Jehanne: Who? Who told you?
He wouldn’t say.
Knight: I’m allowed to truss you up and hang you from my saddle. That’s if it’s necessary.
She roared at him, her little Barbary propping beneath her in fright.
Jehanne: Damn you, where am I going?
Some of the common archers and squires were laughing at the knight.
Knight: It happens you’re going to Poitiers. To be asked questions by scholars.
She pretended that was news.
Knight: Mademoiselle, the Faculty of Poitiers is going to decide whether you’re a witch or not.
He wasn’t wearing a helmet and his eyes suggested he knew the answer already.
Jehanne: What’s your name?
Knight: Monsieur Lucien d’Estivet, Count of St Luce.
Jehanne: When the Goddam English leave this country, I’ll see you’re given the last square inch. You can be lord of that.
Knight: We’ll both be old before anything like that happens.
Jehanne: That’s the trouble with you lot. You can’t believe anything’s going to change.
He was just young and vain enough to be hurt. He should have laughed with his archers but it was beyond him.
The squire of the Count of St Luce sang deliciously, a soft tenor.
Squire: She stood in her scarlet gown,
If anyone touched her, the gown rustled down,
And she called out Eia.
But a better girl by far
Was a girl in a saffron gown,
And when I alone touched her
The gown rustled down.
And she called out Eia.
She thought of Jean Duke of Alençon and his Duchess waking warm as bread in each others arms this morning. What with sun and journey and the Count of St Luce edgy about his dignity, it was nearly possible to think about it without pain.
Ahead, outside a pub four miles from Loudun, flags were flying – the flag of Anjou, Sicily, Jerusalem. Horses grazed the common and soldiers lolled on benches. But someone saw Jehanne’s party coming and the flags were uprooted and Yolande – in white satin and side-saddle – rode out along the muddy highway to meet her.
Yolande: Do you want to stay the night here or go on?
Jehanne: I’d rather go on.
Yolande: Then it can all start earlier.
Jehanne: Yes.
They rode off to one side. The Count of St Luce went a little pale in case he was bad-mouthed to the Queen of Sicily.
Yolande: Two things you’ll have to remember about Poitiers. Nearly all the men who’ll examine you are hard-up. There are no endowed seats at Poitiers, no official university. They were all Paris professors once, as I said, but the Burgundians expelled them. There’s a Parliament in Poitiers, but it scarcely sits, it never has cases brought to it. Cases can’t get to it. Because of the state of the country. Doctorates of law, civil and canon, doctorates of theology … they’re spilling down the stairs in Poitiers.
Yolande sat on a war horse. Her mouth seemed to Jehanne to be four feet above Jehanne’s head, and the big square face filled a quarter of the sky.
Yolande: Now the Advocate-General … you’ll be staying at his place … he’s quite broke, all his property is in the north. He’s living on bankers’ money. Most of us belong to certain north Italian banking families. Except men like Fat Georges – he’s in business for himself. And owns himself. By the way, the Advocate-General has the best house in Poitiers, so you’ll be very comfortable. But that’s the first thing, everyone is broke and wants the King to send an army to Orleans and knows he’ll do it for you.
Jehanne: How do they know it?
Yolande: The preaching orders keep saying it. The Franciscans and Dominicans. Charles hears them. He believes them.
Jehanne: I’d hoped he believed me as well.
Yolande: He does too – don’t be touchy.
It’s my business, Yolande had said, to believe everything is arranged. She would have tried to arrange the birth, death and resurrection of King Jesus.
Yolande: The second thing to remember is that they have some sort of pride that won’t let them rush things. Don’t make enemies of them by being too impatient. You’ll be there, in Poitiers, some time.
Jehanne: How much time?
Yolande: A month. You can count on a month.
Jehanne: Dear God.
The city sat proud on a fat knoll in the flat plain of Poitou and by the gentle river Clain.
Regnault de Chartres, Chancellor of France, set up an office for the Royal Commission in a house in the north of the city. From this office small committees of theologians would go to the Hôtel de la Rose, where the girl was lodged, to interrogate her. After each session of questioning the interrogators would report back to the Commission as a whole and the theological arguments would begin to fly. Sometimes the entire Commission would question the girl, either at its office or in the cathedral of Poitiers.
The Inquisitor Turelure and Père Sequin filled the house with the collected works of Jerome, Origen, Tertullian, St Ambrose, St Augustine, Odo of Cluny, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas. Their mentality was: it is impossible that in these books somewhere there is not a key to that girl at the Hôtel de la Rose.
Archbishop Regnault himself had that hatred of sudden reversals and lightning rearrangements that most statesmen have. He wanted to send an army to Orleans, he even wanted to go to Rheims. He didn’t want Charles, the Armagnac party, to be made ridiculous through the lunacies of a little Mademoiselle Christ.
Queen Yolande’s part in making the girl’s reputation through sundry preachers appalled him. He would tell the Commission that its first work was to find out whether the girl was actually sane.
Two Armagnac bishops, apart from Monsieur Regnault himself, sat on the Commission. Machet also, and Pierre de Versailles, Abbot of Talmont and a royal ambassador.
Yolande somehow took apartments in the same house as the Commission used. After three or four weeks it was clear she was trying to influence it from the outside. The Franciscans in Poitiers preached about the girl – not as if she was a person but a divine event. Everyone knew the Franciscans were Yolande’s people.
The Commission was begun with a solemn high Mass in St Pierre’s on Monday morning.
Jehanne attended it with Madame Rabateau, her hostess, then walked back to the Hôtel de la Rose and heard nothing from the commissioners for two days. By Wednesday breakfast time she was frightened. What were they talking about? All Monday, all Tuesday? She began to wonder if they were finding ways of challenging her that de Baudricourt and the King had not used.
There had been no light or Voices since she left Chinon.
On Wednesday morning the waiting ended. Four commissioners visited her. The inquisitor Turelure, Pierre de Versailles, Maîtres Jean Erault and Jean Lombard, professors from Paris.
From the moment Turelure spoke she felt a rash of confidence, her blood crackling in her ears in a sort of celebration because they were men without benefit of Voices and their information all oblique, through books and precedent of law.
And she could be impatient with them, she saw, and must be impatient. Because they were the canny sort of men who might say if her Voices say things are so bad, why isn’t she more impatient?
Turelure began by checking her for insanity, heresy. Being an inquisitor, the two were one and the same to him.
His questions were:
Do you believe Our Lord Jesus Christ is God?
Is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity?
Is One Divine Person subsisting in two natures, Divine and Human?
He watched her, for the formulas of belief themselves had power to make witches fall frothing on the floor.
His further questions:
Do you believe the world we see about us was created by God or Satan?
Do you believe that coupling within marriage is approved of by God?
That the Eucharist should be given to people
in the form of wine as well as in the form of bread?
Jehanne: No. None of that sort of thing is ever thought of in the countryside.
Turelure: No? Suppose I told you that two years ago, outside Toulouse, a knight fell in love with a freehold farmer’s daughter. When he told her he was going to make a marriage contract through her father she said she loved him but if she lost her virginity she’d go to hell. The young knight went to a canon of Toulouse for advice. He said, I’m afraid your girl sounds like a Catharist heretic. Catharists think Satan created the visible world, that all copulation is evil. They are a threat to society and they are widespread. For example, the farmer’s daughter had picked up the heresy from some local noblewoman. Both women were jailed and the noblewoman repented but the girl wouldn’t and was burned alive in the end. Do you think she was right?
Jehanne: No. She was brave.
Turelure: Wouldn’t you say the bravest thing of all is to say no, my conscience can’t be right in this matter, the Church must be right.
Jehanne: I can’t say, Maître. I can’t imagine myself turning a knight down for such bad reasons.
That first day they asked about the origins of the Voices. It had not occurred to her to tell General de Baudricourt about the mandrake-crowning rite in Boischenu: the incarnations that Bertrand, Mesdames Aubrit and de Bourlement were. Now she knew not to tell Turelure and those others; that they would misunderstand. The Boischenu events were for her, to inform her and help her see the mystery. The experts had no rights to them.
She felt roseate, having managed the Commissioners well that day.
And on Wednesday night the rain began again. The Queen of Sicily was dining with the Rabateaus and Jehanne.
Yolande: Let’s hope it’s making mud on the Loire.
Yolande had this hopeful image of the Goddams hardly anyone else in Chinon or Poitiers seemed to share. They lay in mud. The mud crawled beneath them and edged them towards the anonymous silts of the Loire.
Yolande: Are you being polite to the gentlemen of the Commission, Jehanne?
She gave a pert answer.
But the gentlemen of the Commission knew how to work on a person. Sometimes half-a-dozen commissioners sat with her all day asking and repeating questions. Sometimes one or two would come with one or two questions. The answers would be portentously written down and read back to her as if she were being given a last chance to recant some dangerous opinion.
Her victories were scarce.
For example, with Maître Aimerie, who sat testing her for some brand of heresy whose name she didn’t know.
Aimerie: Your Voice told you God would save the people of France in their agonies. But if he intends to do that, why do we need an army?
Jehanne: Maître, the normal arrangement is the armies do the fighting and God decides who wins.
He nodded at that – he approved. For some reason his approval made her very angry.
Jehanne: It seems to me you could have answered that question for yourself.
Aimerie: The question was: could you answer it?
Jehanne: I’d have to be an idiot not to be able to answer that.
Maître Sequin de Sequin from Limoges questioned her in his broad-vowelled southern accent.
Sequin: What sort of French do your Voices speak?
Jehanne: Better than yours.
That got round. It became one of the commissioners’ favourite stories.
But Jehanne was breathless with inertia. She would have welcomed seeing boyish if not childish Alençon. She wanted to see Charles. Her brain yawned but she slept badly. And was once woken to find the heat in her right side had become a pain and there were the golden brows of Madame Ste Margaret.
Madame Ste Margaret: Tell them, rosebud, they must hurry, hurry. They must hurry, hurry, rosebud.
At one time they didn’t come near her for four straight days. They seemed to be trying to prove some thesis to her about God moving slowly. Regnault de Chartres never came at all.
In Holy Week Sequin challenged her.
Sequin: We’ve concluded that you’re not to be believed, you’re all talk, you haven’t given a sign.
Jehanne: Dear God, send me with the army! I’m not here to give signs. What do you want? Orleans is the only sign I can give you, you’ll get more sign than you can handle at Orleans. For God’s sake, signs!
She was allowed to walk about during interviews and she always found herself on her feet when the questioning was finished. That day she was at the first floor windows, looking down rue St Etienne.
In the wet square the children of Poitiers were catching cats, pagan animals, familiars of demons. By the cathedral stood wickerwork cages built like men with horns, built like Satan, the horned god. Here the cats would be locked up and tomorrow night, after Christ’s death, the cages would be ignited and the burning animals would scream weirdly enough to convince all the city that a sort of justice against the black world had been achieved.
Jehanne: If you want signs we might as well all give up and join the cat-chase.
Sequin was a farmer’s son and had a southerner’s lack of malice. He even enjoyed the status he had: the commissioner Jehanne slapped down most.
They asked her if she had to send a manifesto to the English generals, what she would say. Maître Jean Erault took it down to be examined by the Commission. It didn’t give them much: it told Talbot, Suffolk, Glasdale, la Poule to go home, and if they wouldn’t to expect the worst.
That Holy Thursday four women of good reputation were sworn in as witnesses to the girl’s virginity.
The four women were Yolande (included in the sub-committee only because she was known to be able to manage Jehanne), Madame de Gaucourt who was older than the queen, Madame Rabateau who was older than Madame de Gaucourt, and an eighteen-year-old, the Countess de Trèves.
On Holy Thursday night, after the Eucharist had been moved to a side chapel and the tabernacle on the high altar of St Pierre lay open and empty, Yolande told Jehanne she would be examined by the four noble ladies in the morning. Virginity was a state that could easily be altered, Yolande said. Not mine, Jehanne said. Mine’s beyond cure. The other examination had been private, for Yolande’s own sake, said Yolande. It couldn’t count with this court.
Jehanne: Have you told the other ladies to expect a shock?
Yolande: I don’t know what you mean.
Jehanne: That I’m a full-grown child. That I’ve never been troubled with troubles.
Yolande: Just let them see for themselves. They’re all kindly creatures. Even me.
In the morning of Good Friday an iron framework such as was used by wealthy women in childbirth and gynaecological disorders was set up above Madame Rabateau’s bed. Jehanne took off her clothes and lay with her feet in stirrups.
She arched her neck and squinted at the wall behind the bed. When it became too painful she looked down the length of her body at the pursed faces of the sub-committee. A fury came over her. None of the women moved, all frowning self-seriously at her genitals, each of them a self-serious tool of the commission. Through Queen Yolande, Madame de Gaucourt, Madame Rabateau, the Countess de Trèves, the commissioners paid you back for the unaccountable and obscene gifts you carried. Obscene because they weren’t earned in any Faculty. Through these four dupe women the men repaid you for laughing at their accents.
She shut her eyes. Immediately she felt a soft hand on her pubis. She sat up.
Jehanne: Don’t touch me!
The vacated stirrups swung before the sub-committee’s faces. The little Countess began crying. Madame Rabateau edged up the bed to comfort her. But Madame de Gaucourt and the Queen stood impassively where they were. Two calm violators.
Yolande: Last time I didn’t touch you. One can see certain obvious features just by looking. And it was unofficial. But you can’t really tell without using your hand. We’ve sworn to God to be decent but thorough. You’ll have to bear it, Jehanne. Without nonsense.
Jehanne opened
her mouth and screamed at them.
To my honoured etc
Dated 1 April 1429
On Easter Sunday in the cathedral of Poitiers, His Grace Regnault de Chartres was forced to sit on a throne on the high altar and listen to one of Yolande’s Franciscans preach a sermon that went close to comparing the girl to Charles Martel. The preacher pawed the pulpit and roared on about France and Christ who bled for it (it alone, it seemed!) and the girl, in male clothing, sat and listened beyond the chancel.
It appears that the Commission has argued in plenary session the verse in Deuteronomy which says, ‘The woman shouldn’t wear men’s clothes or a man dress as a woman: such behaviour is odious to God.’ Queen Yolande tells me that Maître Machet suggested that since the prohibition was not mentioned in the Gospels it could be considered to have lapsed, to be merely an injunction for the ancient Jews. Maître Erault reminded the commission that in Compiègne the relics were preserved of Ste Euphrosyne, who had lived thirty years in male clothing to underline her virginity.
It seems therefore that she will get clear away with her strange habits of dress.
Meanwhile the Franciscan order is preaching wonders about the girl all over Poitou as far away as Bourges. Franciscans are sneaking into Orleans to preach the new hope she implies …
Bernardo Massimo
In Easter week, the small party of Franciscans who had been sent to the Vaucouleurs area to look into Jehanne’s origins came back to Poitiers. Regnault had hoped the Burgundians might have caught them, but a king’s messenger had got them there and back using back roads, fog and night. They were Yolande’s people, with Yolande’s vision of the girl. They weren’t of much objective use to the Commission. Yolande very kindly sent one of them to tell the girl how things were in the Vaucouleurs castellany.
He found people mustered in front of the Rabateau house, not rowdy people. They looked as if they were waiting for a birth or death to be announced. Later he discovered they were a changing crowd – everyone passing stood there for perhaps ten minutes, or longer if the Queen of Sicily or Monsieur de Gaucourt were arriving or leaving.
Inside, the Franciscan found the girl sitting with Madame Rabateau. She had spindle and distaff and was working very fast with them. At first she wasn’t very warm. She’d seen too many theologians lately.
Blood Red, Sister Rose Page 18