It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in certain
circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of Beauvais had
entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew exactly, with
a perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least, that,
notwithstanding the effect which his theatrical _mise en scène_ had
produced upon the imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or earth
would induce that young soul to content itself with a lie. He knew it,
though lies were his daily bread; the children of this world are wiser
in their generation than the children of light. He had bidden his
English patrons to wait a little, and now his predictions were
triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of any man that on such
a certainty he could have calculated and laid his devilish plans; but
there would seem to have existed in the mediæval churchman a certain
horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic which was peculiar
to their age and profession, and which no better principle in their own
minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their delight of sensation,
in distinction from the other appetites perhaps scarcely less cruel
which other men indulged with no such horrified denunciation from the
rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared with Cauchon that sharp
sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her out; young Courcelles, so
modest and unassuming and so learned, among the rest; not L'Oyseleur, it
appears by the sequel. That Judas, like the greater traitor, was
struck to the heart; but the less bad man who had only persecuted, not
betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and only rejoiced that at last
the victim was ready to drop into the flames which had been so carefully
prepared.
The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried
with their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the
Archbishop's house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily
called together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner
escaped had been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one each
man rose again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of Fécamp,
led the tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done: to give
her up to the secular justice, "praying that she might be gently
dealt with." Man after man added his voice "to that of Abbot of Fécamp
aforesaid"--that she might be gently dealt with! Not one of them could
be under any doubt what gentle meaning would be in the execution;
but apparently the words were of some strange use in salving their
consciences.
The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In point
of view of the law, there should have followed another trial, more
evidence, pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to Monseigneur
de Beauvais that he now defied law, and no longer prolonged the useless
ceremonials of that mockery of justice. It is said that in coming out of
the prison, through the courtyard full of Englishmen, where Warwick
was in waiting to hear what news, the Bishop greeted them with all the
satisfaction of success, laughing and bidding them "Make good cheer, the
thing is done." In the same spirit of satisfaction was the rapid action
of the further proceedings. On Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on
Wednesday morning at eight 'clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear
her sentence, and there, without even that formality, the penalty was at
once carried out. No time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison
where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge
of her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful
scene, which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty
years after by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it had
become the only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest colours,
and themselves as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt that
so remarkable an occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a deep
impression on the minds of all those who were in any way actors in
or spectators of that wonderful scene. And every word of all these
different reports is on oath; but notwithstanding, a touch of
unconscious colour, a more favourable sentiment, influenced by the
feeling of later days, may well have crept in. With this warning we
may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy, all the more for the
atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no way idealised,
which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in which Jeanne
figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified, tormented, and
often trembling girl.
On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l'Advenu appeared in the
cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell--first "to announce
to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true contrition and
penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the said l'Advenu did
very carefully and charitably." Jeanne on her part received the news
with no conventional resignation or calm. Was it possible that she had
been deceived and really hoped for mercy? She began to weep and to cry
at the sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding the solemnity of her last
declaration, that she would rather bear her punishment all at once than
to endure the long punishment of her prison, her heart failed before
the imminent stake, the immediate martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and
earth: "My body, which has never been corrupted, must it be burned to
ashes to-day!" No one but Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her
perfect purity; was it good for nothing but to be burned, that young
body not nineteen years old? "Ah," she said, "I would rather be beheaded
seven times than burned! I appeal to God against all these great wrongs
they do me." But after a while the passion wore itself out, the child's
outburst was stilled; calming herself, she knelt down and made her
confession to the compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to
"receive her Saviour" as she had so often prayed and entreated before.
It would appear that this had not been within Friar Martin's commission.
He sent to ask the Bishop's leave, and it was granted "anything she
asked for"--as they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned
convict. But the Host was brought into the prison without ceremony,
without accompanying candles or vestment for the priest. There are
always some things which are insupportable to a man. Brother Martin
could bear the sight of the girl's anguish, but not to administer to
her a diminished rite. He sent again to demand what was needful, out of
respect for the Holy Sacrament and the present victim. And his request
had come, it would seem, to some canon or person in authority whose
heart had been touched by the wonderful Maid in her long martyrdom. This
nameless sympathiser did all that a man could do. He sent the Host with
a train of priests chanting litanies as they went through the streets,
with torches burning in the pure early daylight; some of these exhorted
the people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her. She must have
heard in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the clergy, the
pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the voices, that
sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the city was
touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been sympathetic to
Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was about to die:
she had stood bravely against the world and answered like a true
Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets, a girl just
nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated for the time.
Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over, received
at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that rite which
He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not permitted
to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the sacred
commemoration. All the time she was still _preschée_ and admonished
by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop and his
followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different parts in
that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult to say.
The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal warrant
for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of mind
is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it, and
a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope and
strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that she
sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation for
which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already mentioned,
importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring to get from
her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and was herself
a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil spirits, not
good,--drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be they good spirits,
or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act of giving her her
last communion, Brother Martin paused with the consecrated Host in his
hands.
"Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer."
Then this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your
voices?" Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the voices,
which have deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not give this
deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus, who did not
live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. "So,
Jeanne," he said, "you have always told us that your 'voices' said you
were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us
the truth at last." Then Jeanne answered: "Truly I see that they have
deceived me." The report is Cauchon's, and therefore little to be
trusted; but the sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that,
even in records more trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her.
The other spectators all report another portion of this conversation.
"Bishop, it is by you I die," are the words with which the Maid is said
to have met him. "Oh Jeanne, have patience," he replied. "It is because
you did not keep your promise." "If you had kept yours, and sent me to
the prison of the Church, and put me in gentle hands, it would not
have happened," she replied. "I appeal from you to God." Several of the
attendants, also according to the Bishop's account, heard from her the
same sad words: "They have deceived me"; and there seems no reason why
we should not believe it. Her mind was weighed down under this dreadful
unaccountable fact. She was forsaken--as a greater sufferer was; and a
horror of darkness had closed around her. "Ah, Sieur Pierre," she said
to Morice, "where shall I be to-night?" The man had condemned her as a
relapsed heretic, a daughter of perdition. He had just suggested to her
that her angels must have been devils. Nevertheless perhaps his face
was not unkindly, he had not meant all the harm he did. He ought to have
answered, "In Hell, with the spirits you have trusted"; that would have
been the only logical response. What he did say was very different.
"Have you not good faith in the Lord?" said the judge who had doomed
her. Amazing and notable speech! They had sentenced her to be burned for
blasphemy as an envoy of the devil; they believed in fact that she was
the child of God, and going straight in that flame to the skies. Jeanne,
with the sound, clear head and the "sane mind" to which all of
them testified, did she perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the
inconceivable contradiction? "Ah," she said, "yes, God helping me, I
shall be in Paradise."
There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to the
mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully not
repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed "as if
it had been a thing of small importance," that her story of the angel
bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither expected nor
intended to be believed. For this we have to thank L'Oyseleur and the
rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that dreadful morning in the
prison.
Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the
long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre
was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy Office.
She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the crowded
courtyard where her "chariot" awaited her. It was her confessor's part
to remain by her side, and Frère Isambard and Massieu, the officer,
both her friends, were also with her. It is said that L'Oyseleur rushed
forward at this moment, either to accompany her also, or, as many say,
to fling himself at her feet and implore her pardon. He was hustled
aside by the crowd and would have been killed by the English, it is
said, but for Warwick. The bystanders would seem to have been seized
with a sudden disgust for all the priests about, thinking them Jeanne's
friends, the historians insinuate--more likely in scorn and horror of
their treachery. And then the melancholy procession set forth.
The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part:
eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortège,
as the car rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid
attained to the calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all the
high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs that
gaped and gazed upon her on every side. In the midst of the consolations
of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears, other words, the
plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips, "Rouen! Rouen!" she
said; "am I to die here?" It seemed incredible to her, impossible. She
looked about still for some sign of disturbance, some rising among the
crowd, some cry of "France! France!" or glitter of mail. Nothing: but
the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the soldiers roughly clearing
the way, the rude chariot rumbling on. "Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you
shall yet suffer because of this," she murmured in her distraction, amid
her moanings and tears.
At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered
with three erections--one reaching up so high that the shadow of it
seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an
enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner
himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure
unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form. Two
platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches
for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil
officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn.
Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it matter? No
sentence at all was read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which
was illegal also. She was probably placed first on the same platform
with her judges, where there was a pulpit from which she was to be
_preschée_ for the last time. Of all Jeanne's sufferings this could
scarcely be the least, that she was always _preschée_, lectured,
addressed, sermonised through every painful step of her career.
The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul
scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance,
when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her
errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas
Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text
was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all the other
members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut
off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church
might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor,
giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence
the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of
invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace."
Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop
himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final
repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The narrative shows
that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in her career, paid no
attention to the tirade levelled at her from the president's place.
"She knelt down on the platform showing great signs and appearance of
contrition, so that all those who looked upon her wept. She called on
her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed glorious Virgin Mary,
and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She called specially--was
it with still a return towards the hoped for miracle? was it with the
instinctive cry towards an old and faithful friend?--"St. Michael, St.
Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would seem to have been a moment in
which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this
wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying,
speaking--sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen companions
of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her. She asked
the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say a mass
for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive her.
Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry of
"Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?" No reason is given for
the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned
a campaign in Normandy with Alençon. Had there been perhaps some special
hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in
the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?
There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their
fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to
the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the
deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the
profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he
would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That which
her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon
the saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of
men. But as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop's evil voice scarcely
silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient--the entire crowd, touched
to its heart with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and
lamentation, "_à chaudes larmes_" according to the graphic French
expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow
and fellow-feeling and impotence to help. Winchester--withdrawn high on
his platform, ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a
spectator merely--wept; and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was
overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon's
cheeks. The very world stood still to see that white form of purity, and
valour, and faith, the Maid, not shouting triumphant on the height of
victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature
could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us
here all day; must we dine here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain
that simulated cruelty. And then the executioner stepped in and seized
the victim.
It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be no
chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim the
atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that the
ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach her:
the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel explanation.
There was a writing set over the little platform which gave footing to
the attendants below the stake, upon which were written the following
words:
JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER,
BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL,
DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and religion
branded the Maid of France--one half of her countrymen: the other half,
silent, speaking no word, looking on.
Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees,
asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no
cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way
seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal
parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all
the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of her
disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its broken
edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried, pressing it
against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross to preserve as
a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold and silver. This
was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few remaining steps and
mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high over all that sea of
heads. When she was bound securely to her stake, she asked again for a
cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church, to be held before her
as long as her eyes could see. Frère Isambard and Massieu, following her
closely still, sent to the nearest church, and procured probably some
cross which was used for processional purposes on a long staff which
could be held up before her. The friar stood upon the faggots holding
it up, and calling out broken words of encouragement so long that Jeanne
bade him withdraw, lest the fire should catch his robes. And so at last,
as the flames began to rise, she was left alone, the good brother always
at the foot of the pile, painfully holding up with uplifted arms the
cross that she might still see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up
with the red glow of the fire, the horrified, trembling crowd like an
agitated sea around. The wild flames rose and fell in sinister gleams
and flashes, the smoke blew upwards, by times enveloping that white
Maid standing out alone against a sky still blue and sweet with
May--Pandemonium underneath, but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came
a great cry from among the black fumes that began to reach the clouds:
"My voices were of God! They have not deceived me!" She had seen and
recognised it at last. Here it was, the miracle: the great victory
that had been promised--though not with clang of swords and triumph of
rescuing knights, and "St. Denis for France!"--but by the sole hand
of God, a victory and triumph for all time, for her country a crown of
glory and ineffable shame.
Thus died the Maid of France--with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips--till the
merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat; and
one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the fire,
wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through the air
in the good monk's trembling hands--from eyes which opened bright upon
the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so long thought
and dreamed.
CHAPTER XVIII -- AFTER.
The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known
in history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the
great catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been fact
and evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been recorded
all the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the most
innocent of all, sought out Frère Isambard, and confessed to him in an
anguish of remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had done.
An Englishman who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in which the
witch should be burned, when he rushed forward to keep his word was
seized with sudden compunction--believed that he saw a white dove
flutter forth from amid the smoke over her head, and, almost fainting
at the sight, had to be led by his comrades to the nearest tavern for
refreshment, a life-like touch in which we recognise our countryman; but
he too found his way that afternoon to Frère Isambard like the other. A
horrible story is told by the _Bourgeois de Paris_, whose contemporary
journal is one of the authorities for this period, that "the fire was
drawn aside" in order that Jeanne's form, with all its clothing burned
away, should be visible by one last act of shameless insult to the
crowd. The fifteenth century believed, as we have said, everything that
is cruel and horrible, as indeed the vulgar mind does at all ages; but
such brutal imaginings have seldom any truth to support them, and there
is no such suggestion in the actual record. Isambard and Massieu heard
from one of the officials that when every other part of her body
was destroyed the heart was found intact, but was, by the order of
Winchester, flung into the Seine along with all the ashes of that
sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics should be kept.
Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed
this dreadful scene. "When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried out
for water, holy water, and called to St. Michæl; then hung her head upon
her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently died." "Being
in the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud voice the holy
name of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of paradise, she
gave up her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name of Jesus in
sign of the fervour of her faith." One of the Canons of Rouen, standing
sobbing in the crowd, said to another: "Would that my soul were in the
same place where the soul of that woman is at this moment"; which indeed
is not very different from the authorised saying of Pierre Morice in
the prison. Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he who wrote _superba
responsio_ on his margin, and had written down every word of her long
examination--his occupation for three months,--says that he "never wept
so much for anything that happened to himself, and that for a
whole month he could not recover his calm." This man adds a very
characteristic touch, to wit, that "with part of the pay which he had
for the trial, he bought a missal, that he might have a reason for
praying for her." Jean Tressat, "secretary to the King of England"
(whatever that office may have been), went home from the execution
crying out, "We are all lost, for we have burned a saint." A priest,
afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, "did not believe that there was any man
who could restrain his tears."
The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none
are visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is
extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed
inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be continually
pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed to have bought
all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges, among whom were
the most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but of none of this
is there any proof given. That they were anxious to procure Jeanne's
condemnation and death, is very certain. Not one among them believed
in her sacred mission, almost all considered her a sorceress, the most
dangerous of evil influences, a witch who had brought shame and loss to
England by her incantations and evil spells. On that point there
could be no doubt whatever. She alone had stopped the progress of the
invaders, and broken the charm of their invariable success. But all that
she had done had been in favour of Charles, who made no attempt to serve
or help her, and who had thwarted her plans, and hindered her work so
long as it was possible to do so, even when she was performing miracles
for his sake. And Alençon, Dunois, La Hire, where were they and all the
knights? Two of them at least were at Louvins, within a day's march,
but never made a step to rescue her. We need not ask where were the
statesmen and clergy on the French side, for they were unfeignedly glad
to have the burden of condemning her taken from their hands. No one
in her own country said a word or struck a blow for Jeanne. As for
the suborning of the University of Paris _en masse_, and all its
best members in particular, that is a general baseness in which it is
impossible to believe. There is no appearance even of any particular
pressure put upon the judges. Jean de la Fontaine disappeared, we are
told, and no one ever knew what became of him: but it was from Cauchon
he fled. And nothing seems to have happened to the monks who attended
the Maid to the scaffold, nor to the others who sobbed about the
pile. On the other side, the Doctors who condemned her were in no way
persecuted or troubled by the French authorities when the King came to
his own. There was at the time a universal tacit consent in France to
all that was done at Rouen on the 31st of May, 1431.
One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already
sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that
dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It
was two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and
sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly allied
to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie existing
between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the hostile
indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to Jeanne, who
had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of Paris and
the adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much against them as
against the English, and the national sentiment to which she, a patriot
before her age, appealed,--bidding not only the English go home, or
fight and be vanquished, which was their only alternative--but
the Burgundians to be converted and to live in peace with their
brothers,--did not exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards, or Normans
was the daughter of far Champagne a fellow countrywoman. There was
neither sympathy nor kindness in their hearts on that score. Some were
humane and full of pity for a simple woman in such terrible straits; but
no more in Paris than in Rouen was the Maid of Orleans a native champion
persecuted by the English; she was to both an enemy, a sorceress,
putting their soldiers and themselves to shame.
I have no desire to lessen our(1) guilt, whatever cruelty may have
been practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much
was practised--the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final
stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and
often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that she
was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A prisoner of
war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in her downfall
was a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame is greater upon
those who sold than upon those who bought; and greatest of all upon
those who did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did not move a finger, to
rescue. And indeed we have been the most penitent of all concerned; we
have shrived ourselves by open confession and tears. We have quarrelled
with our Shakespeare on account of the Maid, and do not know how we
could have forgiven him, but for the notable and delightful discovery
that it was not he after all, but another and a lesser hand that
endeavoured to befoul her shining garments. France has never quarrelled
with her Voltaire for a much fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to the
remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the assembly
held on the Thursday after Jeanne's death, how and when we are not told.
It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is the place of
meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole testimonial is
that the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous
records: but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom
by responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever
certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all
judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison,
stand up and give their report of what happened there--part of which
we have quoted--their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last
acknowledged herself to be deceived. According to their own showing it
was exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed
to make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems
no reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as
substantially true. The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's
part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived
in respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart.
It was to her the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning
showed her the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her
renewed conviction. The scene at the stake would lose something of its
greatness without that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled
soul.
Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according
to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a
danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine
that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and
accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions
of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had
witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of
witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a
long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and
a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The _procès_
was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of
Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman
of coat armour--against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop
of Beauvais, and Lemaître, the Deputy Inquisitor--with other persons
chiefly concerned in the judgment. Some of these men were dead, some,
wisely, not to be found. The result was such a mass of testimony as put
every incident of the life of the Maid in the fullest light from her
childhood to her death, and in consequence secured a triumphant and full
acquittal of herself and her name from every reproach. This remarkable
and indeed unique occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused
any enthusiasm. Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the
extraordinary calm of contemporary opinion which was still too near the
catastrophe to see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of
news which hindered the common knowledge of a trial--a thing too heavy
to be blown upon the winds,--while it promulgated the legend, a thing
so much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an
extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many
ages, and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory,
in the country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots
and champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear than
daily bread.
In the new and wonderful spring of life that succeeded the revolution
of 1830, the martyr of the fifteenth century came to light as by a
revelation. The episode of the Pucelle in Michelet's _History of France_
touched the heart of the world, and remains one of the finest efforts of
history and the most popular picture of the saint. And perhaps, though
so much less important in point of art, the maiden work of another
maiden of Orleans--the little statue of Jeanne, so pure, so simple, so
spiritual, made by the Princess Marie of that house, the daughter of the
race which the Maid held in visionary love, and which thus only has ever
attempted any return of that devotion--had its part in reawakening
her name and memory. It fell again, however, after the great work of
Quicherat had finally given to the country the means of fully
forming its opinion on the subject which Fabre's translation, though
unfortunately not literal and adorned with modern decorations, was
calculated to render popular. A great crop of statues and some pictures
not of any great artistic merit have since been dedicated to the memory
of the Maid: but yet the public enthusiasm has never risen above the
tide mark of literary applause.
There has been, however, a great movement of enthusiasm lately to gain
for Jeanne the honour of canonisation(2); but it seems to have failed,
or at least to have sunk again for the moment into silence. Perhaps
these honours are out of date in our time. One of the most recent
writers on the subject, M. Henri Blaze de Bury, suggests that one reason
which retards this final consecration is "England, certainly not a
negligible quantity to a Pope of our time." Let no such illusion move
any mind, French or ecclesiastical. Canonisation means to us, I presume,
and even to a great number of Catholics, simply the highest honour
that can be paid to a holy and spotless name. In that sense there is
no distinction of nation, and the English as warmly as the French, both
being guilty towards her, and before God on her account--would welcome
all honour that could be paid to one who, more truly than any princess
of the blood, is Jeanne of France, the Maid, alone in her lofty humility
and valour, and in everlasting fragrance of modesty and youth.
(1) The writer must add that personally, as a Scot, she has
no right to use this pronoun. Scotland is entirely guiltless
of this crime. The Scots were fighting on the side of France
through all these wars, a little perhaps for love of France,
but much more out of natural hostility to the English. Yet
at this time of day, except to state that fact, it is
scarcely necessary to throw off the responsibility. The
English side is now our side, though it was not so in the
fifteenth century: and a writer of the English tongue must
naturally desire that there should at least be fair play.
(2) I am informed, however, that she is already "Venerable,"
not a very appropriate title--the same, I presume, as
Bienheureuse, which is prettier,--and may therefore be
addressed by the faithful in prayer, though her rank is
only, as it were, brevet rank, and her elevation incomplete.