Saint Joan of Arc

by Vita Sackville-West

  Domremy itself, a small grey village, lies, as has been said, in the valley of the Meuse. The valley of the Meuse fans out between the wooded hills of Lorraine. It is a green, large, gentle, and undramatic countryside. The Meuse at Domremy is a slow and gentle stream. The water-meadows are lush and full of buttercups in spring. There are more cherry-trees in blossom than it is fair for any province to possess, and more cowslips and dandelions than are necessary to tum any grass from green to gold. In autumn the wooded hills are on fire with colour, ranging from the dark green of the fir-trees to the gold and red of the beeches. It is a lost, pleasant, rural land, with the little villages lying along the river as beads at intervals upon that silver string.

  There is nothing sinister, or even suggestive, about Domremy or the Meuse valley. It lies rather out of the way, but that was all to its advantage in the unfortunate days when Englishmen, Burgundians, and Armagnacs snarled like quarrelsome dogs all over the rest of France. The repercussions of war which affected it really reduced themselves to occasional raids, and to brawls between the boys of neighbouring villages. For their broken heads the state of French and English politics was responsible, rather than anything inherent in the character of the Lorraine duchy. But for the distant war-like elements in French and English camps, the population of Lorraine, young and old, could have pursued its ordained course of life without disquiet or disturbance. There was nothing disquieting or disturbing about its fields and forests. Nothing in Nature suggested evil, violence, or mystery. All was calm and open; propitious, even, to the husbandman, thankful for his fertile soil and matter-of-factly resigned to such exigencies as were normally imposed by the seasons. There were neither mountains nor cliffs of fall; no ravines, chasms, or torrents; no melodramatic scenery; no haunt of giant, demon, spectre, or afreet. A pastoral rather than an agricultural region, when the sun breaks through the morning mists, it is as fair and smiling as many parts of rural France.

  Then there are the woods: miles of beechwood, bright and shot with sun, translucently green as only young beech-trees can be green, carpeted with anemones, lily of the valley, wild strawberry; speared by the young fronds of Solomon’s Seal; crossed by many paths, and opened into clearings with newly cut cord-wood neatly stacked. So, at least, it is today: a richly wooded country on either side of the Meuse valley, and if there was any difference at the beginning of the fifteenth century it would be in favour of still deeper woods and paths with less danger of frequentation. In such a wood stood one of Jeanne d’Arc’s favourite shrines (Notre Dame de Bermont), a couple of miles from her native village, so that her steps were often turned in that direction, and she must have known the way through the woods as well as the squirrel or the rabbit.

  Another wood, more famous in history, lay nearer to the village, on the slope of a hill, and visible from the house of Jacques d’Arc. This was known as the Bois Chenu, or wood hoary with age, which may also be interpreted in the double sense of the word as meaning the wood of oak-trees. The Bois Chenu, on two counts, was regarded as a place to be avoided; it was the home of wild boars and wolves,fn1 and it was also said to be the haunt of fairies. Jeanne herself later denied that she had heard this legend, but added that on her arrival at Chinon several people had asked her whether there was not a wood called the Bois Chenu in her country, because, apparently, certain prophecies were current, to the effect that a young girl who would work wonders should come from the neighbourhood of a wood of that name; ‘but,’ she added, ‘I never gave any credence.’fn2 From this statement it would appear that the Bois Chenu and its legends enjoyed not only a local but a more widespread reputation (unless, indeed, as is possible, Jeanne’s own companions brought the first gossip about it to Chinon when they arrived there with her from Vaucouleurs?). Merlin and the Venerable Bede were both held responsible for these prophecies. Jeanne’s own views on magic were flat, sound, and contemptuous: ‘I hold all that,’ she said, ‘to be sorcery.’fn3 Similarly, when they asked her what she had done with her mandrake, she replied that she had not got a mandrake, and had never possessed one; she had heard tell, she said, that tl1ere was a mandrake somewhere near the village, and tliat a nut-tree grew above it, though she did not know where; she had heard, also, that it was a dangerous tliing, evil to possess; but she had never seen it, and was ignorant of die purposes to which it might be put. In short, although she had heard that it brought money, she did not believe it, and her voices had never told her anytliing about it. fn4

  Nevertheless, her judges pursued her with questions as to other magical traditions of her native village, and on these questions she was ready to be more explicit. When they asked her about a certain tree, she replied frankly, without pretending not to know to which tree they alluded, that tliere was indeed a tree called the Arbre des Dames or, by others, the fairies’ tree; or, again, le Beau May; a big tree, a beech, standing near a fountain. She had heard, and had seen with her own eyes, that persons attacked by fever went to drink of the waters of this fountain, but she did not know whether a cure was ever eff.cted. She had heard, also, that the sufferers, when restored to health, had got up and walked to the tree in question. She had heard old people, though not her own contemporaries, say that the fairies held conversation there. Her own godmother, the wife of the mayor of Domremy an honest woman, neither a soothsayer nor a witch, had said in her presence that she had seen fairies (Dominas Fatales) round that tree, but she, Jeanne, did not know whether that was true or not. For her own part, she had never, to her knowledge, seen the aforesaid fairies near that tree, though whether she had seen them elsewhere or not, she did not know. What she did know was, that the girls hung garlands on the branches, and that she herself had sometimes hung garlands there with her companions; sometimes they left them hanging, sometimes they brought them away. She added that since she had learned that she must go into France, she had taken as little part as possible in these games and amusements; since she had come to years of discretion (which in her case must be interpreted as twelve or thirteen), she could not recall having danced near the tree; it might be, she said, that she had danced there with children, but even then she sang rather than danced.fn5 Why she thought it less offensive to sing than to dance, is not explained; perhaps because it brought her into no physical contact with other people, not even with children.

  She could not, or would not, say whether Saint Catherine or Saint Margaret had ever spoken to her beside the tree. On the other hand, she replied, without hesitation, that they had spoken to her beside the neighbouring fountain, but could not remember what they had said to her there. fn6

  All these stories of fatal women, mandrakes, and miraculous cures thus appear to have produced little but scorn or incredulity in Jeanne’s mind. This is the more surprising, when we consider that she was, as an ignorant peasant, potentially as credulous and superstitious as the rest of her class. She seems, however, with her habitual gift of disregarding everything except the matter which directly and urgently concerned her, to have discounted her local traditions for what they were worth. ‘Yes,’ she says, in effect, ‘I heard about all that, but I never believed it.’ Whatever did succeed in convincing her, convinced her so unshakably that she was able to toss the rest aside.

  All these stories, however silly and childish, were a part of rustic life. As such, they were innocent and inevitable. Such relaxations as the children’s expeditions to the Arbre des Dames were only the natural escape from a daily existence which was always poor and sometimes harsh; they were treats away from the boring round. Children who had to scrub and dig and drive animals into the fields deserved a holiday every now and then, and if invented beings such as fairies were supposed to play a part in the day’s outing, no sinister motive could be adduced, beyond the usual legends of folk-lore. Jeanne went for fun with the rest. In any case, the tree, in spite of the sinister suggestions attached to it by the judges at Rouen, seems to have been well patronised by the local gentry. Several of the Domremy witnessesfn7 testified that the seigneurs
of Bourlémont frequented it with their ladies and their daughters, sometimes going for a picnic under its branches, sometimes even joining the youth of the village there on a special Sunday – an arrangement which not only suggests a rather surprisingly democratic relationship between the village and the members of its lordly house, but also invests the poor maligned tree with a certain cachet of respectability.

  Village romps to which the noble Bourlémonts could thus lend their sanction cannot have been too disreputable or discreditable. And if Jeanne, having come to years of discretion, decided to abstain as far as possible from the merry-making of her companions, it was only because a truer sense of proportion had been secretly vouchsafed to her. When one believes oneself to hold visual, audible, and tactile communion with saints, one no longer cares much for such frivolities as hanging wreaths on boughs to please the fairies.

  III

  Apart from the evil interpretation set later upon these venial super-stitions and amusements of Domremy, the life of the peasants and their children in that village was as simple and hard-working as in any other place where a living depended upon the crops and the cattle. They had to use their hands and their muscles in order to keep their little concerns going. Besides, there was always the complication of politics and factions in the background. France and England were at war; had been at war so long that no living Frenchman could remember the day when his country had been free from the claim across the Channel, or from the presence of foreign troops on his native soil; so long that Frenchman themselves were divided, and now no longer knew clearly whether it was the French or the English party that they supported. Even a province so remote as Lorraine, a village so remote as Domremy, could not fail to be affected by the disturbance and insecurity of greater France. It all added, however intermittently, to the anxieties of an already strenuous existence. Flocks and herds were liable to be driven off, houses and churches burnt, without much warning. Nevertheless, looking back in retrospect at a state of affairs which sounds uncomfortable and uneasy when read in detail, one must try to preserve a sense of balance between the facts as they appear in print and the facts as they probably appeared to those who actually experienced them. Human standards adapt themselves most quickly and surprisingly, and a people who had grown up with the discomforts of vague though continuous war handed down to them by their very grandfathers, surely accepted those conditions in a spirit of acquiescence and philosophy as naturally as the vicissitudes of farming or the vagaries of the climate. Cows might inexplicably die; hayricks catch fire; crops be ruined by drought or hail; soldiers come and set fire to half the village – it was all in the day’s work. Life was like that, and so it had to be. It had been like that ever since the oldest inhabitant, and his father before him, could remember.

  Thus it is probably as well not to exaggerate, as some historians would seem to have exaggerated, the troubles suffered by the peasants of a little village like Domremy. Their life would not have been easy, even in times of peace. The times being times of war merely added another complication, in so far as they had to reckon with the caprices of men as well as with the caprices of Nature. But, on the whole, life seems to have flowed on its usual course, with its ups and downs, for the d’Arc family during the childhood of its daughter Jeanne. I am of course aware that M Siméon Luce, that meticulous and conscientious biographer of Jeanne’s early years before she left her home, has pointed out that Domremy was not so isolated a hamlet as one might imagine, lying, as it did, on the old Roman highway between Dijon, Langres, and Verdun.fn8 I am aware also that when Antoine and Jean de Vergy, under English orders, marched on Vaucouleurs in July 1428, the inhabitants of Domremy thought it prudent to retire into the neighbouring market-town of Neufchâteau, seven miles away, driving their animals before them; returning a fortnight later to find their church burnt and their fields in pitiable ruin. I am aware also that news travelled far more quickly than we might suppose possible in an age of pritnitive means of communication, when every item of news arrived by word of mouth without the aid of the daily paper, the telegraph, telephone, or wireless, and that the peasants of Lorraine were consequently kept quite well informed of current events in the rest of France. Those events were certainly disturbing enough. Still, I believe that nearly a century of habit must have accustomed their minds to accept the state of affairs almost as a normal condition, the more immediate proccupations of daily life bulking larger in the foreground of their consciousness than the distant whistle of arrows on the battlefields of France.

  IV

  An additional complication of course grew out of the politically ambiguous position of Domremy itself. It has already been suggested that Jeanne may have taken part with the boys and youths in the scrimmages between Domremy and Maxey, but there is no evidence that the grown men lent their hand to an increased disturbance of their common countryside. They realised, probably, that as they might at any moment have quite enough to suffer from the incursion of armed raids from the outside, it was to their interest to live at peace in their respective hamlets, allowing the incomprehensible politics of the noble factions to affect their daily life as little as possible.

  There was another reason which, whatever the unexpressed anxiety in Jeanne’s young, earnest, and awakening mind, must have impelled the farmer-peasants of Domremy to club together for mutual protection. This was the system by which each family took it in tum to watch their collected herds at pasture. M Louis Bertrand, himself a Lorrainer, says that each family, according to a prearranged order, had to supply what was called in Lorraine a pâtureau or a pâturelle, a boy or girl to drive out the cattle in the morning, watch them during the day, and bring them home at night.fn9 It seems probable from the subsequent testimony of the many witnesses, who had known Jeanne as a girl, that the men of the village as well as the children sometimes accompanied the procession of animals. I should imagine that this escort of adults was not the usual rule, but was provided only when some rumours of a possible raid had reached their ears, and that normally the children were left in sole charge, in very much the same way as the passing motorist in France today sees a little girl sitting by the roadside, her head tied up in a handkerchief, while three or four cows wander within call. Obviously it would have been injudicious and absurd for men, whatever their politics, to disagree too openly when next day their precious cattle would be entrusted to the charge of their opponent’s son or daughter, or even to the supervision of the opponent himself. On the whole, it appears that the inhabitants of Domremy lived at peace amongst themselves, which is scarcely to be wondered at.

  Occasionally, when the rumours of raids were particularly pressing, they would not take the collective beasts into the open pastures, but would drive them into the enceinte of a walled fortress known as the Château de l’Ile. This fortress has now disappeared, but for a few traces of foundations and some scattered stones which give a definite indication of its original site in the village opposite the church on the north side of the present bridge over the Meuse.fn10 The island which gave the château its name has likewise disappeared, and the river, which in Jeanne’s day divided itself into two branches, now flows in a single stream. But in Jeanne’s day it provided a place of security and refuge. It was in the possession of a private family. Its owners, the family of Bourlémont, were the seigneurs of Domremy, and, judging by the will of Jean de Bourlémont in 1399,fn11 were Christianly minded men. Not only was Jean de Bourlémont careful to arrange that all his squires and pages (variés) should be paid according to their deserts, that the ashes of Saint Catherine should be restored to the church of Maxey (ashes which had been given to him by the curé of Maxey, and which would be found en Bourgogne en mon écrin), that prayers should be said for his soul and candles burned, but he also went into such details as that if his men of Domremy chose to say and could prove that he had done any injustice to them in respect of the twelve dozen goslings they yearly paid to him, those goslings should be restored (récablis et restitués) by his son. Such a
will and testament shows, I think, that a better understanding and a more democratic spirit could exist between the local lord and his dependents in the fifteenth century than is commonly supposed. The usual idea is that in mediaeval days the great consistently oppressed the humble, the rich the poor. But there is certainly no evidence of oppression in Jean de Bourlémont’s will. There is, on the other hand, a manifest desire to treat both his servants and his village-people decently. Bearing Jean de Bourlémont’s conscience in mind, it ceases to surprise us that his men of Domremy should have been allowed to drive their cattle on occasion within the walls of his private property. Great lords did not suffer from scruples about wages and goslings unless urged by some form of social responsibility.fn12

  V

  This system of pâturage, current at Domremy for mutual convenience, and innocent enough in itself, as one might think, since it saved busy farmers a lot of trouble to share out their children in the communal tending of their beasts, gave rise later on to some curious dissensions and contradictions when the daughter of one of those busy farmers had ceased to be merely his daughter and had turned into a personage so public and so important as to be condemned to death by the representatives of a great Church at the instigation of a great nation. It had its sequel twenty-four years after that, when the Pope himself intervened in the question of her posthumous reputation and decreed that his venerable brothers the Archbishop of Reims and the Bishops of Paris and Coutances should hear the testimony of all those concerned in the case (intéressés dans la cause), in order to see that justice might be done.fn13 It has its sequel even today, in the legend of Jeanne the shepherdess which survives in the popular imagination side by side with the legend of Jeanne the captain and the martyr. How puzzled the friends and the playmates of Jeanne d’Arc must have been, when they were asked to answer, amongst other things, the question whether Jeanne had taken her part in looking after the cattle, or whether she had not. To them, it must have seemed so simple: of course she did. They all did. Jeanne, they thought, took her tum with the rest.