Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (40 page)

Le Crotoy, in whose prison Alençon had spent five years awaiting ransom, lay twelve days to the west, through Avesnes-le-Comte, Lucheux, and Drugy, and offered a respite of three weeks on the Normandy coast, protected from the eyes of all the people, some of whom traveled a considerable distance to join the restless clots gathered around the castle in which Joan was housed. Not every pilgrim was hostile.
“She received the ladies of Abbeville, who had arrived by boat down the Somme, and who came to see her as a marvel of their sex,” and she was allowed to go to Mass—the last she would ever attend—celebrated by a fellow prisoner, Nicolas de Queuville, a priest
who also heard her confession. It was a hiatus she’d look back on as presenting comfort, if not freedom.

There was this, too: She’d never seen a beach before; she’d never seen the sea. She hadn’t seen any body of water wider than a river, its right bank visible from its left. At Le Crotoy, only the marsh grass underfoot was familiar, footprints filling rapidly with water. But look west, where the sun set, and the grass disappeared, and the land as well. The bay of the Somme spread out flat, shallows and sandbars sliding almost imperceptibly into the sea, a desolate scene in December, as there was no water deep enough for a port of any kind. If she admitted its beauty, she must have seen its menace as well. The land on which she stood ran out; there was no more.

They left Le Crotoy on December 20, a three-day caravan along
the Normandy coast. Joan was in irons, watching through bars to see how it was that sometimes there was no line drawn between sky and water, and the water wasn’t any color at all, none she could name. If she was lucky, she saw a sunset pave the sea with fire, a straight path burning like a fuse toward another day’s end. Joan spent one night at Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, and then it was December 21. The cell she slept, or tossed, in still stands, built just inside the ruins of the old city walls. Eu had a prison, too, as did Argues, once the home of William the Conqueror. From Argues, the party quit the coast and turned south to Rouen, where Joan arrived on December 23, 1431.

A cage had been made to measure for the girl once fitted for the best armor money could buy.
“I have heard from Étienne Castille, the blacksmith,” Jean Massieu, the trial’s usher, testified, “that he made an iron cage for her, in which she was held in a standing position, secured by the neck, the hands, and the feet, and that she was kept in it from the moment when she was brought to Rouen until the opening of her trial.” No eyewitness claimed to have seen Joan caged, so it might have been used as a threat rather than the actual physical trap for which it was intended. The weeks of Joan’s approach to Rouen had allowed time to prepare for the incarceration of so dangerous a sorceress, one with untested powers, an individual who leaped off ramparts and survived falls that would kill a mortal: a witch with the ability to fly. No one saw her in the cage, but the mason Pierre Cusquel, one of the few local craftsmen to own a massive scale, saw it soon after it was built.
“I saw it being weighed at my house,” he testified—probably to determine its price.

By the time Joan arrived, some of the Rouennais had been waiting near the city’s gates for as long as a day, protecting what turf they’d claimed, elbowing and pressing forward, taking courage in numbers and jeering and profaning freely where smaller crowds just gaped and pointed. Rouen wasn’t a town but a city, the second most populous in France, with throngs to fill its streets and squares. When Joan arrived, it had been occupied for more than a decade, since January 1419, when it surrendered to the English after a merciless six-month siege. Henry V had marched on the city in July 1418 to discover its fortifications had been augmented in the three years since Agincourt. Now Rouen had one of the largest garrisons in France, and, with seventy thousand citizens, it was a prize Henry was set on acquiring, and with it the rest of Normandy. As he hadn’t enough troops to make an assault on
the freshly buttressed walls, he made do with surrounding them and their sixty towers bristling with crossbows. Resigned to starving them into submission, he cut off all means of getting food into the city, and by the time winter arrived, the Rouennais had eaten their dogs, cats, and even rats before at last, inevitably, they began slaughtering their horses. In December, the city’s leaders made the decision to push all the old, the ill, and the orphaned—twelve thousand people, nearly a fifth of the population—outside the city walls. Henry, recognizing a wicked and dishonorable advantage he was not above seizing, refused to allow the would-be refugees to cross the line of siege, so there they remained, trapped in the frozen ditch between the city walls and the enemy forces, huddled together. On Christmas Day, Henry allowed the Church to distribute bread to the living, but the gift did no more than awaken hunger and forestall an inevitable end. The clamor they made died one voice at a time. No one survived. Rouen’s was the story of Orléans, without the Maid.

“Joan was brought to this city of Rouen by the English and imprisoned in the castle of Rouen,” a Rouennais remembered, “in a room beneath the staircase on the side looking out to the open country”—a tower cell on the north side of Bouvreuil castle, built by Henry upon his victory over Rouen and named for the hillock on which it stood. Bouvreuil overlooking the city with its deep stone gutters running with color from the dye works, staining the Seine blue one week, orange the next. The boy king, Henry VI, had been living in Bouvreuil castle since June 1429, save a trip to England for his November 6 coronation. He would have a second, in Paris, on December 16, 1431, six and a half months after Joan was executed.

The room in which Joan was held for the last five months of her life was eight steps up from the castle’s oval courtyard,
“lined with buildings constructed against the walls: the great hall, where governmental functions took place; kitchens and servants’ quarters … and … in the middle of the courtyard … a chapel.” She wasn’t underground, but with no source of light other than its one barred window her cell was
“very dark,” and it was barren, although large enough to allow room for as many as half a dozen visitors when Cauchon called on her with a cadre of examiners. The trial’s usher, Jean
Massieu, who accompanied Joan back and forth from her cell to the chambers in which the trial was conducted, testified that there was
“a great bed in it, on which she slept,” always in leg irons. “I know for certain that at night she lay chained by the legs with two pairs of irons, and tightly secured by another chain which passed through the legs of her bed.” That chain was “attached to a great block of wood five or six feet long, by means of a lock.” Night and day she was left in the care of five “guards of the lowest sort … common torturers”—
houssepailliers
, the usher called them. In medieval French the word was the equivalent of “ruffian,” increasingly used in place of “abuser.” As usher, or in the words of Cauchon, “executor of the commands and convocations emanating from our authority,” Massieu overheard them mock her cruelly at every opportunity. Pretending to have overheard information critical to her case, they purposefully raised her hopes of release one day and told her she’d surely be burned on the next. Three of these ruffians remained locked within her cell and were with her at all times. They moved about freely; chains rendered her
“unable to stir from her place.” Should she need to use the latrine, with which all such keeps were furnished, a guard unlocked and accompanied her to the closet-size room with a hole in the floor through which waste dropped directly into a cesspit or moat. In winter months, it would have been gelid. Typically, the atmosphere that filled such privies was so saturated with ammonia gas that they came to be called
garderobes
, or cloakrooms, where guests could expect their coats to be hung, as the caustic smell was believed to kill vermin.

The latrine wasn’t directly annexed to the cell like the cell’s two ancillary spaces. One was a landing for the stairs with hidden access to the other, used by spies: a room large enough to accommodate several men at once, from which it was possible to spy on Joan in her cell and eavesdrop on conversations that unfolded between her and those, like her false confessor, sent to extract useful admissions. Because the English were “desperately afraid that she might escape,” the single room had but three keys. One was in the possession of the bishop of Winchester, identified by Régine Pernoud as the “real manager of the trial”—the same bishop who had embezzled funds earmarked for stamping out Hussites to raise an army of archers to fight the French.
A second key was entrusted to the man determined to please Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop Cauchon; the third to the bishop’s henchman, Jean d’Estivet, the trial’s promoter, or lead prosecutor.

That all three of her keepers were clerics allowed them to collectively preserve the conceit of Church custody, but Joan was in a military prison maintained by her enemies, which, as Jean Fabri, one of the few assessors, or assistant judges, to take Joan’s part, reported,
“greatly displeased some of the assessors” … as it was not “proper procedure … since she had been handed over to the Church … But no one dared raise the subject.” For a month, Joan asked that she be moved, as was her right, and placed in Church custody under the guard of women. The worst that had happened at Beaurevoir was that a knight, Haimond de Macy, had come calling and, as he testified for the nullification,
“tried several times playfully to touch her breasts. I tried to slip my hand in, but Joan would not let me. She pushed me off with all her might.” This aborted assault on the fortress of Joan’s unpolluted body was repeated in Rouen by a tailor sent to measure her for clothes she wore once before choosing flames over a dress. She slapped him forcefully, too. Initially held under relentless threat of attack, Joan
“complained to the Bishop of Beauvais, to the sub-Inquisitor, and to Master Nicolas Loiseleur that one of her guards had tried to rape her,” as the scribe Guillaume Manchon testified. Other witnesses heard, on other occasions, the same complaint, finally answered by a woman—the last who would be in a position, like Yolande and the old Duchess of Luxembourg, to intercede on her behalf.

“It’s grotesque,” Bedford whispers to Cauchon in Bresson’s
The Trial of Joan of Arc.
They eavesdrop through a chink in the wall as she is questioned in her cell.
“She’s lived with soldiers and slept on the straw with them and she’s still a virgin?”

“You’re not a maiden,” Jean d’Estivet says to Joan on the other side of the wall.

“I say I am. If you don’t believe me, too bad.”

“You don’t belong to God but to the Devil.”

“I belong to our Lord, Jesus Christ,” Joan says, calm in her defiance, calm and arrogant.

In Rouen, it was Joan who appealed for a vaginal examination to
prove her virginity. The procedure was conducted under the authority of the Duke of Bedford’s wife, Anne of Burgundy—Philip’s sister—and necessarily accomplished within a few weeks of Joan’s arrival, as the duke and duchess are known to have departed from Rouen on January 13, 1431. A notary for the trial passed on the unsubstantiated report that Bedford secreted himself in the spies’ annex and peered through the chink in the wall at Joan as she was examined by the matrons, who subsequently attested that the Pucelle was a true maid, uncorrupted. Fortuitously if not miraculously, her hymen remained intact despite evidence of an
“injury from riding horseback,” a conclusion that didn’t exonerate Joan but predicated Cauchon’s changing tack by swapping in one superstition for another. If, as she claimed, her power lay in her virginity, it stood to reason that
“if she were robbed of it, she would be disarmed, the spell would be broken, she would sink to the common level of women.”

“These women confirm that she’s a virgin,” Bresson’s Bedford tells Cauchon.

“Yes,” Cauchon says, “that’s what gives her strength.”

“If it’s her virginity that gives her strength we’ll make her lose her virginity.” Bedford is matter-of-fact, as if speaking of prying the lid off a box.

Joan had taken what measures she could against assault. Period illustrations allow costume historians to augment the descriptions culled from the trial record:

two layers of hosen securely fastened to the doublet, the inner layer being waist-high conjoined woolen hosen attached to the doublet by fully twenty cords, each cord tied into three eyelets apiece (two on the hosen and one on the doublet), for a total of forty attachment points on the inner layer of hosen. The second layer, which was made of rugged leather, seems to have been attached by yet another set of cords. Once this outfit was thus fastened together by dozens of cords connecting both layers to the doublet, it would be a substantial undertaking for someone to try to pull off these garments … The use of twenty cords on the inner layer was an excessively large and exceedingly awkward amount for this type of clothing, which
normally had no more than half that number, indicating that she was deliberately taking measures to further increase its protective utility at the cost of her own convenience.