Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (47 page)

On Sunday, May 13, Warwick threw a grand formal dinner, attended by 110 guests, including his daughter, married to Talbot, still held hostage by the Armagnacs, and others who played a role in Joan’s story. It was an unusually sumptuous feast, the purchases for which filled two pages of the earl’s household account book,
rather than the usual single page required for a party of that size. For a nightcap to the festivities, Warwick escorted a party of select guests to Joan’s cell; the keep was a short walk from his home.
“I have a dirty virgin witch girl tucked away on a litter of straw in the depths of a prison here in Rouen,” Anouilh’s Warwick says.

Although he thought it “inopportune” to pay such a call, Cauchon was among Joan’s unwelcome visitors, as was her old captor, Jean of Luxembourg.
“I have come here to offer you ransom,” Jean said, “on condition that you promise never again to take up arms against us.” In his cups, he found the taunt funny enough that he repeated it several times.

“In God’s name,” Joan said. “You are mocking me. I know well you have neither the wish nor the power to do so … I know very well that the English will have me killed, believing that after my death they will win the kingdom of France. But even if there were a hundred thousand Goddams
^*2
more than are here at present, they will not gain the kingdom.”

Haimond de Macy, the knight who had tried, unsuccessfully, to fondle Joan’s breasts, testified that the Earl of Stafford, also present,
“was incensed by this speech and half drew his dagger to strike her, but the Earl of Warwick prevented him.”

Last days vanish quickly, even in a cell. On May 14, the university faculty of theology convened to draft their response to the twelve articles of condemnation, which Jean Beaupère, Nicolas Midi, and a third cleric, Jacques de Touraine, had brought to Paris for them to review. By the morning of May 19, the envoys had returned with the expected endorsement, and the bishop summoned all the assessors to the chapel for a reading of the results of the faculty’s deliberations: a unanimous consensus. The “iniquitous and scandalous demoralization of the people” that Joan inspired must come to an end. With respect to her voices, considering
“the quality of the person and the place, and the other circumstances,… either these are imagined, corrupting and pernicious lies, or … these apparitions and revelations are superstitious, from malign and diabolical spirits such as Belial, Satan and Behemoth,” the three demons chosen to represent Joan’s three angels.
Belial appears in both the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaic texts the Church classifies as apocryphal. The Dead Sea Scrolls describe him as the leader of the Sons of Darkness. Satan, the adversary, is the proud angel who fell from heaven, who tempted Jesus and ushered Joan off the roof of Beaurevoir. Behemoth, a rapacious primeval monster,
stalks through the book of Job, summoned by God to demonstrate his power over evil as well as good, a land-bound Leviathan.

The Paris faculty judged Joan one who
“believes lightly and affirms rashly … her belief is evil and she strays from the faith.” Her miracles and precognition were accomplished through sorcery. She was “impious toward her parents.” By dressing as a man, she committed blasphemy, “setting aside divine law.” She was a “traitress, deceitful, cruel, and thirsty for the shedding of human blood, seditious and an inciter of tyranny.” That she asserted she would go to Paradise was “a presumptuous and rash assertion, a pernicious lie.” Her clothing, and the disgrace of having worn it countless times while receiving the Eucharist, revealed her as someone who defied “sacred doctrine, and the laws of the Church.” She was an apostate who held “a reprehensible view on the unity and the authority of the Church”—a schismatic.

On May 23, at the instruction of the Paris faculty, Joan was “charitably exhorted” once more. “Jeanne was led to a room near her prison in the castle of Rouen and into the presence of her judges assembled in tribunal,” among them Jean de Châtillon, Beaupère, Midi, Professor Guillaume Érard of the Sorbonne, and Pierre Maurice, canon of Rouen, a young theologian who
“displayed a great deal of fervor in attempting to enlighten Joan,” “expounded Joan’s faults to her … and caused her to be warned to abandon these shortcomings and errors, to correct and reform herself, to submit to the correction and decision of our Holy Mother the Church.”

“Jeanne, dearest friend,” Maurice said,

it is now time, near the end of your trial, to think well over all that has been said … although you have been shown the perils to which you expose your body and soul if you do not reform … nevertheless up till now you have not wished to listen. Do not permit yourself to be separated from Our Lord Jesus Christ who created you to be a partaker in His glory. Do not choose the way of eternal damnation with the enemies of God who daily endeavor to disturb men, counterfeiting often the likeness of Christ, His angels and His saints.

If you persevere in this error, your soul will be condemned to eternal punishment and perpetual torture, and I do not doubt that your body will come to perdition. Let not human pride and empty shame … hold you back because you fear that if you do as I advise you will lose the great honors which you have known … you will lose all if you do not as I say.

Joan would say nothing that she hadn’t before, during the trial. “If I were condemned and saw the fire and the faggots alight and the executioner ready to kindle the fire, and even if I myself were in it, I would say nothing else. I would maintain until death what I said in the trial.”

The next day, Thursday, May 24, was Pentecost, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, their baptism by fire after Jesus had been crucified and resurrected, a great crowd of 120 astonished when
“suddenly from heaven there came a sound like
the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” For the occasion of Pentecost, Cauchon
“organized a spectacle designed to impress the prisoner” with the looming threat of fire.

Two scaffolds had been erected in the cemetery of the abbey of Saint-Ouen, a stone’s throw from the Cathedral of Rouen. One was for judges, notables, notaries, prelates, and bureaucrats, the other for Joan, visited early that morning by the cathedral’s canon, Jean Beaupère, who explained that she was to be taken to a public scaffold where a sermon would be delivered to her. Somewhere en route from her cell to the cemetery, Loiseleur drew her into a “certain small doorway.”
“Trust me,” he said, “and you will be saved. Accept your [woman’s] dress, and do everything they tell you, or you are in danger of death. If you do as I say … you will be turned over to the Church.”

Under heavy guard, Joan was escorted to her scaffold by Massieu. It was the first time the public had been invited to look at Joan, now raised above their gaping mouths and staring eyes. She faced the hoary old professor, Érart, who preached a venomous sermon that veered into melodrama whenever he addressed Joan directly.
“Oh, royal house of France, you have never known monsters till now!” he raved. “But now you are dishonored for giving your faith to this woman, this witch, heretic, and child of superstition.”

“Do not speak of my king,” Joan said. “He is a good Christian.”

“I am speaking to you, Joan, and I tell you your king is a heretic and a schismatic.”

“By my faith, lord,… he is the noblest Christian and loves the faith and the Church better than any. He is not as you say.”

“Make her shut up,” Érard said to Massieu.

Once Érard concluded the spewing of invective and name-calling that passed for a homily, Jean Massieu read Joan the “schedule of abjuration”—a document, he later testified, that was no more than eight lines long, which made it a different document from the one included with the official trial record, a long abjuration composed by Nicolas de Venderès, a licentiate in law and English partisan, that enumerated the specific errors of faith Joan was alleged to have committed
and which she was now renouncing. Of the one he read and Joan signed, Massieu remembered only that it stipulated she was never again to dress as a man, cut her hair short, or bear arms. A version of that eight-line schedule discovered with the Orléans manuscript of the trial’s French minutes is considered by some historians to be a copy of the original that Joan signed.

“I, Joan, called the Pucelle, a miserable sinner … confess that I have grievously sinned in falsely pretending to have revelations from God and His angels, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, etc.”

So radical an abridgment of a document of such importance was unorthodox enough to be suspect. It may explain the curious form of the abjuration Joan was asked to sign: a
“slip of parchment designed to be attached to a legal document” that appeared to have been prepared in haste. Massieu was certain
“Joan did not understand the schedule or the danger she was in.” Pressed to sign it, she asked that the clerics review it first.

“Let it be seen by the Church in whose hands I ought to be placed,” she said. “If they advise me that I should sign it and do as I’m told, I will do it gladly.”

“Do it now,” Érard said. “Or else you will end your life today in the fire.”

A tumbrel waited to wheel Joan off to the stake, already set with piles of fagots and tinder and raised high on a platform assembled for the occasion. By some accounts it was made of stone; others called it “plastered”—a means, presumably, of fireproofing an otherwise flammable wood scaffold. Cauchon made sure Joan had been taken to the cemetery by way of the marketplace so that she might see what awaited her should she fail to abjure.
“In principle, the pains of fire were only applicable to a relapsed heretic,” one of the clerics who had been present at the abjuration testified, speculating that Cauchon had “set his snare solely for the purpose of subsequently making a relapsed heretic of Joan.” Warwick had made the expectations of the English clear: it wasn’t enough that Joan be executed; they wanted her burned as a witch.

“I will sign it rather than be burned,” Joan answered Érard. At hearing her submit, the crowd grew very restless. Some threw stones as they screamed, “Death to the witch,” and the English soldiers had
to restrain the mob by means of force.
“Never were the Jews filled with such hatred against Jesus as the English against the Maid,” Michelet wrote, for she had “wounded them at their most sensitive point, in the naïve and profound esteem they have of themselves.”

“Now,” the Evangelist Matthew recorded,
“the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’ ”

“Barabbas,” they said, choosing a “notorious criminal.”

“Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?”

All of them said, “Let him be crucified!”

“Why, what evil has he done?” the governor asked. But they shouted all the more.

“Let him be crucified!”