Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (50 page)

“And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour,”
“while the sun’s light failed.”
“And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘E’lo-i, E’lo-i, la’ma sabach-tha’ni?’ ” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

“And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”

“And the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”

“Jesu,” Joan called as she died, “Jesu!” Her essence was transformed by light too hot to touch—heir to Moses’s burning bush, to the blinding flash that made Saul into Paul.

The Bourgeois of Paris, a genuine eyewitness—the population of Rouen swelled with voyeurs from all classes—reported that after Joan was dead and her clothes burned away,
“the fire was raked back, and her naked body,” lifted above the eyes of the marketplace, “was shown to all the people, with all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman to remove any doubt from the people.” When “they had seen enough and looked as long as they liked at the dead body bound to the stake, the executioner started a great fire again round her poor carcass … and flesh and bone were reduced to ashes.”

As he watches the fire consume her in Gastyne’s
La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc
, the executioner turns away, his face contorted with fear. “We have burned a saint!” he screams, and the petrified onlookers turn their backs to run in panic.

“Abba!” Jesus called, begging for delivery. “Father!”

“Jesu!” Joan cried when the flames engulfed her, her voice the last to sound in Schiller’s play.
“Look! Do you see the rainbow in the sky? Heaven is opening its golden gates … Clouds lift me up—my heavy armor’s changing—I am on wings—I rise—up—up—earth falls away so fast.”

Signs abounded. Many who watched Joan die above the heads of the mob spoke of seeing “Jesus” “written in the flames of the fire in which she was burned.” When an English soldier who had been particularly vocal about his hatred for Joan heard her call on Jesus as she burned, he succumbed to “rapture” so intense it left him insensible. Once revived “with the aid of strong drink,” he spoke of seeing “a white dove flying from the direction of France at the moment she was giving up the ghost.” Birds exulted at her birth, beating their wings and proclaiming the savior’s arrival. Silent now, they swept Joan heavenward, at last granted her wish “to be sent back to God, from whence I came.”

Bresson’s camera swings from Joan’s head, caught in a cloud of white smoke, to a skylight, translucent but not transparent. Overhead, the silhouettes of doves move restlessly, waiting for her ascent through that ceiling between earth and the light beyond it. Dreyer’s flock wheels over Joan’s head, and her eyes follow them until they close, her gaze wet with light. A woman runs past, a white lamb in her arms.

“We made a lark into a giant bird,” Anouilh’s Warwick laments, a bird “who will travel the skies of the world long after our names are forgotten, or confused, or cursed down.”

The executioner, Thérage, who had been instructed to incinerate Joan’s clothes, shoes, plate, spoon—whatever belongings a prisoner might own—along with every scrap of her flesh and throw all the ash into the Seine, approached Ladvenu and Isambart de la Pierre and
“said and affirmed that notwithstanding the oil, sulphur, and charcoal that he had applied to Joan’s entrails and heart, he had not found it possible to burn them or reduce them to ashes. He was astonished at this as at a patent miracle.”

By noon Thérage was on his knees before a priest, weeping for his lost soul, begging for absolution in which he couldn’t believe: so horrific was his crime.
^*4

“I never wept as much for anything that befell me,” Guillaume Manchon testified, “and could not finally stop weeping for a whole month afterward.”

^*1
First recorded use in the fifteenth century, from
catacumbae
, derived from
cata tumbas
, Latin for “among the tombs.” Tradition holds that the Apostles (among them Saint Peter, over whose remains Saint Peter’s Basilica was constructed) were buried underground in a network of tunnels later used for holding the Mass.

^*2
French slang for “English” as they so often repeated the expletive “Goddamn” heard by the French as
Goddam.

^*3
“Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly.” Proverbs 26:11.

^*4
According to records in France’s national library, Thérage recovered sufficiently to continue in his line of work and received, on March 25, 1432, “111 livres et 13 sous pour 104 exécutions.”

Poisoned by disappointment over Joan’s having not in the end denied her voices, on June 7, 1431, a week after she was burned, Cauchon summoned a handful of assessors to a closed meeting at the archbishopric’s palace in Rouen. Among them were the three clerics who had kept Joan company on the last morning of her life and who would have heard any last-minute disavowal of her voices, had she made such a thing: Pierre Maurice, Martin Ladvenu, and Jean Toutmouillé. All three proved sufficiently ductile to suborn; they joined several others in the creation of “ex officio information upon certain words spoken by the late Jeanne before many trustworthy persons, whilst she was still in prison and before she was brought to judgment.” The fraudulent affidavit was devised to be attached like a postscript to the official Latin trial record Thomas de Courcelles would assemble over the next six months. Present at the closed meeting, Thomas, who elided his name here as he did wherever he found it in the French trial minutes, swore that Joan admitted her voices “were evil spirits who had promised her deliverance and that she had been deceived.” In the end, he said, she had agreed that their having failed to save her was proof of their malevolence. Nicolas de Venderès, who wrote the exhaustive abjuration included in the official record—not the brief one read to Joan—agreed she had renounced her angels as
mauvais esprits
, as did Nicolas Loiseleur. Apparently, his crisis of conscience was of insufficient strength or duration to inspire his disobeying Cauchon. Not only did Loiseleur claim that on the morning of Joan’s execution he had “heard her say that it was she, Jeanne, who had announced to her king the crown mentioned in the trial, that she was the angel, and there had been no other angel but herself”; he also testified that when led to the stake, Joan had not asked God to forgive any of her persecutors but “was heard to ask with great contrition of
heart pardon of the English and Burgundians for having caused them to be slain, put to flight and, as she confessed, sorely afflicted.” The flourish suggests Cauchon ordered Loiseleur to openly atone for groveling before Joan on the day she was executed.

More apologia than affidavit, the “ex officio information,” in reversing all Joan held to be true, amounted to a blanket pardon for her persecutors even as it provided them with evidence that Joan finally confessed that the infamous heavenly sign presented to Charles at Chinon was no crown but a “pure fiction.” Left unsigned by all three notaries, the document was produced as the necessary preamble to a second unorthodox postscript to the trial record. A letter dated June 28, 1431, was carried from Bishop Pierre Cauchon to “the emperor, kings, dukes and other princes of all Christendom.” Writing both for and as the nine-year-old King of England, who hadn’t the faculties to manufacture the statement at hand, Cauchon qua Henry “thought it wise to make known that the certain woman whom the vulgar called The Maid” was dead, condemning Joan, “who with an astonishing presumption, and contrary to natural decency, had adopted man’s dress, assumed military arms, dared to take part in the massacre of men in bloody encounters and appeared in divers battles,” until, by an act of God, she had been delivered into the young king’s hands. “As befits a Christian king reverencing the ecclesiastical authority with filial affection,” Henry had relinquished “the said woman to the judgment of Our Holy Mother Church.” But, as no effort was great enough to save a woman of such grave wickedness, after Joan had been handed over to the secular arm,

the fire of her pride which then seemed stifled, renewed by the breath of devils, suddenly burst out in poisonous flames; this wretched woman returned to her errors, to her false infamies which she lately had vomited away. Finally, as the ecclesiastical sanctions decree, to avoid the infection of the other members of Christ, she was given up to the judgment of the secular power which decided that her body was to be burned. Seeing then the nearness of her latter end, this wretched woman openly acknowledged and fully confessed that the spirits which she claimed had visibly appeared to her were only evil and lying spirits, that her
deliverance from prison had been falsely promised by the spirits, who she confessed had mocked and deceived her.

Cauchon closed his self-congratulatory pronouncement by underscoring the necessity that the people “be taught not to put their faith lightly in superstitions and erroneous frivolities, especially at a time such as we have just experienced.” Joan hadn’t been the answer to desperate war-torn prayers. She had been not God’s envoy but the devil’s, “shedding human blood, causing popular seditions and tumults, inciting the people to perjury and pernicious rebellions, false and superstitious beliefs, by disturbing all true peace and renewing mortal Wars, permitting herself to be worshiped and revered by many as a holy woman.”

His victory was a paper one, but Cauchon prevailed in having it broadcast from pulpit to pulpit throughout Europe. Once they’d gone up in smoke with their owner, Joan’s clothes took on even greater significance than they had in the trial. On August 9, Jean Graverent—the
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris
identified him only as
“a friar of the Order of Saint Dominic”—preached a great public sermon that trended toward outright fiction and hysteria, claiming Joan had admitted “she had persisted in [wearing] the clothing of a man when she was about fourteen years old, and that from that time on her mother and father would gladly have brought about her death if they could have done so without staining their consciences. So she had therefore left them, accompanied by the devil, and since then had killed Christian people, full of fire and blood.” Having “recanted, and been assigned penance … of which she did not do a single day, but was waited on in prison like a lady,” she was paid a visit by Satan’s emissaries, disguised as saints, who “said to her, ‘Miserable creature who changed your dress for fear of death! Do not be afraid. We will protect you effectively from them all.’ So she then immediately undressed and put on all the old clothes she wore when riding, which she had pushed into the straw of her bed. She trusted this devil so much that she said she was sorry that she’d ever agreed to give up her clothes.”