Ah! I appeal before God, the Great Judge, from the great wrongs and grievances (ingravances) being done to me.’ And she complained marvellously in that place of the oppressions and violences which had been done to her in the prison by the gaolers and by others who had been let in against her.
“After these complaints came the aforesaid bishop to whom she immediately said: ‘Bishop, I die by you.’ He began to remonstrate with her, saying: ‘Ah! Joan, have patience herein, you die because you held not to what you had promised and are returned to your first evil-doing.’ And the poor Maid answered him, ‘Alas! if you had put me in the prisons of the court of the Church, and into the hands of competent and fitting ecclesiastical keepers, this would not have happened. That is why I appeal against you before God.’ That done, I went out and heard no more.” (R.234–235)
This deposition is completed by that of the usher Jean Massieu:
“The Wednesday morning, the day that Joan died, Brother Martin Ladvenu heard her confession, and Joan’s confession heard, he sent me to the Bishop of Beauvais to notify him that he had heard her in confession and asked that the sacrament of the Eucharist be given her. The bishop called together several persons on that matter. After their deliberation, he told me to tell Brother Martin that he was to give her the sacrament of the Eucharist and all that she asked for. . . . The Body of Jesus Christ was carried to her irreverently without stole or light, at which Brother Martin, who had confessed her, was ill-pleased. Wherefore I was sent back to fetch a stole and the light, and so Brother Martin administered it. And that done, she was taken to the Old Market, and at her side were Brother Martin and me, accompanied by more than eight hundred men of war with axes and swords, and she, being at the Old Market and after the preaching during which she showed great constancy and very peaceably listened to it, showing great sign and evidence and clear appearance of her contrition, penitence and fervour of faith, as much by her pious and devout lamentations and invocations of the blessed Trinity and of the blessed glorious Virgin Mary and of all the blessed saints of Paradise, naming expressly several of these saints in the which devotions, lamentations and true confessions of faith, as in requesting also of all manner of people of what condition and estate soever, whether of her own party or the other, pardon most humbly, requesting that they would pray for her, forgiving them the evil that they had done her, she persevered and continued a very long space of time, as about half an hour, and so to the end, at which the judges there present and even several Englishmen were provoked to tears and to weeping and indeed most bitterly wept at it.” (R.236–237)
The text of the Condemnation proceedings gives the official account of the scene, which took place in the Old Market Place of Rouen, near to the church of Saint-Sauveur. In this are particularly mentioned, as being with Cauchon and the vice-Inquisitor Jean Lemaitre, Louis of Luxembourg, Bishop of Thérouanne, Jean de Mailly, Bishop of Noyon, Jean de Chatillon, André Marguerie, Nicolas de Venderès, Raoul Roussel, Denis Gastinel, Guillaume Haiton—all of them men in whom there is no difficulty in discovering the most ardent partisans of the English cause. And there were some others, like Guillaume le Boucher, Jean Alepée, Pierre de Houdenc and, of course, the University Masters. Among these were Pierre Maurice; and above all Nicolas Midy whose task it was to preach a final sermon to Joan.
After his sermon, the definitive sentence was spoken by Pierre Cauchon himself:
“We declare that thou, Joan, commonly called the Maid, art fallen into diverse errors and diverse crimes of schism, idolatry, invocation of devils and numerous others. . . . And thereafter, after abjuration of thine errors, it is evident that thou hast returned to those same errors and to those crimes, your heart having been beguiled by the author of schism and heresy. . . . Wherefore we declare thee relapsed and heretic.” (C.411–412)
Joan should, at this point, have been conducted to the secular judges, who alone were qualified to decide the actual sentence and apply it. But Cauchon, in haste to have done with it, neglected that formality.
Martin Ladvenu: “It was evident, to the judges, that she had submitted herself to the determination of the Church and that she was a believer and Catholic and repentant, and it was by permission and on the order of the judges that I gave Joan the Body of Christ. She was handed over as relapsed to the secular judges, and I believe that had she gone over to the side of the English, she would not have been so treated. I am certain that after she had been abandoned by the Church, she was taken by the English soldiers who were there in great number, and without any sentence by the secular judges, although the sheriff of Rouen and the council of the lay court were there. I know it, for I was with Joan all the time from the castle until the moment when she yielded up the ghost and it was I who, on the order of the judges, administered to her the sacraments of penitence and of the Eucharist.”
His evidence was confirmed by the sheriff’s lieutenant, Laurent Guesdon: “I was at the last sermon delivered at the Old Market of Rouen; I was there with the sheriff for at the time I was lieutenant of the sheriff. The sentence was pronounced whereby Joan was abandoned to secular justice. As soon as possible after this sentence, immediately and without delay, she was delivered into the hands of the sheriff, and without the sheriff or myself, to whom it appertained to pronounce sentence, having pronounced one, the executioner, without further ado, seized Joan and took her to the place where the wood was ready and she was burned.” (R.233–234)
Jean Massieu also bears witness to this haste: “While she was making her devotions and pious lamentations, I was hard-pressed by the English, and even by one of their captains, to leave her in their hands the sooner to put her to death, saying to me, who according to my understanding comforted her at the scaffold: ‘What, priest, will you make us dine here?’ And incontinent, without other form or sign of judgment, sent her to the fire, saying to the Master of the Work (executioner), ‘Do thine office.’ And so was she taken and bound, still continuing praises and lamentations to God and the saints, and whose last word, in departing this life, cried in a loud voice: ‘Jesus’.” (R.237)
The apparitor of the archiepiscopal court, Maugier Leparmentier, who had, it will be recalled, been sent for two weeks before this event to put Joan to the torture, was present: “The day when Joan was burned, the wood was got ready to burn her before the sermon was finished or the sentence had been pronounced. And no sooner the sentence uttered by the bishop, without any delay, she was taken to the fire, and I did not see that there was any sentence pronounced by the lay judge. But was at once taken to the fire. And in the fire she cried more than six times ‘Jesus’, and above all with her last breath she cried in a loud voice ‘Jesus!’ so that all present could hear her. Almost all wept with pity, and I have heard say that the ashes, after her burning, were gathered up and cast into the Seine.”
The most detailed accounts of Joan’s last moments are provided, as we might expect, by those who accompanied and supported her to the scaffold itself. There was, in the first place, the usher, Jean Massieu: “When she was abandoned by the Church I was still with her and with great devoutness she asked to have the cross. Hearing that, an Englishman who was present made a little cross of wood from the end of a stick, which he gave her and devoutly she received and kissed it, making pious lamentations to God our Redeemer who had suffered on the Cross, for our redemption, of which Cross she had sign and representation. And she put this cross into her bosom, between her flesh and her clothes, and furthermore asked humbly that I enable her to have the cross from the church so that she could have it continually before her eyes until death. And I so contrived that the parish clerk of Saint-Sauveur brought it to her. Which being brought, she embraced it long and closely and retained it until she was bound to the stake. Brother Isambart had gone with the parish clerk to fetch the cross. The pious woman asked, requested and begged me, as I was near her at her end, that I would go to the near-by church and fetch the cross to hold it raised right before her eyes until the threshold of death, that the cross which God hung upon be continually before her eyes in her lifetime. Being in the flames she ceased not until the end to proclaim and confess aloud the holy name of Jesus, imploring and invoking without cease the help of the saints in paradise. And what is more, in giving up the ghost and bowing her head, uttered the name of Jesus as a sign that she was fervent in the faith of God.” (R.270)
Martin Ladvenu: “As to her great and admirable contrition, repentance and continual confession, she called still upon the name of Jesus and devoutly invoked the help of the saints in paradise, as Brother Isambart, who had supported her to her passing and addressed her on the way of salvation, has already deposed.” (R.207)
Among other depositions touching her end, and they were numerous since that end was public, there is that of Jean Riquier, parish priest of Heudicourt at the time of the Rehabilitation. At the time of the Condemnation he was a boy of about fifteen who, as a chorister in the church of Rouen, moved much in that town’s ecclesiastical circles: “Master Peter Maurice visited her in the morning, before she was brought to the sermon in the Old Market. And Joan said to him: ‘Master Peter, where shall I be this evening?’ And Master Peter answered her: ‘Have you not good hope in God?’ She said that she had and that with God’s help she would be in paradise. That I had from Master Peter himself. When Joan saw the fire kindled she began to cry out in a loud voice ‘Jesus, Jesus’, and still until her death she cried ‘Jesus’. And when she was dead, as the English feared lest it be said that she had escaped, they told the executioner to push back the fire a little so that those present could see her dead, that it be not said she had escaped. . . . I heard Master Jean Alepée, then canon of Rouen, present at Joan’s execution, weeping copiously, say in my presence and the presence of those about me: ‘I would that my soul were where I believe this woman’s soul to be.’ ”
And here is what was being said among the people, passed down to us by the voice of the stone-mason Pierre Cusquel: “I was not present at the last preaching, and the condemnation and execution of Joan,” he said, “because my heart would not have been able to bear and suffer it, out of pity for Joan, but I did hear say that she received the Body of the Lord before her condemnation. . . . I heard say that Master Jean Tressard, secretary to the King of England, returning from Joan’s execution afflicted and groaning, wept lamentably over what he had seen in that place and said indeed: ‘We are all lost, for we have burnt a good and holy person,’ and that he believed that her soul was in God’s hands and that, when she was in the midst of the flames, she had still declaimed the name of the Lord Jesus. That was common repute and more or less all the people murmured that a great wrong and injustice had been done to Joan. . . . After Joan’s death the English had the ashes gathered up and thrown into the Seine because they feared lest she escape or lest some say she had escaped.” (R.240–241)
And there is the contrition of an Englishman, notably of the executioner Geoffroy Therage, as recounted by Brother Isambart de la Pierre: “One of the English, a soldier who detested her extraordinarily, and who had sworn that with his own hand he would bear a faggot to Joan’s pyre, in the moment when he was doing so and heard Joan calling upon the name of Jesus in her last moment, stood stupefied and as if in ecstasy, and was taken thence to a tavern near the Old Market so that, drink helping, he might regain his senses. And after having eaten a meal with a Brother of the Order of Preaching Friars, this Englishman confessed, by the mouth of this Brother who was himself English, that he had sinned gravely and that he repented of what he had done against Joan whom he held to be a saintly woman for, as it seemed to him, this Englishman had himself seen, at the moment when Joan gave up the ghost, a white dove coming out on the side towards France. And the executioner, on the same day after the mid-day meal, came to the convent of the preaching friars and said to me, as to Brother Martin Ladvenu, that he greatly feared to be damned for he had burned a holy woman.”
Jean Massieu: “I heard it said by Jean Fleury, clerk and writer to the sheriff, that the executioner had reported to him that once the body was burned by the fire and reduced to ashes, her heart remained intact and full of blood, and he told him to gather up the ashes and all that remained of her and to throw them into the Seine, which he did.”
Isambart: “Immediately after the execution, the executioner came to me and my companion Martin Ladvenu, struck and moved to a marvellous repentance and terrible contrition, all in despair, fearing never to obtain pardon and indulgence from God for what he had done to that saintly woman; and said and affirmed this executioner that despite the oil, the sulphur and the charcoal which he had applied against Joan’s entrails and heart, nevertheless he had not by any means been able to consume nor reduce to ashes the entrails nor the heart, at which was he as greatly astonished as by a manifest miracle.” (R.270)
As for the feelings of the man who had managed the whole business, Pierre Cauchon, we know nothing unless we judge by the steps he took during the days following the execution and which seem to reveal in him at least a certain nervous irritability. There was first the imprisonment of the preaching friar Pierre Bosquier, condemned to prison on bread and water until the following Easter for having said, on the afternoon of the day of the execution, that they who had judged Joan had done ill. Then on June 7th Cauchon assembled some of the assessors and made them say what he would have liked Joan herself to say: that she had been misled and deceived by her voices. We need not doubt that Nicolas de Venderès, Thomas de Courcelles, Nicolas Loiseleur, Pierre Maurice, readily and abundantly said what was required of them: Joan said that her voice had told her that she would be liberated from prison and she had seen clearly and knew that she had been misled by them. . . . She had been deceived and would not have faith in her voices. . . . She referred the matter to the ecclesiastics to know whether they were good or bad spirits. . . . She said: “Truly, I see well that they have deceived me. . . .” It is unpleasant to find, among those who thus answered the judge’s questions, Brother Martin Ladvenu and that same Brother Jean Toutmouillé who, obviously, had been overcome by Joan’s lamentations when he went to announce to her that she was about to die by burning. At all events, Cauchon tried to get these Posthumous Informations inserted into the official record, but came up against an unexpected resistance, that of the notary Guillaume Manchon, who subsequently declared: “I was at the continuation of the trial until the end, saving at some examinations of people who spoke to him aside, like private persons. Nevertheless, my lord of Beauvais tried to constrain me to sign them, which thing I would not do.” (R.243)
And in effect the MS. book of the proceedings, as it has come down to us in the three surviving copies already referred to, are significant in their arrangement: after the record of the definitive sentence, the three notaries Guillaume Colles, called Boisguillaume, Guillaume Manchon and Nicolas Taquel, in that order, appended, as was customary, each a note of the registration, followed by signature and sign manual. On the master MS., written on parchment, are thereafter appended the red wax seals of the notary, the bishop and the vice-Inquisitor. Then, on the following pages, are transcribed, but this time without the notaries’ signatures at the bottom of the pages and without any note of registration, the Posthumous Informations. Thus we have proof of the illegality of a proceeding which the notary, recovering some of his courage, refused to sanction: it was really altogether too easy to put words into Joan’s mouth after she was dead.
Then again, on June 12th following, Cauchon obtained for himself and the principal assessors “letters of warranty” from the King of England. By these letters the King promises that: “On the word of a King, if it come about that any one of the persons who worked in the trial be brought to trial (summoned, sued) for that trial or its dependences. . . . we will aid and defend, have aided and defended in court of law and without, such persons at our own cost and expense. . . .” One of the prelates who had taken an active part in the trial, the Bishop of Noyon, Jean de Mailly, was greatly embarrassed when, at the Trial of Rehabilitation, he was reminded of these letters of warranty: of the three prelates mentioned at the time of the promulgation of the definitive sentence, he was the sole survivor, since Cauchon and Louis of Luxembourg were both dead.
The text of the Rehabilitation proceedings runs: “The witness was questioned on the letters of warranty which the King of England gave to the Bishop of Beauvais and to the others who were involved in that trial. From those letters it emerges that the bishop of Noyon was included in the safeguard given.
“I do believe, he answered, that there were some. I do not remember it very well. I know, however, that it was not at his own expense that the Bishop of Beauvais held that trial, but at the expense of the King of England, and that the expenses which were incurred in it were on the account of the English.” (R.253)
For the English, Joan’s death was followed by an immediate resumption of military operations. On June 2nd that same Laurent Calot who had guided Joan’s hand in making her sign the abjuration with a cross, signed an indent on the English crown treasurer, Thomas Blount, for money to finance the construction of war machines for the siege of Louviers. (The original document is in the National Archives, AF II, 448.) This was a vindication of the rumours which were circulating among the people of Rouen.
Jean Riquier: “It was commonly said that the English did not dare lay siege to Louviers until Joan was dead. . . . Among others I heard Master Pierre Maurice, and Nicolas Loiseleur and others whom I no longer remember, say that the English so feared her that they did not dare, while she still lived, lay siege to Louviers, and that it was necessary to humour them, that a trial would be quickly made against her and that therein they would find occasion for her death.” (R.194)
This remark was also reported by Brother Jean Toutmouillé: “Before her death the English were proposing to lay siege to Louviers, but soon ate their words, saying that they would not besiege the town until the Maid had been examined. Of which what follows is manifest proof, for immediately after her burning, they went and set siege to Louviers, estimating that never in her lifetime would they get glory or prosperity in deeds of war.” (R.194)
This was also the opinion of another witness, prior of the convent of Saint-Michel near Rouen, who had not personally taken any part in the trial but who, inhabiting Rouen, had followed the whole business from outside.
Thomas Marie: “As Joan had done wonders in the war and as the English are generally superstitious, they thought that there was in her something of magic. That was why, as I believe, in all their councils and otherwise, they desired her death.”
Question: How do you know that the English are superstitious? THOMAS MARIE: Everyone knows it, it is even a current proverb.* (R.191)
Meanwhile, the University of Paris and Bedford himself, acting for the King of England, hastened to make known to all that Joan had died at the stake as a heretic. An official letter from the King was sent “to the emperor, to the King, to the dukes and other princes and all Christendom, 8th June 1431 (text in C.423-426); it is written in Latin, the European language and the language of all official documents. Another letter, dated June 28th, was written in French and sent to “the prelates of the Church, to the dukes, counts and other nobles and cities of the Kingdom of France”; it was only a translation of the other one but it was important that to the French people of France it be written in their own language. The letter sums up the events following which “This woman, who had herself called Joan the Maid, had, for two years and more, against divine law and her condition as of the feminine sex, worn male attire, a thing abominable to God, and in that state conveyed to our capital enemy, to whom and to those of his party, Churchmen, nobles and common people, she gave it often to be understood that she was sent by God.”
The trial and the Saint-Ouen “abjuration” were next described, after which “. . . for the which things, according to what the judgments and institutions of holy Church ordain, in order that henceforth she contaminate not the other members of Jesus Christ, she was forthwith preached to publicly and as a backslider into the crimes and faults to her habitual, abandoned to secular justice which without delay condemned her to be burned.”
The University of Paris, meanwhile, was sending its own letter to the pope and the College of Cardinals to inform them of what had been done with its full approbation. It has often been asked what the court of Rome had known about the trial. In fact, Pope Martin V, who without any doubt had heard of Joan and her victories, had died on February 20, 1431, on the eve of the first phase of Joan’s trial. His successor, Gabriel Condulmaro, Bishop of Siena, elected on March 3rd and taking the name Eugenius IV, was obliged, from the very beginning of his pontificate, to deal with that series of disturbances which were to mar its whole course: besieged in Rome by the Colonna, threatened by the Duke of Milan, and betrayed by the papal troops, he fled to Florence on May 29th—the eve of Joan’s execution. Three months later he was stricken with hemiplegia but, his mental faculties intact, for the next sixteen years he stood up to that extraordinary Council of Basle which has been called “the greatest assembly of indiscipline the world has ever known”. It is a curious circumstance that most of Joan’s judges were to figure in it, at the head of the faction which wanted to make the pope submit to conciliar authority. Jean Beaupère left Rouen even before Joan’s execution, for Rome, to persuade the new pope, if necessary with menaces, that Basle, and not some Italian city as the pope would have preferred, should be the meeting place of the forthcoming council. Among speakers in the debate were Nicolas Loiseleur, Nicolas Midy, Pierre Maurice and Pierre Cauchon himself, while Thomas de Courcelles succeeded in getting a cardinal’s hat out of the anti-pope Felix V who had been elected by the council as a move in their struggle with Eugenius IV. In point of fact, the same power was at work in both cases—Joan’s trial and the Council of Basle: this power was the University of Paris, which held itself to be the real head of Christendom as, in good faith, it held itself to be the real head of the Kingdom of France. And having come out for the double monarchy in civil government and for the conciliar theses in ecclesiastical government, Joan was the university’s enemy as well as the pope himself.
In Paris itself the university did not fail to make known, with great ceremony, the outcome of the trial in which it had played a predominant role. The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, written by a university man and therefore conveying university feeling exactly, has a long account of how “. . . on the day of Saint-Martin-le-Bouillant (July 4th) a general procession was made to Saint-Martin-des-Champs and a brother of the Order of Saint Dominic, who was an Inquisitor and a Master of Theology, preached a sermon. In this he included a version of Joan the Maid’s whole life; she had claimed to be the daughter of very poor folk; she had adopted man’s attire when she was only fourteen and her father and mother would willingly have killed her then had they been able to do it without wounding their own conscience; and that was why she left them, accompanied the hellish Enemy. Thereafter her life was one of fire and blood and the murder of Christians until she was burned at the stake.”
The Journal records, before this, and in all the detail which the writer had been able to obtain, a life and trial of Joan in much the same spirit, adding an account of her execution which no doubt conveys more or less what was known in Paris and echoes the version put about by the university: “When she saw that her punishment was certain she cried for mercy and orally abjured. Her clothes were taken from her and she was attired as a woman, but no sooner did she find herself in this attire than she fell again into error and asked for her man’s clothes. She was therefore soon condemned to death by all the judges, and bound to a stake on the scaffold of plaster (cement) on which the fire was built. She perished soon, and her dress was all burned away, then the fire was drawn a little back that the people should doubt not. The people saw her stark naked with all the secrets which a woman can and should have. When this sight had lasted long enough, the executioner replaced great fire under that poor carrion which was soon charred and the bones reduced to ashes. Many people said there and elsewhere that she was a martyr and that she had sacrificed herself for her true prince. Others said that this was not so and that he who had so long protected her had done ill. Thus spake the people, but whether she had done well or ill, she was burned that day.” (P. 106)
Meanwhile Clement de Fauquembergue, clerk to the Parliament, was noting in his register: “The thirtieth day of May 1431, by trial of the Church, Joan, who called herself the Maid, who had been taken in a sortie from the town of Compiègne by the men of messire John of Luxembourg . . . was burned in the Town of Rouen and there was written on the mitre she had on her head the following words: ‘heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolater’. And on a placard before the scaffold where the said Joan was, were written these words: ‘Joan, self-styled the Maid, liar, pernicious, abuser of the people, soothsayer, superstitious, blasphemer of God; presumptuous, misbeliever in the faith of Jesus-Christ, boaster, idolater, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic.’ And there pronounced the sentence messire Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, in whose diocese the said Joan had, so they say, been taken. And he summoned to hold the trial many notable Churchmen of the duchy of Normandy, graduates in sciences, and many theologians and jurists of the University of Paris, as they say is contained in the proceedings.” He then includes a reference to his first mention of Joan, thus: “See above in our register for the tenth day of May 1429, etc.” (Q. iv, 459–460. The original register is in the National Archives.)
Finally, there are various references to the event, notably in the Burgundian chroniclers such as Monstrelet, who gives a copy of the letter addressed by the King of England to the Duke of Burgundy, relating Joan’s death: “Most dear and well-beloved uncle, the fervent delectation which we know that you have as a true Catholic prince in our Holy Mother Church and the exaltation of our holy faith exhorts and admonishes us to signify to you and write that to the honour of our Mother the holy Church, . . . has been solemnly accomplished extirpation of errors in our town of Rouen. . . . This woman, who had herself styled Joan the Maid . . . was taken by secular justice to the Old Market within Rouen and there was publicly burned in sight of the whole people.” (Q. iv, 403.) The remainder of the letter was simply a translation of the circular mentioned above.
Subsequent events clearly show the English anxiety to wipe out and utterly abolish everything which had been due to Joan’s activities. At the same time as they resumed military operations, they were busy arranging to crown the boy-king Henry VI, King of France. He had been crowned King of England, at Westminster, on November 6, 1429; he received the second crown of his double monarchy at Notre Dame in Paris on December 16, 1431, six months after Joan’s death. Paris was chosen in default of Rheims, which was back in French hands. No surprise need be felt at the fact that among the ecclesiastics summoned to assist at this coronation were the Bishops of Beauvais and Noyon. The invaluable Beauchamp Household Book is very interesting at this stage, giving as it does a day-by-day account of the stages in the journey from Rouen to Paris which the countess and her suite entered at night, by way of the river, possibly to avoid attracting too much attention.
The Bourgeois de Paris gives copious details of the coronation ceremonies: “Sunday December 16th, early in the morning, King Henry went on foot from the Palais Royal to Notre Dame, accompanied by processions from the town which sang very melodiously. In Notre Dame a long and wide platform, on to which ten men could mount side by side, was erected before the choir, the steps of it were painted azure dotted with fleurs-de-lys in gold. . . .”
There follow some remarks in which, albeit a fervent Burgundian, the diarist expresses his disapproval of English cuisine, on the subject of the coronation banquet. “Nobody,” he writes, “had reason to boast of the meal. The most part of the meats, especially those destined for the common people, had been cooked on the preceding Thursday, which seemed very strange to the French. . . .” (P. 110)
How was the news of Joan’s death received in that part of France which, on a later occasion, was to be known as the Zone Libre? The part, in short, which had remained outside the Anglo-Burgundian dominion or had been liberated in the astonishing epic campaign of 1429. The letters circulated by the University of Paris and by the English Government had obviously spread the news widely; it was officially distributed everywhere.
But—and it will suffice those who lived through the more recent Occupation to recall their own memories of 1940–45—many must have received this news with scepticism, convinced that this was a case of false news spread by the enemy to undermine his opponent’s morale. And it is probable that in Orleans, even more than elsewhere, eye-witnesses of Joan’s exploits, prompt to consider her as an “angel of God”, must long have refused to believe that she, the Joan whom they had known in all the glory of an unhoped-for victory, could possibly have suffered the most infamous of all deaths on the scaffold, the death reserved for heretics. The English might do what they would in taking care that nobody could say that she had escaped; many must certainly have believed it and persisted in hoping against hope.
In short, what happened to Joan was what happens to every hero of every age: people refuse to believe in their death, they are endowed with an imaginary post-mortem life. How many times, even in our own epoch, have we not read in our newspapers, concerning a gentleman not precisely beloved by the generality of mankind, that Hitler was still alive, that he was on an island in the Pacific, or in South America, or elsewhere? The same kind of folk legend which brought Frederick Barbarossa back to life after he had died on a crusade in 1190, and did the same for his grandson, Frederick II who died sixty years later, brought Joan of Arc back to life in thousands of imaginations. It was inevitable. National feeling, sharpened in a period of warfare, played its part. An exactly similar fate attended a contemporary of Joan’s whose importance was in no way comparable with hers: the astrologer Jean des Builhons, who was said to have predicted to Salisbury the latter’s death before Orleans: “King Charles VII had him set at liberty (after the siege) and kept him, giving him a pension and an honourable house, albeit some who are still of the English party say the contrary and that he died in prison.” This is from a contemporary treatise on astrology. (See Q. iv, 345, in footnote.)
There was far more reason for such rumours to get about in Joan’s case. And we have an echo of them in an anonymous Norman chronicle written after Charles VII’s death, which recounts her trial in a few words and adds, referring to the English: “Finally they had her publicly burned or another woman like her, as to which many men were and still are of diverse opinions.” (Q. iv, 344)
And as was also to be expected, the situation was exploited by more than one woman, deliberate impostors or under a genuine illusion, who claimed to be Joan the Maid, or thought themselves capable of continuing her exploits. There was, for example, Jeanne la Feronne who, like Catherine de la Rochelle, claimed to have good advice to give the King who certainly wanted none of it.
Among the imitators who claimed actually to be Joan herself, the best known was the famous Claude des Armoises, of whom we shall give some account, since, despite repeated refutations, there have been, even in our own time, diverse writings making use of her history with a view to showing that Joan was never burned at the stake. It was in 1436, five years after Joan’s execution and not long after the entry of the royal army into Paris (April 13th), that this good lady made her appearance. The event is thus related in the chronicle which reports it, that of the Dean of Saint-Thiébault of Metz, whose text we give in full:
“Year 1436, sire Philippin Marcoult was chief municipal magistrate of Metz. The same year on the twentieth day of May the Maid Joan, who had been in France, went to La Grande-aux-Ormes, near Saint-Privas. She was led there to talk to some of the lords of Metz and was calling herself Claude. On the same day there came to see her her two brothers, one of whom was a knight and was called messire Pierre, and the other Petit-Jean, esquire. And they thought that she had been burned, but when they saw her they recognized her and she too recognized them. And the Monday one and twentieth day of the said month, they took her with them to Bacquillon and the sire Nicole Louve, knight, gave her a horse whose price was thirty francs and a pair of hose, and the lord Aubert de Boullay a hooded cape, and sire Nicole Grognat a sword. And the said Maid leapt upon the horse very skilfully and told sire Nicole Louve several things by which he understood well that she it was who had been in France. And she was recognized by many signs for the Maid Joan of France who took King Charles to be crowned at Rheims. And there were some who would say that she had been burned at Rouen in Normandy; and she spoke most often in parables, and she told neither the substance nor the appearance of her intentions. She said that she would have no power before Saint-John-the-Baptist’s Day. But when her brothers had taken her away, she soon returned for the Feast of Pentecost (May 28th) to the town of Marieulle to the house of Jean Cugnot and there stayed about three weeks. Then she set out on the third for Notre-Dame-de-Liesse. And when she was about to go many from Metz went to see her at Marieulle; they gave her several jewels and they recognized that she was indeed Joan the Maid of France. And then Geoffroy Dex (Desch) gave her a horse and then she went away to Arlon, a town which is in the duchy of Luxembourg. When she was in Arlon she was constantly with Madame de Luxembourg, and she was there until the moment when the son of the Count of Warnembourg took her to Cologne; and the count loved her greatly, so much so that when she wanted to go he had made for her a beautiful cuirass for her armour; and then she returned to Arlon and there was celebrated the wedding of Robert of Armoises, knight, and the said Joan the Maid, and then afterwards departed the said sieur of Armoises with his wife, the Maid, to live at Metz in the house of the said Sir Robert, which he had before Sainte-Segolene. And there they stayed for as long as it pleased them.”
Such is the story told by the Dean of Saint-Thiébault of Metz in the oldest MS. of his chronicle. But a second MS. (Bib. Nat. Coll. Dupuy, No. 630), of later date, rectifies in some particulars the terms of the first, thus: “In this year came a young girl who said she was the Maid of France, and playing her part so well that many were deceived by her, and especially all the people of most consequence. She was at La Grande-aux-Ormes and there were the lords of Metz, such as the lord Nicole Louve . . .”
The rest of this MS. recounts, more briefly than the first, how she went to Notre-Dame-de-la-Liesse and to Arlon, and then was married to the lord Robert of Armoises, and it no longer identifies her with Joan the Maid. It is obvious that the Dean of Saint-Thiébault had at first, like many others, been duped, and then changed his mind when the fraud had been exposed.
He was certainly not the only one who was to be fooled by Claude des Armoises, who must surely have had some physical resemblance to the heroine, to pass herself off as Joan; she must also have had that ease in playing her part which has distinguished so many adventurers of the same kind. As we have seen, she put in her first appearance at Metz. The people of Orleans got to hear of her and wanted to know what this was all about; the town’s account books give us some information as to what steps they took. On July 31st the municipal council sent a messenger named Coeur-de-Lys to Arlon:
“To Coeur-de-Lys, the twenty-eighth day of October, 1436, for a journey which he made for the town to the Maid who was at Arlon in the duchy of Luxembourg and for carrying the letters which he bore from Joan the Maid to Loches to the King, who was there, in which journey he spent forty and one days, to wit thirty-eight days in the journey to the Maid and seven days to go to the King, and set out the said Coeur-de-Lys to go to the Maid, Tuesday the last day of July and returned the second day of September following. For all this . . . Six pounds parisis.
“To Jacquet Lepretre, the second day of September, for bread, wine, pears and green walnuts, dispensed in the chamber of the said town at the coming of the said Coeur-de-Lys who brought letters from Joan the Maid and for drink for the said Coeur-de-Lys who said that he was very thirsty. For this . . . two sous four deniers parisis.” (Q. v, 327)
The messenger, then, had been to Arlon and back and had then been sent off again to the King at Loches. But meanwhile Petit-Jean, Joan’s brother, had come to Orleans on August 5th, and then had himself gone to the King at Loches. For this fact we are indebted to the Orleans account books: Jean du Lys had been to the procurator of the town to ask for some money, saying that the King had ordered that he be given a hundred francs, but that he had been given only twenty and that he had already spent twelve of them, and that he had not enough left for the return journey. But this exchange of letters does not seem to have made a great impression either on the people of Orleans or on the King: nothing whatever was done to follow it up.
This was the moment of the bogus Joan’s journey to Cologne: apart from what the Dean of Saint-Thiébault has to tell us about this, her residence in that city is known to us from a work by the Alsatian Inquisitor, Jean Nidier, prior of the Dominicans at Nuremberg; it is entitled The Formicarium. It tells how the Inquisitor of Cologne summoned the false Joan to appear before him because of the attitude which she had taken in claiming to arbitrate between the two prelates who were, at the time, disputing the archiepiscopal see of Treves, and stating that she had been sent by God to support one of them. The false Joan would appear, on this occasion, to have accomplished such prodigies before the Inquisitor as seem to have made a great impression on Jean Nidier: she is said to have torn up a napkin and reassembled the pieces instantaneously: then to have smashed a glass against the wall and instantly made it whole again under the eyes of those present! What follows in Nidier’s account shows the bogus Joan marrying “a certain knight”, but without giving the name of Robert des Armoises who was presumably unknown to him. Later he says that she lived in a state of concubinage with a priest. We can hardly take much account of this story, excepting as to the fact of her residence in Cologne which Nidier may have known from the town Inquisitor.
Be that as it may, the adventuress, who thenceforth called herself Joan and no longer Claude, did marry Robert of Armoises on November 7, 1431. The certificate of their marriage was published by Dom Calmet in his History of Lorraine (vol. 3, col. 195). We know of the event only through this publication, which was in 1728, for the author does not give his exact source; the original document has never been found again. However, there is nothing suspect in the form in which Dom Calmet gives it. As for Robert of Armoises, we know very little about him, but it is fairly well established that his family came originally from Champagne; Dom Calmet gives his genealogy but it is not very reliable. It seems clear that Robert’s family had settled in Lorraine towards the end of the fourteenth century, and that in the fifteenth Robert of Armoises who had hitherto held the fief of Norroy and the lordship of Tichemont, had had his property confiscated in 1435 by René of Anjou, Duke of Bar. This was probably why he was living in Metz; that town, like the whole duchy of Luxembourg, being hostile to René.
Contrary to what is maintained in certain accounts of Claude des Armoises, notably in that of Anatole France, no document exists to show that she ever went to Vaucouleurs or to Domremy at the time in question. We know, in fact, nothing whatever about her until 1439 when she reappeared in Orleans. It is probable—we will give authority for this hypothesis below—that in the meantime her husband had died. On July 18th she was received by the town, as is proved by the account book; the town entertained her to a vin d’honneur and thereafter she was invited “to dine and to sup” on the following July 30th. On August 1st the town made her a present of two hundred and ten pounds parisis, “for the good which she did the town during the siege”. On September 3rd, again, she was given another vin d’honneur; for the same date we find the following item: “For eight pints of wine dispensed at a supper at which were Jean Luillier and Thevenon of Bourges, because it was thought to present it to the said Joan who left before the wine was come.” (Q. v, 331–332). It will be recalled that Jean Luillier was the merchant who had formerly provided the cloth for Joan’s clothes.
The accounts thereafter do not mention her again. On the other hand, and for the same year 1439, they itemise the expenses for the funeral service which the town celebrates every year for the repose of the real Joan’s soul.
Claude des Armoises, then, vanished rather suddenly, for she was expected at a dinner for which she did not turn up on September 4, 1439. It is known from other sources that she then made her way to the famous Gilles de Laval, lord of Rais. Now it happens that the King was expected at Orleans in the month of September 1439 and it may well be that Claude, whose principal object was to get money out of people who believed in her tales, left the town because she was afraid to be seen by him.
As for Gilles de Rais, he was to be arrested at the beginning of the year 1440 and to undergo that famous trial for sorcery at the end of which he was hanged and burned. Claude des Armoises then went to Paris. Touching her residence in that city we have the account of the Bourgeois de Paris:
“At the same time (August 1440) came great news of the Maid formerly burned at Rouen for her misdeeds. Many persons, deceived by her, firmly believed that her saintliness had enabled her to escape from the pyre and that another woman had been burned at the stake in error, in her place. But she was really burned and her ashes were really cast into the river to avoid the sorceries which might have followed. Now soldiers brought at this time to Orleans another Maid who was very honourably received, and when she drew near to Paris this great error began again and it was thought that she was the true Maid. But the University and the Parliament brought her to Paris willy-nilly, and she was shown to the people in the great court of the Palace on the marble stone, then preached to and interrogated. She said that she was not a maid and that she had been married to a knight by whom she had two sons.” (pp. 146–7)
From this we may deduce, as mentioned above, that Robert des Armoises was dead, and it was probably under the spur of want that Claude went to Orleans and tried her luck, and then to Paris. The next passage in the Journal gives an account of the exploits which Claude boasted of having performed: she said that she had enlisted at Rome in the army of Pope Eugenius IV, which is by no means impossible but is attested only by this account.
Thereafter Claude disappears from history. Her fraud is recounted at greater length in Pierre Sala’s Hardiesses des grands rois et empereurs, a work we have already referred to, when we pointed out that it was written rather late, between 1510 and 1516, but from sources which the author claimed to be first-hand. His story is that Claude des Armoises was unmasked by the King himself who, in greeting her, is made to say: “Maid, sweetheart, be you very welcome again,* in the name of God who knows the secret which is between you and me.” Whereupon Claude, frightened, fell upon her knees and cried “mercy” and revealed her fraud.
At all events, what we can be sure of from the documents is that there was an adventuress gifted enough to pass herself off as Joan, even on Joan’s own brothers, at least one of whom, Petit-Jean, the elder, went to the length of undertaking to get her recognized by the people of Orleans in 1436. It has been claimed that Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, also recognized her. This is quite untrue; it is to be found in no document and, moreover, Isabelle Romée’s presence in Orleans is attested only from the month of July 1440, at which time Claude des Armoises was, as we have said, in Paris. The Orleans town account books mention that in July, indeed, Isabelle was in the town, she had fallen ill on the seventh of the month and was nursed at the town’s expense until August 31st. A monthly pension of forty-eight sous parisis was to be paid her thereafter, and it appears regularly in the accounts until her death in November 1458.
We should likewise note that Joan’s other brother, Pierre, is only once mentioned in this connection, and that is in the chronicle by the Dean of Saint-Thiébault which we have quoted, and in the first MS. only. Now it was this brother who had been most devoted to his sister and who was made prisoner with her at Compiègne. It is not certain that he had been released from prison by 1436; he was held by the Bastard of Vergy, Jean, a Burgundian captain in the service of the English. In 1439 Charles VII granted him the farm of the tolls in the bailiwick of Chaumont as a means of livelihood after the payment of his ransom, which had utterly ruined him. Later, in 1443, Charles of Orleans, who had been released from his English prison three years before, made him a gift of the Ile-aux-Boeufs, up-river from Orleans. We shall here quote from the text of the deed of gift, since it has given rise to misleading commentaries:
“Having heard the supplication of messire Pierre du Lys, knight, stating that to acquit himself loyally towards the King our lord and us, he left his country to enter the service of the King our said lord and of ourselves, in company with Joan the Maid his sister, with whom until his absentment and thereafter until the present time, he has exposed his body and his goods in that service and in the matter of the King’s wars, both in the resistance to the ancient enemies of the realm who laid siege to our town of Orleans, as in several journeys made and undertaken for the King, our said lord, and his chiefs in war, and otherwise in several and diverse places and by fortune of the said wars was made prisoner by the said enemies and constrained to sell his wife’s patrimonies to pay his ransom, requests that we may be pleased to give . . . etc. . . .” (Q. V, 213)
The misleading commentaries in question relate to the words “until son (his or her) absentment”*, in which they see an allusion to Joan having supposedly “absented” herself, to reappear with her brother under the form and face of Jeanne des Armoises. But, grammatically speaking, the term absentment (absentement) can only be referred to the subject of the sentence, to wit Pierre himself; and, historically, at the date when this deed was drawn, three years had passed since Claude des Armoises had been unmasked and since any document mentions her name.
Claude des Armoises was not the last adventuress to make a name for herself in this field. In 1457 King René, Duke of Anjou, granted a letter of remission to one Jeanne de Sermaize, married to an Angevin named Jean Douillet, who had been detained for three months in the prison of Saumur for having passed herself off as Joan the Maid; she too had succeeded in convincing several people who had formerly seen the real Joan.
The success of such adventuresses may be surprising; it is, however, certainly not exceptional. History swarms with cases of people passing themselves off as somebody else. We may take our choice even in Joan’s own epoch. There is the case reported by Maurice Garçon (see his article Jeanne d’Arc est bien morte sur le bucher de Rouen, Ecclesia No. 158, May 1962, pp. 59–68). This concerns a woman who, in 1423, turned up in Ghent declaring herself to be own sister to the Duke of Burgundy, Philippe the Good, Marguerite, widow of Louis, Duke of Guyenne, and the elder brother of Charles VII. She was cared for by the people of Ghent for several weeks and so well treated that they refused to believe in the imposture when the duke, having got wind of the business, tried to undeceive them. He had to go to Ghent accompanied by his sister before they would consent to believe that they had been deceived.
Some time before this, in the autumn of 1402, an adventurer had turned up at the Scottish court giving out that he was King Richard II who, imprisoned three years before when Henry IV of Lancaster had deposed him, had lived first in the Tower of London, subsequently in Pontefract Castle where he died on February 14, 1401. The bogus Richard was “recognized” under the guise of a beggar, by a lady of his former court, and taken to the Duke of Albany, in Scotland, who entertained him generously. Under the name of Richard Plantagenet he gathered a party of adherents about him. The fraud was carried to such lengths that the King of France sent an emissary to Scotland to investigate. A bastard son of the Black Prince, Roger Clarendon by name, rallied to Richard’s cause and there were several uprisings in his favour. People were still talking about it twenty years later. Now the King of England was better known, and had been seen by more people than Joan of Arc had been in a public life which lasted only one year.
Still more remarkable was the famous case of Perkin Warbeck, a native of Tournai, who passed himself off as the eldest son of Edward IV, Richard of York, claiming to have miraculously escaped the Tower of London massacre. He found partisans in the Low Countries with Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, and an invasion of England was organised in support of his claims. In the end he was hanged on Henry VII’s orders. Without seeking further examples in the period of the false Louis XVII (of whom there were several), not to mention a certain Grand Duchess of Russia, it is, then, easy enough to find cases of successful historical impersonation which are, on the whole, much more surprising than that of Claude des Armoises.
“Joan was not burned at the stake; she was enabled to escape; another woman was burned in her place.”
The people who have put forward this hypothesis found their case on the following documents:
The Norman chronicle which we quoted (Q. iv, 344) from a MS. in the British Museum: apparently written in 1439 (see details on this subject in Q. iv, 339), it gives an exact notion of the state of public opinion and of the contradictory rumours about Joan’s fate then circulating.
An abridged chronicle composed in Brittany in 1440 and contained in a MS. (No. 1155) now in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (see Q. iv, 344, in a note). The following passage appears in it: “Year 1431, the eve of the Sacrament, was the Maid burned at Rouen or condemned to be.”
To these two documents, long well known to historians of Joan of Arc,* is added a work printed in the sixteenth century, Symphorien Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses, Lyon, 1503. In this a short passage devoted to Joan is followed by: “. . . and in the end was by treachery taken and given to the English who, despite the French, burned her in Rouen; they say it nevertheless, but the French deny it.”
But this, self-evidently, is a literary work devoid of historic pretensions and which simply sets down the “they say” rumours in circulation about Joan, not the actual circumstances of her life and death. Only the other two documents, then, have any validity for historians. But the doubts which they express only reveal what was thought by many people in circles favourable to the French cause in the years 1439–40. It was natural enough, at that time, that people should refuse to believe in a death which seemed a justification of the English cause. The hope of seeing Joan return would have been strongest in places where faith in her had been strongest: hence we see Claude des Armoises trying her luck in Orleans, where Joan had spent only a short time in all (certainly from April 29th to May 9th, also January 19th 1430, when there was a banquet in her honour; and perhaps—but this is purely conjectural—on other occasions of which no record remains), but where the people would certainly all be fervently hoping that the news of her execution was false.
The two chronicles in question date from the time when Claude des Armoises was creating a stir, the consequent rumours in circulation giving some foundation to the hope that Joan might have escaped from the English.
Apart from those people who had actually seen her burned at the stake in Rouen, what, indeed, could be exactly known in a France divided by occupation and torn by war? All the people had to go on were the letters circulated by the English government and the University of Paris, both sources highly suspect among partisans of the French cause. For the French, no real light was to be shed on the case of Joan of Arc until they had reconquered Rouen in 1449 and were in possession of the trial papers and able to gather evidence from eye-witnesses (see Chapter 9).
Thus, for the historian, the two chronicles throw light on the state of mind during the period of doubt between Joan’s death and the reconquest of the realm; they can throw no light on facts, nor, moreover, does either of them claim to do so. But on the other hand, the facts are established very clearly indeed by the documents which we have quoted in this chapter:
1. Official documents: Letter from the University of Paris to the pope notifying him of Joan’s trial, condemnation and execution. It is definitely and expressly stated that she is dead—migravit a seculo. (C.435)
The same notification made to the College of Cardinals. (C.435)
Letter from the King of England to the emperor, kings, dukes and princes of all Christendom, dated from Rouen, June 8, 1431. (C.423)
Letter from the same notifying likewise “the prelates of the Church, dukes, counts and other nobles, and to the cities of our realm of France”. Also from Rouen, June 28th. (C.426)
2. Chronicles: That of the Bourgeois de Paris which we quoted and which relates a public act in which the Inquisitor of France in person officially announces to the people of Paris the condemnation and death of a heretic. Also Monstrelet’s.
To the above may be added the diverse deeds and documents which imply Joan’s execution, for example the condemnation of Jean Bosquier accused in the official proceedings of saying that “it had been ill done . . . to abandon Joan to secular justice”, the conventional term used to indicate the execution of heretics (C.432); and, again, the letters of warranty given to those who had taken part in the trial and condemnation.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed that no record of the execution is to be found in the file of the proceedings; but this is to demonstrate a singular ignorance, for in fact, of course, all Inquisitorial trials closed at the very point where Joan’s was closed: at the point where the culprit is handed over by the court to the “secular arm”. It was always the secular arm, lay justice, which carried out conviction and sentence. Thus the record, if one existed, should be sought in the archives of the bailiwick; but custom varied in this respect from place to place, and it is by no means certain that any such record was ever written.
3. Finally, we have the evidence of a whole series of eye-witnesses bearing every sign of veracity and all agreeing in the main particular: Joan’s execution. The evidence in question is to be found in the depositions made at the Trial of Rehabilitation and given by a very varied set of people, for it includes not only some who were actively involved in the matter, such as the Bishop of Noyon, the notaries, the usher and the two Dominicans who supported Joan to the scaffold, but also people who were simply there as sight-seers like Jean Riquier, or who, like Pierre Cusquel, refused to be present because they could not have borne the sight.
But, curiously enough, the amateurs of fancy hypotheses, instead of taking note of eye-witness accounts, turn to the Chronicle of Perceval de Cagny—who could not have been present at the scene and for good reason!—from which they extract a single detail which they flourish as decisive.
We may, indeed, read in this Chronicle, which as we know was written by an esquire in the Duke of Alençon’s service and gives the most vivid details of other points in the story, notably on the Loire campaign—the following lines:
“The people of the King of England’s justice in the town of Rouen made ready fitting places and made preparations to execute justice in a place which could be seen by a great concourse of people; and the said 24th day of May . . .” (here he is confusing the date with that of the Saint-Ouen business) “. . . at about the hour of noon Joan was brought from the castle, her face veiled (embronché) to the place where the fire was ready, and after certain things (having been) read in that place, was bound to the stake and burned, by the report of those who say they saw it.” (Q. iv, 36)
The word embronché has given rise to innumerable arguments. In point of fact, in old French it signifies either veiled or penché . . . stooped, bent forward. It is probable, as Maurice Garçon has pointed out (in Ecclesia op. cit.), that all it meant in this context was that the mitre which was usually placed on the heads of condemned persons had, derisively, been put on crooked.
At all events it is clear enough that the real historian is bound to prefer direct evidence to this single, and second-hand, account by Perceval de Cagny, who was not present and clearly says so. Brother Isambart and the others quoted above were present; and they do not tell us that Joan’s face was veiled.*
There is another point: who is supposed to have been burned in Joan’s place? This causes our fancy theorists no trouble at all: the prisons, it seems, “were overflowing with witches for burning”. At this point their argument becomes merely ludicrous. As we have said, whereas heresy trials were fairly numerous in the fifteenth century, trials for witchcraft were extremely rare. Joan, herself, as we have seen, was not condemned as a witch, although in the Instruction phase of the trial attempts were made to convict her of having practised some witchcraft. And the supposition of our theorists become merely fantastic when they claim that in 1432 four hundred witches were burned in Rouen alone. In point of fact, a trial for witchcraft held in Lorraine in 1456, at which eight people were victimised, raised a great deal of strong feeling. Readers interested in this aspect of the question and wishing to know more about it cannot do better than refer to Maurice Garçon’s Les Proces en Sorcellerie and a little work by Jean Palou which was published in the Que-sais-je? collection, La sorcellerie.
We may perhaps conclude with a piece of free entertainment provided by the same amateurs of fancy theories. They declare that they have found details of the four hundred executions of witches in the Archives des domaines de la cité de Rouen, in which, they further declare with astonishment, they can find “no trace of the execution of Joan of Arc”
The Archives des domaines anterior to 1789 were removed to the Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime, where they occupy the following series: C.632–641, C.2329, 2348–2349, 2353–2355, 2554 and 2602. And we have no hesitation in offering a large reward to anyone who can find therein any reference to witch-burning in the fifteenth century.
As for the des Armoises lady, her history is well established (see Grosdidier de Mattons’ Le Mystère de Jeanne d’Arc). As we have seen, her assimilation to the real Joan of Arc is founded solely on misconceived interpretation of facts, e.g., the term absentement; or upon more glaring mistakes, e.g., the “proof” which is found in the fact that she was received by “la dame de Luxembourg”, who is confused with the one who had received Joan herself but who had died before Joan was executed.
Furthermore, all who have tried to maintain her cause in the face of history, show clear evidence of serious gaps in their historical education and information. To begin with the all too famous Father Jerome Vignier, from whom Dom Calmet borrowed most of the material which he published about Claude des Armoises. This Oratoire priest was a forger of remarkable nerve, who applied himself to the fabrication of letters supposed to have been written by popes of the fourth and fifth centuries, and who composed, with a talent which cannot be denied, a so-called “colloquy between Christians and Arians” supposed to have taken place at Lyon in 499, and which for a long time fooled historians. (See the article on this subject by Julien Havet in the Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 1885.)
As for those “recently discovered portraits” of the Maid and her husband, Robert des Armoises, which were published in a work advocating that well-worn theory, they are, alas, quite incapable of convincing the reader: the only photograph of them shows that they are in a manner somewhere between the troubadour style and that of the illustrator “Bibliophile Jacob”; one does not have to be an expert to refuse to accept them as fifteenth-century portraits. The only people who are likely to be taken in are those with a penchant for mystification!
* It is a fact that both Henry V and his brother, the Regent Bedford, had a particular fear of witchcraft.—E.H.
* A play on words: the French is Vous soyez la tres bien revenue. Bienvenu, welcome; bien revenu, well-come-again; but also a revenant is one who returns from the dead, a ghost.—E.H.
* The word “absentment” which I have used for the French absentement, in any case archaic, does not exist in good English, but I made it up for obvious reasons. It may be noted that in the translation, above, the misleading commentary has no foundation, for in English we make the pronoun, in this case son, agree with the sex of the subject (his, her); whereas in French, since it agrees with the word qualified by it, there is no indication of the sex of the subject. But as Mlle Pernoud says, the commentator had only to parse the sentence in question to see that there was no foundation for his argument.—E.H.
* First published by Vallet de Viriville, who was one of those who refuted the errors of Caze touching the alleged bastardy (see Bib. de l’Ecole des Chartes, 2nd S., Vol. 11), they were republished by Quicherat himself.
* Embroncher in current French is a building term, meaning to lay tiles with an overlap. De Cagny’s words may mean that her face was overlapped, i.e., shadowed by, as M. Garçon suggests, the mitre of the condemned. But is it not possible that the word was used, by extension, to describe facial expression? Her face was darkened, overshadowed—i.e., by fear or grief?—E.H.