If we may believe the registrars, they never ceased wondering at her memory. They were amazed that she should recollect exactly what she had said a week before. Nevertheless her memory was sometimes curiously uncertain, and we have reason for thinking with the Bastard that she waited two days at the inn before being received by the King.
With regard to this audience in the castle of Chinon, she told her judges she had recognised the King as she had recognised the Sire de Baudricourt, by revelation.
The interrogator asked her: “When the Voice revealed your King to you, was there any light?”
This question bore upon matters which were of great moment to her judges; for they suspected the Maid of having committed a sacrilegious fraud, or rather witchcraft, with the complicity of the King of France. Indeed, they had learnt from their informers that Jeanne boasted of having given the King a sign in the form of a precious crown. The following is the actual truth of the matter:
The legend of Saint Catherine relates that on a day she received from the hand of an angel a resplendent crown and placed it on the head of the Empress of the Romans. This crown was the symbol of eternal blessedness. Jeanne, who had been brought up on this legend, said that the same thing had happened to her. In France she had told sundry marvellous stories of crowns, and in one of these stories she imagined herself to be in the great hall of the castle at Chinon, in the midst of the barons, receiving a crown from the hand of an angel to give it to her King. This was true in a spiritual sense, for she had taken Charles to his anointing and to his coronation. Jeanne was not quick to grasp the distinction between two kinds of truth. She may, nevertheless, have doubted the material reality of this vision. She may even have held it to be true in a spiritual sense only. In any case, she had of her own accord promised Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret not to speak of it to her judges.
“Saw you any angel above the King?”
She refused to reply.
This time nothing more was said of the crown. Maître Jean Beaupère asked Jeanne if she often heard the Voice.
“Not a day passes without my hearing it. And it is my stay in great need.”
She never spoke of her Voices without describing them as her refuge and relief, her consolation and her joy. Now all theologians agreed in believing that good spirits when they depart leave the soul filled with joy, with peace, and with comfort, and as proof they cited the angel’s words to Zacharias and Mary: “Be not afraid.” This reason, however, was not strong enough to persuade clerks of the English party that Voices hostile to the English were of God.
And the Maid added: “Never have I required of them any other final reward than the salvation of my soul.”
The examination ended with a capital charge: the attack on Paris on a feast day. It was in this connection possibly that Brother Jacques of Touraine, a friar of the Franciscan order, who from time to time put a question, asked Jeanne whether she had ever been in a place where Englishmen were being slain.
“In God’s name, was I ever in such a place?” Jeanne responded vehemently. “How glibly you speak. Why did they not depart from France and go into their own country?”
A nobleman of England, who was in the chamber, on hearing these words, said to his neighbours: “By my troth she is a good woman. Why is she not English?”
The third public sitting was appointed for two days thence, Saturday, the 24th of February.
It was Lent. Jeanne observed the fast very strictly.
On Friday, the 23rd, in the morning, she was awakened by her Voices themselves. She arose from her bed and remained seated, her hands clasped, giving thanks. Then she asked what she should reply to her judges, beseeching the Voices thereupon to take counsel of Our Lord. First the Voices uttered words she could not understand. That happened sometimes, in difficult circumstances especially. Then they said: “Reply boldly, God will aid thee.”
That day she heard them a second time at the hour of vespers and a third time when the bells were ringing the Ave Maria in the evening. In the night of Friday and Saturday they came and revealed to her many secrets for the weal of the King of France. Thereupon she received great consolation. Very probably they repeated the assurance that she would be delivered from the hands of her enemies, and that on the other hand her judges stood in great danger.
She depended absolutely on her Voices for direction. When she was in difficulty as to what to say to her judges, she prayed to Our Lord; she addressed him devoutly, saying: “Good God, for the sake of thy holy Passion, I beseech thee if thou lovest me to reveal unto me what I should reply to these churchmen. Touching my dress I know well how I was commanded to put it on; but as to leaving it I know nothing. In this may it please thee to teach me.”
Then straightway the Voices came.
At the third sitting, held in the Robing Chamber, there were present sixty-two assessors, of whom twenty were new.
Jeanne showed a greater repugnance than before to swearing on the holy Gospels to reply to all that should be asked her. In charity the Bishop warned her that this obstinate refusal caused her to be suspected, and he required her to swear, under pain of being convicted upon all the charges. Such was indeed the rule in a trial by the Inquisition. In 1310 a béguine, one La Porète, refused to take the oath as required by the Holy Inquisitor of the Faith, Brother Guillaume of Paris. She was excommunicated forthwith, and without being further examined, after lengthy proceedings, she was handed over to the Provost of Paris, who caused her to be burned alive. Her piety at the stake drew tears from all the bystanders.
Still the Bishop failed to force an unconditional oath from the Maid; she swore to tell the truth on all she knew concerning the trial, reserving to herself the right to be silent on everything which in her opinion did not concern it. She spoke freely of the Voices she had heard the previous day, but not of the revelations touching the King. When, however, Maître Jean Beaupère appeared desirous to know them, she asked for a fortnight’s delay before replying, sure that before then she would be delivered; and straightway she fell to boasting of the secrets her Voices had confided to her for the King’s weal.
“I would wish him to know them at this moment,” she said; “even if as the result I were to drink no wine from now till Easter.”
“Drink no wine from now till Easter!” Did she thus casually use an expression common in that land of the rose-tinted wine (vin gris), a drop or two of which with a slice of bread sufficed the Domremy women for a meal? Or had she caught this manner of speech with the habit of dealing hard clouts and good blows from the men-at-arms of her company? Alas! what hypocras was she to drink during the five weeks before Easter! She was merely making use of a current phrase, as was frequently her custom, and attributing no precise meaning to it, unless it were that wine vaguely suggested to her mind the idea of cordiality and the hope that after her deliverance she would see the Lords of France filling a cup in her honour.
Maître Jean Beaupère asked her whether she saw anything when she heard her Voices.
She replied: “I cannot tell you everything. I am not permitted. The Voice is good and worthy.... To this question I am not bound to reply.”
And she asked them to give her in writing the points concerning which she had not given an immediate reply.
What use did she intend to make of this writing? She did not know how to read; she had no counsel. Did she want to show the document to some false friend, like Loiseleur, who was deceiving her? Or was it her intent to present it to her saints?
Maître Beaupère asked whether her Voice had a face and eyes.
She refused to answer and quoted a saying frequently on the lips of children: “One is often hanged for having spoken the truth.”
Maître Beaupère asked: “Do you know whether you stand in God’s grace?”
This was an extremely insidious question; it placed Jeanne in the dilemma of having to avow herself sinful or of appearing unpardonably bold. One of the assessors, Maître Jean Lefèvre of the Order of the Herm
it Friars, observed that she was not bound to reply. There was murmuring throughout the chamber.
But Jeanne said: “If I be not, then may God bring me into it; if I be, then may God keep me in it.”
The assessors were astonished at so ready an answer. And yet no improvement ensued in their disposition towards her. They admitted that touching her King she spoke well, but for the rest she was too subtle, and with a subtlety peculiar to women.
Thereafter, Maître Jean Beaupère examined Jeanne concerning her childhood in her village. He essayed to show that she had been cruel, had displayed a homicidal tendency from her earliest years, and had been addicted to those idolatrous practices which had given the folk of Domremy a bad name.
Then he touched on a point of prime importance in elucidating the obscure origin of Jeanne’s mission:
“Were you not regarded as the one who was sent from the Oak Wood?”
In this direction he might have succeeded in obtaining important revelations. False prophecies had indeed established Jeanne’s reputation in France; but these clerks were incapable of discriminating amongst all these pseudo-Bedes and pseudo-Merlins.
Jeanne replied: “When I came to the King, certain asked me whether there were in my country a wood called the Oak Wood; because of prophecies saying that from the neighbourhood of this wood should come a damsel who would work wonders. But to such things I paid no heed.”
This statement we must needs believe; but if she denied credence to the prophecy of Merlin touching the Virgin of the Oak Wood, she paid good heed to the prophecy foretelling the appearance of a Deliverer in the person of a Maid coming from the Lorraine Marches, since she repeated that prophecy to the two Leroyers and to her Uncle Lassois, with an emphasis which filled them with astonishment. Now we must admit that the two prophecies are as alike as two peas.
Passing abruptly from Merlin the Magician, Maître Jean Beaupère asked: “Jeanne, will you have a woman’s dress?”
She answered: “Give me one; and I will accept it and depart. Otherwise I will not have it. I will be content with this one, since God is pleased for me to wear it.”
On this reply, which contained two errors tending to heresy, the Lord Bishop adjourned the court.
The morrow, the 25th of February, was the first Sunday in Lent. On that day or another, but probably on that day, my Lord Bishop sent Jeanne a shad. Having partaken of this fish she had fever and was seized with vomiting. Two masters of arts of the Paris University, both doctors of medicine, Jean Tiphaine and Guillaume Delachambre, assessors in the trial, were summoned by the Earl of Warwick, who said to them:
“According to what has been told me, Jeanne is sick. I have summoned you to devise measures for her recovery. The King would not for the world have her die a natural death. She is dear to him, for he has bought her dearly; his intent is that she die not, save by the hand of justice, and that she should be burned. Do all that may be necessary, therefore, visit her attentively, and endeavour to restore her.”
Conducted to Jeanne by Maître Jean d’Estivet, the doctors inquired of her the cause of her suffering.
She answered that she had eaten a carp sent her by the Lord Bishop of Beauvais, and that she believed it to be the cause of her sickness.
Did Jeanne suspect the Bishop of designing to poison her? That is what Maître Jean d’Estivet thought, for he flew into a violent rage:
“Whore!” he cried, “it is thine own doing; thou hast eaten herrings and other things which have made thee ill.”
“I have not,” she answered.
They exchanged insults, and Jeanne’s sickness thereupon grew worse.
The doctors examined her and found that she had fever. Wherefore they decided to bleed her.
They informed the Earl of Warwick, who became anxious:
“A bleeding!” he cried; “take heed! She is artful and might kill herself.”
Nevertheless Jeanne was bled and recovered.
On Monday, the 26th, there was no examination. On the opening of the fourth sitting, Tuesday, the 27th, Maître Jean Beaupère asked her how she had been, which inquiry touched her but little. She replied drily:
“You can see for yourself. I am as well as it is possible for me to be.”
This sitting was held in the Robing Chamber in the presence of fifty-four assessors. Five of them had not been present before, and among them was Maître Nicolas Loiseleur, canon of Rouen, whose share in the proceedings had been to act the Lorraine shoemaker and Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
Maître Jean Beaupère, as on the previous Saturday, was curious to know whether Jeanne had heard her Voices. She heard them every day.
He asked her: “Is it an angel’s voice that speaketh unto you, or the voice of a woman saint or of a man saint? Or is it God speaking without an interpreter?”
Said Jeanne: “This voice is the voice of Saint Catherine and of Saint Margaret; and on their heads are beautiful crowns, right rich and right precious. I am permitted to tell you so by Messire. If you doubt it send to Poitiers, where I was examined.”
She was right in appealing to the clerks of France. The Armagnac doctors had no less authority in matters of faith than the English and Burgundian doctors. Were they not all to meet at the Council?
The examiner asked: “How know ye that they are these two saints? Know ye them one from another?”
Said Jeanne: “Well do I know who they are; and I do know one from the other.”
“How?”
“By the greeting they give me.”
Let not Jeanne be hastily taxed with error or untruth. Did not the Angel salute Gideon (Judges vi), and Raphaël salute Tobias (Tobit xii)?
Thereafter Jeanne gave another reason: “I know them because they call themselves by name.”
When she was asked whether her saints were both clothed alike, whether they were of the same age, whether they spoke at once, whether one of them appeared before the other, she refused to reply, saying she had not permission to do so.
Maître Jean Beaupère inquired which of the apparitions came to her the first when she was about thirteen.
Jeanne said: “It was Saint Michael. I beheld him with my eyes. And he was not alone, but with him were angels from heaven. It was by Messire’s command alone that I came into France.”
“Did you actually behold Saint Michael and these angels in the body?”
“I saw them with the eyes of my head as plainly as I see you; and when they went away I wept and should have liked them to take me with them.”
“In what semblance was Saint Michael?”
She was not permitted to say.
She was asked whether she had received permission from God to go into France and whether God had commanded her to put on man’s dress.
By keeping silence on this point she became liable to be suspected of heresy, and however she replied she laid herself open to serious charges, — she either took upon herself homicide and abomination, or she attributed it to God, which manifestly was to blaspheme.
Concerning her coming into France, she said: “I would rather have been dragged by the hair of my head than have come into France without permission from Messire.” Concerning her dress she added: “Dress is but a little thing, less than nothing. It was not according to the counsel of any man of this world that I put on man’s clothing. I neither wore this attire nor did anything save by the command of Messire and his angels.”
Maître Jean Beaupère asked: “When you behold this Voice coming towards you, is there any light?”
Then she replied with a jest, as at Poitiers: “Every light cometh not to you, my fair lord.”
After all it was virtually against the King of France that these doctors of Rouen were proceeding with craft and with cunning.
Maître Jean Beaupère threw out the question: “How did your King come to have faith in your sayings?”
“Because they were proved good to him by signs and also because of his clerks.”
“What revelations were m
ade unto your King?”
“That you will not hear from me this year.”
As he listened to the damsel’s words, must not my Lord of Beauvais, who was in the counsels of King Henry, have reflected on that verse in the Book of Tobias (xii, 7): “It is good to keep close the secret of a king”?
Thereafter Jeanne was called upon to reply at length concerning the sword of Saint Catherine. The clerks suspected her of having found it by the art of divination, and by invoking the aid of demons, and of having cast a spell over it. All that she was able to say did not remove their suspicions.
Then they passed on to the sword she had captured from a Burgundian.
“I wore it at Compiègne,” she said, “because it was good for dealing sound clouts and good buffets.” The buffet was a flat blow, the clout was a side stroke. Some moments later, on the subject of her banner, she said that, in order to avoid killing any one, she bore it herself when they charged the enemy. And she added: “I have never slain any one.”
The doctors found that her replies varied. Of course they varied. But if like her every hour of the day and night the doctors had been seeing the heavens descending, if all their thoughts, all their instincts, good and bad, all their desires barely formulated, had been undergoing instant transformation into divine commands, their replies would likewise have varied, and they would have doubtless been in such a state of illusion that in their words and in their actions they would have displayed less good sense, less gentleness and less courage.
The examinations were long; they lasted between three and four hours. Before closing this one, Maître Jean Beaupère wished to know whether Jeanne had been wounded at Orléans. This was an interesting point. It was generally admitted that witches lost their power when they shed blood. Finally, the doctors quibbled over the capitulation of Jargeau, and the court adjourned.
A famous Norman clerk, Maître Jean Lohier, having come to Rouen, the Count Bishop of Beauvais commanded that he should be informed concerning the trial. On the first Saturday in Lent, the 24th of February, the Bishop summoned him to his house near Saint-Nicolas-le-Painteur, and invited him to give his opinion of the proceedings. The views of Maître Jean Lohier greatly disturbed the Bishop. Off he rushed to the doctors and masters, Jean Beaupère, Jacques de Touraine, Nicolas Midi, Pierre Maurice, Thomas de Courcelles, Nicolas Loiseleur, and said to them:
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 463