Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (46 page)

Even had an appeal reached the pope, it might have accomplished little. The schism had come to an end in 1417 with the election of Martin V by the previous ecumenical council, of Constance, which
chose a candidate acceptable to all three warring papacies—one in Pisa having in 1409 joined those in Rome and Avignon. Martin V was, as he would have necessarily been, a politician with a gift for compromise. After Martin’s death, on February 20, 1431, his successor, Eugene IV, would spend his term in conflict with the reform movement that grew out of the Council of Constance, its aim to limit the supreme power of the papacy by making the pope accountable to an assembly of prelates: an indefinite ecumenical council. Eugene could not have been ignorant of Joan’s predicament, but whatever desire he might have had to adjudicate either for or against her, his term was consumed by defending what would once have been his uncontested rights against the new council, of Basel. The inquisitorial arm of the Church wielded ever more influence in the wake of Martin V’s making war on the Hussites, and a witch trial whose foregone verdict was a critical matter of international politics is unlikely to have tempted his involvement. Too, even before her capture, Joan had already tumbled inadvertently into the controversy that remained twenty-five years after the schism was officially but not popularly ended. Factions remained, as did confusion.
Twenty years earlier, Pierre Cauchon had been made chaplain of Saint-Étienne of Toulouse in recognition of his campaigning for the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, to renounce the papacy.

“Asked if she had not had letters from the count d’Armagnac,” the trial record states, “asking which of the three sovereign pontiffs he should obey,” she answered that she’d been in too great a hurry to respond properly in the moment and asked the count to wait for a reply.

“The count’s messenger arrived when I was mounting my horse to set off for Paris.”

“Did you not profess to know, by the counsel of the King of Kings, what the count should hold in this matter?”

“I know nothing about that. The count asked whom God wanted him to obey. I didn’t know how to instruct him.”

“Whom do you believe to be the true Pope?”

“Are there two of them?”

“Do you entertain any doubts concerning whom the count should obey?”

“I believe we should obey our Holy Father in Rome.”

“Why then did you write that you would give an answer at some other time, since you say you believe in the Pope at Rome?”

“I was referring to another matter. I told the count’s messenger other things, which were not written.” No less impatient than usual to get where she was going, Joan had dismissed the question without properly considering it. “If the messenger had not gone off at once he would have been thrown into the water,” she said, “but not through me.”

On May 2, Joan was taken from her cell to the room adjoining the castle’s great hall to receive an amplified version of the admonition Cauchon had delivered in her cell, when she was recovering from her illness. Before the sixty-three assessors who had assembled for the occasion, Cauchon announced that “an old and learned master of theology, one particularly understanding in these matters,” Jean de Châtillon, archdeacon of Évreux, would undertake “the present task of demonstrating to this woman certain points on which she is in error” and “persuade her to abandon her faults and errors and show her the way of truth.” He invited any judge who “thinks he can say or do any good thing to facilitate her return or helpfully instruct her for the salvation of her body and soul … to speak to us or to the assembly.” No one came forward with a suggestion.

Jean began by reviewing the articles of faith—in essence, the credo Joan said her mother had taught her. “If she wished to reform,” the archdeacon said, “as a good devout Christian must, the clergy were always ready to act towards her in all mercy and charity to effect her salvation. If, however, out of arrogant and haughty pride she desired to persist in her own views, and imagine she understood matters of faith better than doctors and learned men, she would expose herself to grave danger.” Her crimes were again tallied: “She would not submit to the Church Militant or any living man, but intended to refer herself to God alone in respect of her acts and sayings.” She “persisted in wearing man’s dress” and was “in error when out of a strange insistence upon her disgraceful dress she preferred not to receive the sacrament
of the Eucharist” on Palm Sunday and Easter “rather than put off her male costume.” She did “attribute the responsibility for her sins to God and His saints,” justifying her bloodlust as ordained. She had “searched curiously into things passing our understanding, to put faith in what was new without consulting the opinion of the Church and its prelates.” In predicting the future and detecting hidden objects, she had “usurped the office of God.” Unsurprisingly, Joan’s foreknowledge of the sword hidden behind the altar at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois had been amplified by enthusiastic storytellers, accruing tales of her divining the whereabouts of “a married priest and a lost cup.” At Beaurevoir, she had either attempted suicide or presumed on the grace of God to break her fall; either was blasphemy.

“You are in great peril of body and soul,” the archdeacon warned, “your soul in danger of eternal fire and [your] body of temporal fire by the sentence of your judges.”

“You will not do as you say against me,” Joan told him, “without evil overtaking you, in body and soul.”

The convocation was then adjourned, as Joan “made no further reply.”

A week after Joan’s disappointingly unfazed response to her public admonition, not to mention her irrepressible insolence, Cauchon called a meeting to determine “if it was expedient to put Jeanne to the torture.” Of those thirteen whose responses were recorded, nine thought it not expedient, one “deferred to the popular opinion,” and three supplied high-minded rationales to support its efficacy. Master Aubert Morel valued torture as a means “to discover the truth of her lies.” Loiseleur “thought it good for the health of her soul,” and Thomas de Courcelles praised it as “wise.” In the end, the pragmatic voice of the treasurer Raoul Roussel prevailed: “Torture was not expedient, lest a trial so well conducted should be exposed to calumny.”

Nonetheless, there was no harm in threatening her, and on May 9 Joan was taken down to the dungeon of the castle keep, where
“instruments of torture were displayed before her.” The Church inherited its understanding of torture from the Greeks, who considered it invaluable
for managing their slaves, as they believed information obtained through torture to be more reliable than whatever a prisoner might give up willingly, without the leverage of pain.
Truth lay hidden in the body, which could be compelled to relinquish it. The Inquisition favored the rack for the extraction of secrets withheld, and its operators stood by, prepared to pull Joan’s bones out of joint. The artistry was in knowing just when to advance one of the ratchets, knowing by feel just how far, how much, to maximize its effects. Most people stood pain better than the noises, surprisingly loud, joints made as they came apart. Pincers were reserved for stubborn cases, their specialized grips designed to pull out fingernails and toenails, and the application of hot coals to exposed flesh was equally persuasive. But the sight of the rack had no more effect on Joan than had the previous week’s threats of excommunication.

“I should afterwards declare that whatever I said you had compelled me to say it by force,” she observed of the prospect of being winched into pieces. One of the torturers, Maugier Leparmentier, testified that when Joan was interrogated in the dungeon,
“she replied with so much wisdom that everyone present was astonished. In the end, my colleague and I retired without touching her.” If Cauchon wasn’t among those astonished by Joan’s self-possession, he was increasingly frustrated by her demonstrating a sangfroid that made her appear invulnerable.

On Holy Cross Day, May 3, she boasted that the angel of annunciation had appeared to her the day before, after she’d been publicly admonished. “I know by my voices it was Saint Gabriel who came to comfort me,” she told Cauchon, “and I asked counsel of my voices …[who] told me that if I desired Our Lord to aid me I must wait upon Him in all my doings.

“I asked if I would be burned, and my voices answered that I must wait upon God, and He would aid me.”

Michelet, who observed that Joan didn’t fully recover from her illness until her public admonishment, wondered if her symptoms might not have been a physical manifestation of the inner turmoil provoked by a profound internal shift, when
“Michael, the angel of battles, who was no longer sustaining her, yielded his place to Gabriel, the angel of grace and divine charity.” Gabriel appeared to Joan as he had to
Mary, with an annunciation of glory through martyrdom. Like Joan, Mary was a mortal who partook of the divine, not God, but his closest mortal relative. Thomas Aquinas might have declared Jesus to be the sole perfect mediator between man and his creator, but the precepts of a thirteenth-century theologian had little weight against Christians’ ever stronger conception of what salvation really looked like: a mother with the mercy and compassion of mothers and the usual weight over her son’s opinions. Mary acquired the title mediatrix in the Church’s infancy, and the cult of the Virgin exploded from the fifth to the fifteenth century. As the Church grew, the need for a figure of redemption that seemed within closer reach than Jesus was ever more apparent. Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Mother of the Church, Our Lady: “Addressed as the one who could bring cleansing and healing to the sinner,” Jaroslav Pelikan wrote, she was also
“the one who would give succor against the temptations of the devil,” offering the possibility for the faithful to regain what Eve lost—redemption that could only be purchased with sacrifice. Like Mary, Joan was an intermediary: those who thronged to touch her believed she was a physical bridge to the divine.

“The God of that age was the Virgin, far more than Jesus,” Michelet wrote, and went on to make an unambiguous equation between Mary and Joan. “The Virgin was needed, a Virgin descending upon earth in the guise of a maid from the common folk, young, fair, gentle, and bold.” Composed in
AD
145,
The Infancy Gospel of James
identifies Mary as a sacrifice given willingly to God by her mother, Anne, who receives an annunciation very like the one Gabriel delivers to Mary.
“An angel of the Lord appeared, saying unto Anna: ‘Anna, the Lord hath hearkened unto thy prayer, and thou shalt conceive and bear, and thy seed shall be spoken of in the whole world.’ And Anne said: ‘As the Lord my God liveth, if I bring forth either male or female, I will bring it for a gift unto the Lord my God, and it shall be ministering unto him all the days of its life.’ ” And when the time came, Mary’s father, Joachim, said,
“Let us bring her up to the temple of the Lord that we may pay the promise which we promised.”

Mary wouldn’t die by flames; she wouldn’t die at all; instead, she
would be assumed directly into heaven. But a mother might prefer martyrdom to the excruciation of bearing witness to her son’s crucifixion.