Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (48 page)

Cauchon turned to the bishop of Winchester to ask what was to be done now in response to Joan’s submission.

“You will have to receive her as a penitent,” Beaufort said.

If this exchange was staged—as it probably was, the embezzling cardinal having already established his deceitful nature—“the principal Englishmen,” kept unaware of any such tampering,
“were most indignant with the Bishop of Beauvais, the doctors, and the other assessors in the case,” a cleric who had been present testified, “because she was not found guilty, sentenced, and handed over for execution.”

“Do not worry, my lord,” the bishop was heard to say to Warwick. “We shall catch her all right.”

Much has been made of two unexplained and perhaps connected aspects of the abjuration. First, Joan, who knew how to sign her name
“mockingly drew a kind of circle” on the schedule in place of a signature. Second, when pressed to improve on the circle, she added an
X
and was observed to laugh or smile when she thus “signed” the document that repudiated her voices. Earlier, under interrogation about military correspondence, Joan said she’d added an
X
to intentionally misleading letters meant to fall into enemy hands so that her own men would know the information they contained was false. Now, on the most important document of her life, Joan made no more mark than an
X
, leading to suggestions that she was not only taunting the judges who were to end her life but refusing to honor a document she distrusted by signing her name on it.

Loiseleur praised Joan before she was led away from the cemetery.
“Please God, you’ve done a good day’s work and saved your soul.”

“Now will you churchmen take me to one of your own prisons so that I shall not be in the hands of the English any longer?” she asked.

“Take her where you brought her from,” Cauchon said. As she was led back to the keep, English soldiers shouted the usual insults at her.

Once locked in her cell, “she was given woman’s dress which she put on immediately she had taken off the male costume,” the trial record states. “She desired and allowed her hair, which had hitherto been cut short round the ears, to be shaved off and removed.”

Accounts vary as to what transpired in the three days between the abjuration and Cauchon’s discovery that Joan had “relapsed” into the same wickedness that proved her a heretic: she exchanged her dress for her twenty-times-two laced hosen. Certainly, he was aware that in a military prison, it would be, as Régine Pernoud judged it,
“ludicrously easy to compel Joan in one way or another to resume those clothes,” thus committing a capital offense, as stipulated by the abjuration she signed. Her confessor Martin Ladvenu testified for the nullification that he had
“heard from Joan’s own lips that a great English lord entered her prison and tried to rape her. That was the reason, she said, why she had resumed male clothes.” Isambart de la Pierre, the only priest aside from Ladvenu who remained loyal to Joan
and acted in good conscience toward her until the last minutes of her life, saw her “weeping, with her face running with tears, and so outraged and disfigured that [he] felt pity and compassion for her.”

Joan told Massieu, he testified, that two days after her abjuration her guards
“pulled off the women’s clothing that covered her and emptied the sack in which were her male clothes.” As she had no other, when she could no longer wait to use the latrine, she was forced to put them on. The guards reported her relapse, and the bishop came running.

“You promised and swore,” Cauchon said, “not to take man’s dress again.”

“The promises made to me have not been kept. I was told I could go to Mass and that my chains would be taken off. If I were put in a gracious prison [guarded by women], I would be good and obey the Church.”

“And the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret,” Cauchon said, “have you heard them since last Thursday?”

“Yes. God sent word through St. Catherine and St. Margaret of the great pity of this treason … by which I saved my life. They told me I damned myself to save my life. For I am sent from God. And my voice told me I did a great evil in declaring that what I had done was wrong. It was only for fear of the fire that I said what I did. They told me I had saved my body to spite my soul.” She had done that, and worse: she’d emptied the past of meaning, called her vocation a sham, and denied the only companions who had remained ever faithful to her. Three days was enough to convince Joan she didn’t want the life she’d saved.

“I would rather do penance once and for all, I would rather die than endure any longer the suffering of this prison.”

Cauchon was heard laughing as he walked back from Joan’s cell to his apartments. A
“crowd of English notables and soldiers” were waiting in the courtyard. “Farewell! Be of good cheer!” Cauchon called out to Warwick. “It is done. We have got her.”

“The soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion around him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him.”

The Passion of Joan of Arc
, a film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, presents an unambiguous equation between Joan and Jesus; during the trial Joan is made to wear a crown of plaited straw (
Fig. 31
). DeMille’s
Joan the Woman’
s opening credits are followed by what amounts to a visual incantation: Interrupted at her spinning by a great light, the Maid looks up and raises her arms toward heaven. Just as the light gathers into a halo, her expression shifts from one of ecstasy to one of horror, her arms fall slowly, not all the way to her sides; instead, they stop, outstretched. Light crucifies her, then, nailing her not to a cross but to a great fleur-de-lis. Martyr and patriot, she casts her eyes heavenward before her head sinks to her breast. Her halo still burns, even though her life has departed (
Fig. 34
).

On Wednesday, May 30, Martin Ladvenu was dispatched with a Dominican friar, Jean Toutmouillé, to inform Joan, he testified,
“by what death she was to die that day, by order and decree of her judges, and when she had heard the hard and cruel death that was so near to her, she began to cry out most sadly and pull and tear at her hair,” her composure at last dismantled.

“Alas,” she keened, “am I to be so cruelly and horribly treated that my pure and unblemished body, which has never been corrupted, must today be consumed and burned to ashes!” Joan’s body was unblemished only in the moral sense. Her flesh bore scars another nineteen-year-old girl’s would not, from a great many small abrasions and cuts as well as injuries significant enough to report, the crossbolt she took to the breast and the injuries to her thigh and the foot that
came down on the
chausse-trappe
, all recent enough to appear livid against what was by now her very pale skin.

Though she admitted her fear of the flames, the vehemence of her response to the idea of losing her corporeal self was inspired by the catechism of a Church that promised resurrection of both soul and body. But not if fire left nothing for God to repair and resurrect—this is why the Catholic Church forbids cremation. Joan’s reverence for flesh she’d defended against male predation so fiercely and for so long is betrayed by the single rupture in her otherwise perfect asceticism: Joan never tried to resist dressing her body as the sacred object she understood it to be. Uncorrupted, untouched by any man. A vessel pure enough to hold God’s grace.

“Oh,” Toutmouillé said she keened.
“I had rather be seven times beheaded than be burned like this. Alas, if only I had been in the prisons of the Church to which I have submitted, if I had been guarded by churchmen and not by my enemies and foes, I should not have come to this miserable end.

“I call upon God, the great Judge, to see the great wrongs and griefs that are done me,” Joan said to Ladvenu and Toutmouillé, who testified that
“she complained exceedingly of the oppressions and violences that had been done to her in prison by her jailers and by others who had been let in to harm her.

“After these lamentations, the aforementioned Bishop entered, and she said to him immediately, ‘Bishop, my death is your doing.’ ”

“Be patient, Joan,” Cauchon told her. “You are to die because you did not keep your promise to us, and because you returned to your former sin.”

“If you had only put me in the Church court’s prisons and entrusted me to decent and proper ecclesiastical warders, this would never have happened. Therefore I appeal against you to God.”

“One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, ‘Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; since we are receiving
the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ And he said to him,
‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ ”