Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (44 page)

“Did your own party firmly believe you to be sent from God?”

“I do not know whether they do, and I refer you to their own opinion. But if they do not, nevertheless I am sent from God.”

“Do they believe rightly in deeming you to be sent from God?”

“If they believe I am sent from God they are not deceived.”

“Are you king of the Jews?” Pontius Pilate asked.

“You have said so,” Jesus said.

As the Sanhedrin’s predawn convocation hadn’t been official, if the crucifixion was to be accomplished according to the letter of the law, the accused had to be arraigned before the Roman prefect.
“Do you not hear how many things they testify against you?” Pilate asked Jesus.

“But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the governor wondered greatly.”

“Have nothing to do with that righteous man,” Pilate’s wife warned him, with as much success as Nicolas de Houppeville had had with Cauchon.

From March 4 to March 9, Joan had a respite. Cauchon, on the other hand, was very busy. He called his henchmen to his home every day to review the minutes of the trial and submitted them to an esteemed expert in clerical law, Jean Lohier, for review, expecting praise rather than the opprobrium he received. Lohier pointed out that the hearings had been held within a castle’s locked hall, not in ecclesiastical chambers. No one had apprised the accused of the so-called evidence against her. Jailed in a military prison, she was under predation by enemy guards. She had no counsel to help her, an untutored nineteen-year-old, respond to the questioning of up to sixty
judges at once, and anyone who attempted to visit and advise her was
“harshly turned back and threatened.” In the opinion of Jean Lohier, the trial was invalidated by any one of these irregularities.

Livid, Cauchon commanded Lohier to attend the remainder of the hearings. But the visiting expert wanted
“no more to do with” a process he understood to be motivated “more from hate than anything else,” and Lohier left town for Rome, never to return. If he informed the pope of what was unfolding in Rouen, no document suggests any action was taken or even considered. After deliberating with a handful of University of Paris colleagues, Cauchon made the decision to “go on with our trial as we have begun,” with one exception. Now the examinations would take place in Joan’s cell because, the bishop explained, the assessors’ “various occupations” made it impossible for more than a few of them to attend at once. The unstated was so obvious it hardly needed stating. Cauchon wanted to terminate the involvement of assessors he suspected might be sympathetic to Joan’s plight and remove the trial from the public eye.

From Saturday, March 10, until Saturday, March 17, Joan was interrogated in her cell nine times. Among the disadvantages for her was that as she no longer hobbled back and forth between the keep and the castle’s great hall, she could no longer look forward to the respite of a few minutes outdoors, spring unfolding into the air, or of occupying a room other than her cell. The only sky Joan saw was through the grilled square of her one window. Too, she was at the mercy of enemies who had suddenly drawn that much closer and invasive, coming and going as they pleased and crowding into the room in which she slept and ate and knelt by her bed with her hands clasped. On each occasion, Cauchon’s lieutenant, Jean de la Fontaine, Nicolas Midi, Gérard Feuillet, at least one notary, and one or more of the toadying minor assessors accompanied the bishop. For the final session Thomas de Courcelles and Jean Beaupère joined them. The topics addressed in the private sessions included the design of her standard, her leap from the tower at Beaurevoir, her foreknowledge of her martyrdom, her blasphemy in receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist while wearing men’s clothes, and her alleged theft of the bishop of Senlis’s horse.

“It was bought for two hundred saluts. Whether he received them
or not, I do not know, but there was an arrangement and he was paid. I wrote him that he could have the horse back if he wished. I didn’t want it, for it was no good for carrying a load.” But even an otherwise useless hackney was good enough to trot the discourse back to either Joan’s “sumptuous and ostentatious clothes” or her angels. As Lohier had warned Manchon, the judges were determined
“to catch her out if they can with her own words—that is to say, in her assertions concerning her visions when she says ‘I am sure about them.’ Were she to say ‘it seems to me’ instead of ‘I am sure,’ in my opinion no one could find her guilty.”

But Joan was sure and, as she said repeatedly, more afraid of displeasing her voices than of displeasing a mortal bishop. No amount of explaining the critical difference between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant could save someone who said, “It seems to me that God and the Church are one, and no difficulty should be made about this. Why do you make difficulties about this?”

A document dated March 14, 1431, and signed by Dunois, acknowledges his receipt from Charles of three thousand
livres tournois
to finance a military campaign in Normandy. It can’t prove but only intimate that, as France had made no attempt to officially ransom Joan, Dunois had at last convinced Charles to attempt her rescue. The following month, La Hire received six hundred
livres tournois
for his “agreeable service,” as Charles put it, in accomplishing unnamed
“causes that move us.” If an attempt to rescue Joan was made, it eluded the notice of any chronicler. Joan’s would-be saviors didn’t have to send spies into Rouen to discover the mortal, if not divine, impossibility of penetrating the guard surrounding Joan. From a distance it was obvious that the English had absolute control over a supremely fortified city. To attempt Joan’s rescue would have been certain suicide.

On March 18, a Sunday, and on Thursday, March 22, Cauchon
“convoked a group of the assessors at his house to discuss future procedure.”
It was given to Jean d’Estivet, as promoter, to draw up the charges, many redundant, some absurd. Cauchon and a few assessors visited Joan in her cell on Saturday, and she was read the transcript of all their questions and the answers she made to them—an opportunity to show off powers some of her judges attributed to either divine or diabolical inspiration rather than mortal genius. Her memory for detail was infallible, and not just in the short term. According to the assessor Pierre Daron, who testified for the nullification,
“they were interrogating her on a point on which she had already been interrogated a week before, she answered, ‘I have been asked that before, on such a day,’ or ‘I was interrogated about that a week ago and I answered like this’ … Then they read the answers for that particular day and found that Joan was speaking the truth.”

In answer to her request to attend Mass the following day, March 25, Palm Sunday, Cauchon told her she could, provided she wore women’s clothing, which she refused to do.

It was the first Holy Week Joan ever spent in a cell, and by its conclusion she wouldn’t have been to Mass even once, because she’d refused to trade her male clothing for the Eucharist on Easter as well. But bars couldn’t dampen the exaltation of Rouen’s church bells announcing the Messiah’s resurrection, and thus life everlasting for the faithful.
Five hundred, it’s estimated, all pealed at once, enough that were Joan to have set a hand against the wall or pressed her palms to the floor, she would have felt the shiver.

On Monday, a group of assessors met to review the articles of accusation; on Tuesday, Joan was brought before the forty or so judges assembled in the room just off the castle’s great hall, where she was, for the first time,
“offered counsel with the explanation that since she was not learned in letters and theology she might choose one of those present to advise her how to answer.” Joan, who had little reason to trust in such an offer, said she had “no intention of separating herself from God’s counsel,” and so the reading of the articles commenced. Each article began with an accusation, the evidence upon which it was based, and the date the evidence was given. One by one, Joan listened and responded, usually by referring to her previous testimony or sometimes dilating her original denial. On certain topics, Joan asked
for a few days or even a week to respond; she wanted to consult her voices.

Jean Le Maître’s assistant, Isambart de la Pierre, who had been present for all the private interrogations, was
so “troubled by the course of inquiry” that he contrived to find a place near to Joan so he could signal and even nudge her. His efforts were useless and costly. Joan didn’t heed his advice, and as soon as Warwick had the opportunity, he attacked Isambart “most spitefully and indignantly, with biting abuse and scornful invective.”

“Why do you keep touching that wicked woman? Why did you go on making signs to her? ’Sdeath villain, if I catch you again trying to get her off or helping her with warnings, I will have you thrown in the Seine.”

Joan was given until Saturday, March 31, to address those points on which she had temporized. Would she “submit to the judgment of the Church which is on earth in her every act and saying, whether good or evil, and especially in the causes, crimes and errors of which she was accused, and in everything concerning her trial?”

“In all these I submit to the Church Militant provided it does not command me to do the impossible … I will not deny them for anything in the world,” she said of her “visions and revelations.” If the Church commanded her to do anything contrary to what she understood as God’s bidding, she would “by no means undertake it.”

After this last interview, Manchon explained, it was
“decided by the counselors, especially by the gentlemen from Paris, that, according to custom, all these articles and answers must be reduced to a few short articles, covering the principal points, so that the matter could be presented briefly and so that the deliberations might be better and more swiftly concluded.” From April 3 to the fifth, the seventy were edited down to twelve before Cauchon did “command and beseech” each assessor to weigh the abridged evidence before him to determine if Joan’s beliefs and actions were “contrary to orthodox faith or suspect with regard to Holy Writ, opposed to the decrees of the Holy Roman Church and the canonical sanctions, scandalous, rash, noxious to the public weal, injurious, enveloped in crimes, contrary to good customs and in every respect offensive.” Each assessor’s conclusion was to be
delivered to Cauchon in writing and bearing his personal seal. No one could recuse himself.