Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (49 page)

“Where shall I be tonight?” Joan asked Pierre Maurice, who visited her in her cell before she was taken to the pyre waiting in the marketplace.

“Do you not trust in God?” Maurice said.

“I do,” Joan told him. “And with God’s aid I shall be in Paradise.”

Church law denied the sacraments to a relapsed heretic, but Cauchon allowed Ladvenu to hear Joan’s confession and administer the Eucharist to her as well. In fact, when the friar Guillaume Duval came to her cell bearing nothing but bread, Ladvenu sent him to fetch wine, as well, and his stole, salver, and candles.
“I administered our Lord’s Body to her,” her confessor testified, “which she received with such humility, devotion, and copious tears as I could not describe.”

Luc Besson’s
The Messenger
allows Joan no more than an apparition to answer her plea.

“You want to confess?” God asks from under a black hood more commonly associated with the Grim Reaper. “I’m listening.”

“I’ve committed sins, my Lord, so many sins.” Joan clasps her hands, looks into her lap. “I saw … so many signs.”

“Many signs,” God agrees.

“Ones I wanted to see. I fought out of revenge and despair. I was all the things people believe they’re allowed to be when fighting for a … a … cause.”

“For a cause,” God echoes.

“I was proud and stubborn.”

“Selfish,” God adds, “cruel.”

“Yes,” Joan says.

“You think you are ready now?”

“Yes.” Joan’s eleventh-hour examination of her conscience leaves her with the dubious comfort of a god who doesn’t promise redemption.

Church law proscribed Cauchon, as an ecclesiastic, from attending a secular execution, just as it officially denied the sacraments to Joan, but the bishop stepped outside a number of conventions on what he expected to be the day of his glory. He allowed Joan the illegal privilege of the Eucharist, but he hadn’t been satisfied by how distraught Joan had been in her cell. She’d had the audacity to condemn him before God. He was too fixed on the idea of her begging and weeping and denying her voices in public to deny himself the chance to see what he expected to unfold—groveling for mercy in a dress, crude as it was, her head, too, stripped of the brazen crown of disrespect she’d made of her hair.

Abandoned to the secular arm and, once received, given no hearing and no conviction, Joan was placed immediately in the care of the executioner. Anywhere between eighty and eight hundred (
accounts vary) soldiers carrying swords and sticks and little axes accompanied the tumbrel that took Joan from her cell to the marketplace, a moving moat of bodies wide enough to prevent any rescue attempt.
“So many indeed,” Manchon said of the soldiers, “that there was no one bold enough to speak to her except Friar Ladvenu and Jean Massieu,” the usher. Although, Nicolas Taquel testified, her old, false confessor, Loiseleur, suffered an improbable last-minute crisis of conscience, and,
“weeping, tried to climb into the cart to ask her pardon,… the English shoved him away and might have killed him but for the intervention of the earl of Warwick, who warned him to leave Rouen at once.”

The soldiers parted the crowd to allow Joan’s delivery to her place in the drama about to be enacted, and the tumbrel rolled slowly through a chaotic mob, the sinister carnival atmosphere electric with anticipation. As most of the citizens of Rouen supported Joan’s great enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, as many as ten thousand people had gathered to see the burning hand of God devour a great wickedness.
“The crowd was enormous, and seething with excitement; it was evident
that, if things did not go exactly as they wished, trouble might be expected from the English.” Four stages had been raised: one for the ecclesiastical judges and notable personages, another for the secular judges and bailiff, a third on which Nicolas Midi would preach a final sermon to Joan, and, finally, the highest and most visible of all, on which the stake had been set. The army was kept busy restraining the ugly press of people who trampled one another to get as close as possible to the pyre.
“And it was not only the common soldiery, the English
mob
, that evinced that thirst for blood,” Michelet wrote. “Substantial people, men of high station, the lords, were as savage as the rabble.”

Joan was dressed in a rough tunic, either gray or black,
“and on the mitre which she had upon her head was written the following words,” Clément de Fauquembergue recorded: “Heretic, relapse, apostate, idolater.” A placard set before the fagots bore a legend: “Joan who had herself named the Pucelle, liar, pernicious person, abuser of people, soothsayer, superstitious woman, blasphemer of God, presumptuous, unbeliever in the faith of Jesus Christ, boaster, idolater, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic.”

“You are fallen again—O, sorrow!—into these errors and crimes as the dog returns to his vomit,”
^*3
Cauchon pronounced after Nicolas Midi’s “long, redundant” sermon was concluded. “You are a relapsed heretic,” he charged, “and by this sentence which we deliver in writing and pronounce from this tribunal, we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you.”

The Church, and the Church’s female body. Joan a rotten member to be cut off, lest she pollute that female body. Whoever noticed didn’t dare say it: the Church’s definition of feminine virtue was based not, as it exhorted endlessly, on her sexual incorruptibility but on her willingness to submit.

Burned, not beheaded, for only fire provides a bridge between this world and the next. The word chosen by the Torah for burnt offering
is
olah
—“that which goes up in smoke.” Joan’s head could not roll; her body couldn’t be broken and left to decay but must be carried up toward the heavens, reduced to
“a smell pleasing to the Lord.”

“Oh, Rouen, I am much afraid that you may suffer for my death,” Joan was heard to say as she was led to the pyre. Like Jesus, she asked God’s forgiveness for her persecutors, and
“she most humbly begged all manner of people, of whatever condition or rank, to … kindly pray for her, at the same time pardoning any harm they had done her,” Massieu testified. “When she was handed over by the Church I remained with her and she asked most fervently to be given a cross. And when an Englishman who was present heard this he made her a little one out of wood from the end of a stick, and handed it to her and she received it and kissed it most devotedly.” She put the cross inside her clothes, against her breast, and asked Massieu to bring the crucifix from the church and hold it where she could see it.

“If it will save from the nought of Hell Souls of the damned that are maddened there, I give up my soul to the nought of Hell,” Péguy’s Joan says, lingering to bid her life—her vocation—good-bye. “Have Lord my soul for the nought of Hell. Take my soul into nothing.”

“What, priest, are you going to keep us until dinnertime?” an English captain heckled Massieu from the opposing platform. The executioner, Geoffroy Thérage, complained that the height of the platform on which the stake had been set hadn’t allowed him to cast a rope around Joan’s neck and strangle her, a mercy routinely extended to those being executed before they had to smell themselves cook, for if the wind blew just right, or wrong, neither heat shock nor smoke inhalation would save them from that. It was a
“slow, protracted burning,” Michelet wrote, that Cauchon wanted, hoping it would accomplish what the rack had denied him and “expose at last some flaw … wrench from her some cries that might be given out as a recantation,” or “at the very least some confused, barely articulate words that could be so twisted.”

“Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” Luc Besson’s Grim Reaper says to Joan. She cannot see the crucifix Massieu
holds before her face—already her eyes are aflame. The hem of her robe catches fire, and in a second the crude dress has burned away, a flag of fire twirling skyward. A chorus of voices unite—a hymn of increasing ecstasy as flames lick between her toes, rush over her head, a halo of impossible beauty, her features gilded, beautiful, as is Fleming’s Ingrid Bergman, in her bride-white robe, the chains that bind her to the stake girdling her waist and crossing her breast, rendering it into a Grecian gown. Fire is the only suitor for so
solitary and frigid a bride, Leonard Cohen sings in “Joan of Arc,” and furious fire spun “the dust” of Joan of Arc heavenward, and “high above the wedding guests / He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.”