Saint Joan of Arc

by Vita Sackville-West

  But, of course, if we once admit the report of the ‘Abbréviateur du Procès,’ with all that story about the Dauphin’s private prayers, alone in his oratory on a certain stated day, then, indeed, it becomes easy to understand why he looked as though he had been visited by the Holy Ghost – or, at any rate, by something altogether outside any rational explanation – but if we limit our credulity to the belief that Jeanne merely told him that he was not the bastard he had always suspected himself to be, then the miraculous element in her revelation comes to grief. In view of the Dauphin’s extreme astonishment, I am almost persuaded to believe in the ‘Abbréviateur’s’ report. I am, in fact, almost persuaded to believe that her revelation consisted in something more than was concerned in the obvious assertion that he was no bastard even though his mother had half declared him to be one. I am almost persuaded to believe in that story about Jeanne’s divination of his private prayers. Nothing but a revelation of such intimate detail could have made such an impression on him. To be told that he was no bastard was reassuring enough to his uneasy mind, yet it was no more than the reassurance he might have received from any fanatical patriot acquainted with the current gossip. I am sure that Jeanne, with her common sense and feminine intuition, made the best use of current gossip and the Dauphin’s uneasiness. Yet I am almost equally sure that she must have said something to convince him, beyond her knowledge of a secret which was, after all, a secret de polichinelle and not the King’s secret at all. That is why I am disposed to accept the report of the ‘Abbréviateur du Procès’ as authentic, and not as a mere elaboration of the story of what actually happened during that private interview between Charles and Jeanne.

  VIII

  Whether my interpretation is right or wrong, some time elapsed before the Dauphin put his trust in Jeanne into any very practical form. He was, by nature and experience, a cautious rather than a reckless man. We may sympathise with him over this, even while despising him for the timidity which always held him back from making the generous gesture. He had had a difficult life. His childhood and boyhood had been punctuated by scenes of distress and drama with which his easy-going nature was entirely unsuited to deal. His character had prevented him from coping with his difficulties in the way that a bigger man would have coped with them. He was a small man, faced with big issues; an unfortunate situation which may enlist our sympathy, but cannot command the respect we accord only to tragedy on big lines. Jeanne worked always along the big lines, peasant though she was; Charles, prince though he was, always along the small, the mean. Jeanne, in consequence, emerges always as the largely generous spirit, Charles as the niggardly and withholding. Yet let us be fair. Jeanne was a fanatic, inspired, as she believed, by the commands of God or His representatives. Charles was a prince beset by personal doubts and worldly difficulties. Jeanne was a simple person making straight for her goal. Charles was a complex person, not at all sure of what his goal ought to be. Jeanne’s position was therefore, in a sense, easier than his. She had no doubts of herself under her heavenly guidance; Charles was made up of doubts from first to last. He was not the man to accede impetuously to Jeanne’s demand for an army wherewith she might proceed immediately to the relief of Orleans.

  Here again we cannot blame him. Stronger men than he would have hesitated before putting the lives of thousands into peril under the guidance of an inexperienced girl. We cannot blame him for this. We cannot even call him vacillating or weak in this particular. On the contrary we ought to give him credit for his discernment in taking her seriously at all.

  IX

  In lighter mood, Jeanne, meanwhile, must have got a certain amount of pleasure out of her stay at Chinon. It is impossible to regard her as an entirely grim and exclusively serious person. She would be the less lovable were we so to regard her. After all, she was only seventeen; and at seventeen one wants one’s moments of relaxation; one wants to enjoy oneself; one wants to play and laugh; one wants the company of one’s contemporaries. Jeanne certainly found her best playfellow in the Duke of Alençon – mon beau duc, as she called him. This gay, handsome, and attractive young prince of twenty-three was away at Saint Florent, shooting quails, when she arrived at Chinon, but, on learning from one of his servants that his cousin the Dauphin had received a girl claiming to be sent by God to raise the siege of Orleans, his curiosity was so much aroused that he decided to return the next day to Chinon. Here he found Jeanne and the Dauphin together. Jeanne, after enquiring from Charles who the young man might be, greeted him with a graciousness that makes one smile: ‘You are very welcome [Vous soyez le très bienvenu]. The more that are gathered together of the royal blood of France, the better.’fn48

  She had a special reason for welcoming him, since he had recently married the daughter of the Duke of Orleans; and the Duke of Orleans, at that time a captive in England, held for some reason a very high place in Jeanne’s affections.fn49 She had, of course, never seen him, but declared him to be under her especial charge, saying that she knew God loved him, and that if necessary she would cross the Channel to fetch him back to France.fn50 There were, in fact, three men whom Jeanne loved: the Dauphin, the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of Alençon. The first two she loved for the sake of an idea rather than for any personal reason, almost comparable to the way she loved her saints; d’Alençon alone was the one who personally caught her fancy, et tousjours depuis se tint plus prouehaine et aeointe du due d’Alencon que de nul autre, et tousjours en parlant de lui l’appeloit Mon beau duc et non autrement.fn51

  He seems to have accepted her without hesitation; he was in fact the only one of the princes who did so. They became friends at once. He saw her again the next day, when they both heard Mass with the Dauphin, after which Charles sent everybody away except d’Alençon, the due de la Trémoïlle, and Jeanne. These four had a long conversation, lasting until dinner. It is then that we get the little picture which shows us that life at Chinon was not altogether grim. After dinner, the Dauphin, no doubt tired of hearing from Jeanne that he must submit his kingdom to the King of Heaven, went out into the meadows; Jeanne also went out, lance in hand; and d’Alençon, admiring the grace and skill which she displayed in tilting, made her the present of a horse.fn52

  Jeanne must have been a born rider, for she can have had but little experience save with the heavy farm-horses at Domremy. True, she had ridden to Nancy, and she had ridden from Vaucouleurs to Chinon, but on neither journey do we find any of her companions referring to any difficulty encountered by her in this unaccustomed exercise. And even the long ride to Chinon must have been accomplished at a sober pace. Not only was it necessary to spare the horses, but a simple calculation will show that the six-hundred kilometres of the journey could easily be covered in the allotted eleven days without ever going out of a walk – i.e. if a horse walks a kilometre in nine or ten minutes, and six kilometres in an hour,fn53 they could have covered the whole distance travelling nine hours a day; though we must of course allow them a margin for rest and food. This quiet progress was a very different thing from tilting at a gallop with a long lance in one’s hand; a proper charger was a very different thing from a cart-horse, or even from a travelling hack; and it is not surprising that Jeanne should have won d’Alençon’s respect to cement their growing friendship.fn54

  A few days later he took her to stay with his wife and his mother for three or four days at Saint Florent. The young duchess received Jeanne very warmly, but confided to her the fears she entertained for his safety. He had only just, she said, been released from captivity,fn55 and his ransom had cost them so much money that she wished he would now remain quietly at home. Jeanne reassured her: ‘Madame, fear nothing. I will bring him back to you as safe and well as he is now, or even better.’fn56 She kept her word, and, indeed, on one occasion saved his life.

  It is easy to contrast his ready acceptance of Jeanne with the Dauphin’s hesitations, but the blame which attaches to Charles comes much later, when Jeanne had proved her value and when he so shamefull
y abandoned her to her enemies. No blame or shame attaches, so far as I can see, to his behaviour when she first arrived at Chinon or to his behaviour during the ensuing weeks.

  Jeanne, of course, not having our advantage of seeing the situation retrospectively, fretted at the delay. She told Jean Paquerel how much she had suffered from the endless enquiries which prevented her from accomplishing her task. The time had come, she said, for her to begin her work. Weeks, however, were to elapse before she was allowed to do so. In the meantime, although subjected to the most rigorous examinations of every kind,fn57 including an examination conducted by Madame de Trèves and Madame de Gaucourt to determine which sex she belonged to,fn58 she was honourably entertained, and her humble lodging changed for rooms in the Tour du Condray. In her circular bastion, with corkscrew staircase and a single circular room on every floor, she was living within the precincts of the castle itself, within an arrow-shot of her beloved Dauphin. She had a chapel attached to the tower, where she could retire to pray. She was put under the charge of the Dauphin’s majordomo, Guillaume Bellier, and of his wife, reputed a virtuous and pious woman;fn59 most important of all, she was allowed free access to the Dauphin; and she had the services of a little page assigned to her. This little page, Louis de Contes, familiarly known as Minguet, spent all his days with her while she lived in the tower, remained as one of her most faithful servants in the more exciting days which were to follow, and has left an account of her during this exasperating period. He had been lent for her service by his master, the seigneur de Gaucourt, governor of Chinon. It is he who tells us that he often saw her coming from or going to sec the Dauphin. Anybody who knows Chinon can sec that it was of course quite easy for him to observe her movements; he had only to climb to the top of the tower to command a view over the whole enclosure of the castle, especially over the bridge spanning the deep fosse which Jeanne must cross in order to reach the Dauphin’s apartments. The rest of her time, when she was neither with Charles nor being examined by important men (homines magni status) nor snubbing the Duke of, Alençon for using strong language, he often saw her on her knees, in prayer as it seemed to him; he could never hear what she was saying, but sometimes saw her in tears.fn60

  It is easy to read between the lines of this deposition, made by the man who had once been Jeanne’s page, the then little Minguet de Contes. The naïf admission, made in retrospect, that he could never overhear what she was saying as she knelt in prayer, brings a boy’s natural curiosity vividly before us. So, also, it is permissible to discern a rueful tone when he speaks of the important men who visited her, but whose conversation he could not report, since he was obliged to withdraw whenever they arrived. He must have longed to stay in the room, and listen. It must have been an exciting experience for a boy of fourteen co be thus attached to the personal service of so controversial a figure as Jeanne. She was at that time the most discussed person in the whole little world of Chinon: and Minguet de Contes, had he expressed himself in the idiom of an English schoolboy of the same age today, would have described himself as ‘jolly lucky.’ It was lucky for him to be singled out as the page of this queer girl who had the Dauphin’s ear, and who was visited in her lodging by men so formidably grand that he could not even record their names. (Incidentally, I think Minguet must have been rather a stupid little boy. He certainly grew up into a man with the most confused memory for events. Chronology was not his forte. Let that pass. He was an honest and devoted soul.)

  These two young creatures, then, shared their tower between them. He spent the whole day with her, but at night his place was taken by women. She was, in fact, although the Dauphin’s guest, under guard all the time. She was under constant surveillance. Either the page was there, a friendly, inquisitive, devoted little page; or else the important men were there, asking her questions; or else the women were there, keeping an eye on her nightly morals. Then, having undergone these preliminary examinations at Chinon, she was taken away to the neighbouring town of Poitiers to undergo examinations of an even more searching kind. The Dauphin went to Poitiers too. Apparently Jeanne had no idea where she was being taken, ifshe was really already half-way to Poitiers when she bethought herself to make enquiries. ‘En nom Dieu,’ she said then, ‘I know I shall have a lot of trouble at Poitiers, but messires will help me; so let us go.’fn61 She was still in her boy’s suit, having refused to put on any other.

  8. POITIERS TO ORLEANS

  I

  At Poitiers they lodged her in the house of one Jean Rabateau, qui avoit espousé une bonne femme.fn1 The Rabateaux had a little oratory in their house, to which Jeanne would often retire in prayer.fn2 But in spite of the gravity of her frequent prayers, she was in a gay and high-spirited mood, rising rapidly with the rising wave. Since leaving Domremy, she had certainly met with checks and delays: she had met with no definite reverse. She had convinced the Dauphin; she had no reason to believe that she would not equally succeed in convincing the doctors at Poitiers. Her replies to them were racy and almost cheeky. ‘I see you have come to ask me questions,’ she said to them; ‘I know neither A nor B.’ And, meeting a young man called Gobert Thibault, she clapped him on the shoulder, saying that she wished she had several men of such goodwill as hefn3 – a remark which drew from Mr Andrew Lang the surprising comment that ‘her ways were those of a clean honest public-school boy.’fn4 She was full of hope, and thought she had nothing to fear. The record of her examination at Poitiers unfortunately no longer exists. It had already ceased to exist by the time she was brought to trial for her life at Rouen. If it were ever to be found, it would quite certainly supplement the already sufficiently extraordinary historical document of her trial; it would, in short, provide the justification to which Jeanne, during the course of that trial, was constantly making appeal. She repeatedly appealed to her judges to refer to the Book of Poitiers. They never did. It had been either suppressed, lost, or destroyed. It seems more likely that it had been suppressed or destroyed than lost. Its loss would argue a degree of carelessness scarcely credible. It seems far more likely that it would have proved too highly inconvenient a document for Jeanne’s judges to have dared to produce at Rouen. It must be remembered, also, that she was being tried at Rouen by an ecclesiastical court, and that ecclesiastical courts were not to be credited with any greater degree of scrupulousness tlian secular. It was one of the most serious losses that Jeanne ever sustained, and would constitute one of the most interesting finds that the scholar or the historian could ever make, were they to bring it to light from some forgotten archives. Even the barest notes taken during the course of the investigation at Poitiers would prove of the utmost value. Jeanne herself evidently set great store by it. Her constant appeals to her judges to have it produced make pitiable reading. As it is, we are left to guess at what revelations the Book of Poitiers may have contained. We do know, however, that the President of the Board of Examiners at Poitiers was no less a personage than the Archbishop of Reims, Chancellor of France,fn5 although he does not appear to have interrogated Jeanne in person; and we do possess one document of supreme interest, taken down from tlie lips of one Frère Seguin who was not only present at, but took part in, rather disastrously for himself, the examination of Jeanne at Poitiers.

  She came in, sat down on tlie end of a bench, and asked them what they wanted of her.fn6

  Frère Seguin, a Carmelite, Professor of Theology at the University of Poitiers, was said to be a disagreeable man – bien aigre homme.fn7 I think Frère Seguin has been rather misjudged by his commentator. I think, on the contrary, that he was a man with a certain sense of humour, even though it may have been of the bitter sort. Otherwise, he would never have reported, twenty-five years later, the exchange of question and answer which passed between him and Jeanne, in which he definitely got the worst of it. He had been so misguided as to ask her what language her voices spoke. He got his answer sharp and slick: ‘A better language than yours,’ Now, as Frère Seguin, according to his own admissions, spoke French in
the patois of the Limousin, which is much the same as saying that an Englishman spoke broad Yorkshire, I suspect that Jeanne’s reply provoked smiles, if not a titter, in the assembly. But Frère Seguin was not yet prudent enough to remove himself beyond the reach of Jeanne’s tart country tongue. He pursued his questions. Did she, he asked, believe in God? Again he got his answer: ‘Yes, and better than you.’ Still undeterred, he then informed her that God was not willing that they should believe her on her mere word, and that they would not advise the Dauphin to supply her with men-at-arms unless she could give them some proof that she was deserving of their trust. At this point, Jeanne seems to have lost her temper. ‘By God’s name,’ she said, ‘I have not come to Poitiers to perform signs. Lead me to Orleans, and I will show you the signs for which I am sent.’fn8