Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (43 page)

On the trial’s third day, sixty-two clerics watched as Joan and the bishop recapitulated the previous days’ stalemate. After Cauchon had, as the record states, “thrice admonished her to take the oath, the said Jeanne answered, ‘Give me leave to speak,’ ” and when the great hall had quieted enough that she could be heard, Joan said, “By my faith, you could ask me things such as I would not answer. Perhaps I shall not answer you truly in many things that you ask me, concerning the revelations; for perhaps you would constrain me to tell things I have sworn not to utter, and so I should be perjured, and you would not want that. I tell you, take good heed of what you say, that you are my judge, for you assume a great responsibility, and overburden me. It should be enough to have twice taken the oath.”

“When did you last take food and drink?” Beaupère asked Joan.

“Since yesterday noon I have not taken either.”

“Has your voice come to you?”

“I heard it yesterday and to-day.”

“At what hour yesterday?”

“Three times: once in the morning, once at vespers, and once in the evening, when the Ave Maria was rung.”

“What were you doing yesterday morning when the voice came to you?”

“I was sleeping, and the voice awakened me.”

“How did it wake you? Did it touch you on the arm?”

“It woke me without touching me.”

“Was it in the room with you?”

“I don’t know, but it was in the castle.”

“Did you not thank it and kneel down?”

“I was sitting on the bed, and I put my hands together. I asked for help, and the voice told me to answer you boldly.”

Joan turned on her chair to accuse Cauchon once more directly. “You say that you are my judge,” she repeated. “Take care what you are doing for in truth I have been sent by God and you put yourself in great danger.” The assessors knew well enough to maintain an unreadable expression, but the audience packed into the gallery felt no such responsibility, and, like Joan’s previous warnings to the bishop, her words inspired a communal gasp released in a static of whisper, anxious and amused. Cheekiness was one thing; to upbraid the bishop by claiming an intimacy with God that was not available to him, another.

“Do you know if you are in God’s grace?” Beaupère asked, hoping to trick Joan into admitting the capital crime of presuming on God’s generosity, and silencing the gallery. As it happened, the question provoked one of Joan’s most often cited and admired parries.

“If I am not, may God put me there,” she said, “and if I am, may God so keep me.” Here, Joan’s genius lay not in the words—they weren’t her own—but in the uncanny speed at which she arrived at a response that allowed her to avoid making an original statement about so dangerous a subject as God’s grace.
Instead, she used a scrap of a prayer validated by the Church for many years. She had a memory that was not only capacious but also well organized, its function unimpeded by sleep deprivation, hunger, and the relentless abuse by her captors.

“I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace,” Joan added for Beaupère. “If I were in a state of sin, I do not think that the voice would come to me.”

The examination arrived at the infamous fairy tree by way of an interrogative stroll through the Domrémy of Joan’s childhood, passing by the fields where, Joan emphasized, she “did not go with the sheep and the other animals” and pausing to consider the ragged bands of children who trailed home “much wounded and bleeding” after a day spent warmongering in Maxey. Try as it might to maintain a cordon sanitaire between its doctrine and secular culture, the Church has never been able to comb faith apart from fantasy. No church ever has. Joan’s accusers were as heterodox as they were high-minded, giving credence to the very things Joan dismissed with a curt “I put no faith in that.”

“I heard from my brother that it is said I received messages at the tree, but that was not so, and I told him I did not, quite the contrary. The sick, when they can rise, go to the tree and walk about it,” and they drank from a spring beside it, “to restore their health. I have seen them myself, but I do not know whether they are cured or not.”

“Is there not in your part of the country an oak-wood?” the examiner asked Joan.

“Yes.”

“And do fairies not repair there?”

“I do not know,” she said. “I have never heard that they do.”

“What of the prophecy that out of this wood would come a maid who should work miracles?”

“I put no faith in that.” The prophecy with which Joan was familiar said France would be saved by a maid from the marshes of Lorraine, not one who emerged from the oak wood behind her father’s house.

Though the late-nineteenth-century illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès typically remained faithful to the plots of familiar folk and fairy tales he chose as subjects for his short silent films, for
Jeanne d’Arc
he scrambled what was known of Joan’s real life. Released in 1900, the film begins with an apparition of three tinted pastel figures, more fairy godmother than angel, that emerge, hanging in midair beside the trunk of a great tree standing, like a sentinel, at the entrance to the tangled heart of a forest. Joan’s sheep scatter; she falls to her knees before Saint Michael, beseeching him, as if to release her from her vocation. Behind her, the shadowed forest looms, and she staggers from her knees to her feet, pressing her hands to her head in operatic fright inspired by the looming terror of the task at hand. The angels vanish after the first seventeen seconds of the ten-minute film and return for a single ambiguous visitation in the eighth minute: twelve seconds of what might be a memory or a dream.

The sensibilities that characterize Méliès’s body of work—sin, redemption, rebirth—and his obvious delight in devilry and mischief are distinctly medieval, a fin-de-siècle
danse macabre.
Like chapbooks, his films unfold in silence, without title cards, a medium for
the illiterate that draws no distinction among supernatural manifestations—not any more than the average man or woman of the Middle Ages. Imps, ghosts, angels, mermaids, a talking moon, Satan in the role of innkeeper: fancy animates a world lighter than the one Méliès places reverently on the shoulders of France’s national heroine. Not only does his careful, sanitized script for
Jeanne d’Arc
eliminate the supernatural from his heroine’s mortal life; it returns Joan to female dress when not armored for battle, demonstrating how long-lived and universal is the unconscious response to those aspects of Joan that challenge patriarchal rule.

As if he had siphoned the religion from Joan’s plot into Bluebeard’s, Méliès saturates the seventeenth-century fairy tale inspired by atrocities committed by Gilles de Rais with enough Christian symbology to recast a fairy tale of original sin as a parable of redemption.
“La Barbe-Bleue” offers a screen onto which Méliès projects Christian interpretations of the bride’s disobedience and its results. After handing his newest wife a huge, phallic key to a forbidden room, Bluebeard leaves her without a chaperone to save her from her weak nature. Immediately, the bride succumbs to a spell cast by an antic devil that capers around her, out of her sight. When she slides the key into the forbidden lock’s hole, she discovers the wives who predeceased her, murdered and hanging on hooks. In horror, she drops the key into a pool of blood that has spilled, menses-like, from their ravished corpses. No matter how hard the bride tries to wash the phallic key to remove evidence of her transgression, the stain of its profane baptism is indelible. Before this fatally curious Eve can be rescued from her base nature, the Virgin Mary must fight the devil for her soul. Virtue triumphs; the dead wives are resurrected; the film’s last frame gathers the saved under the wings of a great white dove.

The unpolluted Maid of
Jeanne d’Arc
, however, ascends to her reward unaided by the Virgin. Dressed in bright, virginal white—forever beyond the reach of sexual sin—Joan rises from the flames of her pyre in a phoenix-like resurrection and arrives in a heaven over which the Eye of Providence (the same that tops the dollar bill’s green pyramid) beams from out of its triangle: a tidy reduction of the Trinity. When she raises her arms to form a cross, the audience understands: the Maid’s white gown isn’t a bride’s but a messiah’s: Joan is
the Christ. God the Father and God the Son would be out of place in Méliès’s paradise, which, as it turns out, includes only women and might not be any more heavenly than being placed on a limitless pedestal (
Fig. 35
).

As was true of all medieval institutions of higher learning, the University of Paris,
“surpassing all others in the fame of its masters and the prestige of its studies in theology and philosophy,” employed a method of critical thought that came to be known as Scholasticism, its labyrinthine dialectical methods and preoccupation with Christian orthodoxy the original source of the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. As conceived by Thomas Aquinas, Scholasticism undertook to answer questions of faith rationally, by the application of logic, a quixotic pursuit if ever there were one. And once reason had demonstrated it couldn’t justify God or his universe, Scholastics didn’t abandon what had revealed itself as a specious effort but clung more intently to
“only a hard shell of argument by logic, practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by ‘hoary-headed children.’ ”

The fourth and fifth days of Joan’s public questioning were attended by fifty-four and fifty-six clerics, respectively, and by however many illustrious guests Cauchon had summoned. After the obligatory conflict over the oath, this time terminated by Joan’s telling Cauchon, “You ought to be satisfied, for I have sworn enough,” Beaupère, identified on these two days as the lead prosecutor, asked Joan how she had been since the trial’s previous session, three days earlier.

“You see well enough how. I have been as well as possible.”

Had she heard her voices? he wanted to know.

“Yes, truly, many times.”

The interrogation that followed was devoted to hairsplitting over Joan’s angels, a topic the canon could not in its inconsistency settle.

Angels assume a corporeal presence throughout the Old and New Testaments.
They stand in roads and block the passage of man and beast;
they sit under oak trees,
wrestle,
climb up and down ladders,
and brandish swords. They also speak through
the mouths of donkeys,
go up in flames over altars, carry the virtuous up to heaven,
and smite the wicked from above. From the Greek
angelos
, for “messenger,” angels most often assume no more than a voice to express God’s wishes. Audible only to those whom they visit, they speak a language different from mortal tongues. For Joan, who knew nothing of Scholasticism’s baroque categorization of heavenly beings, the topic presented the danger of her inadvertently revealing what traditions of demonology would condemn as evidence of witchcraft.
Counterfeits of reality were held to be the work of the devil, not God, and Joan’s descriptions of her angels evolved under the pressure of relentless questioning from voices accompanied by a great light to solid beings whom Joan not only saw and heard but touched and kissed.

Was their hair long, did it hang down, was it the only thing between their heads and their crowns? Was it Saint Michael who told her to wear male clothing? Did Saint Margaret speak English? Did she have arms and legs or a “different kind of member”? In what form exactly had Saint Michael appeared? Was he carrying a set of scales? (The archangel’s role on Judgment Day was to weigh souls.)

Joan was clever enough to avoid answering questions she understood as traps but too proud to hide her exasperation.

“Was Saint Michael naked?”

“Do you think God has not wherewithal to clothe him?” she countered.

“Did he have any hair?”

“Why should it be cut off?”

Cauchon, who
“had invited a number of prominent people to watch him prosecute what he believed would be a clear case against an illiterate nineteen-year-old peasant girl who was either a fraud or possessed by evil spirits, or both,” had anticipated a glorious public triumph. By the conclusion of the sixth session, which focused on her alleged promotion of the cult of personality that had developed around her, it was clear he was to be disappointed, at the least. If Cauchon’s cronies weren’t amused by Joan’s impertinence, and his unwilling accomplices too cowed to smile, the audience of bigwigs the bishop had collected to bear witness to his crowning glory—and no seat went untaken, there wasn’t standing room—felt no such loyalty. Joan had an audience, and she couldn’t resist playing to it. Jean
Le Sauvage, a Dominican who spoke of the case
“with great repugnance,” said he had “never seen a girl of that age wreak such havoc with her examiners.”