After a hard night’s ride, Joan and her army, now no more than four hundred strong, reached Compiègne at “a secret hour of the morning” “and entered the town without having encountered any resistance” and “without confusion nor disturbance from either herself or her men.” The ease with which she accomplished the operation recalled her equally unhindered entrance into Orléans under siege. Perhaps she took this as auspicious, as she anticipated an efficient triumph over “a small and unsuspecting garrison, with an open bridge and a friendly town behind her … child’s play,” Sackville-West judged it, “for the victor of Orléans and Patay.” It was the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and as usual Joan heard Mass at dawn and only then approached the captain of Compiègne’s garrison, Guillaume de Flavy, to learn what she could of the present situation. She and her men had spent the night armored and on horseback, but Compiègne was in danger of falling to the enemy, and she hadn’t time to spare. The “young, violent and formidable de Flavy … told her that the bridge at Margny”—immediately across the river Oise—“was held by the advance guard of the Anglo-Burgundian army.” The Duke of Burgundy waited five miles to the north, with the larger part of the enemy forces. What Guillaume de Flavy did not tell Joan was that while she was slipping through the dark after her Black Horseman, the Duke of Burgundy’s vassal Jean of Luxembourg-Ligny was leading his forces downriver from Clairoix to Margny to meet with the Duke of Burgundy and “eight or ten other gentlemen” to orchestrate the tightening of the siege around the weakening city.
“Not to worry, Charles,” Yolande says in Luc Besson’s The Messenger. “If God is still with her, she will be victorious.”
“But her army is so much smaller,” Charles says, suffering a spasm of conscience.
“Then her faith,” Yolande answers, “will have to be bigger.”
It was easy for those who betrayed Joan to comfort themselves. No one needed to worry about rescuing a girl with heaven on her side. If Joan was vanquished, she had fallen from the grace she had once summoned.
“He trusts in God,” the chief priests and elders said of Jesus, “let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said ‘I am the son of God.’ ”
Not anticipating an attack by French troops, the Anglo-Burgundians had laid aside their weapons to attend to their boulevard and other defensive maintenance, when, at nine in the morning, “mounted on her horse, armed as would be a man,” Georges Chastellain wrote, Joan sallied out from Compiègne’s main gate, “adorned in a doublet of rich cloth of gold over her armor. She rode a gray steed, very handsome and very proud, and displayed herself in the armor and manners that a captain who leads a large army would. And in that state, with her standard raised high and blowing in the wind, and accompanied by many noble men, around four hours before midday, she charged out of the town” and set out to join a “large and forceful skirmish [that] was being fought on the meadows outside of town. She armed herself and had her men armed [sic] themselves.” Though it was no longer the fashion for knights to wear rich coats into battle, Joan had acquired so many gifts from grateful burghers with their bolts of velvet and satin. God’s chef de guerre should look her part.
Joan and her small army “mounted their horses, and went out to join in the mêlée,” and had already moved across the bridge toward Margny before the Anglo-Burgundians ran to rearm themselves.
“Did your voices order you to make this attack from Compiègne?” the examiner asked Joan.
“I had no order to go forth. With my company I crossed over the bridge of Compiègne and through the boulevard. I attacked the forces of lord Jean de Luxembourg, and twice drove them as far as the camp of the Burgundians, and the third time to the middle of the highway.”
Behind her were Guillaume de Flavy and ranks of “archers and men with crossbows and culverins at the gate of Compiègne, and more archers and crossbow men in little boats bobbing on the river.” As Joan wasn’t known to deviate from her characteristic forward-in-the-name-of-God approach, the Duke of Burgundy was waiting for her arrival, and the third time she “charged forward strongly into the Burgundian army,” she was ambushed.
“The English who were there [in the middle of the highway] cut off the road from me and my company,” Joan testified. “I retreated to the fields, on the Picardy side near the boulevard. And there was nothing but the river and the boulevard with its ditch.” The enemy “turned toward the Maid in such a great number that those of her company could not hope to save her” and, frightened for her safety, begged her to hasten back within the walls of Compiègne. “But,” Anatole France explained, “her eyes were dazzled by the splendor of angels and archangels.”
She spoke to her men furiously, Perceval de Cagny reported. “ ‘You be quiet!’ she told them. ‘Their defeat depends on you. Think only of striking at them.’ Even though she said this, her men did not want to believe it and by force they made her return directly to the bridge,” where she didn’t hasten back to safety but remained, a target toward which every soldier came running, so that “there was a great clash of arms.” “The situation,” according to Sackville-West, “was really beyond redemption.” Joan’s men in flight came “pouring back across the bridge into the town” as she “went after the fugitives, fighting desperately to defend their rear … Her last moments under arms were worthy of her gallantry.” At the sight of a stampede of Burgundians and English tearing across the river after the French, Guillaume de Flavy ordered the bridge raised and the gate shut, leaving Joan and a few of her men locked outside the city walls, outnumbered and soon surrounded. In a field just a short gallop from safety, “an archer,” Chastellain wrote, “a rough and very sour man, full of much spite because a woman, who so much had been spoken about, should have defeated so many brave men, as she had done, grabbed the edge of her cloth of gold doublet, and threw her from her horse flat to the ground. Never was she able to find refuge nor to receive help from her soldiers, though they tried to assist her to become remounted.” It was six thirty in the evening and bright, as the sun wouldn’t set until nine. Captured with Joan were her brother Pierre, Jean d’Aulon, and Jean’s brother.
Perceval de Cagny was not one of the chroniclers who suggested Guillaume de Flavy had, in closing the gate, carried out an order intended to deliver Joan into the hands of her enemies, but Compiègne’s main gates had remained closed all along, and there was no reason for the captain to imagine the city might be in enough danger to merit closing a small, auxiliary gate on Joan, whose purpose was to save his city and garrison. As documents prove the Duke of Burgundy used what Kelly DeVries calls “bribery to achieve the surrender of towns in 1430, the case of Guichard Bournel and Soissons being the perfect example,” it’s quite likely Compiègne would have been included among those towns. Joan, who provided what turned out to be the sole eyewitness account of her capture, didn’t mention any of the gates of Compiègne at all.
“If your voices had ordered you to make this attack from Compiègne, and had signified that you would be captured, would you have gone?”
“If I had known when I was to be taken, I would not have willingly gone. Nevertheless, I would have done their bidding in the end, whatever it cost me.” The standard of faith to which she held herself was that of Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, after his disciples had fallen asleep and left him to contemplate his fate, “fell on his face and prayed, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt.’ ”
“When you made this attack from Compiègne, did you have any voice or revelation to go forth and make it?”
“I did not know I was to be captured that day, and I had no other order to go forth. But I had always been told that I must be taken prisoner.”
“Why didn’t you take special precautions on the day when you were captured,” the lieutenant to the bailiff at Rouen asked her, “since you suspected this would happen?”
“I knew neither the day nor the hour,” Joan said, as she had to the archbishop of Reims when he asked where she expected to die, again borrowing from Jesus’s parable about the imminence of death and salvation, which the Gospels characterize as a consummation between Christ, the holy “bridegroom,” and the faithful, who wait in expectation of his coming to “bear them away to the marriage feast.”
“Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only,” Jesus said, and Joan focused less on her mortality than on the eternal salvation she expected in reward for her service, hedging the bet by traveling in the company of a priest to whom she turned whenever she found a sin to confess, which, under the commandment-bending contingencies of war, was frequently.
In Luc Besson’s mystical interpretation of Joan’s capture, the violent, dirty clamor of battle vanishes as Joan is pulled backward from off her high horse, her right arm holding her cruciform sword aloft. The ground on which she falls isn’t the blood-laced mud of a battlefield but the lush, otherworldly meadow where she first received the sword of her vocation and where the breath of God now tears over Joan like “the rush of a violent wind,” as the apostles described the descent of the Holy Spirit, ravishing her. “My Lord,” she whispers to a vision of a white-robed Jesus. “My Lord” (Fig. 28).
Victor Fleming is guided by a similar impulse to sanctify what he, too, reveals as the fulfillment of vocation rather than a tumble from grace; his, however, is chaste. Costumed in a priestly black tunic, complete with white collar, Joan places her armor on the altar at Saint-Denis (Fig. 27) and is delivered into captivity immediately, in the very next scene, the Battle of Compiègne excised from Anderson’s script, as it is from Shaw’s.
Every telling of Joan’s life pauses, as it must, at this threshold between her freedom and her captivity, the point at which her trajectory as a crusading knight shifts toward the passion of Christ. “We will draw down the curtain, now,” Twain writes, “upon the most strange, and pathetic, and wonderful military drama that has been played upon the stage of the world. Joan of Arc will march no more.”
“Holy and terrible one, hard is your hand,” Schiller’s Joan cries as she is taken. “Am I cast out forever from your grace? No angel comes, and miracles have an end: Heaven’s gates are shut; God turns away His face.” A century later, her lament assumes, in Péguy’s voice, a chill, nihilistic cast. What happens, she says, “when you see that your prayers are useless” and “the whole of Christendom is plunging purposely, plunging steadily to the losing of all souls”?
In the days following Joan’s fall into enemy hands, rumor amplified the role her rich cloak—or doublet, depending on the source—had played in her capture. It was a detail that Perceval de Cagny didn’t include in his description of how five or six foot soldiers unseated Joan, “the one putting his hand on her and the others on her horse,” and that Georges Chastellain might have been tempted to invent as a glamorous accessory to a scene he hadn’t witnessed. From the moment Joan assumed the attire of an aristocratic male, her every lace and seam had been the object of scrutiny and gossip; her extravagant taste was common knowledge, the cloak too irresistible a symbol to discard.
Joan had been defeated, the archbishop of Reims announced to his flock, because “she did not wish to pay attention to any counsel and did everything at her own [authority]… full of pride due to the rich garments she had begun to wear.” He hadn’t the courage to admit the observation was his own, attributing it instead to Le Berger, the shepherd who had yet to have been drowned in a sack, to suggest the words had been pronounced by a mystical cognoscente. “She often dressed in rich and sumptuous habits, precious stuffs and cloth of gold and furs,” reads the thirteenth article of accusation Regnault’s cronies drew up preparatory to Joan’s trial. “It is notorious that when she was captured she was wearing a loose cloak of cloth of gold.”
Like the shepherdess’s crook, the golden cloak proved impossible to strip away from the account. “Have I not been punished for my vanity?” Shaw’s Joan asks the inquisitor. “If I had not worn my cloth of gold surcoat in battle like a fool, that Burgundian soldier would never have pulled me backwards off my horse; and I should not have been here.”
The “tremendous and immediate excitement” occasioned by her capture was enough to remind anyone who might have forgotten the degree to which Joan possessed the imagination of all Europe. The English exulted; the French worried that so unambiguous a defeat cast doubt on Joan’s claim of a divine vocation; the rest of the world watched to see what would happen next.
The archer who pulled Joan down from her horse was in the service of the Bastard of Vendôme, a vassal of Jean II of Luxembourg, who was himself a liege of the Duke of Burgundy. Vendôme, “more joyous than if he had a king in his hands,” escorted her immediately across the Oise River to Margny, just at the end of the bridge that connected the town to Compiègne. There, in the manner of a noble—and thus announcing her noble status—Joan formally surrendered to Jean of Luxembourg, as she had refused to do to the Bastard of Vendôme. Luxembourg was not only a vassal of the Duke of Burgundy’s but also, as demonstrated by England’s royal account books, in the service of King Henry VI and had carried out a number of chevauchées against the French—raids like those that had blighted Joan’s childhood. Immediately upon gaining a prize of such magnitude, the impoverished count found himself pulled into a glare he hadn’t known before. Joan wasn’t in captivity for more than a few hours when the Duke of Burgundy came calling, accompanied by Monstrelet. Though present at a meeting that was by any standard historic, the great Burgundian chronicler reported only that “the Burgundian and English partisans were very joyous, more than if they had taken five hundred combatants, for they did not fear or dread either captains or any other war chief as much as they had up until that day this Maid,” and he conveniently forgets what the Maid and Philip the Good said to each other—“some words that I do not remember very well.” Whatever transpired had evidently shown either Joan in too flattering a light or the duke in too unflattering a one. In any case, the duke left in a state of elation and went immediately to where he was quartered to compose an exultant circular, preserved among the records of the town of Saint-Quentin.
“The woman called the Maid has been taken,” he crowed, “and from her capture will be recognized the error and mad belief of all those who became sympathetic and favorable to the deeds of this woman.”
Under heavy guard, Jean of Luxembourg transported Joan, her brother Pierre, her squire, Jean d’Aulon, and his brother some two miles upriver from Margny to the fortress of Clairoix, where they remained until Sunday, May 28, by which time the Duke of Burgundy had already received a letter from Jean Graverent, the pro-Burgundian vice-inquisitor of France. On behalf of the University of Paris, Graverent demanded that Joan be turned over to his jurisdiction “as soon as it can be done safely and conveniently … since she is strongly suspected of various crimes smacking of heresy.” The letter was dated May 26, and as Paris’s street criers could not have broadcast the news of Joan’s capture before the previous evening, he’d responded so immediately as to suggest he was poised to pounce—not for himself, but for the man who would act as his deputy, Pierre Cauchon. Graverent was conducting another inquisition and would arrive in Rouen only in time to observe the trial’s second, private phase of interrogation, limiting his involvement in what he wasn’t as confident would be the certain success Cauchon anticipated.
From Clairoix, the prisoners were removed to Beaulieu-les-Fontaines, another twenty miles northeast of Compiègne, where Jean of Luxembourg had been quartered since early 1430, when he had taken the town. Joan was valuable, the ransom he anticipated high, and he wasn’t going to risk her escape or rescue by bewitched fanatics. Beaulieu’s fortress was secure; her cell was small, stone walls and stone floor with a single square window. He kept her locked in it for six weeks as negotiations between England and France broke down once again. Impatient to be freed and anticipating her ransom, Joan knew Charles had Talbot with which to bargain, and other English captains, too, as well as gold to gather to sweeten the deal. Guileless as she was, she never imagined her king hadn’t already started to negotiate for her release, and preoccupied with enemies in the French court angling to thwart her ambition, she hadn’t considered what her capture might be worth to the English. Nor did it occur to her that whoever proved her a sorceress could destroy not only the Valois line but also the French monarchy, dependent as it was on a drop of chrism over which the devil had now swept his foul paw. Joan had been called a witch, many times, but she gave the epithet as little credence as she did any other—after all, being called a whore hadn’t tarnished her virginity. Joan was a visionary; she had friends, but she understood her quest in terms of roles rather than individuals with personalities that complicated outcomes. She didn’t see Charles, for example, as Georges Chastellain did: “There were frequent and diverse changes all around his person, for it was his habit … when one had been raised high in his company even to the summit of the wheel, that then he began to be annoyed with him, and, at the first occasion that could provide some sort of justification, he willfully reversed that person from high to low,” not so much hardening his heart as taking active pleasure in his sadism; from such cruelties he “savored all the fruit all he could suck.” He was a fearful person, without the moral fiber to resist demonstrating what power he had, and Joan’s vision of her anointed Christian king was so convincing that it eclipsed the actual man, whom she defended on the eve of her execution as “the noblest Christian of all Christians,” who “loves the faith and the Church better than any.”
There was only one person as eager as Joan to resolve her predicament, and as it happened, Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, was in Calais, as was the Duke of Bedford, when news of Joan’s capture reached him. He could prove Joan was a sorceress, Cauchon told his old friend. Too, he pointed out, Joan had been taken prisoner in what was rightfully his diocese, which he’d served loyally, in loco, until forced by the French to seek asylum in Rouen. It was “not actually in the diocese,” Michelet pointed out, “but it was hoped that people would be easily deluded on that point.” Deluded or not, no one objected to the claim. On June 22, when the University of Paris again demanded the Duke of Burgundy relinquish Joan for trial, the letter was signed not by Graverent but by Cauchon.
Joan, however, was not in the duke’s possession, at least not yet, as Jean of Luxembourg, torn by competing influences, stalled for time. For her second meeting with the Duke of Burgundy, this time accompanied by his wife, Isabel of Portugal, Joan was transferred from her tower room to the Episcopal palace next to the cathedral. The meeting included Jean of Luxembourg and his wife, Jeanne of Béthune. Again, no record was made of the conversation among the five, but the result was that while husbands plotted the Maid’s fate, wives found themselves swayed by her fervor and convinced of her innocence. Joan remained at Beaulieu until July 10. She was allowed to keep Jean d’Aulon in her service, she had the company of her brother, and Jean of his, and she nearly managed to set all of them free.
“How did you expect to escape from Beaulieu?”
“I had hidden myself between two pieces of wood. I would have shut my guards up in the tower, had it not been for the porter, who had seen and encountered me. It did not please God to have me escape on this occasion.”
Maintaining that it was the prerogative of all prisoners to attempt escape, she would try again from a different tower. On July 11, as troops moved south toward Compiègne in anticipation of renewing the siege, Joan was moved to Jean of Luxembourg’s grander residence, at Beaurevoir. Jean’s wife, Jeanne of Béthune, might have influenced “the choice of a more suitable residence for the prisoner … rather than a mere fortress made especially dangerous for a woman by the comings and goings of soldiers.”
Joan was chaperoned by three women for whom she “conceived a great devotion”: Jean’s aunt the Demoiselle of Luxembourg; his wife, Jeanne of Béthune; and his stepdaughter, also named Jeanne. As the first step in securing any sympathy for Joan was to get her out of men’s clothing, the two older women were “greatly distressed by her obstinate refusal to abandon her masculine clothes, and tried by every means to persuade her into a more feminine frame of mind.” When she rejected the dresses they offered, they appealed to her vanity and brought fine fabrics for her to consider, hoping to tempt her into accepting female attire tailored to her wishes.
“You were told to change your habit at Beaurevoir,” the examiner said. “Were you not?”
“Yes.”
“But you refused.”
“If I had had to do it, I would rather have at the request of these two ladies than of any other ladies in France, save my queen. But I had not God’s permission.”
“When do you cut your hair?” Jean’s stepdaughter asks Joan in Jacques Rivette’s Joan the Maid, as she watches her hack away at it with scissors.
Joan pauses before answering; the hand with the scissors is still. “When I look too much like a girl,” she says. “My hair goes with my clothes. I’ve been wearing them for so long. I have done and seen so much with them. I could not leave them.” It’s unlikely Joan’s “black hair, cut round,” would have received any less meticulous attention than the rest of her appearance, but scriptwriters, unhampered by conflicting evidence, prefer she cut her own hair with a knife, a pair of crude shears, whatever she can find, sawing at it while she watches her transformation in a makeshift mirror. For Joan’s first haircut, Rivette chooses the polished breastplate of a suit of armor as a mirror (Fig. 9).
The old Demoiselle of Luxembourg moved on from dresses to extortion and “cast herself at [her nephew’s] feet; in vain did she plead with him not to dishonor himself” and threatened to withhold his inheritance should he sell Joan to the English. “But what power had this good dame against the Norman gold of the King of England, and against the anathemas of the holy church? For if my Lord Jean had refused to give up this damsel suspected of … crimes against religion,” Anatole France explained, he would find himself exposed “to heavy legal penalties.” Jean of Luxembourg was among the bankrupt nobility, and as “the younger son of a younger son, he could not even count with any certainty on succeeding to his aunt’s fortune, which he fully expected his elder brother to dispute.” He needed whatever money he could get for the Maid’s ransom. Beyond that, the Duke of Burgundy was his feudal lord; he could not withhold Joan without fear of reprisals. For as long as his aunt was alive, he remained under her sway, but the facts remained: Jean of Luxembourg had Joan in his custody and would be forced to relinquish her to the Duke of Burgundy, who was in service to the king of England, who “had a lien on French prisoners … Therefore he had a lien on Jeanne.”
Traveling from court to court, secular and ecclesiastical, all that summer of 1430, Pierre Cauchon lobbied tirelessly, an impresario assembling the performance of a lifetime. The bishop needed a venue, a cast, scriptwriters, prompters, backstage support. The beauty of it was that the hardest part, publicity, had already taken care of itself. What European wasn’t awaiting the “beautiful trial” Cauchon promised? As for its prophesied verdict, whoever burned the most notorious and dangerous sorceress ever known would catapult himself into the kind of fame and power that could set him on the path to the papacy. The first reward Cauchon had picked out for himself was the archbishopric of Rouen, recently vacated. Among the unlucky witch’s fatal mistakes had been evicting him from his diocese, not only for incurring his enmity, but also because it was partly in consideration of the loss of that position and its advantages that the English “placed him in charge of special missions in England, Paris, and elsewhere,” one of those missions being the trial of Joan of Arc. According to the chatty account book of Normandy’s receiver general, Pierre Surreau, who recorded that 765 livres tournois were given to Cauchon in consideration of his tireless diplomatic service, “for 153 days, ‘Pierre Cauchon took leave of the king, our lord, to do his business, as much in the city of Calais as in many trips to my lord the duke of Burgundy or to my lord John of Luxembourg in Flanders, to the siege before Compiègne, and at Beaurevoir in the matter of Joan called the Maid.’ ”
Joan, too, grew increasingly expensive, and Jean of Luxembourg had the right to turn her back over to the French for a ransom rather than selling her to the English. But only England was collecting the funds to pay for her. “In August 1430, a special tax was levied by the estates of Normandy to raise 120,000 livres” to cover the expense of what would be a protracted trial involving scores of justices, “of which 10,000 was set aside for Joan’s purchase” from Jean of Luxembourg, whose brother Louis of Luxembourg, the bishop of Thérouanne and councilor to the English king Henry, had negotiated the price. Louis—the rich older brother whom Jean expected to contest any will that favored him—was an intimate of both Bedford and Cauchon. As the dean of the church of Beauvais from 1414 until 1430, he divided his time between Beauvais and the archbishopric’s palace in Rouen. A year after Joan’s execution, Henry ordered his treasurer general in Normandy to pay Louis 1,000 livres in consideration of “the great expenses which in the cause of our service he has had and has to pay.”
On September 18, 1430, the Demoiselle of Luxembourg expired, and her nephew’s conscience along with her, a crisis from which Joan averted her face by focusing obsessively on the fate of Compiègne, whose every skirmish she followed. When the city at last fell, on October 24, “a kind of frenzy seems to have taken possession of her,” as Sackville-West described it. For the first time, Joan and her voices were at odds, and “the argument continued daily for some time, Jeanne beseeching, the Voices refusing their permission” for her to attempt to escape from her captors. No matter how desperately Joan begged them to allow her to rush to the aid of Compiègne in an exultant, quixotic last act, she must not jump, Saints Catherine and Margaret said.
But without the distraction of war, the months slid silently by, each day as slow as emptiness could make it. She knew she had but a year; what consolation did she have but to look forward to her arrival at redemption? “I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven,” Galahad, a “maiden knight” as chaste as Joan, prays in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad.”
I muse on joy that will not cease,
Pure spaces clothed in living beams,
Pure lilies of eternal peace,
Whose odours haunt my dreams;
And, stricken by an angel’s hand,
This mortal armour that I wear,
This weight and size, this heart and eyes,
Are touch’d, are turn’d to finest air.
Like Galahad, like Roland, Joan was to be borne up from the battlefield by the wings of angels. Roland “offers his right-hand glove to God, and Saint Gabriel takes it … God sent his angel cherubin down to him … Saint Michael … Saint Gabriel … they bear Roland’s soul to Paradise.” Joan knew God’s heroes died in rapture, in glory, not in a dank cell, exiled from combat. The claustrophobia of prison made her wild and reckless, she who was so impulsive by nature, to the point that “she ceased to listen to her Voices, who forbade her the fatal leap.” As Beaurevoir’s tower was typical of medieval fortresses, with arrow slits rather than windows, a guard was posted only at the bottom in the reasonable presumption that no one would try to escape from the top. Joan could not have jumped from a point lower than the tower’s crenellated rampart, which is estimated to have been seventy feet high, a measurement based in archaeological fact rather than hagiographic hyperbole. There was nothing that might have broken her fall—no tree limb or anything else that might encourage escape, no hillock of grass or cushion of undergrowth. She landed in the castle’s dry moat.
“Why did you jump?” the examiner asked.
“I had heard that the people of Compiègne, all of them to the age of seven, were to be put to fire and to the sword. I would rather die than live after the destruction of such good people.” As Michelet saw it, the problem was a simple one. “Her body was at Beaurevoir, her soul at Compiègne.”
“Was that the only reason?”
“The other was that I knew I had been sold to the English, and I would have died rather than fall into their hands.”
“Did you expect to kill yourself when you leaped?”
“No, because as I leaped I commended myself to God and Our Lady.”
“Hadn’t your voices forbidden you to jump?”
“I begged their pardon afterward. I admitted I was wrong in jumping, and my angels forgave me. They saw my need, and that I could in no way hold myself back, so they lent aid to my life and prevented me from being killed.”
The line of questioning aimed at two capital crimes. If Joan had attempted suicide, she’d condemned herself, like Judas, who turned away from the limitless grace of a god who forgave everything—except rejection. If she’d expected her angels to soften her landing, she’d committed the antithetical sin, equally dire, of presuming God would save her from the mortal consequences of her acts. That she never considered seeking forgiveness and receiving absolution from an earthly cleric, rather than supernatural beings only she could see, was by definition heretical.
“Did you receive any great penance?”
“A large part of my penance was the hurt I did myself in falling.” The hurt Joan did herself was significant enough that she didn’t know where she was when she regained consciousness; her Burgundian captors had to tell her. “For two days she neither ate nor drank nor moved,” and the physician who attended her feared she’d broken her back.
“The devil took him [Jesus] to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple,” the Evangelist Matthew wrote. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil said, “throw yourself down; for it is written: ‘He will give his angels charge of you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ”
The devil has a good memory for Scripture, too—as good as Jesus’s, when given the opportunity to speak, quoting here from Psalm 91.
Jesus answered him, “Again it is written: ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’ ”
“You presumed upon the grace of God,” the examiner said. But Joan admitted only disobedience—not the presumption that her angels would loan her wings. It seemed obvious to her that if they had, she wouldn’t have been injured. And were she the author of such blasphemy, why would they have come to aid and soothe her?
“St. Catherine told me the people of Compiègne would have succor before St. Martin’s Day in winter without fail. And she told me to confess and ask God to forgive me.
“So I was comforted and began to get well, and to eat, and soon afterwards recovered.” Joan’s account of her leap was given on March 6, 1431, four and a half months after Compiègne fell—long enough to countless times review what she’d done, as she must have, filling the dark of her cell and its sleepless nights with memories of past deeds, this one followed by unconsciousness, disorientation, and days of death-like torpor. Given the friable nature of human memory, and her fixation on redemption, it’s possible she attempted a suicide she later denied. Joan’s vigor and her tolerance for physical injury and pain were unnatural enough to inspire her confidence in superhuman strength, but could her sense of invulnerability have been strong enough to make leaping from an altitude of seventy feet, the average height of a six- or seven-story building today, seem survivable?
As the Church’s grip on the people’s collective imagination loosened, Joan would increasingly be perceived as a young woman who, once her active trajectory was halted by her capture and incarceration, fell prey to doubt. The Messenger replaces Joan’s voices with a hooded presence claiming to be God—or is it the devil, so adept at impersonation? In either case, Besson suggests the apparition, which only Joan sees and hears, is evidence of her decompensating under the crush of guilt inspired by the mass murders for which she was responsible. Hadn’t she, the 1999 film asks, suffered what psychoanalysis would term a delusion of grandeur? Isn’t God the internalized fantasy of a terrorizing and inconsistently benign patriarch? The film poses questions from a vantage medieval Europeans never had and dismisses the comfort Joan received from her voices. She admitted instances in which they failed to provide the direction she sought. She argued with them sometimes. Before her life ended, she would have disobeyed and even briefly betrayed her voices, but she was never heard to say, as she does in Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, that her voices abandoned her, leaving her to “wait here alone, in the darkness and in silence,” asking if she “made an error that was not forgiven.”
She hadn’t been beaten, stripped of her clothing, or scourged. She didn’t fall under the weight of the cross on which she would be crucified, but Joan had her Via Dolorosa. Sold to the English, she endured a punitive reversal of Christine de Pizan’s portrait of her victorious sweep through the spring countryside in the wake of Charles’s coronation: “As he returns through his country, neither city nor castle nor small town can hold out against them. Whether he be loved or hated, whether they be dismayed or reassured, the inhabitants surrender.” She wouldn’t fulfill Christine’s prediction that she would go on to save all Christendom from heretics and unbelievers, hers an unstoppably glorious trajectory. Instead, she was “paraded throughout many of the lands of France occupied by the Burgundians and then the English.” From Beaurevoir to Rouen, she was the single irresistible exhibit of a traveling sideshow that crawled out of dark November and on into December and its darker Christmas, a six-week pilgrimage guaranteed its share of rain and sleet, two weeks’ worth anyway, as Joan and her retinue of guards and hecklers followed the circuitous route necessary to skirt French-held territory, moving over flatlands low enough to dip, here and there, into marsh.
The vanguard of such processions was traditionally given to the spoils of war. Joan would have taken the lead under heavy guard, wearing not armor but shackles, mounted on a horse, perhaps, or pulled in a wagon, even held in a cage, at last cut down to mortal size, a maid returned to her proper state: booty. She never spoke of the journey. After a year spent surrounded by throngs of worshipful well-wishers, Joan was learning what it was like to be an object of public loathing, ridicule, and censure, a symbol not of France’s victory but of its loss. People spat at her because she was French, they threw things at her because she was a witch, they called her a dirty cunt because the Church told them female wickedness wore a sexual stain and they hadn’t the imagination or independence of mind to think of anything else. Long separated from her brother and Jean d’Aulon, and now from the kind women around Jean of Luxembourg, Joan had only her voices to comfort her. “I asked that when I was taken I might die quickly without long suffering in prisons; and the voices told me to be resigned to everything, that it must so happen.” They said it often enough that she knew her suffering was ordained and that a “great victory” awaited her. “Take everything peacefully,” they said to her. “Have no care for thy martyrdom. In the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.” A victory unlike Roland’s or Galahad’s, but deliverance and paradise nonetheless.
From Bapaume the party moved north, out of the valley of the Somme and into the plains of Flanders, to Arras, whose felicitous placement on the Scarpe River presented a strategic advantage that had purchased centuries of strife. Courts as far-flung as that of the Spanish Hapsburgs had claimed the city, which became a famed center of troubadour culture, the cosmopolitan home to poets’ societies and host to countless recitals of chansons de geste, whose audiences were as eager as a barn filled with bumpkins to see a witch, as they would be a dragon or any other outright manifestation of the devil’s work. If seeing Joan was frightening, it was in equal measure reassuring. To the English and the Burgundians she presented a mortal vessel into which they could project and contain their fear of evil, just as she had given the French one in which to safeguard their faith. Like all messianic leaders, she fulfilled an essential psychic need for both her enemies and her adherents; thus she possessed multitudes, all of them fixed on her unlawful example.
“When you were in Arras, did not my lord Jean de Pressy and others offer you a woman’s dress?”
“Yes. He and many others also asked me to take an outfit of that sort.”
“And it was Captain Baudricourt who had a male costume made for you, with arms to match?” the examiner said, adding that the captain had done so “reluctantly, with great repugnance.”
“It was not Sir Robert who gave me clothing but the people of Vaucouleurs. I was armed by order of my king.”
While in Arras, Joan was confined in one of the Duke of Burgundy’s many châteaus, where a sympathetic guard slipped her a file, or a would-be savior slipped it past a guard, but it was discovered and confiscated before she had a chance to use it. By the time the victory parade left for Avesnes-le-Comte, the days had grown significantly shorter than they had been upon the party’s arrival in Arras, enough to startle and disquiet anyone who’d spent two weeks in a cell. Every day the sun’s light drained away a little sooner, a little faster, as she was drawn ever farther from any source of mortal rescue. Fields and pasture claimed what wasn’t wooded or settled, and the apple orchards of Normandy were falling under winter’s shadow as Joan passed by land she and Alençon had dreamed of reclaiming, co-commanders of an army out of reach of court politicking. How starkly frail a branch looked without leaves or fruit, nothing more than a dark scribble against a pale, chill sky. The procession visited ten cities, in which Joan spent a night or two in the town keep, probably in hearing of a public sermon devoted to her grievous sins, for what preacher would squander the opportunity to edify his flock with a morality tale inspired by a visit from the fallen Maid? By now, Joan had been called a witch and a whore so many times, as often as she’d been threatened with rape, that the words themselves had lost their power to summon tears, and the same angels who had protected her from the idolatry she recognized in her followers diminished the impact of her abrupt arrival at universal revilement. Though the torments that awaited her were extraordinary enough to be the object of fascination six centuries after her birth, the company she kept was even more so. Her fate was sealed; the face with which she met it remained her own. Still, the clamor of battle would have been preferable, even less disorienting, than her passage through an endless gauntlet of staring peasants. The dread her presence aroused muffled the jeering that would otherwise greet a war prize of her magnitude, and only those curious enough to overcome their fears drew close. The rest hung back; they didn’t want to see the sorceress who’d led the armies of France so much as they wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren that they had.
Le Crotoy, in whose prison Alençon had spent five years awaiting ransom, lay twelve days to the west, through Avesnes-le-Comte, Lucheux, and Drugy, and offered a respite of three weeks on the Normandy coast, protected from the eyes of all the people, some of whom traveled a considerable distance to join the restless clots gathered around the castle in which Joan was housed. Not every pilgrim was hostile. “She received the ladies of Abbeville, who had arrived by boat down the Somme, and who came to see her as a marvel of their sex,” and she was allowed to go to Mass—the last she would ever attend—celebrated by a fellow prisoner, Nicolas de Queuville, a priest who also heard her confession. It was a hiatus she’d look back on as presenting comfort, if not freedom.
There was this, too: She’d never seen a beach before; she’d never seen the sea. She hadn’t seen any body of water wider than a river, its right bank visible from its left. At Le Crotoy, only the marsh grass underfoot was familiar, footprints filling rapidly with water. But look west, where the sun set, and the grass disappeared, and the land as well. The bay of the Somme spread out flat, shallows and sandbars sliding almost imperceptibly into the sea, a desolate scene in December, as there was no water deep enough for a port of any kind. If she admitted its beauty, she must have seen its menace as well. The land on which she stood ran out; there was no more.
They left Le Crotoy on December 20, a three-day caravan along the Normandy coast. Joan was in irons, watching through bars to see how it was that sometimes there was no line drawn between sky and water, and the water wasn’t any color at all, none she could name. If she was lucky, she saw a sunset pave the sea with fire, a straight path burning like a fuse toward another day’s end. Joan spent one night at Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, and then it was December 21. The cell she slept, or tossed, in still stands, built just inside the ruins of the old city walls. Eu had a prison, too, as did Argues, once the home of William the Conqueror. From Argues, the party quit the coast and turned south to Rouen, where Joan arrived on December 23, 1431.