On the evening of April 15, Bishop Cauchon made the unusual gesture of sending Joan a piece of carp for dinner, a little respite from whatever prison fare she might expect that evening. It was Friday, on which it was not permitted to eat any meat or fowl, only fish, and while the peasantry could afford no better than preserved and unpalatably salty fish, aristocrats ate fresh carp or sometimes salmon. Whether or not the gift reflected a genuinely charitable impulse, its result was punitive. A few hours after retiring for the night, Joan woke with a fever and began vomiting. Hours passed until the guard changed and her condition was reported to John Gray and then Warwick, who responded with concern enough to dispatch not one but two physicians, Guillaume de la Chambre and Jean Tiphaine, whose directions were to make sure Joan recovered.
Escorted to her cell by Jean d’Estivet, the physicians found Joan shackled, as always, to the block at the end of her bed. No one had attended to her. According to the guards in her cell, “she had vomited a great deal” and felt ill enough to ask the doctors to summon a priest to hear her confession and administer last rites, which was not the hysterical response it might be judged today. Joan lived in an era of few and primitive remedies, when the onset of acute gastroenteritis wasn’t the treatable ailment it became once medicine offered artificial means of rehydration. The stress, physical abuse, and compromised hygiene of captivity meant prisoners routinely fell ill and died, and fever accompanied by a severe or prolonged bout of vomiting might characterize not only food-borne illnesses but also incipient typhus, cholera, even plague. Guillaume testified that he had felt “her on the right side and found her feverish. So we decided to bleed her. When we reported this to the Earl of Warwick, he said to us, ‘Take care with your bleeding. For she is a cunning woman and might kill herself.’ The king valued her highly and had paid dearly for her and he did not want her to die except by the hands of justice. He wanted to have her burned … Nevertheless she was bled, and this immediately improved her condition.”
The other attending physician, Tiphaine, testified that he’d “asked her what was wrong and where she felt pain. She answered that a carp had been sent to her by the Bishop of Beauvais, of which she had eaten, and that she thought that to have been the cause of her illness. Then Jean d’Estivet upbraided her, saying that this was false.”
In fact, he called Joan a whore and liar and accused her of using herbal emetics, ignoring the fact that she had no means of obtaining them nor advantage to be gained by their effects. “ ‘It is you, you wanton,’ Jean d’Estivet said, ‘who have taken aloes and other things that have made you ill.’
“This she denied,” Tiphaine said, “and there was a liberal exchange of abuse between Joan and d’Estivet,” upon which Joan’s condition immediately deteriorated, as corroborated by Guillaume de la Chambre, who recalled separately, “Once she was cured, a certain Master Jean d’Estivet came on the scene and exchanged some abusive language with Joan … which so greatly annoyed Joan that she had a relapse and became feverish again.”
It’s tempting to accuse Cauchon of deliberately poisoning his victim. DeMille doesn’t resist; he guides the bishop’s hand to withdraw a tiny vial of poison from the decorative carving of his throne-like chair and pour its contents into a goblet of wine he offers not to Joan but to Charles, a toast to his coronation. In the film, as in history, the king himself is the ultimate target of the bishop’s attempts to invalidate the Armagnac claim to the throne. Joan bends to give the bishop’s hand a kiss of respect and recoils from his flesh, as if it, not the wine, is tainted. A luminous sword only she can see points its glowing tip at the poisoned cup, and Joan seizes it before Charles can put it to his lips.
A food-borne pathogen whose vector was fish handled without refrigeration or contaminated by an unclean serving vessel is a more likely cause of Joan’s illness than any intent to poison the one key player in Cauchon’s grand spectacle, but her exaggerated response to Jean d’Estivet’s attack raises the question of a third possibility. If his presence and his verbal abuse upset her to the point of relapse, even raising her body temperature, the course of her illness might have been psychosomatic. The fervor of vocation that granted Joan her extraordinary tolerance for pain and the ability to transcend injury and exhaustion that felled the strongest among mortal warriors suggests a sympathy between spirit and flesh that might have left her body as vulnerable to emotional agitation and revulsion as it was to the force of her will. Joan knew Cauchon sought her death, and that was enough to provoke a violent rejection of a meal he’d offered and she literally could not stomach. No matter the organic cause of Joan’s illness, she attributed it to the gift of a murderous enemy.
Like the stag that won the Battle of Patay, a poisoned fish enters the story of Joan’s life bearing a meaning that a tainted bit of mutton or pheasant cannot bring to the narrative—yet another detail that tethers Joan to Jesus. Before the reign of Clovis, whose conversion transformed what had been a capital crime into a requirement of the state, early Christians relied on secret signs to point the way to clandestine meetings for worship, typically held underground, in catacombs.*1 Among these, the most commonly used was the fish, ichthys in Greek, an animal that, like a dove or a stag, represents a messiah who promised to make his disciples Peter and Andrew “fishers of men,” and has the advantage of providing an acronym for Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr—“Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” People still use the symbol to identify themselves as Christians. Joan’s illness and the fish she blamed it on are documented; it isn’t possible to interpret them as imaginative additions, no more than it is to prevent the fish from striking an unconscious note of significance: a wicked man purporting to be Christ’s representative on earth fed Joan a fish in what was a perversion of Jesus’s multiplying fish to sustain five thousand of his followers.
Two days later, on April 18, Cauchon, accompanied by the assessors Guillaume Le Boucher, Jacques de Touraine, Maurice du Quesnay, Nicolas Midi, Guillaume Adelie, and Gérard Feuillet, visited Joan in her cell, where they found her very weak and fretting over the possibility of dying unconfessed and unabsolved. The bishop told her the reason he’d come to her sickbed was his concern for her immortal soul, for which he was “disposed to seek salvation.” He “reminded her that for many different days in the presence of many learned persons she had been examined on grave and difficult questions concerning the faith, to which she had given varied and divergent answers … found to contain words and confessions that from the point of view of the faith were dangerous.” Joan was, the bishop reminded her, “unlettered and ignorant,” himself generous in his offer “to provide her with wise and learned men, upright and kindly, who could duly instruct her.” If she insisted on “trusting to her own mind and inexperienced head” rather than selecting an adviser from the six judges he had brought with him, he was afraid her case would be lost and the Church “compelled to abandon her.”
“It seems to me,” Joan said to Cauchon, ignoring an offer she suspected was a trick, “seeing how ill I am, that I am in great danger of death. If it be that God desires to do His pleasure on me, I ask to receive confession and my Savior [the Eucharist] also, and a burial in holy ground.”
“If you wish to receive the sacraments, Joan, you must do as good Catholics are in duty bound. You must submit to the holy Church. If you do not,” Cauchon said, looking down on the stubborn figure in the bed, “the only sacrament you will receive is that of penance. That we are always ready to administer.”
“I cannot now tell you anything more,” Joan said.
“The more you fear for your life because of your illness,” Cauchon told her, “the more you ought to amend that life. You will not enjoy the rights of the Church if you do not submit to the Church.”
“If my body dies in prison, I trust you will have it buried in holy ground. If you do not, I put my trust in Our Lord.”
Before Cauchon took his leave, once again, the record states, Joan was “summoned, exhorted and required to take the good counsel of the clergy and notable doctors and trust in it for the salvation of her soul.”
Forced into the position of Cauchon’s lieutenant, Guillaume de la Fontaine was not Joan’s enemy. A close friend of Nicolas de Houppeville, who had risked his own freedom by passing a letter to the jailed prelate, Guillaume was so disturbed by the tenor of the bishop’s “charitable exhortation” to Joan that on May 1, in anticipation of the following day’s public admonition, he made his way to her cell with Martin Ladvenu, who served as Joan’s confessor in the last month of her life, and Isambart de la Pierre, whom Warwick had threatened to have drowned for trying to aid Joan in responding to the assessors’ questions. It was Isambart de la Pierre’s impression that it had never been explained to Joan that the Church Militant included the recently convened ecumenical Council of Basel and the newly elected Pope Eugene IV. It was not limited to the judges who had assembled in Rouen to try her. Aware how dire was her situation, the three clerics advised Joan to appeal directly to the pope, with the unfortunate result that the next day, when Joan asked for what Cauchon knew she hadn’t before understood was her right, the bishop went immediately to her guards to find out who might have planted such an idea in her head. Manchon testified that when he found out, Cauchon “stormed most angrily … and threatened to do them a violent mischief.” Le Maître made excuses for Isambart and Martin and “begged for their pardon, saying that if any mischief were done to them he would not take part in the trial.” Guillaume didn’t feel sufficiently protected by such limited collateral and left town for fear of his life, and the Earl of Warwick forbade Joan any visitors who had not been first approved by Cauchon. As there was no one who would dare carry an appeal from Joan to Pope Eugene, the request was effectively, and unlawfully, denied.
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.
On Sunday, May 13, Warwick threw a grand formal dinner, attended by 110 guests, including his daughter, married to Talbot, still held hostage by the Armagnacs, and others who played a role in Joan’s story. It was an unusually sumptuous feast, the purchases for which filled two pages of the earl’s household account book, rather than the usual single page required for a party of that size. For a nightcap to the festivities, Warwick escorted a party of select guests to Joan’s cell; the keep was a short walk from his home. “I have a dirty virgin witch girl tucked away on a litter of straw in the depths of a prison here in Rouen,” Anouilh’s Warwick says.
Although he thought it “inopportune” to pay such a call, Cauchon was among Joan’s unwelcome visitors, as was her old captor, Jean of Luxembourg. “I have come here to offer you ransom,” Jean said, “on condition that you promise never again to take up arms against us.” In his cups, he found the taunt funny enough that he repeated it several times.
“In God’s name,” Joan said. “You are mocking me. I know well you have neither the wish nor the power to do so … I know very well that the English will have me killed, believing that after my death they will win the kingdom of France. But even if there were a hundred thousand Goddams*2 more than are here at present, they will not gain the kingdom.”
Haimond de Macy, the knight who had tried, unsuccessfully, to fondle Joan’s breasts, testified that the Earl of Stafford, also present, “was incensed by this speech and half drew his dagger to strike her, but the Earl of Warwick prevented him.”
Last days vanish quickly, even in a cell. On May 14, the university faculty of theology convened to draft their response to the twelve articles of condemnation, which Jean Beaupère, Nicolas Midi, and a third cleric, Jacques de Touraine, had brought to Paris for them to review. By the morning of May 19, the envoys had returned with the expected endorsement, and the bishop summoned all the assessors to the chapel for a reading of the results of the faculty’s deliberations: a unanimous consensus. The “iniquitous and scandalous demoralization of the people” that Joan inspired must come to an end. With respect to her voices, considering “the quality of the person and the place, and the other circumstances,… either these are imagined, corrupting and pernicious lies, or … these apparitions and revelations are superstitious, from malign and diabolical spirits such as Belial, Satan and Behemoth,” the three demons chosen to represent Joan’s three angels. Belial appears in both the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaic texts the Church classifies as apocryphal. The Dead Sea Scrolls describe him as the leader of the Sons of Darkness. Satan, the adversary, is the proud angel who fell from heaven, who tempted Jesus and ushered Joan off the roof of Beaurevoir. Behemoth, a rapacious primeval monster, stalks through the book of Job, summoned by God to demonstrate his power over evil as well as good, a land-bound Leviathan.
The Paris faculty judged Joan one who “believes lightly and affirms rashly … her belief is evil and she strays from the faith.” Her miracles and precognition were accomplished through sorcery. She was “impious toward her parents.” By dressing as a man, she committed blasphemy, “setting aside divine law.” She was a “traitress, deceitful, cruel, and thirsty for the shedding of human blood, seditious and an inciter of tyranny.” That she asserted she would go to Paradise was “a presumptuous and rash assertion, a pernicious lie.” Her clothing, and the disgrace of having worn it countless times while receiving the Eucharist, revealed her as someone who defied “sacred doctrine, and the laws of the Church.” She was an apostate who held “a reprehensible view on the unity and the authority of the Church”—a schismatic.
On May 23, at the instruction of the Paris faculty, Joan was “charitably exhorted” once more. “Jeanne was led to a room near her prison in the castle of Rouen and into the presence of her judges assembled in tribunal,” among them Jean de Châtillon, Beaupère, Midi, Professor Guillaume Érard of the Sorbonne, and Pierre Maurice, canon of Rouen, a young theologian who “displayed a great deal of fervor in attempting to enlighten Joan,” “expounded Joan’s faults to her … and caused her to be warned to abandon these shortcomings and errors, to correct and reform herself, to submit to the correction and decision of our Holy Mother the Church.”
“Jeanne, dearest friend,” Maurice said,
it is now time, near the end of your trial, to think well over all that has been said … although you have been shown the perils to which you expose your body and soul if you do not reform … nevertheless up till now you have not wished to listen. Do not permit yourself to be separated from Our Lord Jesus Christ who created you to be a partaker in His glory. Do not choose the way of eternal damnation with the enemies of God who daily endeavor to disturb men, counterfeiting often the likeness of Christ, His angels and His saints.
If you persevere in this error, your soul will be condemned to eternal punishment and perpetual torture, and I do not doubt that your body will come to perdition. Let not human pride and empty shame … hold you back because you fear that if you do as I advise you will lose the great honors which you have known … you will lose all if you do not as I say.
Joan would say nothing that she hadn’t before, during the trial. “If I were condemned and saw the fire and the faggots alight and the executioner ready to kindle the fire, and even if I myself were in it, I would say nothing else. I would maintain until death what I said in the trial.”
The next day, Thursday, May 24, was Pentecost, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, their baptism by fire after Jesus had been crucified and resurrected, a great crowd of 120 astonished when “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” For the occasion of Pentecost, Cauchon “organized a spectacle designed to impress the prisoner” with the looming threat of fire.
Two scaffolds had been erected in the cemetery of the abbey of Saint-Ouen, a stone’s throw from the Cathedral of Rouen. One was for judges, notables, notaries, prelates, and bureaucrats, the other for Joan, visited early that morning by the cathedral’s canon, Jean Beaupère, who explained that she was to be taken to a public scaffold where a sermon would be delivered to her. Somewhere en route from her cell to the cemetery, Loiseleur drew her into a “certain small doorway.” “Trust me,” he said, “and you will be saved. Accept your [woman’s] dress, and do everything they tell you, or you are in danger of death. If you do as I say … you will be turned over to the Church.”
Under heavy guard, Joan was escorted to her scaffold by Massieu. It was the first time the public had been invited to look at Joan, now raised above their gaping mouths and staring eyes. She faced the hoary old professor, Érart, who preached a venomous sermon that veered into melodrama whenever he addressed Joan directly. “Oh, royal house of France, you have never known monsters till now!” he raved. “But now you are dishonored for giving your faith to this woman, this witch, heretic, and child of superstition.”
“Do not speak of my king,” Joan said. “He is a good Christian.”
“I am speaking to you, Joan, and I tell you your king is a heretic and a schismatic.”
“By my faith, lord,… he is the noblest Christian and loves the faith and the Church better than any. He is not as you say.”
“Make her shut up,” Érard said to Massieu.
Once Érard concluded the spewing of invective and name-calling that passed for a homily, Jean Massieu read Joan the “schedule of abjuration”—a document, he later testified, that was no more than eight lines long, which made it a different document from the one included with the official trial record, a long abjuration composed by Nicolas de Venderès, a licentiate in law and English partisan, that enumerated the specific errors of faith Joan was alleged to have committed and which she was now renouncing. Of the one he read and Joan signed, Massieu remembered only that it stipulated she was never again to dress as a man, cut her hair short, or bear arms. A version of that eight-line schedule discovered with the Orléans manuscript of the trial’s French minutes is considered by some historians to be a copy of the original that Joan signed.
“I, Joan, called the Pucelle, a miserable sinner … confess that I have grievously sinned in falsely pretending to have revelations from God and His angels, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, etc.”
So radical an abridgment of a document of such importance was unorthodox enough to be suspect. It may explain the curious form of the abjuration Joan was asked to sign: a “slip of parchment designed to be attached to a legal document” that appeared to have been prepared in haste. Massieu was certain “Joan did not understand the schedule or the danger she was in.” Pressed to sign it, she asked that the clerics review it first.
“Let it be seen by the Church in whose hands I ought to be placed,” she said. “If they advise me that I should sign it and do as I’m told, I will do it gladly.”
“Do it now,” Érard said. “Or else you will end your life today in the fire.”
A tumbrel waited to wheel Joan off to the stake, already set with piles of fagots and tinder and raised high on a platform assembled for the occasion. By some accounts it was made of stone; others called it “plastered”—a means, presumably, of fireproofing an otherwise flammable wood scaffold. Cauchon made sure Joan had been taken to the cemetery by way of the marketplace so that she might see what awaited her should she fail to abjure. “In principle, the pains of fire were only applicable to a relapsed heretic,” one of the clerics who had been present at the abjuration testified, speculating that Cauchon had “set his snare solely for the purpose of subsequently making a relapsed heretic of Joan.” Warwick had made the expectations of the English clear: it wasn’t enough that Joan be executed; they wanted her burned as a witch.
“I will sign it rather than be burned,” Joan answered Érard. At hearing her submit, the crowd grew very restless. Some threw stones as they screamed, “Death to the witch,” and the English soldiers had to restrain the mob by means of force. “Never were the Jews filled with such hatred against Jesus as the English against the Maid,” Michelet wrote, for she had “wounded them at their most sensitive point, in the naïve and profound esteem they have of themselves.”
“Now,” the Evangelist Matthew recorded, “the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’ ”
“Barabbas,” they said, choosing a “notorious criminal.”
“Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?”
All of them said, “Let him be crucified!”
“Why, what evil has he done?” the governor asked. But they shouted all the more.
“Let him be crucified!”
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.’ ”
“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.”
“And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour,” “while the sun’s light failed.” “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘E’lo-i, E’lo-i, la’ma sabach-tha’ni?’ ” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
“And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”
“And the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”
“Jesu,” Joan called as she died, “Jesu!” Her essence was transformed by light too hot to touch—heir to Moses’s burning bush, to the blinding flash that made Saul into Paul.
The Bourgeois of Paris, a genuine eyewitness—the population of Rouen swelled with voyeurs from all classes—reported that after Joan was dead and her clothes burned away, “the fire was raked back, and her naked body,” lifted above the eyes of the marketplace, “was shown to all the people, with all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman to remove any doubt from the people.” When “they had seen enough and looked as long as they liked at the dead body bound to the stake, the executioner started a great fire again round her poor carcass … and flesh and bone were reduced to ashes.”
As he watches the fire consume her in Gastyne’s La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc, the executioner turns away, his face contorted with fear. “We have burned a saint!” he screams, and the petrified onlookers turn their backs to run in panic.
“Abba!” Jesus called, begging for delivery. “Father!”
“Jesu!” Joan cried when the flames engulfed her, her voice the last to sound in Schiller’s play. “Look! Do you see the rainbow in the sky? Heaven is opening its golden gates … Clouds lift me up—my heavy armor’s changing—I am on wings—I rise—up—up—earth falls away so fast.”
Signs abounded. Many who watched Joan die above the heads of the mob spoke of seeing “Jesus” “written in the flames of the fire in which she was burned.” When an English soldier who had been particularly vocal about his hatred for Joan heard her call on Jesus as she burned, he succumbed to “rapture” so intense it left him insensible. Once revived “with the aid of strong drink,” he spoke of seeing “a white dove flying from the direction of France at the moment she was giving up the ghost.” Birds exulted at her birth, beating their wings and proclaiming the savior’s arrival. Silent now, they swept Joan heavenward, at last granted her wish “to be sent back to God, from whence I came.”
Bresson’s camera swings from Joan’s head, caught in a cloud of white smoke, to a skylight, translucent but not transparent. Overhead, the silhouettes of doves move restlessly, waiting for her ascent through that ceiling between earth and the light beyond it. Dreyer’s flock wheels over Joan’s head, and her eyes follow them until they close, her gaze wet with light. A woman runs past, a white lamb in her arms.
“We made a lark into a giant bird,” Anouilh’s Warwick laments, a bird “who will travel the skies of the world long after our names are forgotten, or confused, or cursed down.”
The executioner, Thérage, who had been instructed to incinerate Joan’s clothes, shoes, plate, spoon—whatever belongings a prisoner might own—along with every scrap of her flesh and throw all the ash into the Seine, approached Ladvenu and Isambart de la Pierre and “said and affirmed that notwithstanding the oil, sulphur, and charcoal that he had applied to Joan’s entrails and heart, he had not found it possible to burn them or reduce them to ashes. He was astonished at this as at a patent miracle.”
By noon Thérage was on his knees before a priest, weeping for his lost soul, begging for absolution in which he couldn’t believe: so horrific was his crime.*4
“I never wept as much for anything that befell me,” Guillaume Manchon testified, “and could not finally stop weeping for a whole month afterward.”
*1 First recorded use in the fifteenth century, from catacumbae, derived from cata tumbas, Latin for “among the tombs.” Tradition holds that the Apostles (among them Saint Peter, over whose remains Saint Peter’s Basilica was constructed) were buried underground in a network of tunnels later used for holding the Mass.
*2 French slang for “English” as they so often repeated the expletive “Goddamn” heard by the French as Goddam.
*3 “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly.” Proverbs 26:11.
*4 According to records in France’s national library, Thérage recovered sufficiently to continue in his line of work and received, on March 25, 1432, “111 livres et 13 sous pour 104 exécutions.”