A cage had been made to measure for the girl once fitted for the best armor money could buy. “I have heard from Étienne Castille, the blacksmith,” Jean Massieu, the trial’s usher, testified, “that he made an iron cage for her, in which she was held in a standing position, secured by the neck, the hands, and the feet, and that she was kept in it from the moment when she was brought to Rouen until the opening of her trial.” No eyewitness claimed to have seen Joan caged, so it might have been used as a threat rather than the actual physical trap for which it was intended. The weeks of Joan’s approach to Rouen had allowed time to prepare for the incarceration of so dangerous a sorceress, one with untested powers, an individual who leaped off ramparts and survived falls that would kill a mortal: a witch with the ability to fly. No one saw her in the cage, but the mason Pierre Cusquel, one of the few local craftsmen to own a massive scale, saw it soon after it was built. “I saw it being weighed at my house,” he testified—probably to determine its price.
By the time Joan arrived, some of the Rouennais had been waiting near the city’s gates for as long as a day, protecting what turf they’d claimed, elbowing and pressing forward, taking courage in numbers and jeering and profaning freely where smaller crowds just gaped and pointed. Rouen wasn’t a town but a city, the second most populous in France, with throngs to fill its streets and squares. When Joan arrived, it had been occupied for more than a decade, since January 1419, when it surrendered to the English after a merciless six-month siege. Henry V had marched on the city in July 1418 to discover its fortifications had been augmented in the three years since Agincourt. Now Rouen had one of the largest garrisons in France, and, with seventy thousand citizens, it was a prize Henry was set on acquiring, and with it the rest of Normandy. As he hadn’t enough troops to make an assault on the freshly buttressed walls, he made do with surrounding them and their sixty towers bristling with crossbows. Resigned to starving them into submission, he cut off all means of getting food into the city, and by the time winter arrived, the Rouennais had eaten their dogs, cats, and even rats before at last, inevitably, they began slaughtering their horses. In December, the city’s leaders made the decision to push all the old, the ill, and the orphaned—twelve thousand people, nearly a fifth of the population—outside the city walls. Henry, recognizing a wicked and dishonorable advantage he was not above seizing, refused to allow the would-be refugees to cross the line of siege, so there they remained, trapped in the frozen ditch between the city walls and the enemy forces, huddled together. On Christmas Day, Henry allowed the Church to distribute bread to the living, but the gift did no more than awaken hunger and forestall an inevitable end. The clamor they made died one voice at a time. No one survived. Rouen’s was the story of Orléans, without the Maid.
“Joan was brought to this city of Rouen by the English and imprisoned in the castle of Rouen,” a Rouennais remembered, “in a room beneath the staircase on the side looking out to the open country”—a tower cell on the north side of Bouvreuil castle, built by Henry upon his victory over Rouen and named for the hillock on which it stood. Bouvreuil overlooking the city with its deep stone gutters running with color from the dye works, staining the Seine blue one week, orange the next. The boy king, Henry VI, had been living in Bouvreuil castle since June 1429, save a trip to England for his November 6 coronation. He would have a second, in Paris, on December 16, 1431, six and a half months after Joan was executed.
The room in which Joan was held for the last five months of her life was eight steps up from the castle’s oval courtyard, “lined with buildings constructed against the walls: the great hall, where governmental functions took place; kitchens and servants’ quarters … and … in the middle of the courtyard … a chapel.” She wasn’t underground, but with no source of light other than its one barred window her cell was “very dark,” and it was barren, although large enough to allow room for as many as half a dozen visitors when Cauchon called on her with a cadre of examiners. The trial’s usher, Jean Massieu, who accompanied Joan back and forth from her cell to the chambers in which the trial was conducted, testified that there was “a great bed in it, on which she slept,” always in leg irons. “I know for certain that at night she lay chained by the legs with two pairs of irons, and tightly secured by another chain which passed through the legs of her bed.” That chain was “attached to a great block of wood five or six feet long, by means of a lock.” Night and day she was left in the care of five “guards of the lowest sort … common torturers”—houssepailliers, the usher called them. In medieval French the word was the equivalent of “ruffian,” increasingly used in place of “abuser.” As usher, or in the words of Cauchon, “executor of the commands and convocations emanating from our authority,” Massieu overheard them mock her cruelly at every opportunity. Pretending to have overheard information critical to her case, they purposefully raised her hopes of release one day and told her she’d surely be burned on the next. Three of these ruffians remained locked within her cell and were with her at all times. They moved about freely; chains rendered her “unable to stir from her place.” Should she need to use the latrine, with which all such keeps were furnished, a guard unlocked and accompanied her to the closet-size room with a hole in the floor through which waste dropped directly into a cesspit or moat. In winter months, it would have been gelid. Typically, the atmosphere that filled such privies was so saturated with ammonia gas that they came to be called garderobes, or cloakrooms, where guests could expect their coats to be hung, as the caustic smell was believed to kill vermin.
The latrine wasn’t directly annexed to the cell like the cell’s two ancillary spaces. One was a landing for the stairs with hidden access to the other, used by spies: a room large enough to accommodate several men at once, from which it was possible to spy on Joan in her cell and eavesdrop on conversations that unfolded between her and those, like her false confessor, sent to extract useful admissions. Because the English were “desperately afraid that she might escape,” the single room had but three keys. One was in the possession of the bishop of Winchester, identified by Régine Pernoud as the “real manager of the trial”—the same bishop who had embezzled funds earmarked for stamping out Hussites to raise an army of archers to fight the French. A second key was entrusted to the man determined to please Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop Cauchon; the third to the bishop’s henchman, Jean d’Estivet, the trial’s promoter, or lead prosecutor.
That all three of her keepers were clerics allowed them to collectively preserve the conceit of Church custody, but Joan was in a military prison maintained by her enemies, which, as Jean Fabri, one of the few assessors, or assistant judges, to take Joan’s part, reported, “greatly displeased some of the assessors” … as it was not “proper procedure … since she had been handed over to the Church … But no one dared raise the subject.” For a month, Joan asked that she be moved, as was her right, and placed in Church custody under the guard of women. The worst that had happened at Beaurevoir was that a knight, Haimond de Macy, had come calling and, as he testified for the nullification, “tried several times playfully to touch her breasts. I tried to slip my hand in, but Joan would not let me. She pushed me off with all her might.” This aborted assault on the fortress of Joan’s unpolluted body was repeated in Rouen by a tailor sent to measure her for clothes she wore once before choosing flames over a dress. She slapped him forcefully, too. Initially held under relentless threat of attack, Joan “complained to the Bishop of Beauvais, to the sub-Inquisitor, and to Master Nicolas Loiseleur that one of her guards had tried to rape her,” as the scribe Guillaume Manchon testified. Other witnesses heard, on other occasions, the same complaint, finally answered by a woman—the last who would be in a position, like Yolande and the old Duchess of Luxembourg, to intercede on her behalf.
“It’s grotesque,” Bedford whispers to Cauchon in Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc. They eavesdrop through a chink in the wall as she is questioned in her cell. “She’s lived with soldiers and slept on the straw with them and she’s still a virgin?”
“You’re not a maiden,” Jean d’Estivet says to Joan on the other side of the wall.
“I say I am. If you don’t believe me, too bad.”
“You don’t belong to God but to the Devil.”
“I belong to our Lord, Jesus Christ,” Joan says, calm in her defiance, calm and arrogant.
In Rouen, it was Joan who appealed for a vaginal examination to prove her virginity. The procedure was conducted under the authority of the Duke of Bedford’s wife, Anne of Burgundy—Philip’s sister—and necessarily accomplished within a few weeks of Joan’s arrival, as the duke and duchess are known to have departed from Rouen on January 13, 1431. A notary for the trial passed on the unsubstantiated report that Bedford secreted himself in the spies’ annex and peered through the chink in the wall at Joan as she was examined by the matrons, who subsequently attested that the Pucelle was a true maid, uncorrupted. Fortuitously if not miraculously, her hymen remained intact despite evidence of an “injury from riding horseback,” a conclusion that didn’t exonerate Joan but predicated Cauchon’s changing tack by swapping in one superstition for another. If, as she claimed, her power lay in her virginity, it stood to reason that “if she were robbed of it, she would be disarmed, the spell would be broken, she would sink to the common level of women.”
“These women confirm that she’s a virgin,” Bresson’s Bedford tells Cauchon.
“Yes,” Cauchon says, “that’s what gives her strength.”
“If it’s her virginity that gives her strength we’ll make her lose her virginity.” Bedford is matter-of-fact, as if speaking of prying the lid off a box.
Joan had taken what measures she could against assault. Period illustrations allow costume historians to augment the descriptions culled from the trial record:
two layers of hosen securely fastened to the doublet, the inner layer being waist-high conjoined woolen hosen attached to the doublet by fully twenty cords, each cord tied into three eyelets apiece (two on the hosen and one on the doublet), for a total of forty attachment points on the inner layer of hosen. The second layer, which was made of rugged leather, seems to have been attached by yet another set of cords. Once this outfit was thus fastened together by dozens of cords connecting both layers to the doublet, it would be a substantial undertaking for someone to try to pull off these garments … The use of twenty cords on the inner layer was an excessively large and exceedingly awkward amount for this type of clothing, which normally had no more than half that number, indicating that she was deliberately taking measures to further increase its protective utility at the cost of her own convenience.
Once her virginity had been confirmed—once it had been established that there was something of value to guard—Joan complained she couldn’t tie all her laces tightly enough to defend herself from the unrelenting predation of her guards. Anne of Burgundy went to the Earl of Warwick, captain of Bouvreuil castle. What member of the English peerage would allow so disgraceful an incident as a prisoner’s rape, knowing how such a contemptible crime would reflect upon the English, the English who were working so hard to dishonor the French? For that matter, how would it reflect on Cardinal Beaufort?
Warwick ordered his commander of the guard, John Gray, “a gentleman in the service of the duke of Bedford,” to arrange for Joan’s guards to be replaced by a putatively less uncivilized team.
Having discovered that threats and bribes weren’t enough to marshal troops in terror of a sorceress, the English wasted no time in getting the trial under way. Soon after Joan’s arrival in Rouen, a chorister who was often in the cathedral where the judges gathered overheard a handful speaking among themselves. “A case must quickly be framed against her,” one said, and, as soon as it was feasible, “an excuse … found for putting her to death.” A Dominican friar, Jean Toutmouillé, testified that “they reckoned that while she was alive they would have no glory or success in the field of war.”
Eager as they were to recapture Louviers, fifteen miles south of Rouen, and check the accelerating decline in their fortunes, the English decided they “would not besiege the town until the Maid had been examined”—and executed. On January 9 the trial’s preliminary phase began. It continued for a month and was dedicated to the appointment of Cauchon’s immediate underlings, the selection of the sixty or so assessors, and the dissemination of muckraking spies to gather what they could about Joan. Cauchon named Jean Le Maître, the sub-inquisitor for Rouen, as his reluctant co-judge. Le Maître’s assistant, Isambart de la Pierre, testified that, like many others, Le Maître had been “moved by fear.” He attended only some of the trial’s sessions and “took no part in the interrogations.”
“There was no one who was not afraid,” Guillaume Manchon testified for the nullification. As one of the trial’s three official notaries, Manchon was “present at all that has been said and done,” an eyewitness to everything that unfolded during the proceedings, his memory aided by the act of writing and rewriting the minutes. “The English instituted the prosecution, and it was at their expense that it was conducted. I do not think, however, that the Bishop of Beauvais was compelled to prosecute Joan, nor was the promoter Jean d’Estivet. They did what they did voluntarily. As for the assessors and other counselors, none would have dared to refuse.”
When Isambart was discovered to have counseled Joan, prompting her when she was being interrogated, he was advised to be silent or be drowned.
“We only gave our opinions and took part in the trial out of fear, threats, and terror, and it was in our minds to run away,” one of the assessors, Richard de Grouchet, testified.
Some sixty assessors, of whom at least forty attended each day of the trial’s public sessions, were drawn from the University of Paris, mostly Dominicans. (The Inquisition recruited and trained judges almost exclusively from Franciscan and Dominican orders.) Some “came of their own free will, some to win English favor, some because they dared not refuse,” and some sought vengeance; it wasn’t only Cauchon that Joan’s victories had chased out of their dioceses and away from their sources of power and revenue. All summoned were required to sit in judgment: none could abstain from offering his opinion, for example, on whether or not to put Joan to the rack, which was decided by vote. If the cowed collaborators outnumbered the chop-licking prosecutors, they had no strength in their numbers. The few brave enough to raise objections became immediate cautionary tales. Nicolas de Houppeville, a bachelor in theology at the University of Paris, was thrown out on the second day when a notary told Cauchon he had overheard the man say the trial presented a number of serious risks. Having noted the unseemly slavering of the bishop at Joan’s arrival in Rouen, how he “spoke exultingly with great joy” of the “beautiful trial” he had planned, a day’s worth of the proceedings was sufficient to confirm Nicolas’s suspicion that the trial would amount to a disgrace. The bishop, he pointed out, was a member of the opposition party. The trial was being financed by the opposition; the prisoner jailed by their military. Joan had already been rigorously and officially examined by the Church at Poitiers—by Cauchon’s superior, the archbishop of Reims. Cauchon had no ecclesiastical right to serve as her judge. Incensed, Cauchon demanded Nicolas de Houppeville appear before him, as he did, but only to declare that as Cauchon was not his superior the bishop had no jurisdiction over him, any more than he did over Joan. Technically, this was true, but it didn’t impede Cauchon’s having him thrown in prison. To betray any sympathy for Joan or allow her the smallest comfort—let alone be caught offering counsel to a girl alone, accused, and unrepresented—was to defy the bishop and, as several assessors made clear, place oneself “in danger of death.”
Jean d’Estivet was confirmed in the position he’d filled for Cauchon before, as promoter of the ecclesiastical court of Beauvais. Witnesses to his behavior betrayed surprise at his venom, but Cauchon, having worked closely with him before, knew exactly whom he’d chosen. A vindictive sadist subject to seizures of rage and fixated on the subject of female pollution, Jean took every opportunity to defame and castigate Joan, calling her “a wanton and a whore” even after her chastity was verified, a “loose woman and a filthy creature.”
As Joan stood in her cage, or lay on her block of wood, or paced as much as fetters allowed, which was only to make shuffling circles like a hobbled dog on a chain, spies were dispatched to Domrémy, Greux, Neufchâteau, Vaucouleurs, Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, Chinon, Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, Jargeau, Troyes, Patay, Reims, Senlis, Saint-Denis, Lagny, Compiègne, and any other place Joan was known to have stayed for so much as a night. “Somebody important from Lorraine came to Rouen,” Jean Moreau, a merchant (a different Jean Moreau from Joan’s godfather), testified. This person had been “specially commissioned to gather information in Joan’s country of origin, to find out what reputation she had there.” But the information he brought back to Cauchon—“nothing that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister”—earned him only calumny. The bishop called him “a traitor and a sinner and told him that he had not carried out his instructions properly” and refused him compensation for his expenses in visiting six parishes, as well as the agreed-upon fee for his labor. Another former spy, Nicolas Bailly, a “scrivener” (equivalent to a notary public) who with the provost Gérard Petit collected information about Joan, was similarly abused, even after having gone to the trouble to have a dozen witnesses appear in person to certify the accuracy of the reports made. Both were accused of being in league with the Armagnacs; neither was paid. There was nothing bad to be found in Joan, but there was a tissue of rumor and speculation from which to create the single precondition required by an inquisitorial trial: diffamatio—a bad reputation, the kind men invent to destroy women brazen enough to claim powers men consider theirs alone.
All three notaries, Guillaume Manchon, Guillaume Colles, and Nicolas Taquel, testified to the corruption of what was presented as a trial that hewed to every letter of the law. Two auxiliary and unnamed notaries were hidden in an alcove behind a curtain in the room where the interrogations were conducted, writing and eliding as directed by a prelate. Manchon, Colles, and Taquel’s official French notes were sometimes redacted rather than translated into Latin by Thomas de Courcelles, a “zealous university man and rector of the faculty of law” who was ultimately so ashamed of his involvement in the trial that he “suppressed his name wherever it occurred in the French minutes.” Courcelles testified for the nullification with the intent to vindicate himself along with Joan. Bedford’s confidant, the Rouen canon Nicolas Midi, a rabid exponent of the University of Paris, reduced the redacted notes to seventy articles of accusation, which were subsequently reorganized into twelve, excluding redundancies and some, but not all, of the more absurd false charges—the one, for example, that Joan kept a mandrake hidden in her bosom as one of the tricks of her trade, a magic tuber that was held to summon money. She’d heard that near her village there was one, she told Midi, though she’d never seen it. Whatever it was, she knew it was held to be “an evil and dangerous thing to keep.”
Twigs of fairy trees and trumped-up breaches of marriage contracts never made, unuttered blaspheming of God, and never-witnessed rituals with the devil: there was enough kindling to set below a stake. Hadn’t her own father dreamed many times of her disgraceful conduct with soldiers and, upon waking, instructed her brothers to drown her should they come true? A century of public burnings preceded the trial of Joan of Arc; still, many historians consider hers the first great witchcraft trial, catalytic in its effects across Europe, as high-profile political inquisitions like Joan’s yielded to those of countless unknown and mostly destitute women who lived outside the cold shoulder of society. Some were midwives, some were prostitutes, some were mentally ill or unfortunate enough to have been raped and ruined for decent society; all made the wrong enemy. None had the protection of father, uncle, brother, or son. Like Joan, they were judged by slander and called whores, filth, the devil’s handmaidens. Society had arrived at a kind of democracy, if not one that suggested the ethical evolution of the species: it was the right of every citizen to watch a witch burn, in person, for himself. The widespread demand for live performances of atrocities and live sacrifices—scapegoats on which to pin their accusers’ sufferings—meant witches were found everywhere.
For one year, from May 1429 to May 1430, Joan presided over a handful of battles resulting in a loss of fewer than ten thousand men, in total. Her trial, its verdict, and the publication of her example united as a catalyst for the three centuries’ worth of zealous, often hysterical, witch hunts amounting to the theatrically cruel execution of as many as a hundred thousand women—a “vast holocaust,” in the words of one historian.
While her family, friends, and comrades were being interrogated, Joan was “subjected to the Inquisition’s tactic of the prison informer,” of whom two are known. A canon of the Rouen Cathedral, Nicolas Loiseleur, one of Cauchon’s cherry-picked cronies “very highly regarded by Bedford’s government,” “pretended to be a man from the Maid’s country and so succeeded in getting writings, conversation, and confidences from her (in prison) by giving her news from home, which was pleasing to her,” the notary Manchon testified. Loiseleur gained Joan’s trust before he revealed himself to be a priest and asked to be her confessor. Joan accepted, and whenever Loiseleur visited, Manchon said, spies in the hidden annex listened through the peephole wall of her cell and recorded all they said for Jean d’Estivet to pore over in pursuit of incriminating evidence. As none existed, none could be extracted. Disguised, Jean d’Estivet himself visited Joan, pretending to be another prisoner, without success.
Loiseleur adapted his function to that of provocateur and encouraged Joan “to defy the court and resist attempts to induce her to modify her statements … and [said] that she must not trust the judges,” who sought to destroy her. While Joan didn’t need encouragement to speak her mind, often impudently, rarely with deference to those who considered themselves her betters, the one man she reflexively considered an ally—she, at least, held confession too sacred to cloak perfidy—didn’t caution Joan to still her sharp tongue. Instead, Loiseleur advocated her impertinence, and thus the enmity of those who heard it.
Joan’s first public examination was held on a Wednesday, February 21, 1431. The sun had yet to rise when Jean Massieu retrieved her from her cell, and though it was but a short distance to the castle’s chapel, it was long as well. Joan couldn’t be marched, or even walked, through the courtyard. The ankle cuffs of her leg irons, connected to each other by only a few links of chain, made it impossible for her to advance more than a few inches with each step. Joan could hobble forward at a torturously slow pace, but not walk. The two moved under cover of armed guard, Massieu’s job to watch she didn’t stumble and fall. From the time of her capture, in May, nine months earlier, Joan had refused women’s clothes from her captors. By the time she left Arras, perhaps sooner, she encountered no one inclined to risk offering her a change of male attire. Having not been captured with a portmanteau, she appeared before her judges, some richly robed, in clothes she had worn every day for months. Whether she was allowed to attend to personal hygiene or had the means to launder her clothes was the prerogative of her captors, who answered to the demands of the English tribunal. She was as pallid as a life spent entirely indoors predicted; she was, undoubtedly, gaunt.
Perhaps, as it had been when she approached the gates of Chinon, Joan had an angel by her side with—as Anouilh described Saint Michael—“two white wings reaching from the sky to the ground.” Maybe “the light that comes in the name of the voice” fell around her as she walked, bright enough to burn away faces that spat at her. If the tongues of angels stopped up her ears, maybe she didn’t hear all the cries of “Death to the witch!”
“Tell us if you are the son of God,” the high priest Caiaphas demanded.
“You have said so,” Jesus said.
Caiaphas tore his robes. “Now you have heard him blaspheme,” he told the crowd of scribes and elders assembled in the dark, an unofficial predawn hearing, as the Sanhedrin could take formal action only by daylight. In either case, the verdict preceded the trial. “What is your judgment?”
“He deserves death,” the crowd said. “Then they spat in his face, and struck him and some slapped him.”
To rid himself of the rabble collecting around Jesus, Caiaphas, the power-hungry high priest who “sought false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death,” had to convince the Romans that in declaring himself messiah, a temporal king anointed by God, Jesus challenged the Romans’ authority. Just as Cauchon seized the opportunity to satisfy his ambitions by proving Joan a witch, so had Caiaphas assumed the responsibility to provide the occupying Romans with a verdict demanding Jesus’s execution. Scriptures used to contextualize and explain human experience were also legal divining rods, and in the trials of both Jesus and Joan they were a source of sacred vocabulary. “You will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven,” Jesus said, drawing on the second-century BC prophet Daniel, who wrote, “There came one like the son of man … and to him was given dominion.”
The isolated answers Jesus gave to the Sanhedrin were drawn from Old Testament apocalyptic prophecies he claimed as validation of his kingship, and they were used as evidence of the capital crime of blaspheming. Joan’s answers and the Scripture summoned to condemn her for blasphemy were drawn from New Testament accounts of the life and death of Jesus and were used similarly by and against her.
Cauchon began the proceedings by explaining to Joan that she was before the Inquisition because she had a diffamatio: “Considering the public rumor and common report and also certain information already mentioned, after mature consultation with men learned in canon and civil law, we decreed that you be summoned to answer interrogations in matters of faith and other points truthfully according to law and reason.”
She would willingly appear before him, Joan said, and requested Cauchon “summon in this suit ecclesiastics of the French side equal in number to those of the English party.” No answer to the request was recorded, and no cleric representing Joan’s political side came forth.
On paper, the trial appears orderly; in the moment it was not so much uncontrolled as purposefully disorienting and disrespectful, one assessor interrupting another, firing questions so fast at Joan that “just when one of them was asking a question or she was replying to it, another would interrupt her; so much that several times she said to her interrogators, ‘My dear lords, please take your turns!’ ” Massieu was only one among many who were “surprised to see how well she could reply to the subtle and tricky questions that were asked her, questions that an educated man would have found it difficult to answer well” under more civilized proceedings. Not only did the assessors interrupt one another, but “they often asked Joan questions in several parts, and several of them asked her difficult questions at the same time … The examination generally went on from eight to eleven hours,” so long that some of the assessors complained of the exhaustion following their participation in what “proceeded in an atmosphere of ‘the greatest tumult.’ ” That neither Joan’s spirit nor her mental acuity flagged as she resisted the combined force of dozens of opponents who protested they were being overburdened by what was, for nearly all of them, the passive role of sitting in judgment attests to her unnatural fortitude even more powerfully than her stunts on the battlefield.
Cauchon and Joan clashed immediately over a point they would continue to argue on subsequent days of interrogation. “Will you place your hands on the holy gospels, and promise to speak the truth in answer to all questions put before you?”
“I do not know what you wish to examine me on,” Joan said. “Perhaps you might ask such things that I would not tell.”
“Will you swear to speak the truth upon those things which are asked you concerning the matter of faith and about what you know?”
“About my father and mother and what I have done since I had taken the road to France, I will gladly swear. As for my revelations from God, I will say nothing, not to save my head.”
“Will you or will you not swear to speak the truth in those things which concern our faith?”
“Once again and on many occasions,” Cauchon admonished Joan to swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and over and over she refused. In the end they made a tacit compromise when “Jeanne, kneeling, and with her two hands upon the book, namely the missal,” made a qualified oath. She’d tell the truth, but only so much of it.
The interrogation followed a basic chronological order but often returned to topics covered during earlier sessions or verged into non sequiturs intended to disorient Joan. The first day’s questioning opened on a pedestrian note. Joan was “alone, sitting on a high chair” and facing forty-two clerics, over whom Cauchon presided. The master of ceremonies on this inaugural and self-consciously historic occasion, Cauchon examined her himself, as he wouldn’t for most of the subsequent sessions.
“Where were you baptized?”
“In the church of Domrémy.”
“Who were your godfathers and godmothers?”
“One was named Agnes, another Jeanne, another Sibylle. My godfathers were Jean Lingué, another Jean Barrey. I know there were others, as my mother told me there were.”
“What priest baptized you?”
“Master Jean Minet, as far as I know.”
“Is Master Minet still living?”
“I believe so.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen, I think.”
“Recite the Paternoster for us.”
“I will gladly, if you hear me in confession.”
“Two clerics of the French language will hear your Paternoster.”
“I will recite it in confession, not otherwise.”
“If we are to believe you know your prayers, you must recite them.”
“I said I would, in confession.” On this point Joan did not compromise. She would not say her prayers before the tribunal. “She said also that she came from God,” the record states, “and that there is nothing for her to do here, and asked to be sent back to God, from whom she came.”
Cauchon summarized the first day’s accomplishments:
Whereupon we, the aforementioned bishop, forbade Jeanne to leave the prison assigned to her in the castle of Rouen without our authorization under penalty of conviction of the crime of heresy. She answered that she did not accept this prohibition, adding that if she escaped, none could accuse her of breaking or violating her oath, since she had given her oath to none. Then she complained that she was imprisoned with chains and bonds of iron. We told her that she had tried elsewhere and on several occasions to escape from prison, and therefore, that she might be more safely and securely guarded, an order had been given to bind her with chains of iron. To which she replied: “It is true that I wished and still wish to escape, as is lawful for any captive or prisoner.”
The trial record shows that forty-eight clerics joined Cauchon for the second day of public interrogation, relocated to the castle’s great hall, with room enough for an audience as well as seventy clerics. Joan, of course, missed the proximity of the sacraments and the altar. Over the following two weeks, while “leading Joan from her prison to her place of trial,” Massieu “several times passed the castle chapel,” and “let her, at her request, stop there and say her prayers.” When Jean d’Estivet caught him, he threatened the usher with prison for “having let that excommunicated whore come near [t]here without permission.”
The sentence might have been a foregone conclusion, but Joan had not been excommunicated—not yet. To assemble the justification for her punishment would require another three months. As it was the second day of questioning, Joan had an additional objection to the oath: she’d taken it the day before.
“Not even a prince, Joan, can refuse to take an oath when required in matter of faith.”
“I swore yesterday; that should be quite enough. You overburden me.”
The deadlock was resolved, as it had been the previous day, with Joan’s taking a qualified oath, swearing “to speak the truth on that which concerned the faith”—the, not her, faith.
The judges’ interrupting each other and speaking all at once made it difficult to accurately record all that was said, let alone who said what, and while each day’s proceedings began with a roll call of those judges who attended the session, the trial record rarely identifies particular prosecutors other than Cauchon and his deputy, “the distinguished professor of sacred theology, Master Jean Beaupère.” The canon of Rouen Cathedral, Beaupère, who had already decided Joan’s voices had “natural causes” arising from “the malice inherent in the nature of women,” commenced the day’s examination by “exhort[ing] her to answer truly, as she had sworn, what he should ask her.”
“You may well ask me such things,” Joan said, “that to some I shall answer truly, and to others I shall not … If you were well informed about me, you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing except by revelation.”
Beaupère took revelation as the focus of that day’s examination, from the arrival of the voice and accompanying light, to what advice Saints Catherine and Margaret had given her, and how they had paved her way to Robert de Baudricourt.
“Was it Captain Baudricourt who advised you to take the clothing of a man?”
This question, the record states, “she refused to answer many times. Finally she said she would charge no one with this; and she changed her testimony many times.” In fact, though the question was rephrased many times, in many ways, on many days, the topic of cross-dressing not so much an occasional digression as a routine jam in a cul-de-sac, Joan’s answer was consistent. She had assumed the clothing of a man in service to her vocation; it was a choice ordained by God and none other. Not even for the privilege of attending Mass would she agree to put on women’s clothes.
On the trial’s third day, sixty-two clerics watched as Joan and the bishop recapitulated the previous days’ stalemate. After Cauchon had, as the record states, “thrice admonished her to take the oath, the said Jeanne answered, ‘Give me leave to speak,’ ” and when the great hall had quieted enough that she could be heard, Joan said, “By my faith, you could ask me things such as I would not answer. Perhaps I shall not answer you truly in many things that you ask me, concerning the revelations; for perhaps you would constrain me to tell things I have sworn not to utter, and so I should be perjured, and you would not want that. I tell you, take good heed of what you say, that you are my judge, for you assume a great responsibility, and overburden me. It should be enough to have twice taken the oath.”
“When did you last take food and drink?” Beaupère asked Joan.
“Since yesterday noon I have not taken either.”
“Has your voice come to you?”
“I heard it yesterday and to-day.”
“At what hour yesterday?”
“Three times: once in the morning, once at vespers, and once in the evening, when the Ave Maria was rung.”
“What were you doing yesterday morning when the voice came to you?”
“I was sleeping, and the voice awakened me.”
“How did it wake you? Did it touch you on the arm?”
“It woke me without touching me.”
“Was it in the room with you?”
“I don’t know, but it was in the castle.”
“Did you not thank it and kneel down?”
“I was sitting on the bed, and I put my hands together. I asked for help, and the voice told me to answer you boldly.”
Joan turned on her chair to accuse Cauchon once more directly. “You say that you are my judge,” she repeated. “Take care what you are doing for in truth I have been sent by God and you put yourself in great danger.” The assessors knew well enough to maintain an unreadable expression, but the audience packed into the gallery felt no such responsibility, and, like Joan’s previous warnings to the bishop, her words inspired a communal gasp released in a static of whisper, anxious and amused. Cheekiness was one thing; to upbraid the bishop by claiming an intimacy with God that was not available to him, another.
“Do you know if you are in God’s grace?” Beaupère asked, hoping to trick Joan into admitting the capital crime of presuming on God’s generosity, and silencing the gallery. As it happened, the question provoked one of Joan’s most often cited and admired parries.
“If I am not, may God put me there,” she said, “and if I am, may God so keep me.” Here, Joan’s genius lay not in the words—they weren’t her own—but in the uncanny speed at which she arrived at a response that allowed her to avoid making an original statement about so dangerous a subject as God’s grace. Instead, she used a scrap of a prayer validated by the Church for many years. She had a memory that was not only capacious but also well organized, its function unimpeded by sleep deprivation, hunger, and the relentless abuse by her captors.
“I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace,” Joan added for Beaupère. “If I were in a state of sin, I do not think that the voice would come to me.”
The examination arrived at the infamous fairy tree by way of an interrogative stroll through the Domrémy of Joan’s childhood, passing by the fields where, Joan emphasized, she “did not go with the sheep and the other animals” and pausing to consider the ragged bands of children who trailed home “much wounded and bleeding” after a day spent warmongering in Maxey. Try as it might to maintain a cordon sanitaire between its doctrine and secular culture, the Church has never been able to comb faith apart from fantasy. No church ever has. Joan’s accusers were as heterodox as they were high-minded, giving credence to the very things Joan dismissed with a curt “I put no faith in that.”
“I heard from my brother that it is said I received messages at the tree, but that was not so, and I told him I did not, quite the contrary. The sick, when they can rise, go to the tree and walk about it,” and they drank from a spring beside it, “to restore their health. I have seen them myself, but I do not know whether they are cured or not.”
“Is there not in your part of the country an oak-wood?” the examiner asked Joan.
“Yes.”
“And do fairies not repair there?”
“I do not know,” she said. “I have never heard that they do.”
“What of the prophecy that out of this wood would come a maid who should work miracles?”
“I put no faith in that.” The prophecy with which Joan was familiar said France would be saved by a maid from the marshes of Lorraine, not one who emerged from the oak wood behind her father’s house.
Though the late-nineteenth-century illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès typically remained faithful to the plots of familiar folk and fairy tales he chose as subjects for his short silent films, for Jeanne d’Arc he scrambled what was known of Joan’s real life. Released in 1900, the film begins with an apparition of three tinted pastel figures, more fairy godmother than angel, that emerge, hanging in midair beside the trunk of a great tree standing, like a sentinel, at the entrance to the tangled heart of a forest. Joan’s sheep scatter; she falls to her knees before Saint Michael, beseeching him, as if to release her from her vocation. Behind her, the shadowed forest looms, and she staggers from her knees to her feet, pressing her hands to her head in operatic fright inspired by the looming terror of the task at hand. The angels vanish after the first seventeen seconds of the ten-minute film and return for a single ambiguous visitation in the eighth minute: twelve seconds of what might be a memory or a dream.
The sensibilities that characterize Méliès’s body of work—sin, redemption, rebirth—and his obvious delight in devilry and mischief are distinctly medieval, a fin-de-siècle danse macabre. Like chapbooks, his films unfold in silence, without title cards, a medium for the illiterate that draws no distinction among supernatural manifestations—not any more than the average man or woman of the Middle Ages. Imps, ghosts, angels, mermaids, a talking moon, Satan in the role of innkeeper: fancy animates a world lighter than the one Méliès places reverently on the shoulders of France’s national heroine. Not only does his careful, sanitized script for Jeanne d’Arc eliminate the supernatural from his heroine’s mortal life; it returns Joan to female dress when not armored for battle, demonstrating how long-lived and universal is the unconscious response to those aspects of Joan that challenge patriarchal rule.
As if he had siphoned the religion from Joan’s plot into Bluebeard’s, Méliès saturates the seventeenth-century fairy tale inspired by atrocities committed by Gilles de Rais with enough Christian symbology to recast a fairy tale of original sin as a parable of redemption. “La Barbe-Bleue” offers a screen onto which Méliès projects Christian interpretations of the bride’s disobedience and its results. After handing his newest wife a huge, phallic key to a forbidden room, Bluebeard leaves her without a chaperone to save her from her weak nature. Immediately, the bride succumbs to a spell cast by an antic devil that capers around her, out of her sight. When she slides the key into the forbidden lock’s hole, she discovers the wives who predeceased her, murdered and hanging on hooks. In horror, she drops the key into a pool of blood that has spilled, menses-like, from their ravished corpses. No matter how hard the bride tries to wash the phallic key to remove evidence of her transgression, the stain of its profane baptism is indelible. Before this fatally curious Eve can be rescued from her base nature, the Virgin Mary must fight the devil for her soul. Virtue triumphs; the dead wives are resurrected; the film’s last frame gathers the saved under the wings of a great white dove.
The unpolluted Maid of Jeanne d’Arc, however, ascends to her reward unaided by the Virgin. Dressed in bright, virginal white—forever beyond the reach of sexual sin—Joan rises from the flames of her pyre in a phoenix-like resurrection and arrives in a heaven over which the Eye of Providence (the same that tops the dollar bill’s green pyramid) beams from out of its triangle: a tidy reduction of the Trinity. When she raises her arms to form a cross, the audience understands: the Maid’s white gown isn’t a bride’s but a messiah’s: Joan is the Christ. God the Father and God the Son would be out of place in Méliès’s paradise, which, as it turns out, includes only women and might not be any more heavenly than being placed on a limitless pedestal (Fig. 35).
As was true of all medieval institutions of higher learning, the University of Paris, “surpassing all others in the fame of its masters and the prestige of its studies in theology and philosophy,” employed a method of critical thought that came to be known as Scholasticism, its labyrinthine dialectical methods and preoccupation with Christian orthodoxy the original source of the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. As conceived by Thomas Aquinas, Scholasticism undertook to answer questions of faith rationally, by the application of logic, a quixotic pursuit if ever there were one. And once reason had demonstrated it couldn’t justify God or his universe, Scholastics didn’t abandon what had revealed itself as a specious effort but clung more intently to“only a hard shell of argument by logic, practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by ‘hoary-headed children.’ ”
The fourth and fifth days of Joan’s public questioning were attended by fifty-four and fifty-six clerics, respectively, and by however many illustrious guests Cauchon had summoned. After the obligatory conflict over the oath, this time terminated by Joan’s telling Cauchon, “You ought to be satisfied, for I have sworn enough,” Beaupère, identified on these two days as the lead prosecutor, asked Joan how she had been since the trial’s previous session, three days earlier.
“You see well enough how. I have been as well as possible.”
Had she heard her voices? he wanted to know.
“Yes, truly, many times.”
The interrogation that followed was devoted to hairsplitting over Joan’s angels, a topic the canon could not in its inconsistency settle.
Angels assume a corporeal presence throughout the Old and New Testaments. They stand in roads and block the passage of man and beast; they sit under oak trees, wrestle, climb up and down ladders, and brandish swords. They also speak through the mouths of donkeys, go up in flames over altars, carry the virtuous up to heaven, and smite the wicked from above. From the Greek angelos, for “messenger,” angels most often assume no more than a voice to express God’s wishes. Audible only to those whom they visit, they speak a language different from mortal tongues. For Joan, who knew nothing of Scholasticism’s baroque categorization of heavenly beings, the topic presented the danger of her inadvertently revealing what traditions of demonology would condemn as evidence of witchcraft. Counterfeits of reality were held to be the work of the devil, not God, and Joan’s descriptions of her angels evolved under the pressure of relentless questioning from voices accompanied by a great light to solid beings whom Joan not only saw and heard but touched and kissed.
Was their hair long, did it hang down, was it the only thing between their heads and their crowns? Was it Saint Michael who told her to wear male clothing? Did Saint Margaret speak English? Did she have arms and legs or a “different kind of member”? In what form exactly had Saint Michael appeared? Was he carrying a set of scales? (The archangel’s role on Judgment Day was to weigh souls.)
Joan was clever enough to avoid answering questions she understood as traps but too proud to hide her exasperation.
“Was Saint Michael naked?”
“Do you think God has not wherewithal to clothe him?” she countered.
“Did he have any hair?”
“Why should it be cut off?”
Cauchon, who “had invited a number of prominent people to watch him prosecute what he believed would be a clear case against an illiterate nineteen-year-old peasant girl who was either a fraud or possessed by evil spirits, or both,” had anticipated a glorious public triumph. By the conclusion of the sixth session, which focused on her alleged promotion of the cult of personality that had developed around her, it was clear he was to be disappointed, at the least. If Cauchon’s cronies weren’t amused by Joan’s impertinence, and his unwilling accomplices too cowed to smile, the audience of bigwigs the bishop had collected to bear witness to his crowning glory—and no seat went untaken, there wasn’t standing room—felt no such loyalty. Joan had an audience, and she couldn’t resist playing to it. Jean Le Sauvage, a Dominican who spoke of the case “with great repugnance,” said he had “never seen a girl of that age wreak such havoc with her examiners.”
“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.
The greater part of the charges addressed Joan’s voices, her saints—that she “sees and hears them, embraces and kisses them, touches and feels them … and has seen parts of their bodies whereof she has chosen not to speak.” Under the direction of these demons she mistook for angels, Joan had assumed male clothing and slept among men without any female companion or chaperone. The glaring illogic of denouncing a proven virgin of sexual promiscuity didn’t prevent its inclusion among other trumped-up charges. The charges that did not address Joan’s direct experience of her angels concerned the powers with which they endowed her, the presumptions they inspired, the liberties they convinced her to take—including jumping from the tower at Beaurevoir and refusing to submit to the Church Militant while claiming certain inclusion among the Church Triumphant—and her insistence on wearing male clothing, the last more offensive than all the rest because it represented her defiance, advertised it.
The word “submit” appears ninety-four times in the trial record. It was impossible to look at Joan without being forced, each time, to consider her insurrection. And this disobedient creature had the audacity to say that “St. Catherine told her she would have aid, and she does not know whether this will be her deliverance from prison, or if, whilst she is being tried, some tumult might come through which she can be delivered. And she thinks it will be one or the other. And beyond this the voices told her she will be delivered by a great victory.”
“Take everything peacefully,” Joan’s voices told her. “Have no care for thy martyrdom; in the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.”
“Her martyrdom she called the pain and adversity which she suffers in prison,” the record stated, “and she knows not how it will end.”