Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (45 page)

The greater part of the charges addressed Joan’s voices, her saints—that she “sees and hears them, embraces and kisses them, touches and feels them … and has seen parts of their bodies whereof she has chosen not to speak.” Under the direction of these demons she mistook for angels, Joan had assumed male clothing and slept among men without any female companion or chaperone. The glaring illogic of denouncing a proven virgin of sexual promiscuity didn’t prevent its inclusion among other trumped-up charges. The charges that did not address Joan’s direct experience of her angels concerned the powers with which they endowed her, the presumptions they inspired, the liberties they convinced her to take—including jumping from the tower at Beaurevoir and refusing to submit to the Church Militant while claiming certain inclusion among the Church Triumphant—and her insistence on wearing male clothing, the last more offensive than all the rest because it represented her defiance, advertised it.

The word “submit” appears ninety-four times in the trial record. It was impossible to look at Joan without being forced, each time, to consider her insurrection. And this disobedient creature had the audacity to say that “St. Catherine told her she would have aid, and she does not know whether this will be her deliverance from prison, or if, whilst she is being tried, some tumult might come through which she can be delivered. And she thinks it will be one or the other. And beyond this the voices told her she will be delivered by a great victory.”

“Take everything peacefully,” Joan’s voices told her. “Have no care for thy martyrdom; in the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.”

“Her martyrdom she called the pain and adversity which she suffers in prison,” the record stated, “and she knows not how it will end.”

On the evening of April 15, Bishop Cauchon made the unusual gesture of sending Joan a piece of carp for dinner, a little respite from whatever prison fare she might expect that evening. It was Friday, on which it was not permitted to eat any meat or fowl, only fish, and while the peasantry could afford no better than preserved and unpalatably salty fish, aristocrats ate fresh carp or sometimes salmon. Whether or not the gift reflected a genuinely charitable impulse, its result was punitive. A few hours after retiring for the night, Joan woke with a fever and began vomiting. Hours passed until the guard changed and her condition was reported to John Gray and then Warwick, who responded with concern enough to dispatch not one but two physicians, Guillaume de la Chambre and Jean Tiphaine, whose directions were to make sure Joan recovered.

Escorted to her cell by Jean d’Estivet, the physicians found Joan shackled, as always, to the block at the end of her bed. No one had attended to her. According to the guards in her cell,
“she had vomited a great deal” and felt ill enough to ask the doctors to summon a priest to hear her confession and administer last rites, which was not the hysterical response it might be judged today. Joan lived in an era of few and primitive remedies, when the onset of acute gastroenteritis wasn’t the treatable ailment it became once medicine offered artificial means of rehydration. The stress, physical abuse, and compromised hygiene of captivity meant prisoners routinely fell ill and died, and fever accompanied by a severe or prolonged bout of vomiting might characterize not only food-borne illnesses but also incipient typhus, cholera, even plague. Guillaume testified that he had felt
“her on the right side and found her feverish. So we decided to bleed her. When we reported this to the Earl of Warwick, he said to us, ‘Take care with your bleeding. For she is a cunning woman and might kill herself.’
The king valued her highly and had paid dearly for her and he did not want her to die except by the hands of justice. He wanted to have her burned … Nevertheless she was bled, and this immediately improved her condition.”

The other attending physician, Tiphaine, testified that he’d
“asked her what was wrong and where she felt pain. She answered that a carp had been sent to her by the Bishop of Beauvais, of which she had eaten, and that she thought that to have been the cause of her illness. Then Jean d’Estivet upbraided her, saying that this was false.”

In fact, he called Joan a whore and liar and accused her of using herbal emetics, ignoring the fact that she had no means of obtaining them nor advantage to be gained by their effects.
“ ‘It is you, you wanton,’ Jean d’Estivet said, ‘who have taken aloes and other things that have made you ill.’

“This she denied,” Tiphaine said, “and there was a liberal exchange of abuse between Joan and d’Estivet,” upon which Joan’s condition immediately deteriorated, as corroborated by Guillaume de la Chambre, who recalled separately, “Once she was cured, a certain Master Jean d’Estivet came on the scene and exchanged some abusive language with Joan … which so greatly annoyed Joan that she had a relapse and became feverish again.”

It’s tempting to accuse Cauchon of deliberately poisoning his victim. DeMille doesn’t resist; he guides the bishop’s hand to withdraw a tiny vial of poison from the decorative carving of his throne-like chair and pour its contents into a goblet of wine he offers not to Joan but to Charles, a toast to his coronation. In the film, as in history, the king himself is the ultimate target of the bishop’s attempts to invalidate the Armagnac claim to the throne. Joan bends to give the bishop’s hand a kiss of respect and recoils from his flesh, as if it, not the wine, is tainted. A luminous sword only she can see points its glowing tip at the poisoned cup, and Joan seizes it before Charles can put it to his lips.

A food-borne pathogen whose vector was fish handled without refrigeration or contaminated by an unclean serving vessel is a more likely cause of Joan’s illness than any intent to poison the one key player in Cauchon’s grand spectacle, but her exaggerated response to Jean d’Estivet’s attack raises the question of a third possibility. If his
presence and his verbal abuse upset her to the point of relapse, even raising her body temperature, the course of her illness might have been psychosomatic. The fervor of vocation that granted Joan her extraordinary tolerance for pain and the ability to transcend injury and exhaustion that felled the strongest among mortal warriors suggests a sympathy between spirit and flesh that might have left her body as vulnerable to emotional agitation and revulsion as it was to the force of her will. Joan knew Cauchon sought her death, and that was enough to provoke a violent rejection of a meal he’d offered and she literally could not stomach. No matter the organic cause of Joan’s illness, she attributed it to the gift of a murderous enemy.

Like the stag that won the Battle of Patay, a poisoned fish enters the story of Joan’s life bearing a meaning that a tainted bit of mutton or pheasant cannot bring to the narrative—yet another detail that tethers Joan to Jesus. Before the reign of Clovis, whose conversion transformed what had been a capital crime into a requirement of the state, early Christians relied on secret signs to point the way to clandestine meetings for worship, typically held underground, in catacombs.
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Among these, the most commonly used was the fish,
ichthys
in Greek, an animal that, like a dove or a stag, represents a messiah who promised to make his disciples Peter and Andrew
“fishers of men,” and has the advantage of providing an acronym for
Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr
—“Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” People still use the symbol to identify themselves as Christians. Joan’s illness and the fish she blamed it on are documented; it isn’t possible to interpret them as imaginative additions, no more than it is to prevent the fish from striking an unconscious note of significance: a wicked man purporting to be Christ’s representative on earth fed Joan a fish in what was a perversion of Jesus’s multiplying fish to sustain five thousand of his followers.

Two days later, on April 18, Cauchon, accompanied by the assessors Guillaume Le Boucher, Jacques de Touraine, Maurice du Quesnay, Nicolas Midi, Guillaume Adelie, and Gérard Feuillet, visited Joan in her cell, where they found her very weak and fretting over the possibility of dying unconfessed and unabsolved. The bishop told her the reason he’d come to her sickbed was his concern for her immortal soul, for which he was “disposed to seek salvation.” He “reminded her that for many different days in the presence of many learned persons she had been examined on grave and difficult questions concerning the faith, to which she had given varied and divergent answers … found to contain words and confessions that from the point of view of the faith were dangerous.” Joan was, the bishop reminded her, “unlettered and ignorant,” himself generous in his offer “to provide her with wise and learned men, upright and kindly, who could duly instruct her.” If she insisted on “trusting to her own mind and inexperienced head” rather than selecting an adviser from the six judges he had brought with him, he was afraid her case would be lost and the Church “compelled to abandon her.”

“It seems to me,” Joan said to Cauchon, ignoring an offer she suspected was a trick, “seeing how ill I am, that I am in great danger of death. If it be that God desires to do His pleasure on me, I ask to receive confession and my Savior [the Eucharist] also, and a burial in holy ground.”

“If you wish to receive the sacraments, Joan, you must do as good Catholics are in duty bound. You must submit to the holy Church. If you do not,” Cauchon said, looking down on the stubborn figure in the bed, “the only sacrament you will receive is that of penance. That we are always ready to administer.”

“I cannot now tell you anything more,” Joan said.

“The more you fear for your life because of your illness,” Cauchon told her, “the more you ought to amend that life. You will not enjoy the rights of the Church if you do not submit to the Church.”

“If my body dies in prison, I trust you will have it buried in holy ground. If you do not, I put my trust in Our Lord.”

Before Cauchon took his leave, once again, the record states, Joan
was “summoned, exhorted and required to take the good counsel of the clergy and notable doctors and trust in it for the salvation of her soul.”

Forced into the position of Cauchon’s lieutenant, Guillaume de la Fontaine was not Joan’s enemy. A close friend of Nicolas de Houppeville, who had risked his own freedom by passing a letter to the jailed prelate, Guillaume was so disturbed by the tenor of the bishop’s “charitable exhortation” to Joan that on May 1, in anticipation of the following day’s public admonition, he made his way to her cell with Martin Ladvenu, who served as Joan’s confessor in the last month of her life, and Isambart de la Pierre, whom Warwick had threatened to have drowned for trying to aid Joan in responding to the assessors’ questions. It was Isambart de la Pierre’s impression that it had never been explained to Joan that the Church Militant included the recently convened ecumenical Council of Basel and the newly elected Pope Eugene IV. It was not limited to the judges who had assembled in Rouen to try her. Aware how dire was her situation, the three clerics advised Joan to appeal directly to the pope, with the unfortunate result that the next day, when Joan asked for what Cauchon knew she hadn’t before understood was her right, the bishop went immediately to her guards to find out who might have planted such an idea in her head. Manchon testified that when he found out, Cauchon
“stormed most angrily … and threatened to do them a violent mischief.” Le Maître made excuses for Isambart and Martin and “begged for their pardon, saying that if any mischief were done to them he would not take part in the trial.” Guillaume didn’t feel sufficiently protected by such limited collateral and left town for fear of his life, and the Earl of Warwick forbade Joan any visitors who had not been first approved by Cauchon. As there was no one who would dare carry an appeal from Joan to Pope Eugene, the request was effectively, and unlawfully, denied.