Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (38 page)

From Clairoix, the prisoners were removed to Beaulieu-les-Fontaines, another twenty miles northeast of Compiègne, where Jean of Luxembourg had been quartered since early 1430, when he had taken the town. Joan was valuable, the ransom he anticipated high, and he wasn’t going to risk her escape or rescue by bewitched fanatics. Beaulieu’s fortress was secure; her cell was small, stone walls and stone floor with a single square window. He kept her locked in it for six weeks as negotiations between England and France broke down once again. Impatient to be freed and anticipating her ransom, Joan knew Charles had Talbot with which to bargain, and other English captains, too, as well as gold to gather to sweeten the deal. Guileless as she was, she never imagined her king hadn’t already started to negotiate for her release, and preoccupied with enemies in the French court angling to thwart her ambition, she hadn’t considered what her capture might be worth to the English. Nor did it occur to her that whoever proved her a sorceress could destroy not only the Valois line but also the French monarchy, dependent as it was on a drop of chrism over which the devil had now swept his foul paw. Joan had been called a witch, many
times, but she gave the epithet as little credence as she did any other—after all, being called a whore hadn’t tarnished her virginity. Joan was a visionary; she had friends, but she understood her quest in terms of roles rather than individuals with personalities that complicated outcomes. She didn’t see Charles, for example, as Georges Chastellain did: “There were frequent and diverse changes all around his person, for it was his habit … when one had been raised high in his company even to the summit of the wheel, that then he began to be annoyed with him, and, at the first occasion that could provide some sort of justification, he willfully reversed that person from high to low,” not so much hardening his heart as taking active pleasure in his sadism; from such cruelties he
“savored all the fruit all he could suck.” He was a fearful person, without the moral fiber to resist demonstrating what power he had, and Joan’s vision of her anointed Christian king was so convincing that it eclipsed the actual man, whom she defended on the eve of her execution as
“the noblest Christian of all Christians,” who “loves the faith and the Church better than any.”

There was only one person as eager as Joan to resolve her predicament, and as it happened, Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, was in Calais, as was the Duke of Bedford, when news of Joan’s capture reached him. He could prove Joan was a sorceress, Cauchon told his old friend. Too, he pointed out, Joan had been taken prisoner in what was rightfully his diocese, which he’d served loyally,
in loco
, until forced by the French to seek asylum in Rouen. It was
“not actually in the diocese,” Michelet pointed out, “but it was hoped that people would be easily deluded on that point.” Deluded or not, no one objected to the claim. On June 22, when the University of Paris again demanded the Duke of Burgundy relinquish Joan for trial, the letter was signed not by Graverent but by Cauchon.

Joan, however, was not in the duke’s possession, at least not yet, as Jean of Luxembourg, torn by competing influences, stalled for time.
For her second meeting with the Duke of Burgundy, this time accompanied by his wife, Isabel of Portugal, Joan was transferred from her tower room to the Episcopal palace next to the cathedral. The meeting
included Jean of Luxembourg and his wife, Jeanne of Béthune. Again, no record was made of the conversation among the five, but the result was that while husbands plotted the Maid’s fate, wives found themselves swayed by her fervor and convinced of her innocence. Joan remained at Beaulieu until July 10. She was allowed to keep Jean d’Aulon in her service, she had the company of her brother, and Jean of his, and she nearly managed to set all of them free.

“How did you expect to escape from Beaulieu?”

“I had hidden myself between two pieces of wood. I would have shut my guards up in the tower, had it not been for the porter, who had seen and encountered me. It did not please God to have me escape on this occasion.”

Maintaining that it was the prerogative of all prisoners to attempt escape, she would try again from a different tower. On July 11, as troops moved south toward Compiègne in anticipation of renewing the siege, Joan was moved to Jean of Luxembourg’s grander residence, at Beaurevoir. Jean’s wife, Jeanne of Béthune, might have influenced
“the choice of a more suitable residence for the prisoner … rather than a mere fortress made especially dangerous for a woman by the comings and goings of soldiers.”

Joan was chaperoned by three women for whom she
“conceived a great devotion”: Jean’s aunt the Demoiselle of Luxembourg; his wife, Jeanne of Béthune; and his stepdaughter, also named Jeanne. As the first step in securing any sympathy for Joan was to get her out of men’s clothing, the two older women were
“greatly distressed by her obstinate refusal to abandon her masculine clothes, and tried by every means to persuade her into a more feminine frame of mind.” When she rejected the dresses they offered, they appealed to her vanity and brought fine fabrics for her to consider, hoping to tempt her into accepting female attire tailored to her wishes.

“You were told to change your habit at Beaurevoir,” the examiner said. “Were you not?”

“Yes.”

“But you refused.”

“If I had had to do it, I would rather have at the request of these two ladies than of any other ladies in France, save my queen. But I had not God’s permission.”

“When do you cut your hair?” Jean’s stepdaughter asks Joan in Jacques Rivette’s
Joan the Maid
, as she watches her hack away at it with scissors.

Joan pauses before answering; the hand with the scissors is still. “When I look too much like a girl,” she says. “My hair goes with my clothes. I’ve been wearing them for so long. I have done and seen so much with them. I could not leave them.” It’s unlikely Joan’s
“black hair, cut round,” would have received any less meticulous attention than the rest of her appearance, but scriptwriters, unhampered by conflicting evidence, prefer she cut her own hair with a knife, a pair of crude shears, whatever she can find, sawing at it while she watches her transformation in a makeshift mirror. For Joan’s first haircut, Rivette chooses the polished breastplate of a suit of armor as a mirror (
Fig. 9
).

The old Demoiselle of Luxembourg moved on from dresses to extortion and
“cast herself at [her nephew’s] feet; in vain did she plead with him not to dishonor himself” and threatened to withhold his inheritance should he sell Joan to the English. “But what power had this good dame against the Norman gold of the King of England, and against the anathemas of the holy church? For if my Lord Jean had refused to give up this damsel suspected of … crimes against religion,” Anatole France explained, he would find himself exposed
“to heavy legal penalties.” Jean of Luxembourg was among the bankrupt nobility, and as
“the younger son of a younger son, he could not even count with any certainty on succeeding to his aunt’s fortune, which he fully expected his elder brother to dispute.” He needed whatever money he could get for the Maid’s ransom. Beyond that, the Duke of Burgundy was his feudal lord; he could not withhold Joan without fear of reprisals. For as long as his aunt was alive, he remained under her sway, but the facts remained: Jean of Luxembourg had Joan in his custody and would be forced to relinquish her to the Duke of Burgundy, who was in service to the king of England, who
“had a lien on French prisoners … Therefore he had a lien on Jeanne.”

Traveling from court to court, secular and ecclesiastical, all that summer of 1430, Pierre Cauchon lobbied tirelessly, an impresario
assembling the performance of a lifetime. The bishop needed a venue, a cast, scriptwriters, prompters, backstage support. The beauty of it was that the hardest part, publicity, had already taken care of itself. What European wasn’t awaiting the “beautiful trial” Cauchon promised? As for its prophesied verdict, whoever burned the most notorious and dangerous sorceress ever known would catapult himself into the kind of fame and power that could set him on the path to the papacy. The first reward Cauchon had picked out for himself was the archbishopric of Rouen, recently vacated. Among the unlucky witch’s fatal mistakes had been evicting him from his diocese, not only for incurring his enmity, but also because it was partly in consideration of the loss of that position and its advantages that the English
“placed him in charge of special missions in England, Paris, and elsewhere,” one of those missions being the trial of Joan of Arc. According to the chatty account book of Normandy’s receiver general, Pierre Surreau, who recorded that 765
livres tournois
were given to Cauchon in consideration of his tireless diplomatic service,
“for 153 days, ‘Pierre Cauchon took leave of the king, our lord, to do his business, as much in the city of Calais as in many trips to my lord the duke of Burgundy or to my lord John of Luxembourg in Flanders, to the siege before Compiègne, and at Beaurevoir in the matter of Joan called the Maid.’ ”

Joan, too, grew increasingly expensive, and Jean of Luxembourg had the right to turn her back over to the French for a ransom rather than selling her to the English. But only England was collecting the funds to pay for her. “In August 1430, a special tax was levied by the estates of Normandy to raise 120,000
livres
” to cover the expense of what would be a protracted trial involving scores of justices,
“of which 10,000 was set aside for Joan’s purchase” from Jean of Luxembourg, whose brother Louis of Luxembourg, the bishop of Thérouanne and councilor to the English king Henry, had negotiated the price. Louis—the rich older brother whom Jean expected to contest any will that favored him—was an intimate of both Bedford and Cauchon. As the dean of the church of Beauvais from 1414 until 1430, he divided his time between Beauvais and the archbishopric’s palace in Rouen. A year after Joan’s execution, Henry ordered his treasurer general in Normandy to pay Louis 1,000 livres in consideration of
“the great expenses which in the cause of our service he has had and has to pay.”

On September 18, 1430, the Demoiselle of Luxembourg expired, and her nephew’s conscience along with her, a crisis from which Joan averted her face by focusing obsessively on the fate of Compiègne, whose every skirmish she followed. When the city at last fell, on October 24,
“a kind of frenzy seems to have taken possession of her,” as Sackville-West described it. For the first time, Joan and her voices were at odds, and
“the argument continued daily for some time, Jeanne beseeching, the Voices refusing their permission” for her to attempt to escape from her captors. No matter how desperately Joan begged them to allow her to rush to the aid of Compiègne in an exultant, quixotic last act, she must not jump, Saints Catherine and Margaret said.

But without the distraction of war, the months slid silently by, each day as slow as emptiness could make it. She knew she had but a year; what consolation did she have but to look forward to her arrival at redemption? “I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven,” Galahad, a “maiden knight” as chaste as Joan, prays in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad.”

I muse on joy that will not cease,

Pure spaces clothed in living beams,

Pure lilies of eternal peace,

Whose odours haunt my dreams;

And, stricken by an angel’s hand,

This mortal armour that I wear,

This weight and size, this heart and eyes,

Are touch’d, are turn’d to finest air.

Like Galahad, like Roland, Joan was to be borne up from the battlefield by the wings of angels. Roland
“offers his right-hand glove to God, and Saint Gabriel takes it … God sent his angel cherubin down to him … Saint Michael … Saint Gabriel … they bear Roland’s soul to Paradise.” Joan knew God’s heroes died in rapture, in glory, not in a dank cell, exiled from combat. The claustrophobia of prison made her wild and reckless, she who was so impulsive by nature, to the point that
“she ceased to listen to her Voices, who forbade her the fatal leap.” As Beaurevoir’s tower was typical of medieval fortresses, with arrow slits rather than windows, a guard was posted only at
the bottom in the reasonable presumption that no one would try to escape from the top. Joan could not have jumped from a point lower than the tower’s crenellated rampart, which is estimated to have been seventy feet high, a measurement based in archaeological fact rather than hagiographic hyperbole. There was nothing that might have broken her fall—no tree limb or anything else that might encourage escape, no hillock of grass or cushion of undergrowth.
She landed in the castle’s dry moat.