Again, it is possible to dovetail the two stories, so that they tally to a sufficient extent, by regarding one of them as the prelude to the other. Jeanne says expressly that she was in her father’s garden when she first saw the cloud of light; now, according to Boulainvilliers, she had run home to her mother, had been scolded, and sent back to her sheep. The whole apparent discrepancy may therefore be explained by supposing that she saw the light on her way back through the garden. Nor can I see any reason why Boulainvilliers should deliberately have invented the whole story of the delusive boy: it seems far more probable that he had it from Jeanne’s own lips, or at any rate from the lips of someone to whom she had confided it. It does not sound like a story which, with all its detail, would come of its own accord into anybody’s head, still less like a story which anybody would invent for fun in a serious letter to a foreign prince.
VIII
Whatever the nature of the voices, and however they arrived, they had come to stay. Once they had begun, they never left her. She heard them with increasing frequency and clarity. At first she was frightened and doubtful, and could not understand what was happening to her; then after she had seen her first strange visitant several times, she decided that he was no other than Saint Michael. Asked how she had finally decided on his identity, she replied that she recognised him at last because he spoke with the tongue of angels. fn30
How did she know, they asked, that he was speaking the language of angels? She replied that she had believed it quite early in the proceedings, and was very much inclined to believe it – a significant phrase, I think; et eust ceste voulenté de le croire. Anyway, she ended by being ,completely convinced. If she was not convinced at first, she said, it was because she was only a child and very much alarmed, but subsequently he, Saint Michael, taught her and showed her so many things, that she came to believe entirely in his identity.fn31 She was quite sure, she said, that it was not the Enemy, meaning the Devil, who had appeared to her in the guise of an angel, for she would know at once whether it was Saint Michael or a thing made in his semblance. fn32 Poor little childish Jeanne, she had obviously been frightened and worried, with no idea of the comfort and guidance she was destined to obtain. The moment when she creust fermement que c’estoit il must have been a great moment in her life: a great moment, a great relief. At that moment she stopped being frightened and acquired, instead, a confidence and a trust which were never to desert her. Having ceased to wonder, she accepted her miraculous visitations as part of her daily life.
The archangel was not, at first, very precise in his instructions. He appears to have proceeded with more tact, caution, and consideration than are usually credited to supernatural apparitions. He never attempted to rush Jeanne. He broke his message very gently. He started by telling her mildly that she must be a good girl, and that God would help her; and told her then, amongst other things, that she must come to the help of the King of France, fn33 warning her also that Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret would presently appear to her, and that she must obey their instructions, since they would be sent by the ordinance of Our Lord. fn34 Jeanne listened to all this without breathing a word to anybody.
The story, as it goes on, becomes more and more extraordinary. The wealth of detail which we possess about the voices and apparitions comes to us at first hand from Jeanne herself. There is no need to draw upon the imagination or to reconstruct events from scraps of evidence: Jeanne’s own full, unshakable account given by herself to her judges at her trial tells us everything we want to know. It is true that every now and then she would refuse to answer a question, saying that her voices had not yet given her the necessary permission, but in spite of these occasional reticences her replies were frank and complete enough to allow us to form a brilliant picture of her experiences during those five strange secret years. Standing alone, a girl of nineteen, before the formidable array of judges of the Ecclesiastical Court and the Holy Inquisition, she spoke as her voices had told her to speak, hardiment, never deviating from either the basis or the detail of her conviction.
This is the account of her visitations, founded almost textually on her own replies:
The spirits who habitually appeared to her were three in number – the Archangel Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine. She claimed also to have seen the Archangel Gabriel and several hundreds of other angels, but it was with her three familiars that she was chiefly concerned. She saw them with her bodily eyes, and wept when they left her, wishing that they could have carried her away with them. They came always accompanied by the cloud of heavenly light. She could touch them and embrace them. Asked whether she embraced them round the neck or round the lower parts of their bodies, she replied that it was more seemly to embrace them round the lower part, by which I presume that she meant round the knees, and that she herself was on her knees before them. Asked whether she felt their warmth when she embraced them, she replied that she could scarcely embrace them without feeling and touching them. They spoke to her in French, addressing her as Jehanne la Pucelle, fille de Dieu. Why should they speak in English, she asked, when they were not on the English side? They smelt good, and wore beautiful crowns, but she could not, or would not, describe their clothes. Asked whether Saint Michael was naked or not, she retaliated by enquiring scornfully whether they imagined that Our Lord had not the wherewithal to clothe him? Asked whether he had any hair or not, she enquired why it should have been cut off? Asked whether the two female saints had any hair (the judges seem to have insisted curiously on this question of hair, no doubt because Jeanne, amongst her other offences, had cut hers short), she replied, ‘C’est bon à savoir.’ Asked whether their hair was long, she replied that she did not know, and, more surprisingly, that she could not say whether they had arms or other limbs. Saint Michael had wings, she said, but she would not say anything about the bodies or limbs of Catherine and Margaret. When they asked her what she meant by this refusal, she replied that she had told theni what she knew, and was not going to say anything further. Asked if she had seen their faces only, she lost her temper, and replied tartly that she would sooner have her throat cut than tell everything she knew; adding, more mildly, that she would willingly tell everything which concerned the trial. She had no hesitation, however, in saying that they spoke very well and beautifully (très bien et bellement), with soft and humble voice. They appeared to her several times a day, especially if she were in a wood. Whenever they came they brought guidance and comfort.fn35
She appears, also, to have been specially affected by the sound of bells. She herself answered freely and at first hand that while in prison she had heard her voices three times in one day: once in the morning, once at vespers, and once in the evening when they were ringing for the Ave Maria.fn36 It was reported of her after her death that she had claimed to hear her voices most distinctly when the bells were ringing for compline and matins, fn37 though this is perhaps neither a reliable nor an unprejudiced testimony. The witnesses who had known her in her early Domremy youth make, it is true, no allusion to any connexion between the bells and the voices, but their words do go to prove that church-bells meant something to her – as, to be sure, they would to any devout Catholic. Without insisting too much on any association between the bells and the voices, and bearing always in mind that the bells of the villages strung up and down that river valley must have echoed in the consciousness of any pious inhabitant habitually within earshot, we can, without further comment, let the Domremy witnesses speak in their own words. One of them says ‘When she was in the fields and heard the bells ringing she bent her knees’; another ‘When the bells rang out she made the sign of the cross and bent her knees.’fn38 Thomas Basin afterwards Bishop of Lisieux repeats the same story.fn39
Nothing would move her from her convictions. Neither would anything induce her to say a word more about her saints than she meant to say. She was positive that she had heard, seen, touched, and even smelt them, not once or twice, but daily, totalling hundreds of times over a
period of seven years. In the last resort, she preferred a frightful death to the recantation which would have saved her life. There can be no question as to the absolute sincerity of her belief. Our only problem – which in the present state of our knowledge seems insoluble – is, to what extent was her beliefjustified? Did the saints really appear to her, engaging four senses out of the five? Or was she merely the victim of her own delusions?
It is better to pursue the story of her life, before discussing these difficult questions.
5. DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS (1)
I
In May 1428, Jeanne, being then sixteen, made her first tentative effort to get herself sent into France to find the Dauphin. The voices were becoming more and more urgent. She herself had reached the marriageable age, and one may reasonably assume in face of the evidence that her parents’ projects of marriage for her were becoming more urgent too. Her father, uninformed though he was of his daughter’s strange experiences, had begun to have disturbing dreams about her. On several occasions, while she was still living at home, in fact about two years after the voices had first started, Jacques d’Arc was visited by the nocturnal information that his daughter would go away with soldiers – information which appears, not unnaturally, to have upset him considerably. It upset him so much, indeed, that he did not mention it to Jeanne herself, but communicated his fears to his wife, who passed them on to the child.fn1 One can scarcely blame Jacques d’Arc for interpreting the idea of his daughter going away with soldiers in the worst possible sense. An ordinary, sensible man, conversant with the ways of soldiers – as he had good cause to be – no idea of a religious mission could possible have entered his head. Any respectable girl becoming aware of a religious mission wanted to join a convent, not an army. There was only one interpretation to be placed against the warning that one’s daughter was about to go away with soldiers, and Jacques d’Arc placed it. He little knew the treatment that his daughter would later mete out to women who had joined the army for different purposes; he little knew that she would break her sword across their backs. In consequence, parental supervision was tightened. Her father and mother were careful to keep her strictly and in great submission.fn2 Moreover, Jacques talked to his sons about it – a conversation which, again, was repeated to Jeanne by her mother. She heard her mother say that her father had said to her brothers: ‘Ifl believed that the thing I have dreamed of her should come to pass, I should want you to drown her; and if you did not do so, I would drown her myself.’fn3 That was no equivocal pronouncement. There is an echo of the Old Testament in its stem and uncompromising grandeur.
Without undue fancifulness, one may imagine that the family breakfast-party at Domremy, after a night when Jacques d’Arc had been visited by such dreams, was not a very cheerful affair. There was the surly father; the worried mother; the puzzled sons. There was the silent little daughter, oppressed by her enormous secret, and in great doubt as to what her parents and her brothers were thinking. Without undue fancifulness, also, one may imagine the distressing conversations which must have taken place between mother and daughter after the men had gone out to their work in the fields. Jeanne respected her mother; it must humanly speaking, have tortured her to listen to these accounts of dreams which, for her part, she knew to be only too well justified. Her conscience must have played queer tricks, and undergone strange perplexities. It is never easy to judge between right and wrong, especially when one is only fourteen.
Again, it may not be too fanciful to suggest that some curious sympathetic bond existed between Jeanne and her father, which increased the pain of her deception, and which can only be explained by assuming some telepathic communication between them. For, after all, what was he doing but dreaming her unrevealed thoughts? I offer this suggestion for what it is worth; it is a point which, so far as I know, has not hitherto been remarked upon by any of her biographers.
However this may be, she stuck to her original plan of saying nothing. She let her mother tell her these stories, and never gave herself away.
II
Rumours of a fresh English attack were spreading over France. Thus both private and public reasons spurred Jeanne to her first attempt. In pursuance of this attempt, she enlisted the help of a certain Durand Lassois or Laxart, who had married her first cousin, fn4 but whom Jeanne, out of respect for his seniority of twenty-four years, called, not cousin, but uncle. This seems to have been the principal, if not the only, mark of respect she ever accorded him: for the rest, she appears to have been able to do as she liked with him. She took his clothes from him when she wanted them, returned them when she had no further use for them, forced him to risk his credit with her parents, and to oblige her in almost incredible ways. Manifestly a man of patient, credulous, and amenable character, well known to his relatives Jacques and Isabelle, a suitable escort for their daughter owing to his affinity by marriage and to the blood-relationship of his wife, he was the very tool to suit Jeanne’s purpose, and with subtlety and determination she made the most of his services.
Durand Lassois and his wife lived at Burey-le-Petit, only two miles short of Vaucouleurs, and to Vaucouleurs it was necessary that Jeanne should go. She had very wisely and obviously decided on Vaucouleurs because that was the nearest place held in the name of the Dauphin; a small garrison town on a hill, about twelve miles up the valley north of Domremy. It was commanded at the time by one Robert de Baudricourt, who has been generally represented as an ordinary hearty soldier with an eye to the main chance. He had, for instance, contrived to marry two wealthy widows in succession – although, to be sure, he had been so incompetent, or, possibly, so easy-going, as to allow some shepherds to steal the cart conveying the provisions to his wedding-breakfast.fn5 He came of a respectable family: his mother, Marguerite d’Aunoy, of Blaise in Bassigny; his father, Liebault de Baudricourt, chamberlain to a duke of Bar and governor of Pont-à-Mousson; his uncles had also held responsible positions, to which he had succeeded.fn6 He was thus what one may call a gentleman, meaning that he came of gentle birth, without necessarily meaning that he was himself a man of refined character. The long and short of it seems to be that Robert de Baudricourt was neither better nor worse than other men of his type; that he was naturally rather bored, stuck away in his little provincial command at Vaucouleurs; that he was as ready as other men to make a bawdy joke when he saw the chance of it; that the arrival of an unknown Jeannette from Domremy providedhim with justsuchachance, relieving the monotony of his garrison days; that he was not a man sentimentally disposed to respect a woman, unless and until that woman gave him very good cause to do so – in short, a good-natured practical, muscular, coarse-grained captain, neither more cynical nor more believing than the rest. Such was the man to whom Jeanne proposed to address herself as the first step to her wild adventure.
She may have heard accounts of him in the family circle of her own home, for it seems probable that her father had once met him in person at Vaucouleurs, in March 1427, owing to the following circumstances: the inhabitants of Domremy and of Greux were under the obligation of paying a yearly tax to the damoiseau of Commercy in return for his protection. Fourteen of the leading men of the two villages had signed the agreement amongst whom appears Jacques d’Arc under the designation of doyen de Domremy. In the winter of 1423, the contract having been entered into during the autumn of the same year, the villagers found themselves unable to pay their toll, and, aware that the damoiseau was not a man to overlook a debt, arranged that two wealthy representatives of the neighbourhood named Jean Aubert and Guyot Poingnant, to whom they habitually sold their surplus hay and their wood, should stand warrant on their behalf witl1 their impatient creditor. The damoiseau, however, without waiting for the affair to be amicably settled, seized and sold some twenty waggon-loads of hay and eighty waggon-loads of wood, besides a number of horses belonging to Guyot Poingnant, the value of the goods thus sequestrated being assessed as rather more than half the total debt. A few days after this raid had taken place t
he debt was paid in full, and Guyot Poingnant, who meanwhile had been detained as hostage in Commercy, hurriedly left for Vaucouleurs to institute proceedings against the villagers of Grewe and Domremy for the loss of property he had suffered owing to their temporary insolvency. These proceedings, which, of course, were laid before Robert de Baudricourt in his capacity of governor of Vaucouleurs, trailed on after the manner of such disputes until the spring of 1427, when Guyot Poingnant, at the end of his patience, refused to renew the powers of the two aibitrators who had previously been appointed by common consent of the parties. It thus appears that he decided to cut his loss, for the dispute was dropped, and the acte de refus was conveyed by the two arbitrators to the defendants. The interest of this small local quarrel lies for us in the fact that among the three representatives concerned in the acte de refus the second was Jean Morel, of Grewe, one of Jeanne’s numerous godparents; and the third, Jacquot d’Arc, of Domremy, her father. fn7
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