Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (42 page)

Loiseleur adapted his function to that of provocateur and encouraged Joan
“to defy the court and resist attempts to induce her to modify her statements … and [said] that she must not trust the judges,” who sought to destroy her. While Joan didn’t need encouragement to speak her mind, often impudently, rarely with deference to those who considered themselves her betters, the one man she reflexively considered an ally—she, at least, held confession too sacred to cloak perfidy—didn’t caution Joan to still her sharp tongue. Instead, Loiseleur advocated her impertinence, and thus the enmity of those who heard it.

Joan’s first public examination was held on a Wednesday, February 21, 1431. The sun had yet to rise when Jean Massieu retrieved her from her cell, and though it was but a short distance to the castle’s chapel, it was long as well. Joan couldn’t be marched, or even walked, through the courtyard. The ankle cuffs of her leg irons, connected to each other by only a few links of chain, made it impossible for her to advance more than a few inches with each step. Joan could hobble forward at a torturously slow pace, but not walk. The two moved under cover of armed guard, Massieu’s job to watch she didn’t stumble and fall. From the time of her capture, in May, nine months earlier, Joan had refused women’s clothes from her captors. By the time she left Arras, perhaps sooner, she encountered no one inclined to risk offering her a change of male attire. Having not been captured with a portmanteau, she appeared before her judges, some richly robed, in clothes she had worn every day for months. Whether she was allowed to attend to personal hygiene or had the means to launder her clothes
was the prerogative of her captors, who answered to the demands of the English tribunal. She was as pallid as a life spent entirely indoors predicted; she was, undoubtedly, gaunt.

Perhaps, as it had been when she approached the gates of Chinon, Joan had an angel by her side with—as Anouilh described Saint Michael—
“two white wings reaching from the sky to the ground.” Maybe “the light that comes in the name of the voice” fell around her as she walked, bright enough to burn away faces that spat at her. If the tongues of angels stopped up her ears, maybe she didn’t hear all the cries of “Death to the witch!”

“Tell us if you are the son of God,” the high priest Caiaphas demanded.

“You have said so,” Jesus said.

Caiaphas tore his robes.
“Now you have heard him blaspheme,” he told the crowd of scribes and elders assembled in the dark, an unofficial predawn hearing, as the Sanhedrin could take formal action only by daylight. In either case, the verdict preceded the trial. “What is your judgment?”

“He deserves death,” the crowd said. “Then they spat in his face, and struck him and some slapped him.”

To rid himself of the rabble collecting around Jesus, Caiaphas, the power-hungry high priest who
“sought false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death,” had to convince the Romans that in declaring himself messiah, a temporal king anointed by God, Jesus challenged the Romans’ authority. Just as Cauchon seized the opportunity to satisfy his ambitions by proving Joan a witch, so had Caiaphas assumed the responsibility to provide the occupying Romans with a verdict demanding Jesus’s execution. Scriptures used to contextualize and explain human experience were also legal divining rods, and in the trials of both Jesus and Joan they were a source of sacred vocabulary.
“You will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven,” Jesus said, drawing on the second-century
BC
prophet Daniel, who wrote,
“There came one like the son of man … and to him was given dominion.”

The isolated answers Jesus gave to the Sanhedrin were drawn from Old Testament apocalyptic prophecies he claimed as validation of his kingship, and they were used as evidence of the capital crime of blaspheming. Joan’s answers and the Scripture summoned to condemn her for blasphemy were drawn from New Testament accounts of the life and death of Jesus and were used similarly by and against her.

Cauchon began the proceedings by explaining to Joan that she was before the Inquisition because she had a
diffamatio
: “Considering the public rumor and common report and also certain information already mentioned, after mature consultation with men learned in canon and civil law, we decreed that you be summoned to answer interrogations in matters of faith and other points truthfully according to law and reason.”

She would willingly appear before him, Joan said, and requested Cauchon “summon in this suit ecclesiastics of the French side equal in number to those of the English party.” No answer to the request was recorded, and no cleric representing Joan’s political side came forth.

On paper, the trial appears orderly; in the moment it was not so much uncontrolled as purposefully disorienting and disrespectful, one assessor interrupting another, firing questions so fast at Joan that
“just when one of them was asking a question or she was replying to it, another would interrupt her; so much that several times she said to her interrogators, ‘My dear lords, please take your turns!’ ” Massieu was only one among many who were
“surprised to see how well she could reply to the subtle and tricky questions that were asked her, questions that an educated man would have found it difficult to answer well” under more civilized proceedings. Not only did the assessors interrupt one another, but
“they often asked Joan questions in several parts, and several of them asked her difficult questions at the same time … The examination generally went on from eight to eleven hours,” so long that some of the assessors complained of the exhaustion following their participation in what “proceeded in an atmosphere of ‘the greatest tumult.’ ” That neither Joan’s spirit nor her mental acuity flagged as
she resisted the combined force of dozens of opponents who protested they were being overburdened by what was, for nearly all of them, the passive role of sitting in judgment attests to her unnatural fortitude even more powerfully than her stunts on the battlefield.

Cauchon and Joan clashed immediately over a point they would continue to argue on subsequent days of interrogation. “Will you place your hands on the holy gospels, and promise to speak the truth in answer to all questions put before you?”

“I do not know what you wish to examine me on,” Joan said. “Perhaps you might ask such things that I would not tell.”

“Will you swear to speak the truth upon those things which are asked you concerning the matter of faith and about what you know?”

“About my father and mother and what I have done since I had taken the road to France, I will gladly swear. As for my revelations from God, I will say nothing, not to save my head.”

“Will you or will you not swear to speak the truth in those things which concern our faith?”

“Once again and on many occasions,” Cauchon admonished Joan to swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and over and over she refused. In the end they made a tacit compromise when “Jeanne, kneeling, and with her two hands upon the book, namely the missal,” made a qualified oath. She’d tell the truth, but only so much of it.

The interrogation followed a basic chronological order but often returned to topics covered during earlier sessions or verged into non sequiturs intended to disorient Joan. The first day’s questioning opened on a pedestrian note. Joan was
“alone, sitting on a high chair” and facing forty-two clerics, over whom Cauchon presided. The master of ceremonies on this inaugural and self-consciously historic occasion, Cauchon examined her himself, as he wouldn’t for most of the subsequent sessions.

“Where were you baptized?”

“In the church of Domrémy.”

“Who were your godfathers and godmothers?”

“One was named Agnes, another Jeanne, another Sibylle. My godfathers were Jean Lingué, another Jean Barrey. I know there were others, as my mother told me there were.”

“What priest baptized you?”

“Master Jean Minet, as far as I know.”

“Is Master Minet still living?”

“I believe so.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen, I think.”

“Recite the Paternoster for us.”

“I will gladly, if you hear me in confession.”

“Two clerics of the French language will hear your Paternoster.”

“I will recite it in confession, not otherwise.”

“If we are to believe you know your prayers, you must recite them.”

“I said I would, in confession.” On this point Joan did not compromise. She would not say her prayers before the tribunal. “She said also that she came from God,” the record states, “and that there is nothing for her to do here, and asked to be sent back to God, from whom she came.”

Cauchon summarized the first day’s accomplishments:

Whereupon we, the aforementioned bishop, forbade Jeanne to leave the prison assigned to her in the castle of Rouen without our authorization under penalty of conviction of the crime of heresy. She answered that she did not accept this prohibition, adding that if she escaped, none could accuse her of breaking or violating her oath, since she had given her oath to none. Then she complained that she was imprisoned with chains and bonds of iron. We told her that she had tried elsewhere and on several occasions to escape from prison, and therefore, that she might be more safely and securely guarded, an order had been given to bind her with chains of iron. To which she replied: “It is true that I wished and still wish to escape, as is lawful for any captive or prisoner.”

The trial record shows that forty-eight clerics joined Cauchon for the second day of public interrogation, relocated to the castle’s great hall, with room enough for an audience as well as seventy clerics. Joan, of course, missed the proximity of the sacraments and the altar. Over the following two weeks, while
“leading Joan from her prison to her
place of trial,” Massieu “several times passed the castle chapel,” and “let her, at her request, stop there and say her prayers.” When Jean d’Estivet caught him, he threatened the usher with prison for “having let that excommunicated whore come near [t]here without permission.”

The sentence might have been a foregone conclusion, but Joan had not been excommunicated—not yet. To assemble the justification for her punishment would require another three months. As it was the second day of questioning, Joan had an additional objection to the oath: she’d taken it the day before.

“Not even a prince, Joan, can refuse to take an oath when required in matter of faith.”

“I swore yesterday; that should be quite enough. You overburden me.”

The deadlock was resolved, as it had been the previous day, with Joan’s taking a qualified oath, swearing “to speak the truth on that which concerned the faith”—
the
, not
her
, faith.

The judges’ interrupting each other and speaking all at once made it difficult to accurately record all that was said, let alone who said what, and while each day’s proceedings began with a roll call of those judges who attended the session, the trial record rarely identifies particular prosecutors other than Cauchon and his deputy, “the distinguished professor of sacred theology, Master Jean Beaupère.” The canon of Rouen Cathedral, Beaupère, who had already decided Joan’s voices had “natural causes” arising from
“the malice inherent in the nature of women,” commenced the day’s examination by “exhort[ing] her to answer truly, as she had sworn, what he should ask her.”

“You may well ask me such things,” Joan said, “that to some I shall answer truly, and to others I shall not … If you were well informed about me, you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing except by revelation.”

Beaupère took revelation as the focus of that day’s examination, from the arrival of the voice and accompanying light, to what advice Saints Catherine and Margaret had given her, and how they had paved her way to Robert de Baudricourt.

“Was it Captain Baudricourt who advised you to take the clothing of a man?”

This question, the record states, “she refused to answer many
times. Finally she said she would charge no one with this; and she changed her testimony many times.” In fact, though the question was rephrased many times, in many ways, on many days, the topic of cross-dressing not so much an occasional digression as a routine jam in a cul-de-sac, Joan’s answer was consistent. She had assumed the clothing of a man in service to her vocation; it was a choice ordained by God and none other. Not even for the privilege of attending Mass would she agree to put on women’s clothes.