Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (52 page)

“After having taken away all means of defending her innocence,” she continued, they “condemned her in a baneful and iniquitous way, flouting all the rules of procedure, charging her falsely and untruthfully of many crimes.” At last, they “had her burned most cruelly in a fire, to the damnation of their souls, provoking tears from all and heaping opprobrium, infamy and an irreparable wrong on this Isabelle and her [family].”

Within a month, investigators were dispatched to Domrémy to collect testimony from those who had known Joan when she was a child. Others went to Vaucouleurs and Toul. In February and March 1456, forty-one witnesses were deposed in Orléans, the Bastard Dunois, among them. Simon Charles, the Duke of Alençon, Jean Pasquerel, Louis de Coutes, Thomas de Courcelles, and the two physicians who attended Joan when she was ill in prison, Jean Tiphaine and Guillaume de la Chambre, all gave their testimony in Paris in April. Guillaume Manchon, Jean Massieu, and Seguin Seguin testified in May in Rouen, and Joan’s squire, Jean d’Aulon, was deposed in Lyon on May 2. And, at last, on July 7, 1456, the three prelates chosen by the pope to render judgment on the trial of condemnation convened in Rouen’s archiepiscopal palace, where twenty-five years earlier Joan had been dragged, fettered, before Pierre Cauchon.

“We say and pronounce that we judge this trial record and sentences that contain deceit, slander, contradiction and manifest error of law and of fact,” and “the execution of all that then ensued, were and are null, invalid, without effect or value. And nevertheless, as is necessary and required by reason, we quash, suppress, and annul them, removing all of their strength.” Whatever “mark or stain of infamy” might cling to the family of Joan of Arc was thereby officially neutralized.

The
“execution of the sentence” was to be accomplished, the document stipulated, through “its solemn publication in two places in this city, straight away in one, that is to say the square of Saint-Ouen”—the cemetery where Joan had been forced to abjure, replacing the name she knew how to write with an
X
—“with a general procession to start and a public sermon.” The second half of the spectacle
would take place the following day, when the sentence of nullification would be read aloud, again, “in the Old Market, that is to say where Joan died in a cruel and horrible fire.” In addition, there was to be “the erection there of a worthy cross in her perpetual memory,” a cross that stands there still, just outside Rouen’s church of Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc.

Joan’s passage through the city of Rouen was thus commemorated. From the archiepiscopal palace that provided the condemnation trial’s courtroom, to the cemetery at Saint-Ouen, to the marketplace where she was burned alive, pilgrims retrace her steps, as they do the stations of the cross in Jerusalem, marking where Christ was condemned and beaten and where he fell, three times, under the weight of the cross on which he died.

The first official biography of Joan of Arc was undertaken in 1500, by order of King Louis XII. By then she’d ridden through countless histories, but only as a cameo; the story of the Virgin from Lorraine was inserted into chronicles of the cities through which she’d passed. This book was her own, and as the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg had overtaken the quills of countless scriveners across Europe with an avalanche of movable type, the story of her life was printed in great quantities and translated.

Across the channel, it was 1593, and she still hadn’t left off mocking the English. “Glory is like a circle in the water,” Shakespeare overheard her say to the dauphin, “Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself / Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. / With Henry’s death the English circle ends.”

“Was Mahomet inspired with a dove?” Charles wonders at the power of his sorceress. “Thou with an eagle art inspired then.”

At home in France, now 1636, a founding member of the Académie Française, Jean Chapelain, began what he
imagined would become France’s
Aeneid
and unfortunately spent the next twenty years advertising it as such. When at last Chapelain completed
La Pucelle
;
ou, La France délivrée: Poème héroïque
, the epic filled twelve volumes and the work that had consumed him for so long collapsed under the weight of his ambition, universally lampooned as the
labor of a tiresome pedant, and not only in his own day. Ridicule persisted.

“Gentlemen,” Voltaire addressed the Académie Française in 1760, complaining, with arch indignation, of
“this shameful abuse of attributing to us, works which are not of our composition, and of falsifying and mutilating those that are, and thus vending [profiting by] our name.” As a member of the academy, he demanded redress for what had begun as a dinner party lark thirty years earlier, when his host, Armand, Duke of Richelieu, challenged him to write an epic poem about Joan of Arc. The story was so fantastical, Voltaire said, that he would undertake it only as satire, which he did, tossing off a dozen cantos of a mock chanson de geste that included a swipe at Chapelain and took its place among the most popular accounts of Joan’s life. Voltaire, squinting in the glare of the Enlightenment, imagined his pen mightier than the Maid’s sword, and he, too, grasped the hem of her gold cloak and pulled her down to where Dunois, “spite of his caution, would oftimes leer on Joan with wanton eye.”

Although Voltaire insisted he’d been jeering at the mythologized Maid and not at Joan herself,
The Maid of Orléans
enraged enough readers that it was banned and burned throughout Europe for all the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, guaranteeing a wide readership. Had Joan the misfortune to encounter herself as a burlesque heroine of lusty appetites, not so much virgin warrior as the highest cherry to be picked, arousing the desire
“to ravish that which has been kept so long,” she might have found it difficult to resist throwing a dart of retribution from on high. The bawdy sexual references that became an embarrassment to Voltaire were plagiarized, mimicked, and malarial. No sooner had he recovered from one bout than another commenced. The scene of Dunois ravishing the Maid in the wake of their great victory at Orléans was a particular favorite for drawing-room dramatizations.

The City of Ladies
“will last for all eternity,” Lady Reason promised Christine de Pizan. “It will never fall or be taken … it will never be lost or defeated.” Reason set Christine to work digging the city’s foundation in the
“Field of Letters … on flat, fertile ground … where
every good thing grows in abundance.” She describes the landscape in
The Book of the City of Ladies.
She tells how Reason brought the bricks and mortar to build
“such high walls that the city inside will be safe from assault.”

Lady Rectitude carried a
“yardstick of truth which separates right from wrong and distinguishes between good and evil.” It would serve Christine de Pizan, Rectitude explained, “to plan the city which you have been commissioned to build” and measure its
“towers, houses, and palaces which will all be covered in bright gold.”

Relieved of carrying a set of scales, Lady Justice held in her right hand the
“vessel of pure gold”—a grail—God had given to her “to share out to each person exactly what he or she deserves.” And when the city was complete, Justice set a crown on the Virgin Mary’s head and named her Queen of all its inhabitants.

It was to be, Rectitude said, a
“city full of worthy ladies,” and Justice closed its strong gates and placed the keys in Christine’s hands. What choice did ladies have, Reason asked, but to separate themselves from those who
“have attacked all women in order to persuade men to regard the entire sex as an abomination”?

But Joan had promised the King of Heaven to take up a sword and “do the fairest deed ever done for Christendom,” and how was she to accomplish such a quest cloistered behind “such high walls”? She couldn’t stay in the City of Ladies. She had to make her way through the perils that lay beyond its gates.

From Domrémy to Vaucouleurs, Chinon, and Poitiers, and on to Orléans and Reims, the Maid rode in a circle of light too strong for death to dim. Who didn’t recognize the Virgin from the marshes of Lorraine? She was the girl to whom God’s angels spoke, walking out of the air to burn her ears with words too hot for ordinary mortals.

“Be good,” they told her, “be chaste and pure,” and they dressed her in bright shining armor and lifted her onto a white horse. They hung the King of Heaven’s banner over her head, and they gave her its staff to hold.

Joan of Arc was tried seven times by the Church for which she gave, and lost, her life. Summoned in 1428 by the young man to whom her father had promised her hand in marriage, she appeared, sixteen years old, before her local bishop and was released from honoring a contract to which she had never agreed.

Upon her arrival at Chinon, on March 4, 1429, she was examined by the hastily assembled tribunal that sent her on to Poitiers, where she waited from March 11 to March 22 for the clerics gathered there to assess her claim of a divine mission. It was during a break from this third trial that she assuaged her impatience by composing her letter to the English.

“Know well that the King of Heaven will send a greater force to The Maid and her good men-at-arms than you in all your assaults can overcome,” she dictated to a scribe. “By blows shall the favor of the God of Heaven be seen.”

In May 1431 she was tried twice: condemned as a heretic and sentenced to life in prison on the twenty-fourth; on the thirtieth she was condemned as a lapsed heretic and burned at the stake.

The sixth trial overturned the verdict of the fifth, and on July 7, 1456, the nullification of the sentence was read aloud in the marketplace where her stake had been set and her life ended.

The cause for her beatification was first championed in 1869 by the bishop of Orléans, Félix Dupanloup, who began by summoning all the other bishops through whose dioceses Joan had passed. No matter what she had come to represent in the centuries since her death, the Maid of Orléans was a saint, he was sure of it, and his passion was persuasive; his colleagues joined with him in petitioning the pope. But, as a twentieth-century prelate explained,
“a cause of canonization is never a matter of urgency,” and from 1873 to 1877 Rome was preoccupied with a petition for the beatification of Christopher Columbus, ultimately denied
“on grounds that the proofs for Columbus’s marriage to the mother of his son Ferdinand, Beatrice Enríquez de Arana, were insufficient,” casting suspicion of sexual impropriety on the great conquistador.