Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (39 page)

“Why did you jump?” the examiner asked.

“I had heard that the people of Compiègne, all of them to the age of seven, were to be put to fire and to the sword. I would rather die than live after the destruction of such good people.” As Michelet saw it, the problem was a simple one.
“Her body was at Beaurevoir, her soul at Compiègne.”

“Was that the only reason?”

“The other was that I knew I had been sold to the English, and I would have died rather than fall into their hands.”

“Did you expect to kill yourself when you leaped?”

“No, because as I leaped I commended myself to God and Our Lady.”

“Hadn’t your voices forbidden you to jump?”

“I begged their pardon afterward. I admitted I was wrong in jumping, and my angels forgave me. They saw my need, and that I could in no way hold myself back, so they lent aid to my life and prevented me from being killed.”

The line of questioning aimed at two capital crimes. If Joan had attempted suicide, she’d condemned herself, like Judas, who turned away from the limitless grace of a god who forgave everything—except rejection. If she’d expected her angels to soften her landing, she’d committed the antithetical sin, equally dire, of presuming God would save her from the mortal consequences of her acts. That she never considered seeking forgiveness and receiving absolution from an earthly cleric, rather than supernatural beings only she could see, was by definition heretical.

“Did you receive any great penance?”

“A large part of my penance was the hurt I did myself in falling.” The hurt Joan did herself was significant enough that she didn’t
know where she was when she regained consciousness; her Burgundian captors had to tell her. “For two days she neither ate nor drank nor moved,” and the physician who attended her feared she’d broken her back.

“The devil took him [Jesus] to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple,” the Evangelist Matthew wrote. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil said, “throw yourself down; for it is written: ‘He will give his angels charge of you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ”

The devil has a good memory for Scripture, too—as good as Jesus’s, when given the opportunity to speak, quoting here from Psalm 91.

Jesus answered him, “Again it is written: ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’ ”

“You presumed upon the grace of God,” the examiner said. But Joan admitted only disobedience—not the presumption that her angels would loan her wings. It seemed obvious to her that if they had, she wouldn’t have been injured. And were she the author of such blasphemy, why would they have come to aid and soothe her?

“St. Catherine told me the people of Compiègne would have succor before St. Martin’s Day in winter without fail. And she told me to confess and ask God to forgive me.

“So I was comforted and began to get well, and to eat, and soon afterwards recovered.” Joan’s account of her leap was given on March 6, 1431, four and a half months after Compiègne fell—long enough to countless times review what she’d done, as she must have, filling the dark of her cell and its sleepless nights with memories of past deeds, this one followed by unconsciousness, disorientation, and days of death-like torpor. Given the friable nature of human memory, and her fixation on redemption, it’s possible she attempted a suicide she later denied. Joan’s vigor and her tolerance for physical injury and pain were unnatural enough to inspire her confidence in superhuman
strength, but could her sense of invulnerability have been strong enough to make leaping from an altitude of seventy feet, the average height of a six- or seven-story building today, seem survivable?

As the Church’s grip on the people’s collective imagination loosened, Joan would increasingly be perceived as a young woman who, once her active trajectory was halted by her capture and incarceration, fell prey to doubt.
The Messenger
replaces Joan’s voices with a hooded presence claiming to be God—or is it the devil, so adept at impersonation? In either case, Besson suggests the apparition, which only Joan sees and hears, is evidence of her decompensating under the crush of guilt inspired by the mass murders for which she was responsible. Hadn’t she, the 1999 film asks, suffered what psychoanalysis would term a delusion of grandeur? Isn’t God the internalized fantasy of a terrorizing and inconsistently benign patriarch? The film poses questions from a vantage medieval Europeans never had and dismisses the comfort Joan received from her voices. She admitted instances in which they failed to provide the direction she sought. She argued with them sometimes. Before her life ended, she would have disobeyed and even briefly betrayed her voices, but she was never heard to say, as she does in Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine
, that her voices abandoned her, leaving her to
“wait here alone, in the darkness and in silence,” asking if she “made an error that was not forgiven.”

She hadn’t been beaten, stripped of her clothing, or scourged. She didn’t fall under the weight of the cross on which she would be crucified, but Joan had her Via Dolorosa. Sold to the English, she endured a punitive reversal of Christine de Pizan’s portrait of her victorious sweep through the spring countryside in the wake of Charles’s coronation:
“As he returns through his country, neither city nor castle nor small town can hold out against them. Whether he be loved or hated, whether they be dismayed or reassured, the inhabitants surrender.” She wouldn’t fulfill Christine’s prediction that she would go on to save all Christendom from heretics and unbelievers, hers an unstoppably glorious trajectory. Instead, she was
“paraded throughout many of the lands of France occupied by the Burgundians and then the English.”
From Beaurevoir to Rouen, she was the single irresistible exhibit of a traveling sideshow that crawled out of dark November and on into December and its darker Christmas, a six-week pilgrimage guaranteed its share of rain and sleet, two weeks’ worth anyway, as Joan and her retinue of guards and hecklers followed the circuitous route necessary to skirt French-held territory, moving over flatlands low enough to dip, here and there, into marsh.

The vanguard of such processions was traditionally given to the spoils of war. Joan would have taken the lead under heavy guard, wearing not armor but shackles, mounted on a horse, perhaps, or pulled in a wagon, even held in a cage, at last cut down to mortal size, a maid returned to her proper state: booty. She never spoke of the journey. After a year spent surrounded by throngs of worshipful well-wishers, Joan was learning what it was like to be an object of public loathing, ridicule, and censure, a symbol not of France’s victory but of its loss. People spat at her because she was French, they threw things at her because she was a witch,
they called her a dirty cunt because the Church told them female wickedness wore a sexual stain and they hadn’t the imagination or independence of mind to think of anything else. Long separated from her brother and Jean d’Aulon, and now from the kind women around Jean of Luxembourg, Joan had only her voices to comfort her. “I asked that when I was taken I might die quickly without long suffering in prisons; and the voices told me to be resigned to everything, that it must so happen.” They said it often enough that she knew her suffering was ordained and that a “great victory” awaited her. “Take everything peacefully,” they said to her. “Have no care for thy martyrdom. In the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.” A victory unlike Roland’s or Galahad’s, but deliverance and paradise nonetheless.

From Bapaume the party moved north, out of the valley of the Somme and into the plains of Flanders, to Arras, whose felicitous placement on the Scarpe River presented a strategic advantage that had purchased centuries of strife. Courts as far-flung as that of the Spanish Hapsburgs had claimed the city, which became a famed center of troubadour culture, the cosmopolitan home to poets’ societies and host to countless recitals of chansons de geste, whose audiences were as eager as a barn filled with bumpkins to see a witch, as they
would be a dragon or any other outright manifestation of the devil’s work. If seeing Joan was frightening, it was in equal measure reassuring. To the English and the Burgundians she presented a mortal vessel into which they could project and contain their fear of evil, just as she had given the French one in which to safeguard their faith. Like all messianic leaders, she fulfilled an essential psychic need for both her enemies and her adherents; thus she possessed multitudes, all of them fixed on her unlawful example.

“When you were in Arras, did not my lord Jean de Pressy and others offer you a woman’s dress?”

“Yes. He and many others also asked me to take an outfit of that sort.”

“And it was Captain Baudricourt who had a male costume made for you, with arms to match?” the examiner said, adding that the captain had done so “reluctantly, with great repugnance.”

“It was not Sir Robert who gave me clothing but the people of Vaucouleurs. I was armed by order of my king.”

While in Arras, Joan was confined in one of the Duke of Burgundy’s many châteaus, where a sympathetic guard slipped her a file, or a would-be savior slipped it past a guard, but it was discovered and confiscated before she had a chance to use it. By the time the victory parade left for Avesnes-le-Comte, the days had grown significantly shorter than they had been upon the party’s arrival in Arras, enough to startle and disquiet anyone who’d spent two weeks in a cell. Every day the sun’s light drained away a little sooner, a little faster, as she was drawn ever farther from any source of mortal rescue. Fields and pasture claimed what wasn’t wooded or settled, and the apple orchards of Normandy were falling under winter’s shadow as Joan passed by land she and Alençon had dreamed of reclaiming, co-commanders of an army out of reach of court politicking. How starkly frail a branch looked without leaves or fruit, nothing more than a dark scribble against a pale, chill sky. The procession visited ten cities, in which Joan spent a night or two in the town keep, probably in hearing of a public sermon devoted to her grievous sins, for what preacher would squander the opportunity to edify his flock with a morality tale inspired by a visit from the fallen Maid? By now, Joan had been called a witch and a whore so many times, as often as she’d been threatened
with rape, that the words themselves had lost their power to summon tears, and the same angels who had protected her from the idolatry she recognized in her followers diminished the impact of her abrupt arrival at universal revilement. Though the torments that awaited her were extraordinary enough to be the object of fascination six centuries after her birth, the company she kept was even more so. Her fate was sealed; the face with which she met it remained her own. Still, the clamor of battle would have been preferable, even less disorienting, than her passage through an endless gauntlet of staring peasants. The dread her presence aroused muffled the jeering that would otherwise greet a war prize of her magnitude, and only those curious enough to overcome their fears drew close. The rest hung back; they didn’t want to see the sorceress who’d led the armies of France so much as they wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren that they had.