she was to be held in prison on bread and water and to wear woman’s
clothes. She herself thought that she was to be put into an
ecclesiastical prison and be kept in the charge of women, but there
is nothing to be found of this in the official report of the first
trial. As she had been wearing men’s clothes by direct command of
God her sin in recanting began to loom enormous before her during
the night; she had forsaken her God even as Peter had forsaken Jesus
Christ in the hour of his need, and hell-fire would be her portion--a
fire ten thousand times worse than anything that the executioner could
devise for her. She got up in the morning and threw aside the pretty
dress which the Duchess of Bedford had procured for her--all women
loved Jeanne d’Arc--and put on her war-worn suit of male clothing.
The English soldiers who guarded her immediately spread abroad the
bruit that Jeanne had relapsed, and she was brought to trial for this
contumacious offence against the Holy Church. The second trial was
short and to the point; she tried to show that her jailers had not kept
faith with her, but her pleadings were brushed aside, and finally she
gave the _responsio mortifera_--the fatal answer--which legalized the
long attempts to murder her. Thus spoke she: “God hath sent me word by
St. Catherine and St. Margaret of the great pity it is, this treason
to which I have consented to abjure and save my life! I have damned
myself to save my life! Before last Thursday my Voices did indeed tell
me what I should do and what I did then on that day. When I was on the
scaffold on Thursday my Voices said to me: ‘Answer him boldly, this
preacher!’ And in truth he is a false preacher; he reproached me with
many things I never did. If I said that God had not sent me I should
damn myself, for it is true that God has sent me; my Voices have said
to me since Thursday: ‘Thou hast done great evil in declaring that what
thou hast done was wrong.’ All I said and revoked I said for fear of
the fire.”
To me this is the most poignant thing in the whole trial, which I have
read with a frightful interest many times. It seems to bring home the
pathos of the poor struggling child, and her blind faith in things
which could not help her in her hour of sore distress.
Jules Quicherat published a very complete edition of the Trial in 1840,
which has been the basis for all the accounts of Jeanne d’Arc that
have appeared since. An English translation was published some years
ago which professed to be complete and to omit nothing of importance.
But this work was edited in a fashion so vehemently on Jeanne’s
side, with no apparent attempt to ascertain the exact truth of the
judgments, that I ventured to compare it with Quicherat, and I have
found some omissions which to the translator, as a layman, may have
seemed unimportant, but which, to a doctor, seem of absolutely vital
importance in considering the truth about the Maid. These omissions
are marked in the English by a row of three dots, which might be
considered to mark an omission,--but on the other hand might not.
Probably the translator considered them too indecent, too earthly, too
physiological, to be introduced in connexion with the Maid of God. But
Jeanne had a body, which was subject to the same peculiarities and
abnormalities as the bodies of other people; and upon the peculiarities
of her physiology depended the peculiarities of her mind.
Jean d’Aulon, her steward and loyal admirer, said definitely in the
Rehabilitation Trial, in 1456:--
“Qu’il oy dire a plusiers femmes, qui ladicte Pucelle ont veue par
plusiers foiz nues, et sceue de ses secretz, que oncques n’avoit eu la
secret maladie de femmes et que jamais nul n’en peut rien cognoistre ou
appercevoir par ses habillements, ne aultrement.”
I leave this unpleasantly frank statement in the original Old French,
merely remarking that it means that Jeanne never menstruated.
D’Aulon must have had plenty of opportunities for knowing this, in
his position as steward of her household in the field. He guards
himself from innuendo by saying that several women had told him.
Jeanne’s failing to become mature must have been the topic of amazed
conversation among all the women of her neighbourhood, and no doubt
she herself took it as a sign from God that she was to remain virgin.
It is especially significant that she first heard her Voices when
she was about thirteen years of age, at the very time that she
should have begun to menstruate; and that at first they did not come
regularly, but came at intervals, just as menstruation itself often
begins. Some months later she was informed by the Voices that she was
to remain virgin, and thereby would she save France, in accordance
with a prophecy that a woman should ruin France, and a virgin should
save it. Is it not probable that the idea of virginity must have been
growing in her mind from the time when she first realized that she
was not to be as other women? Probably the delusion as to the Voices
first began as a sort of vicarious menstruation; probably it recurred
when menstruation should have reappeared; we can put the idea of
virginity into the jargon of psycho-analysis by saying that Jeanne had
well-marked “repression of the sex-complex.” The mighty forces which
should have manifested themselves in normal menstruation manifested
themselves in her furious religious zeal and her Voices. Repression
of the sex-complex is like locking up a giant in a cellar; sooner or
later he may destroy the whole house. He ended by driving Jeanne d’Arc
to the stake. That was a nobler fate than befalls some girls, whom the
same giant drives to the streets; nobler, because Jeanne the peasant
was of essentially noble stock. Her mother was Isabel Romée--the
“Romed woman”--the woman who had had sufficient religious fervour to
make the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Rome that she might acquire
the merit of seeing the Holy Father; Jeanne herself made a still more
dangerous pilgrimage, which has won for her the love of mankind at the
cost of her bodily anguish. Madame her mother saved her own soul by
her pilgrimage, and bore an heroic daughter; Jeanne saved France by
her courage and devotion to her idea of God. And this would have been
impossible had she not suffered from repression of the sex-complex and
seen visions therefore.
Another remarkable piece of evidence has been omitted from the English
translation. It was given by the Demoiselle Marguerite la Thoroulde,
who had taken Jeanne to the baths and seen her unclothed. Madame la
Thoroulde said, in the Latin translation of the Rehabilitation Trial
which has survived: “Quod cum pluries vidit in balneo et stuphis
[sweating-bath] et, ut percipere potuit, credit ipse fore virginem.”
That is to say, she saw her naked in the baths and could see that she
was a virgin! What on earth did the good lady think that a virgin
would look like? Did she think that because Jeanne did not look like a
stout French matron she must therefore be a virgin? Or did she see a
strong and boyish form, with little development of hips and bust, which
she thought must be nothing else but that of a virgin? That is the
explanation that occurs to me; and probably it also explains Jeanne’s
idea that by wearing men’s clothes she would render herself less
attractive to the mediæval soldiery among whom her lot was to be cast.
An ordinary buxom young woman would certainly not be less attractive
because she displayed her figure in doublet and hose; Rosalind is none
the less winsome when she acts the boy; and I should have thought that
Jeanne, by wearing men’s clothes, would simply have proclaimed to her
male companions that she was a very woman. But if the idea be correct
that she was shaped like a boy, with little feminine development, the
whole mystery is at once solved. It is to be remembered that we know
absolutely nothing about Jeanne’s appearance[4]; the only credible
hint we have is that she had a gentle voice.
In the Rehabilitation Trial several of her companions in arms swore
that she had had no sexual attraction for them. It is quaint to
read the evidence of these respectable middle-aged gentlemen that
in their hot and lusty youth they had once upon a time met at least
one young girl after whom they had not lusted; they seem to consider
that the fact proved that she must have come from God. Anatole France
makes great play with them, but it would appear that his ingenuity
is in this direction misplaced. Is it not possible that Jeanne was
unattractive to men because she was immature--that she never became
more than a child in mind and body? Even mediæval soldiery would not
lust after a child, especially a child whom they firmly believed to
have come straight from God! It must be remembered that to half of
her world Jeanne was unspeakably sacred; to the other half she was
undeniably a most frightful witch. Even the executioner would not
imperil his immortal soul by touching her. It was the custom to spare
a woman the anguish of the fire, by smothering her, or rendering her
unconscious by suddenly compressing her carotids with a rope before the
flames leaped around her. But Jeanne was far too wicked for anybody
to touch in this merciful office; they had to let her die unaided;
and afterwards, so wicked was her heart, they had to rescue it from
the ashes and throw it into the Seine. Is it conceivable that men who
thought thus would have ventured hell-fire by making love to her? Yet
more--it is quite possible that she had no bodily charms whatever; we
know nothing of her appearance. The story that she was charming and
beautiful is simply sentimental legend. Indeed, it is difficult not to
become sentimental over Jeanne d’Arc.
A noteworthy feature in her character was her Puritanism. She
prohibited her soldiers from consorting with the prostitutes that
followed the army; sometimes she even forced them to marry these women.
Naturally the soldiers objected most strongly, and in the end this was
one of the causes that led to her downfall. Jeanne used to run after
the prohibited girls and strike them with the flat of her sword; in one
case the girl was killed. In another the sword broke, and King Charles
asked, very sensibly, “Would not a stick have done quite as well?”
This is believed by some people to have been the very sword of Charles
Martel which the priests had found for her at St. Catherine’s command,
and naturally the soldiers, deprived of their female companions,
wondered what sort of a holy sword could it have been which could
not even stand the smiting of a prostitute? When people suffer from
repression of the sex-complex the trouble may show itself either by
constant indirect attempts to find favour in the eyes of individuals
of the opposite sex, or sometimes by actually forbidding all sexual
matters; Puritanism in sexual affairs is often an indication that
all is not quite well with a woman’s subconscious mind; nor can one
confine this generalization to one sex. It is not for one moment to be
thought that Jeanne ever had the slightest idea of what was the matter
with her; the whole of her delusions and Puritanism were to her quite
conscious and real; the only thing that she did not know was that her
delusions were entirely subjective--that her Voices had no existence
outside her own mind. Her frantic belief in them led her to an heroic
career and to the stake. She did not consciously repress her sex;
Nature did that for her.
Women who never menstruate are not uncommon; most gynæcologists
see a few. Though they are sometimes normal in their sexual
feelings--sometimes indeed they are even nymphomaniacs or very nearly
so--yet they seldom marry, for they know themselves to be sterile, and,
after all, most women seem to know at the bottom of their hearts that
the purpose of women is to produce children.
But there is still more of psychological interest to be gained from a
careful reading of the first trial. It is possible to see how Jeanne’s
unstable nervous system reacted to the long agony. We had better, in
order to be fair, make quite certain why she was burned. These are the
words uttered by the good Bishop of Beauvais as he sentenced her for
the last time:--
“Thou hast been on the subject of thy pretended divine revelations
and apparitions lying, seducing, pernicious, presumptuous, lightly
believing, rash, superstitious, a divineress and blasphemer towards
God and the Saints, a despiser of God Himself in His sacraments;
a prevaricator of the Divine Law, of sacred doctrine and of
ecclesiastical sanctions; seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic,
erring on many points of our Faith, and by these means rashly guilty
towards God and Holy Church.”
This appalling fulmination, summed up, appears to mean--if it means
anything--that she believed that she was under the direct command of
God to wear man’s clothes. To this she could only answer that what she
had done she had done by His direct orders.
Theologians have said that her answers at the trial were so clever
that they must have been directly inspired; but it is difficult to see
any sign of such cleverness. To me her character stands out absolutely
clearly defined from the very beginning of the six weeks’ agony; she is
a very simple, direct, and superstitious child struggling vainly in the
meshes of a net spread for her by ecclesiastical politicians who were
determined to sacrifice her to serve the ends of brutal masters. She
had all a child’s simple cunning; when the Bishop asked her to repeat
her Paternoster she answered that she would gladly do so if he himself
would confess her. She thought that if he confessed her he might
have pity on her, or, at least, that he would be bound to send her
to Heaven, because she knew how great was the influence wielded by a
Bishop; she thought that she might tempt him to hear her in the secrets
of the confessional if she promised to repeat her Paternoster to him!
Poor child--she little knew what was at the bottom of the trial.
She sometimes childishly boasted. When she was asked if she could sew,
she answered that she feared no woman in Rouen at the sewing; just
so might answer any immature girl of her years to-day. She sometimes
childishly threatened; she told the Bishop that he was running a great
risk in charging her. She had delusions of sight, smell, touch, and
hearing. She said that the faces of Saints Catherine and Margaret were
adorned with beautiful crowns, very rich and precious, that the saints
smelled with a sweet savour, that she had kissed them, that they spoke
to her.
There was a touch of epigram about the girl, too. In speaking of her
banner at Rheims, she said: “It had been through the hardships--it were
well that it should share the glory.” And again, when the judges asked
her to what she attributed her success, she answered, “I said to my
followers: ‘Go ye in boldly against the English,’ _and I went myself_.”
The girl who said that could hardly have been a mere military
_mascotte_. Yet, in admitting so much, one does not admit that she may
have been a sort of Amazon. As the desperation of her position grew
upon her she began to suffer more and more from her delusions; while
she lay in her dungeon waiting for the fatal cart she told a young
friar, Brother Martin Ladvenu, that her spirits came to her in great
numbers and of the smallest size. When despair finally seized upon her
she told “the venerable and discreet Maître Pierre Maurice, Professor
of Theology,” that the angels really had appeared to her--good or bad,
they really had appeared--in the form of very minute things[5]; that
she now knew that they had deceived her. Her brain wearied by her long
trial of strength with the Bishop, common sense re-asserted its sway,
and she realized--the truth! Too late! When she was listening to her
sermon on the scaffold in front of the fuel destined to consume her,
she broke down and knelt at the preacher’s knees, weeping and praying
until the English soldiers called out to ask if she meant to keep them
there for their dinner; it is pleasing to know that one of them broke
his lance into two pieces, which he tied into the form of a cross and
held it up to her in the smoke that was already beginning to arise
about her.
Her last thoughts we can never know; her last word was the blessed name
of Jesus, which she repeated several times. In public--though she had
told Pierre Maurice in private that she had “learned to know that her
spirits had deceived her”--she always maintained that she had both seen
and believed them because they came from God; her courage was amazing,
both physical and moral. She was twice wounded, but she said that
she always carried her standard so that she would never have to kill
anybody--and that in truth she had never killed anybody.
Her extraordinary accomplishment was due to the unbounded superstition
of the French common people, who at first believed in her implicitly;
it was Napoleon, a French general, who said that in war the moral is
to the spiritual as three is to one; our Lord said, “By faith ye shall
move mountains”; and it must not be forgotten that she went to Orleans
with powerful reinforcements which she herself estimated at about ten
to twelve thousand men. This superstition of the French was more than
equalled by the superstition of the English, who looked upon her as a
most terrifying witch: one witness at the Rehabilitation Trial said
that the English were a very superstitious nation, so they must have
been pretty bad. Indeed, most of the witnesses at that trial seem to
have been very superstitious; one must examine their evidence with care
lest one suddenly finds that one is assisting at a miracle.
She seems to have been hot-tempered and emphatic in her speech, with
a certain tang of rough humour such as would be natural in a peasant
girl. A notary once questioned the truth of something she said at her
trial; on inquiry it was found that she had been perfectly accurate;
Jeanne “rejoiced, saying to Boisguillaume that if he made mistakes
again she would pull his ears.” Once during the trial she was taken ill
with vomiting, apparently caused by fish-poisoning, that followed after
she had eaten of some carp sent her by the Bishop. Maître d’Estivet,
the promoter of the trial, said to her, ‘Thou _paillarde_!’ (an abusive
term), ‘thou hast been eating sprats and other unwholesomeness!’ She
answered that she had not; and then she and d’Estivet exchanged many
abusive words. The two doctors of medicine who treated her for this
illness gave evidence, and it is pleasing to see that they seem to
have been able to rationalize a trifle more about her than most of
her contemporaries. But, taken all through, her evidence gives the
impression of being exceedingly simple and straightforward--just the
sort of thing to be expected from a child.
It is noteworthy that a great many witnesses at the Rehabilitation
Trial swore that she was “simple.” Did they mean that she was
half-witted? Probably not. More probably it was true that she always
wanted to spare her enemies, when, in accordance with the custom of the
Hundred Years’ War, she should rather have held them for ransom if they
had been noble or slain them if they had been poor men. To the ordinary
brutal mediæval soldiery such conduct would appear insane. Possibly,
of course, the term “simple” might have been used in opposition to the
term “gentle.”
May I be allowed to give a vignette of Jeanne going to the
burning, compiled from the evidence of many onlookers given at the
Rehabilitation Trial? She assumed no martyresque imperturbability; she
did not hold her head high in the haughty belief that she was right
and the rest of the world wrong, as a martyr should properly do. She
wept bitterly as she walked to the fatal cart from the prison-doors;
her head was shaven; she wore woman’s dress; her face was swollen and
distorted, her eyes ran tears, her sobs shook her body, her wails moved
the hearts of the onlookers. The French wept for sympathy, the English
laughed for joy. It was a very human child who went to her death
on May 30th, 1431. She was nineteen years of age--according to some
accounts, twenty-one--and, unknown to herself, she had changed the face
of history.
The Empress Theodora
This famous woman has been the subject of one of the bitterest
controversies in history; and, while it is impossible to speak fully
about her, it is certain that she was a woman of remarkable beauty,
character, and historical position. For nearly a thousand years
after her death she was looked upon as an ordinary--if unusually
able--Byzantine princess, wife of Justinian the lawgiver, who was one
of the ablest of the later Roman Emperors; but in 1623 the manuscript
was discovered in the Vatican of a secret history, purporting to have
been written by Procopius, which threw a new and amazing light on her
career.
Procopius--or whoever wrote this most scurrilous history--states
that the great Empress in early youth was an actress, daughter of a
bear-keeper, and that she had sold tickets in the theatre; her youth
had been disgustingly profligate: he narrates a series of stories
concerning her which cannot be printed in modern English. The worst of
these go to show that she was an ordinary type of Oriental prostitute,
to whom the word “unnatural,” as applied to vice, had no meaning.
The least discreditable is that the girl who was to be Empress had
danced nearly naked on the stage--she is not the only girl who has done
this, and not on the stage either. She had not even the distinction
of being a good dancer, but acquired fame through the wild abandon
and indecency with which she performed. At about the age of twenty
she married--when she had already had a son--the grave and stately
Justinian: “the man who had never been young,” who was so great and
learned that it was well known that he could be seen of nights walking
about the streets carrying his head in a tray like John the Baptist.
When he fell a victim to Theodora’s wiles he was about forty years
of age. The marriage was bitterly opposed by his mother and aunts,
but they are said to have relented when they met her, and even had a
special law passed to legalize the marriage of the heir to the throne
with a woman of ignoble birth; and, after the death of Justin, Theodora
duly succeeded to the leadership of the proudest court in Europe. This
may be true; but it does not sound like the actions of a mother and old
aunts. One would have thought that a convenient bowstring or sack in
the Bosphorus would have been the more usual course.
So far we have nothing to go by but the statements of one man; the
greatest historian of his time, to be sure--if we can be certain that
he wrote the book. Von Ranke, himself a very great critical historian,
says flatly that Procopius never wrote it; that it is simply a
collection of dirty stories current about other women long afterwards.
The Roman Empire seems to have been a great hotbed for filthy tales
about the Imperial despots: one has only to remember Suetonius, from
whose lively pages most of our doubtless erroneous views concerning the
Palatine “goings on” are derived; and to recall the foul stories told
about Julius Cæsar himself, who was probably no worse than the average
young officer of his time; and of the last years of Tiberius, who was
probably a great deal better than the average. Those of us who can cast
their memories back for a few years can doubtless recall an instance of
scurrilous libel upon a great personage of the British Empire, which
cast discredit not on the gentleman libelled but upon the rascal who
spread the libel abroad. It is one of the penalties of Empire that
the wearer of the Imperial crown must always be the subject of libels
against which he has no protection but in the loyal friendship of his
subjects. Even Queen Victoria was once called “Mrs. Melbourne,” though
probably even the fanatic who howled it did not believe that there was
any truth in his insinuation. And Procopius did not have the courage
to publish his libels, but preferred to leave to posterity the task
of finding out how dirty was Procopius’ mind. Probably he would not
have lived very long had Theodora discovered what he really thought of
her. He was wise in his generation, and had ever the example of blind
Belisarius before him to teach him to walk cautiously.
Démidour in 1887, Mallet in 1889, and Bury also in 1889, have once more
reviewed the evidence. The two first-mentioned go very fully into it,
and sum up gallantly in Theodora’s favour; but Bury is not so sure.
Gibbon, having duly warned us of Procopius’ malignity, proceeds slyly
to tell some of the most printable of the indecent stories. Gibbon is
seldom very far wrong in his judgments, and evidently had very little
doubt in his own mind about Theodora’s guilt. Joseph Maccabe goes over
it all again, and “regretfully” believes everything bad about her.
Edward Foord says, in effect, that supposing the stories were all
true, which he does not appear to believe, and that she had thrown
her cap over the windmills when she was a girl--well, she more than
made up for it all when she became Empress. After all, it depends upon
how far we can believe Procopius; and that again depends upon how far
we can bring ourselves to believe that an exceedingly pretty little
Empress can once upon a time have been a _fille de joie_. That in its
turn depends upon how far each individual man is susceptible to female
beauty. If she had been a prostitute it makes her career as Empress
almost miraculous; it is the most extraordinary instance on record of
“living a thing down,” and speaks volumes for her charm and strength of
personality.