Poisoned by disappointment over Joan’s having not in the end denied her voices, on June 7, 1431, a week after she was burned, Cauchon summoned a handful of assessors to a closed meeting at the archbishopric’s palace in Rouen. Among them were the three clerics who had kept Joan company on the last morning of her life and who would have heard any last-minute disavowal of her voices, had she made such a thing: Pierre Maurice, Martin Ladvenu, and Jean Toutmouillé. All three proved sufficiently ductile to suborn; they joined several others in the creation of “ex officio information upon certain words spoken by the late Jeanne before many trustworthy persons, whilst she was still in prison and before she was brought to judgment.” The fraudulent affidavit was devised to be attached like a postscript to the official Latin trial record Thomas de Courcelles would assemble over the next six months. Present at the closed meeting, Thomas, who elided his name here as he did wherever he found it in the French trial minutes, swore that Joan admitted her voices “were evil spirits who had promised her deliverance and that she had been deceived.” In the end, he said, she had agreed that their having failed to save her was proof of their malevolence. Nicolas de Venderès, who wrote the exhaustive abjuration included in the official record—not the brief one read to Joan—agreed she had renounced her angels as mauvais esprits, as did Nicolas Loiseleur. Apparently, his crisis of conscience was of insufficient strength or duration to inspire his disobeying Cauchon. Not only did Loiseleur claim that on the morning of Joan’s execution he had “heard her say that it was she, Jeanne, who had announced to her king the crown mentioned in the trial, that she was the angel, and there had been no other angel but herself”; he also testified that when led to the stake, Joan had not asked God to forgive any of her persecutors but “was heard to ask with great contrition of heart pardon of the English and Burgundians for having caused them to be slain, put to flight and, as she confessed, sorely afflicted.” The flourish suggests Cauchon ordered Loiseleur to openly atone for groveling before Joan on the day she was executed.
More apologia than affidavit, the “ex officio information,” in reversing all Joan held to be true, amounted to a blanket pardon for her persecutors even as it provided them with evidence that Joan finally confessed that the infamous heavenly sign presented to Charles at Chinon was no crown but a “pure fiction.” Left unsigned by all three notaries, the document was produced as the necessary preamble to a second unorthodox postscript to the trial record. A letter dated June 28, 1431, was carried from Bishop Pierre Cauchon to “the emperor, kings, dukes and other princes of all Christendom.” Writing both for and as the nine-year-old King of England, who hadn’t the faculties to manufacture the statement at hand, Cauchon qua Henry “thought it wise to make known that the certain woman whom the vulgar called The Maid” was dead, condemning Joan, “who with an astonishing presumption, and contrary to natural decency, had adopted man’s dress, assumed military arms, dared to take part in the massacre of men in bloody encounters and appeared in divers battles,” until, by an act of God, she had been delivered into the young king’s hands. “As befits a Christian king reverencing the ecclesiastical authority with filial affection,” Henry had relinquished “the said woman to the judgment of Our Holy Mother Church.” But, as no effort was great enough to save a woman of such grave wickedness, after Joan had been handed over to the secular arm,
the fire of her pride which then seemed stifled, renewed by the breath of devils, suddenly burst out in poisonous flames; this wretched woman returned to her errors, to her false infamies which she lately had vomited away. Finally, as the ecclesiastical sanctions decree, to avoid the infection of the other members of Christ, she was given up to the judgment of the secular power which decided that her body was to be burned. Seeing then the nearness of her latter end, this wretched woman openly acknowledged and fully confessed that the spirits which she claimed had visibly appeared to her were only evil and lying spirits, that her deliverance from prison had been falsely promised by the spirits, who she confessed had mocked and deceived her.
Cauchon closed his self-congratulatory pronouncement by underscoring the necessity that the people “be taught not to put their faith lightly in superstitions and erroneous frivolities, especially at a time such as we have just experienced.” Joan hadn’t been the answer to desperate war-torn prayers. She had been not God’s envoy but the devil’s, “shedding human blood, causing popular seditions and tumults, inciting the people to perjury and pernicious rebellions, false and superstitious beliefs, by disturbing all true peace and renewing mortal Wars, permitting herself to be worshiped and revered by many as a holy woman.”
His victory was a paper one, but Cauchon prevailed in having it broadcast from pulpit to pulpit throughout Europe. Once they’d gone up in smoke with their owner, Joan’s clothes took on even greater significance than they had in the trial. On August 9, Jean Graverent—the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris identified him only as “a friar of the Order of Saint Dominic”—preached a great public sermon that trended toward outright fiction and hysteria, claiming Joan had admitted “she had persisted in [wearing] the clothing of a man when she was about fourteen years old, and that from that time on her mother and father would gladly have brought about her death if they could have done so without staining their consciences. So she had therefore left them, accompanied by the devil, and since then had killed Christian people, full of fire and blood.” Having “recanted, and been assigned penance … of which she did not do a single day, but was waited on in prison like a lady,” she was paid a visit by Satan’s emissaries, disguised as saints, who “said to her, ‘Miserable creature who changed your dress for fear of death! Do not be afraid. We will protect you effectively from them all.’ So she then immediately undressed and put on all the old clothes she wore when riding, which she had pushed into the straw of her bed. She trusted this devil so much that she said she was sorry that she’d ever agreed to give up her clothes.”
By the end of November 1431, six months after Joan’s execution, the official trial document had been completed, copied, bound, and distributed. Three original copies survive, each authenticated by Cauchon’s seal. Extant receipts and documents authorizing payments made to “Pierre, bishop of Lisieux, formerly bishop of Beauvais … for the trial for heresy of the deceased Joan, formerly called the Maid,” have allowed scholars to calculate the total cost of Joan’s trial and execution at 10,865 livres tournois. All but 770 wrung from Normandy’s taxpayers were disbursed from the English king’s treasury in six sums, five received by the bishop during the year 1431 and the last delayed by England’s wartime financial predicament until 1437.
A first-class lawyer of the time would have earned as much as three hundred livres a year; the village curé for a town like Domrémy received but five. Had Jacques d’Arc leased the house in which his family lived, he would have paid his landlord about two or three livres a year. Had he convinced Joan to marry, the wedding feast and dowry together would have cost little more. And had there been anything left of his daughter to bury, Jacques d’Arc would have set himself back a good ten livres for even an inexpensive funeral, with minimal bell ringing, clergy, and refreshments.
On December 16, Pierre Cauchon, thus swaddled in considerable riches as well as entitlements, attended Henry VI’s coronation in Paris. As reported by Enguerrand de Monstrelet, the bishop of Winchester joined him, along with the Duke of Bedford, the Earls of Warwick, Suffolk, and Salisbury, and Louis of Luxembourg. At the formal banquet that followed the anointing, the bishop sat close to the newly anointed king. Beautiful or not, already the trial and execution of Joan of Arc had provided Cauchon with the altitude he’d anticipated; within a few years his diplomatic status would soar as high as mortally possible. In 1435, he attended the Council of Basel and then the Congress of Arras. He was general envoy for Henry VI; he was the English queen’s chancellor as well. During 1439 and 1440, his career took him back and forth across the channel, chasing the peace he never lived to see, as on December 18, 1442, he died at his home in Rouen, suddenly, while being shaved.
Little more than a decade would pass before his heirs had occasion to write to “the judges of the nullification trial, through the intermediary of its procurator, Jean de Gouvis, to disclaim any responsibility” for their great-uncle Pierre’s infamous crimes. “Hard-pressed to remain in the good graces of the new [French] government … they rejected him [Cauchon] absolutely.”
A larger sliver of poetic justice could be tweezed from the creeping years-long torture of Nicolas Midi’s dying by degrees, a literally untouchable pariah. The biblical scourge of leprosy descended on the venerable theologian three years after he delivered the “solemn sermon” on the morning Joan died, the one he conceived for her “salutary admonition and the edification of the people.”
“Most diligent care must be taken,” Midi called out to his barbarous audience, eager to get past the preaching and on to the stake, “to prevent the foul contagion of this pernicious leprosy from spreading to other parts of the mystic body of Christ.” And he cut off the limb he misjudged and ordered it be burned.
As Midi had been the one who boiled Joan’s interrogation down to the twelve articles that summarized her “doctrine,” his fate was almost immediately interpreted as a divine punishment. Not only was his death gruesome; it was slow enough that the once revered doctor of the Church was forced to witness the enjoyment his torture inspired in those he’d once counted his friends. It was, perhaps, unfortunate to have chosen the affliction that ended up killing him as a metaphor for Joan’s heresy.
From the time of Joan’s capture until her execution, the war had fizzled and stalled. The French continued to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, and the English, having discovered the challenge of marshaling forces in thrall to even a captured and chained witch of such formidable power, funneled their dwindling resources into Joan’s trial. But by executing the girl who insisted peace was to be found only at the tip of a lance, they’d also removed the greatest obstacle to Charles’s attempts at reconciliation with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and England’s continued presence in France depended on its alliance with Burgundy. Despite the efforts of the esteemed general envoy of the English, Pierre Cauchon, at the Congress of Arras, in 1435, that alliance was undone. Charles agreed to make reparation for the death of John the Fearless, and Burgundy, though it remained a free state, recognized Charles as the King of France, significantly undermining Henry VI’s claim to his throne. Paris, the jewel of all Europe, was once again the French capital.
Emboldened by the shift in his fortunes, by 1441 Charles had recovered the aggressive flair that characterized the teenage dauphin who had yet to be emasculated by his mother’s betrayal. The king of France, thirty-eight years old, once again climbed on a charger, took the lead of his army, and discovered how vitiated were the forces on which his nation’s independence relied. A truce from 1444 to 1449 allowed him to redirect what revenues he could muster from making war into reorganizing his ragged ranks of mercenaries, feudal levies, and volunteers into the “first professional, permanent, national standing army that Europe had seen since Rome.” Now there were compagnies d’ordonnances, their senior officers appointed by the king, who disbursed funds directly to those officers to pay his men-at-arms. Locally recruited corps of anywhere between one hundred and four hundred knights, most of whom were cavalry and whose archers now carried longbows, replaced demoralized bands of ill-equipped, underpaid, and hungry soldiers. Thanks to the brothers Jean and Gaspard Bureau, whose innovations in the use of gunpowder made French artillery the most advanced in all Europe, French “cannons quickly pulverized one English-held fortress town after another.” In 1449, the once impenetrable walls of Rouen, with their sixty towers, fell, and by 1453 the Hundred Years War was over. Had Joan lived to see what she had prophesied, she would have been forty-one years old.
The Maid’s enemies died off, and her friends multiplied. Fantastic rumors spread. If Saint Michael hadn’t set Joan free, then mortal knights had ridden to her rescue. Too many and too shining for the enemy to hold at bay, they swept through the old market like crusaders storming Jerusalem. They trampled the English, and they freed the Maid who freed Orléans and brought the French king his crown.
Not only were there sightings of Joan’s apparition; there were flesh-and-blood impostors. One among the flurry of alleged Maids even attracted international attention. A woman named Claude des Armoises, whose repertoire of parlor tricks included prestidigitation (she was said to be able to make broken glass and torn napkins whole again), emerged in 1436, two of Joan’s brothers her unlikely accomplices. Petit-Jean, or as he preferred to be called, Jean du Lys, passed through Orléans on August 5, en route to see Charles, for whom he claimed to carry a message from his sister. Two weeks later he was back in town, grumbling that although the king had promised him a hundred livres—probably in consideration of Jean’s having bankrupted himself to pay his own ransom from the English—the king’s officers had given him only twenty, to which the ever-grateful people of Orléans added another twelve. It was one thing, however, to claim to be his illustrious dead sister’s messenger as a means of jimmying himself past La Trémoille’s cadre to speak with the king about financial restitution, another to embrace a fraud in front of an audience. The Chronique du doyen de Saint-Thibault-de-Metz recorded that on May 20, 1436, a woman claiming to be the Maid and using the alias Claude des Armoises came to Metz in person, and there met with the local nobility as well as with her brothers Pierre and Jean. They had, they said, “believed she had been burned; but when they saw her they recognized her and she also recognized them.” The last mention of this “Joan” was as the guest of honor at a banquet in Orléans on July 18, 1439. The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris reported that Claude des Armoises was ultimately unmasked and “confessed her imposture before the University of Paris.”
By the time the nullification trial was under way, any hope of monetary gain to be wrung from proximity to the Maid had evaporated, and Jean acquitted himself to the degree that he testified as to his sister’s innocence. Popular accounts of what is generally called the “retrial” of Joan of Arc suggest it was undertaken at the behest of Joan’s grieving and outraged mother, but it was, of course, Charles and his advisers who initiated the process, determined to neutralize whatever taint of illegitimacy might remain from Joan’s role in his anointing, a taint that hadn’t faded so much as changed in the twenty years since she’d died. Joan was on her way to becoming a national icon, a heroine more widely beloved with every year that passed. On February 15, 1450, Charles appointed Cardinal Guillaume Bouillé, a University of Paris professor who was known to be ashamed of the institution’s contemptible role in Joan’s persecution and death, to initiate an inquiry into the trial of condemnation.
“A long time ago,” the king wrote, with the air of embarking on a fairy tale, “Joan the Maid was taken and captured by our ancient enemy,” and they “had her tried … and during this trial they made and committed many errors and abuses,” and they “put her to death very cruelly, iniquitously, and against reason.” To redress this shameful injustice, Charles did “command, instruct, and expressly charge” Bouillé to collect the evidence needed to begin the process of Joan’s vindication. The cardinal, deputized by royal decree, was to be provided access to whatever documents he wanted: to refuse him was to disobey the king. Bouillé was not the only cleric eager to redress what was as much an embarrassment to the Church as to the crown. By 1452 the grand inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, had joined the investigation into what they would discover had been more of a travesty than a properly conducted trial. Most of the documents generated by the inquiry have been lost, but it is known that from May 2 to May 8, 1452, twenty-two witnesses were interviewed, among them Guillaume Manchon, Jean Massieu, Isambart de la Pierre, and Martin Ladvenu. The papal legate, Cardinal d’Estouteville, sent a messenger to Charles on May 22. The inquisitor of the faith and Bouillé would arrive shortly with a dossier for the king to examine, he reported. “They will reveal to you most clearly all that has been done in the trial of Joan the Pucelle. And because I know this matter greatly touches your honor and estate, I have acted with all my power.” Sufficient to mandate an official inquiry, the statements collected in Rouen were later included in the nullification trial record.
On June 11, 1455, Pope Calixtus III wrote to the bishops of Paris and Coutances and the archbishop of Reims, charging them to begin the work required to “wipe out this mark of infamy suffered wrongfully.” Three years had passed, not long by Rome’s clock, papal politics as byzantine then as now. The nullification proceedings opened in Paris on November 7, 1455, with a petition from Isabelle Romée, who read from a prepared statement asking the Church to redress what she presented as not only the destruction of her daughter’s life but also “an insulting, outrageous and scornful action towards the rulers and the people …
“After having taken away all means of defending her innocence,” she continued, they “condemned her in a baneful and iniquitous way, flouting all the rules of procedure, charging her falsely and untruthfully of many crimes.” At last, they “had her burned most cruelly in a fire, to the damnation of their souls, provoking tears from all and heaping opprobrium, infamy and an irreparable wrong on this Isabelle and her [family].”
Within a month, investigators were dispatched to Domrémy to collect testimony from those who had known Joan when she was a child. Others went to Vaucouleurs and Toul. In February and March 1456, forty-one witnesses were deposed in Orléans, the Bastard Dunois, among them. Simon Charles, the Duke of Alençon, Jean Pasquerel, Louis de Coutes, Thomas de Courcelles, and the two physicians who attended Joan when she was ill in prison, Jean Tiphaine and Guillaume de la Chambre, all gave their testimony in Paris in April. Guillaume Manchon, Jean Massieu, and Seguin Seguin testified in May in Rouen, and Joan’s squire, Jean d’Aulon, was deposed in Lyon on May 2. And, at last, on July 7, 1456, the three prelates chosen by the pope to render judgment on the trial of condemnation convened in Rouen’s archiepiscopal palace, where twenty-five years earlier Joan had been dragged, fettered, before Pierre Cauchon.
“We say and pronounce that we judge this trial record and sentences that contain deceit, slander, contradiction and manifest error of law and of fact,” and “the execution of all that then ensued, were and are null, invalid, without effect or value. And nevertheless, as is necessary and required by reason, we quash, suppress, and annul them, removing all of their strength.” Whatever “mark or stain of infamy” might cling to the family of Joan of Arc was thereby officially neutralized.
The “execution of the sentence” was to be accomplished, the document stipulated, through “its solemn publication in two places in this city, straight away in one, that is to say the square of Saint-Ouen”—the cemetery where Joan had been forced to abjure, replacing the name she knew how to write with an X—“with a general procession to start and a public sermon.” The second half of the spectacle would take place the following day, when the sentence of nullification would be read aloud, again, “in the Old Market, that is to say where Joan died in a cruel and horrible fire.” In addition, there was to be “the erection there of a worthy cross in her perpetual memory,” a cross that stands there still, just outside Rouen’s church of Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc.
Joan’s passage through the city of Rouen was thus commemorated. From the archiepiscopal palace that provided the condemnation trial’s courtroom, to the cemetery at Saint-Ouen, to the marketplace where she was burned alive, pilgrims retrace her steps, as they do the stations of the cross in Jerusalem, marking where Christ was condemned and beaten and where he fell, three times, under the weight of the cross on which he died.
The first official biography of Joan of Arc was undertaken in 1500, by order of King Louis XII. By then she’d ridden through countless histories, but only as a cameo; the story of the Virgin from Lorraine was inserted into chronicles of the cities through which she’d passed. This book was her own, and as the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg had overtaken the quills of countless scriveners across Europe with an avalanche of movable type, the story of her life was printed in great quantities and translated.
Across the channel, it was 1593, and she still hadn’t left off mocking the English. “Glory is like a circle in the water,” Shakespeare overheard her say to the dauphin, “Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself / Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. / With Henry’s death the English circle ends.”
“Was Mahomet inspired with a dove?” Charles wonders at the power of his sorceress. “Thou with an eagle art inspired then.”
At home in France, now 1636, a founding member of the Académie Française, Jean Chapelain, began what he imagined would become France’s Aeneid and unfortunately spent the next twenty years advertising it as such. When at last Chapelain completed La Pucelle; ou, La France délivrée: Poème héroïque, the epic filled twelve volumes and the work that had consumed him for so long collapsed under the weight of his ambition, universally lampooned as the labor of a tiresome pedant, and not only in his own day. Ridicule persisted.
“Gentlemen,” Voltaire addressed the Académie Française in 1760, complaining, with arch indignation, of “this shameful abuse of attributing to us, works which are not of our composition, and of falsifying and mutilating those that are, and thus vending [profiting by] our name.” As a member of the academy, he demanded redress for what had begun as a dinner party lark thirty years earlier, when his host, Armand, Duke of Richelieu, challenged him to write an epic poem about Joan of Arc. The story was so fantastical, Voltaire said, that he would undertake it only as satire, which he did, tossing off a dozen cantos of a mock chanson de geste that included a swipe at Chapelain and took its place among the most popular accounts of Joan’s life. Voltaire, squinting in the glare of the Enlightenment, imagined his pen mightier than the Maid’s sword, and he, too, grasped the hem of her gold cloak and pulled her down to where Dunois, “spite of his caution, would oftimes leer on Joan with wanton eye.”
Although Voltaire insisted he’d been jeering at the mythologized Maid and not at Joan herself, The Maid of Orléans enraged enough readers that it was banned and burned throughout Europe for all the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, guaranteeing a wide readership. Had Joan the misfortune to encounter herself as a burlesque heroine of lusty appetites, not so much virgin warrior as the highest cherry to be picked, arousing the desire “to ravish that which has been kept so long,” she might have found it difficult to resist throwing a dart of retribution from on high. The bawdy sexual references that became an embarrassment to Voltaire were plagiarized, mimicked, and malarial. No sooner had he recovered from one bout than another commenced. The scene of Dunois ravishing the Maid in the wake of their great victory at Orléans was a particular favorite for drawing-room dramatizations.
The City of Ladies “will last for all eternity,” Lady Reason promised Christine de Pizan. “It will never fall or be taken … it will never be lost or defeated.” Reason set Christine to work digging the city’s foundation in the “Field of Letters … on flat, fertile ground … where every good thing grows in abundance.” She describes the landscape in The Book of the City of Ladies. She tells how Reason brought the bricks and mortar to build “such high walls that the city inside will be safe from assault.”
Lady Rectitude carried a “yardstick of truth which separates right from wrong and distinguishes between good and evil.” It would serve Christine de Pizan, Rectitude explained, “to plan the city which you have been commissioned to build” and measure its“towers, houses, and palaces which will all be covered in bright gold.”
Relieved of carrying a set of scales, Lady Justice held in her right hand the “vessel of pure gold”—a grail—God had given to her “to share out to each person exactly what he or she deserves.” And when the city was complete, Justice set a crown on the Virgin Mary’s head and named her Queen of all its inhabitants.
It was to be, Rectitude said, a “city full of worthy ladies,” and Justice closed its strong gates and placed the keys in Christine’s hands. What choice did ladies have, Reason asked, but to separate themselves from those who “have attacked all women in order to persuade men to regard the entire sex as an abomination”?
But Joan had promised the King of Heaven to take up a sword and “do the fairest deed ever done for Christendom,” and how was she to accomplish such a quest cloistered behind “such high walls”? She couldn’t stay in the City of Ladies. She had to make her way through the perils that lay beyond its gates.
From Domrémy to Vaucouleurs, Chinon, and Poitiers, and on to Orléans and Reims, the Maid rode in a circle of light too strong for death to dim. Who didn’t recognize the Virgin from the marshes of Lorraine? She was the girl to whom God’s angels spoke, walking out of the air to burn her ears with words too hot for ordinary mortals.
“Be good,” they told her, “be chaste and pure,” and they dressed her in bright shining armor and lifted her onto a white horse. They hung the King of Heaven’s banner over her head, and they gave her its staff to hold.
Joan of Arc was tried seven times by the Church for which she gave, and lost, her life. Summoned in 1428 by the young man to whom her father had promised her hand in marriage, she appeared, sixteen years old, before her local bishop and was released from honoring a contract to which she had never agreed.
Upon her arrival at Chinon, on March 4, 1429, she was examined by the hastily assembled tribunal that sent her on to Poitiers, where she waited from March 11 to March 22 for the clerics gathered there to assess her claim of a divine mission. It was during a break from this third trial that she assuaged her impatience by composing her letter to the English.
“Know well that the King of Heaven will send a greater force to The Maid and her good men-at-arms than you in all your assaults can overcome,” she dictated to a scribe. “By blows shall the favor of the God of Heaven be seen.”
In May 1431 she was tried twice: condemned as a heretic and sentenced to life in prison on the twenty-fourth; on the thirtieth she was condemned as a lapsed heretic and burned at the stake.
The sixth trial overturned the verdict of the fifth, and on July 7, 1456, the nullification of the sentence was read aloud in the marketplace where her stake had been set and her life ended.
The cause for her beatification was first championed in 1869 by the bishop of Orléans, Félix Dupanloup, who began by summoning all the other bishops through whose dioceses Joan had passed. No matter what she had come to represent in the centuries since her death, the Maid of Orléans was a saint, he was sure of it, and his passion was persuasive; his colleagues joined with him in petitioning the pope. But, as a twentieth-century prelate explained, “a cause of canonization is never a matter of urgency,” and from 1873 to 1877 Rome was preoccupied with a petition for the beatification of Christopher Columbus, ultimately denied “on grounds that the proofs for Columbus’s marriage to the mother of his son Ferdinand, Beatrice Enríquez de Arana, were insufficient,” casting suspicion of sexual impropriety on the great conquistador.
The seventh jury Joan faced, again in absentia, accused her of crimes she might have predicted, so familiar had they become. The first of three devil’s advocates said she’d “boasted of her virginity … but she was not always careful of modesty or free of imprudence … nor did she keep herself from the anger that is customary of military persons.” She refused to share her visions and revelations with the Church, he said, and “did not face death like a martyr, but suffered it with great anguish and fear.”
“What was heroic about her faith?” the second demanded. She’d jumped off the tower at Beaurevoir. She’d wept when she was wounded “and carried on in a way unbefitting” to a heroine. She admitted freely that she was afraid of going to prison, unlike “the saints of history, who positively desired to suffer out of love for God.”
Witnesses were lacking, said the third. He took exception to her defenders’ producing sometimes-contradictory testimony from documents five centuries old, and he cited the opinion of an unidentified distinguished father who found it “surprising to read that only Gabriel was sent to the Most Holy Virgin to announce the incarnation of the divine Redeemer, whereas two archangels, Gabriel and Michael, appeared to Joan, and in such a way that she really saw, heard, and even touched and adored them. Who knows whether she did not suffer some hallucination and cultivated it as consonant with her own genius.”
The charges didn’t stick. Joan of Arc was beatified on April 18, 1909, and canonized on May 16, 1920.
Who is it, Scripture asks, “who makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire?”
“The voice was gentle,” Joan told the examiner. “The voice was soft and low.”
