II
In the village of Domremy, Jacques, or Jacquot, d’Arc held a respect-worthy position. He was not a native of Domremy, having been born at Ceffonds in Champagne, in the diocese of Troyes, in 1375, transferring himself to Domremy just before his marriage to Isabelle Romée of Vouthon, another village lying within five miles of Domremy. Oddly enough, his name was not really d’Arc at all, or, rather, it did not sound like that when pronounced by the people of Lorraine. It sounded like d’Ay. So strong, indeed, was (and still is) the local habit of suppressing the r and of pronouncing the a short, that it is actually and phonetically written d’Ay in an official document, sealed with a Great Seal of green wax, and a double lacing of ribbons red and green, no less a document than the Act of Ennoblement conferred by Charles VII on Jeanne and her family.fn5 The paradox thus arises that Jacques, as a native of Champagne, probably pronounced his name in one way, and his children, with their Lorraine accent, in another.
Jacques d’Arc has been represented both as very poor and as very prosperous. The truth, as usual, lies between the two. In actual fact, it appears that he was what we should now call a peasant-farmer with certain official responsibilities suggested by his exemplary character and that of his wife, as much as by his social standing and solvency. An upright man in a small place, it was natural that he should be appointed to such functions as adjudicataire of the local château (1419), and subsequently as doyen or sergeant of Domremy (1423), ranking immediately after the mayor and sheriff, and being charged with the collection of the tailles, a tax levied on persons other than noble or ecclesiastical. He is to be found also among seven other worthies of his village, answerable for the tribute exacted by the damoiseau of Commercy (1423). Four years later (1427), he is to be found active as delegate of his neighbours in a dispute conducted before the governor of Vaucouleurs, Robert de Baudricourt, a captain who, however reluctantly, and much to his own surprise, was destined to play an important rôle at the outset of the extraordinary career of Jacques d’Arc’s daughter.
Taking all these facts together, it becomes apparent that Jacques d’Arc was a personage of some consideration in his adopted village. Not only did he officially rank third in its hierarchy, but he was charged with responsible offices in its little local affairs. This is no very glorious boast to advance on behalf of the father of the notorious Pucelle. The village was small and humble;Jacques d’Arc was small and humble too. He lived in a cottage. He married a girl from a neighbouring village. The records of his official life suggest no more than that he was locally respected; they suggest in no way that he played a part in anything more than local business. He made himself esteemed and trusted by his fellow-villagers. He represented them when representation was needed. He was a pious and decent man, and, by all showing, his wife was a pious and decent woman too. They were in no way remarkable, and are perhaps best described as being of a good, useful, and enduring type.
There is not much to be drawn, even by deduction, from what we know of Jacques d’Arc’s character. Its lines are the simple ones of probity, piety, and perhaps also a certain severity – although Mr Andrew Lang does suggest that there were ‘convivial elements in the character of this austere sire.’fn6 This suggestion he bases on the fact that when Jacques d’Arc went to Reims for the coronation, having received a present of money from the King, he remained two full months at the inn of the Ane Rayé, kept by the widow Alice Moriau, opposite to the Cathedral, instead of returning to Domremy after the ceremonies were over. Mr Lang draws the inference that he could get more enjoyment in Reims, a town famous for its wines, than he could at home; and who shall say that Mr Lang’s inference was wrong?
III
From everything we can gather of his wife Isabelle, or, in the local patois, Zabillet, she belonged to exactly the same type as Jacques. A unanimity in the comments of their friends and neighbours links this estimable couple in a well-matched conjunction. ‘They were good and faithful Catholics; good working-people (laboratores) of good repute, leading an honest life according to their condition.’fn7 ‘They were labourers, truly good Catholics, honest and worthy, according to their means, for they were not rich.’fn8 ‘They were good Catholics, of good repute, honest people, honest labourers.’fn9 ‘They were an honest couple, Catholics, of good repute, hard-working, honest in their poverty, for they were not rich.’fn10 ‘They were persons of good repute, good Catholics, and respectable people.’fn11 Allowance must of course be made for the repetitive form into which question and answer were cast; but even so, in the absence of any dissentient voice, the reader must remain convinced of the unassailable respectability of the d’Arc ménage. Isabelle was even said to have acquired her surname of Romée from having made a pilgrimage to Rome, but this is an uncertain point, and it is quite possible that she may have inherited the right to call herself Romée from some ancestor who made the pilgrimage in question. Whether she had been to Rome or not, she was certainly a woman of devout and irreproachable character. She brought up her children well, teaching them the Pater, the Ave, and the Credo;fn12 she taught her daughter Jeanne to be a good housewife and to take a pride in the crafts considered suitable to her sex.fn13 It was by no fault of Isabelle Romée, if, instead of a chicken, she had hatched an eagle.
She must have been a woman of proud spirit. It was she who, although très fort malade at the time, removed herself from Domremy to Orleans in 1440, at the age of sixty, some nine years after the deaths of her husband and her daughter, and, after a lapse of ten more years, instituted an appeal which worried the Pope into ordering a re-examination into that daughter’s trial. By the time that re-examination started, she was décrépite par l’age, and was asking to be excused from attending all the sittings. None but a woman of character could even have envisaged such an attempt, much less have carried it through. If one considers the circumstances of the parties concerned, it appears astounding that a woman, born a peasant of France in the fifteenth century, should have had the courage to tackle so supreme and mysterious a figure as the Pope in Rome – an achievement far more suprising than the analogous case of the injured mother of today, who sends a letter to the Home Office petitioning for the reprieve of her child. One cannot help feeling that such a mother, who, although ill, bothered the Pope to that extent, was a mother worthy to engender the daughter she did engender, and that perhaps justice has never been wholly done to her.
IV
Life in the little Domremy household, with two such parents at the head of it, cannot have been soft for its children. Isabelle could scold; Jacques could threaten; and, when Jacques threatened, he did it in no measured terms. His threats took the form of saying that, in given circumstances, he would drown his daughter himself, if her brothers refused to do so. fn14 There spoke no sentimental, spoiling father, but a father who brought up his daughter in a proper, moral school, safeguarding her virtue as a father should. He would rather drown her than allow her to lose it. Poor Jacques d’Arc, he seems to have been endowed with his share of his daughter’s gift of divination. He suffered from the most distressing dreams about her – dreams that she would go off with armed men instead of making the comfortable marriage he was devising for her.
They were decent, strong-minded, respectable people, and to them was born, in January 1412, their second daughter and fourth child, whom they named, not very inventively, Jeanne.fn15
v
Legends subsequently and inevitably sprang up, attendant upon the circumstances of that mid-winter day. One cannot start life as a mere squalling little ordinary Jeanne in a cottage somewhere in provincial France, and then develop into a Maid of Orleans, a Pucelle of dreaded reputation, without some legend arising around the actual date of one’s birth. But for once such legends, far from confusing the historian, help him to establish the exact date he wants. Jeanne, daughter of Jacques d’Arc, was born on January 6th; Epiphany; Twelfth Night; the day of the Three Kings. She would have chosen more suitably had she chosen the feast of Saint Michael, Saint
Catherine, or Saint Margaret to make her first appearance in the world. The choice, however, had not been left to her. It seems destructive, in the face of several pretty fairy-tales, to suggest that the village at the moment took no more interest in the labour of Isabelle Romée than it took in the labour of any other villager’s wife. A woman accepted her pain in her turn; she went through her necessary hours; and in the course of time was delivered. Country people take these things very much as a matter of course. But subsequently, needless to say, everybody remembered that Jeanne had been born on the feast of the Epiphany. Even the poultry of the village, according to some accounts, seem to have noticed it. Perceval de Boulainvilliers, in that letter to the Duke of Milan, flings himself with true mediaeval fantasy into his version of the story: ‘It was during the night of the Epiphany that she first saw the light in this mortal life, and, wonderful to relate, the poor inhabitants of the place were seized with an inconceivable joy. Still uninformed of the birth of the Maid, they ran one to the other, enquiring what new thing had happened. For some, it was a cause of fresh rejoicing. What can one add? The cocks, as heralds of this happy news, crowed in a way that had never been heard before, beating their bodies with their wings; continuing for two hours to prophesy this new event.’fn16
Andrew Lang, usually determined to romanticise as far as his conscience would allow him, in this instance comments with sober good sense.fn17 He sees no reason why all this should not have occurred, nor does he see why the facts should not be regarded as highly probable instead of miraculous. Twelfth Night would naturally be celebrated with noise and festivity; the villagers ‘would run about in high spirits, and awaken the poultry.’ Later on, of course, when Jeanne became famous, the superstitious gleefully interpreted the facts to suit their own purposes. That, for him, and for me also, is the long and short of the matter. The important thing is that the legend enables us to fix the exact date of her birthday.
VI
She was baptised in the little church at Domremy, by one Jean Minet, or so she believed, fn18 and her godfathers and godmothers were numerous. Her parents, after all, were well known and much esteemed, counting many friends among their neighbours. Considering that Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée already had three children, they still seem to have had plenty of friends to draw on in compliment at the birth of their fourth child. Moreover it was still the custom to give one’s child a lot of godparents, the number not yet having been limited by the Council of Trent. It is odd to think that, but for the circumstance of these honest people having been invited to watch that particular baby at the font, they would by now be swallowed up into the blackness of death and obscurity, with no more record of their names and personalities than millions upon millions of their equals. As it is, they have been spared from ranking among the un-numbered and anonymous dead. We know them all by name, and several of them by their avocations. In some cases we have a report of their actual words, spoken some forty-four years later, when the representatives of the Pope – surely as alarmingly as once the soldiery from whom their small god-daughter had liberated France – descended upon them to ask them what they could remember of that god-daughter as a child. By one of the many freaks of history, that un-witting infant conferred a relative immortality upon those humble peasants who happened to be friends of her family so long ago as fourteen hundred and twelve.
Jeanne herself displays a surprising vagueness about the names and number of her godparents. She mentions only the first six out of the ten, though she does add that her mother had told her there were others:
Jeanne, wife of Aubéry or Aubry, mayor of Domremy.
Agnès, surname unknown.
Jeanne, surname unknown, unless, as seems probable, she was referring to the wife of Thévenin the wheelwright, who is known to have been her godmother.
Sibylla, surname unknown.
Jean Lingué.
Jean Barrey.
Jean Morel, labourer, of Grewe near Domremy.
Beatrice, wife of Estellin, a cultivateur of Dornremy.
Jeannette, wife of Thiesselin, a clerk of Dornremy, originally from Vittel.
Mention is made also of a Jean Rainguesson, but, as both he and Jean Lingué were dead by the time her sponsors were required to give evidence on her behalf, nothing, unluckily for them, is known of them beyond their names.
They varied in their ages: Beatrice Estellin was thirty-six; Jeanne Thévenin and Jean Morel were each twenty-six; Jeannette Thiesselin only sixteen. Thus by 1456, when called upon to testify, Beatrice Estellin was just eighty, Jeanne Thévenin and Jean Morel just seventy, and Jeannette Thiesselin sixty. They do not seem to have taken their early duties very seriously, for Jeanne remarks that no one but her mother taught her the articles of her faith.fn19 They were all agreed, however, that she was an exceptionally pious child, and had been brought up as a good Catholic. They were very emphatic and unanimous on this point; just as emphatic and unanimous as they were on the point of her parents’ outstanding honesty and virtue.
4. DOMREMY (2)
I
Jeanne d’Arc’s early life at Domremy, for all the trouble, controversy, and legend to which it subsequently gave rise, was in fact one of the most simple and ordinary description. Life was hard; it is hard for the villager at Domremy today. Passing down the street of that poverty-stricken village, it is difficult to imagine much difference between conditions then and now. The houses are still little better than hovels, damp, ill-ventilated, and ill-repaired. Whole families live in rooms whose squalor we should scarcely tolerate in a farm stable. Thanks to the carloads of tourists who come to spend a few hours visiting the birthplace of the national Saint, and strolling about the sites once hallowed by her presence, the village street is kept a little cleaner than most village streets in that country district where men and their animals live in a truly Irish state of sociability; but go behind the houses, and you will fmd the hens scratching among the manure-heaps still lusciously and oozingly stacked beside the kitchen door. It is fair to presume that in Jeanne’s day nobody bothered whether the manure-heap was within sight or out of it, any more than they bother today in the less distinguished villages of Lorraine, nor is it unfair to imagine that the condition of the dwellings was, if anything, more deplorable and more insanitary then than now. It is true that Jacques d’Arc was in a slightly superior position to the ordinary peasant, but the dark little rooms of his square grey house will convince anybody that Jeanne’s days at home were spent in conditions of extreme harshness and discomfort – a harshness and discomfort which, of course, she took entirely for granted. She might almost as well have been sleeping in a cellar, and, in spite of Jacques d’Arc’s superior position, there were certain features of Domremy life from which even the most prosperous could not escape. None, living in that valley, could escape the heavy morning mists which blanket the water-meadows and shut out the struggling sun. None could escape that cold and penetrating damp, least of all those who were obliged to rise early and to go out, huddled under a rough cloak, into the dripping pastures. It was a rheumatic rather than a gay existence. The peasants of Domremy, to this day, are not a pleasure-seeking race, and I doubt whether gaiety entered at any point into the life of Jeanne and her young companions, except in so far as they created it for themselves in certain innocent pastimes which later on were to figure so seriously amongst the other outrageous indictments of her trial. For the rest, a Domremy child found life a strict and businesslike affair. It was strict in a matter-of-fact way, scaling no romantic heights; strict in a plodding way, with its pleasant moments, its hours of sunshine as well as its hours of fog and rain. Perhaps for this very reason it seems all the more difficult to understand the sources of Jeanne’s extraordinary inspiration. She was no Emily Bronte, denizen of wild moors. She was an ordinary little peasant girl, accustomed to take the rough with the smooth, born to a countryside which suggested no violent contrasts between reality as she lived it and reality as it might ideally be lived. True, there were certain
features which might be said to excite the fancy of an imaginative child, but in the first place there is no reason to picture Jeanne, in her normal hours, as a particularly imaginative child, and in the second place the local traditions in themselves in no way superseded the customs of widespread country folk-lore. There were vast woods, big trees, and woodland springs; there were attendant tales of fairies; there were special days on which the children of the neighbourhood went out in a body to hang wreaths and garlands on the boughs – innocent festivals which, in one form or another, were being reproduced all over Europe with no greater significance than the survival of some local though ancient superstition. Everybody at Domremy had grown up with these customs, and everybody consequently took them as a matter of course. It was a little hard on Jacques d’Arc’s daughter, who had gone out with the troop of other children ever since she was old enough to toddle the necessary distance, to be burnt some sixteen years later on a charge of idolatrous practices.
II
If Jeanne were to return to Domremy today, she would notice but little change in the features of the landscape. She could stand at the top of the hill, and look across the valley at the hills opposite, with the same flat characteristic, table-like top. She would notice that the forest no longer stretched right down to the river, but that the trees had been cleared to half-way up the slope, apparently in order to open the view from the steps of a new, enormous basilica, which she would soon, with consternation, discover to have been erected in her honour. Entering, she would discover with surprise that she, who had drawn her dying breath in torture, branded as a witch, was now regarded as a saint; and that the English, whose hands had hoisted her on to her funeral pyre, now hung up their flag in reverence to her name. Faintly puzzled by the mutability of human opinion, she might descend towards the village, passing on the way a crucifix erected at the very spot where the footpath she had followed to Neufchâteau had struck across the fields, and then she would come down between the houses and out into the village street, where the tiny church would present an almost familiar appearance, but on closer inspection would reveal itself as having turned the wrong way round. She would look in vain for the Château de l’Ile. Once outside the village, however, away from the works of man and among the works of God, she could very easily, and without being unduly disconcerted, pick her way to the sites and haunts she knew.
Saint Joan of Arc Page 4