by Ali Alizadeh
She hears every word spoken to her by Jeanne in their tent. Their last night together. After Piéronne had told the warrior that she wanted to end their forbidden romance. She had thought it reasonable to ask that. She remembers Jeanne speaking. In the voice of a dying animal.
Do you love me, Piéronne?
Did you ever love me, Piéronne?
Piéronne hears herself hum a melody. She cannot name it immediately but soon remembers where she’s heard it. A slowed version of the dirge played by the queen of France’s musicians last Christmas Eve. When Piéronne and Jeanne had laughed, drunk, eaten and received the host together.
Piéronne peels back the shell of her cloak and listens to God. It was not deception, my child. It was the event of your life. It was not the gourmet food and the spiced wine, Holy Father. Truth, Piéronne. Break with falsehood. It was the event of my life. To be loved so truthfully. To know that she would love me, without the joys of a marriage and children, without public vows, without the intention to gain wealth and power from loving me. And to know that I cannot lie about her, and I will never slander her. To know that I love her too. To love one another, until death does us part.
In the morning, the abbess finds her young cellmate awake and pensive.
Mother, there is a passage of the Holy Book I’ve been thinking about all night, but I can’t remember the exact words. It’s something about speaking in the voice of angels, from First Corinthians, I think. I’ve heard it recited in French. Do you know it?
The abbess smiles sadly.
Please recite it to me, Mother.
The abbess shakes her head.
I beseech you, my daughter, to withdraw what you told them yesterday. God does not wish your martyrdom.
Piéronne scrutinises the specks of dust glittering in the slivers of light.
Can you help me remember it, Mother? Tell me if I’m saying it correctly. Although I speak with the tongues of angels…That’s not right, is it? Please, Mother. There’s something in there about bells and cymbals too, isn’t there?
No, Piéronne…
Please don’t cry, Mother. They’ll let you go as soon as you officially expel me from your community. You’ll be back in the abbey with the sisters by the end of today. I’m not sacrificing myself, Mother. I wouldn’t know anything about becoming a martyr. I’m simply doing what I want to do. I cannot lie about her. I simply cannot. Is this how it goes: Although I speak with the tongues of men and even those of angels, I’m nothing but a noisy bell or a shrill cymbal, if I have no love…
The abbess can’t avoid the impossible radiance of the girl’s eyes.
And the rest of it goes like this, doesn’t it, Mother: Although I have the gift of prophecy and have absolute faith in the Lord, I have nothing, if I have no love.
Feet can be heard approaching the door of their cell. Men unlock the door.
And although I possess all the riches in the world and even if I offer my own body to be burnt, I have nothing, if I have no love.
8
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris. It is of course already known to everyone. So many have read Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, have taken photos of themselves before its yawning, sculpted entrance, its monumental twin belltowers. But how many people know what happened there, in the public square in front of the imposing house of worship, the parvis, on Sunday 3 September 1430, in the presence of nobles and commoners, Burgundian lords and English knights?
The onlookers surround a makeshift scaffold, adjacent to two substantial, steel-enforced poles of wood. A windy, overcast day. The people’s subdued, disquieting chatter. The ancient stone presence of the cathedral behind them. Crowds of seminarians and beggars, prostitutes and bird-peddlers, parted by armoured pikemen. Two shackled women are escorted to the scaffold. They walk up the ladder, stand in front of three men in religious regalia, who sit on ornate armchairs upon the pedestal.
The older female prisoner, mistaken by the writer of Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris as quite young, in the garb of a nun, is prodded forward by the military escort. The youngest of the clergymen arises, speaks forcefully of the deadliness of sinning against God. He points at the robust wooden stakes. The Abbess of Corbeil lowers her face in repentance. She renounces her solidarity with the condemned blasphemer. The oldest priest, the bishop who presided over yesterday’s trial, approves. Shackles are removed from the abbess’s hands. She is directed away from the platform, and released.
A pause before the next event. Spectators expect to witness the final judgement on Piéronne the Breton, the woman who has openly, sensationally defended the mortal enemy of England and Burgundy, Jeanne the Maid. (The only person in all of France to have sided with the nation’s past and future heroine after Jeanne’s capture.)
She steps forward. In an unwieldy cloak, with bare feet and a bare head of light orange hair. Visibly trembling and visibly unshaken. The churchmen stand up, sermonise about Hell and damnation. They point at the dark, totemic poles. They command the young woman to abjure. To refute her previous statements. To concede that Jeanne the Maid is a heretic, an idolatress and a blasphemer.
Piéronne smiles. She moves her chained hands to her face and wipes away her tears. She breathes in the autumnal air. She whispers: No. She whispers: Jeanne is a good woman. She is not guilty of a sin.
The audience agitates and utters gasps of excitement and words of astonishment. The priests upon the platform boast and declare Piéronne a sinner. They excommunicate her. Soldiers lead her down the ladder and walk her to one of the momentous poles. They poke her subtly, dutifully with a spear and compel her up the five wooden steps at the base of the beam. Another man climbs up the steps and buckles a chain around the pole and Piéronne’s body.
Soldiers are busy lugging logs and branches. The man who chained her to the stake, the executioner, is given a torch by an English knight. Everyone sees the flame clearly. It’s fanned by the wind and quickly ignites the pile of wood. It overwhelms the beam. The last thing she sees with her worldly eyes: a white pigeon, maybe a dove, soaring away from the place of public murder, disappearing above Paris.
9
Nine months later, in Rouen’s Old Market Square.
The faintest smile, under a mask of cinder and singed skin. Permanent, motionless. Jeanne the Maid has also died.
An eager English soldier who has volunteered to add more wood to the fire to ensure the death of the Whore of France is later found in a tavern, taken there to regain composure with the aid of a few drinks, paid for by the English crown. This has been recorded in a ledger. After a number of ales, he tells an English monk that he saw a dove, maybe a white pigeon, fly into the sky at the precise moment when the young woman stopped coughing and screaming God’s name and closed her eyes amid the flames.
The English soldiers who shovel her ashes into sacks and ride down to the river to scatter the last remains of their kingdom’s greatest enemy have unexpectedly moist eyes.
The executioner himself visits a convent in Rouen, begging two monks to hear his confession, for he believes he has killed a holy woman. This is known from the testimony given eighteen years later by one of the monks, the Dominican brother Isambard de la Pierre.
According to Brother Isambard’s statement, the executioner claims a few organs and entrails remained of Jeanne the Maid after the fire subsided; and he applied oil, sulphur and charcoal to these remnants to burn them. And he was not able to reduce to ashes by any means possible the last of these organs.
He could not burn Jeanne’s heart.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Ivor Indyk and Nick Tapper who edited, engaged with and guided the manuscript from an early stage to publication. Thanks also to Anna MacDonald, Jessica Stafford, Jennifer Mills, Laetitia Nanquette and Anna Poletti who kindly read and provided invaluable feedback on the earlier versions of this novel.
The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its b
ook publishing program.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.