TRIAL AND TORTURE AND DEATH
At this noble work there now was set a band of some sixty of the most learned and distinguished scholars, judges, and ministers in the land. There was an occasional one for whom the work was too abominable. One such declared boldly that to force this simple girl to reply without guidance to such great doctors, to so many masters, was mocking justice. "They mean to catch her," was his verdict. "I will stay no longer. I cannot witness it." And indeed they did mean to catch her; but what a chase she gave them! I doubt if there is such a test of wit and courage and faith in all the history of disputation.
At every point they taxed their devilish ingenuity to put her at a disadvantage. They drained her physical strength by abominable prison conditions. Joan had been a captive for seven months when she was finally taken to Rouen to trial. In the dungeon tower room given her it is said she was at first chained in an iron cage in which it was impossible to stand erect; certain it is that shackles were always on her feet, a chain round her waist by which she was padlocked to a beam. Five English guards slept in her room jeering at and insulting her. It was in this room they came to her with promises, bribes, flatteries, and threats.
It was from here that she went in chains in February, 1431, for six public examinations by the sixty or more doctors and lawyers. These open meetings proved too damaging to her judges. She was too truthful, too unafraid, too confident in God and her Voices. The subtlety of some of her answers confused and shamed the most relentless of her examiners. They had that overpowering quality which the direct unadulterated truth gives. What chance in the long run has a university dialectician before the truth?
THE LAST COMMUNION OF JOAN OF ARC
From the painting by Michel
They took her to closed chambers, and hardly did better. They went to her when she was ill and likely to die. But they could not touch this clean white thing. It slipped through their fingers like a ray of light. And on what unimportant matters they badgered her! Her dress, for one. The trial seems at points to have been hung on the crime of her wearing man's apparel. "Dress is but a little thing, less than nothing," she told them.
THE JOAN OF ARC PRISON TOWER AT ROUEN
They threatened her finally with torture if she did not reply to questions she said her Voices had forbidden her to answer. In the very torture chamber with the horrid irons before her eyes she cried, "Verily, if you were to tear my limbs asunder and drive my soul out of my body, naught else would I tell you, and if I did say anything unto you, I would always maintain afterward that you dragged it from me by force."
THE BURNING OF JOAN OF ARC AT ROUEN
From the fresco in the Panthéon, Paris, by J. E. Lenepveu
For months this unbelievable torment went on, until finally, lost in the maze they had prepared for her, worn by confinement and incessant mental and physical strain, she broke under the threat of burning,—a child's horror of a fate she had persuaded herself God would not permit. Her Voices had deceived her. She signed the deed of abjuration they had prepared for her: only to find it did not mean what she thought.
Back in her prison, her courage and her confidence reasserted themselves and she recanted, "All that I said I uttered through fear of fire, and I recanted nothing that was not contrary to the truth. I had liefer do my penance once and for all, to wit by dying, than endure further anguish in prison. Whatsoever abjuration I have been forced to make, I never did anything against God and religion. I did not understand what was in the deed of abjuration, wherefore I did not mean to abjure anything unless it were Our Lord's will."
It was this that caught her, such is the dexterity of the human intellect bent on proving that which is good to be evil. Joan had been pronounced a heretic, she had confessed to being one, so they declared: now she recanted. The Holy Church could have nothing to do with so monstrous a creature. At last the learned doctors had unimpeachable authority for turning her over to the English, who now had the undeniable right of burning her alive.
They lost no time. It was on a Tuesday (May 29) that she was declared a relapsed heretic. It was on the morning of the following day that she died by fire. A rough wooden cross, fashioned, at her request, by a pitying English soldier, was on her breast, the words "Jesus, Jesus" on her lips. On her head was a great fool's cap on which was written Hérétique, relapse, apostate, idolâtre.
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
| JEANNE D'ARC—HER LIFE AND DEATH
By Mrs. M. O. Oliphant THE LIFE OF JOAN OF ARC By D. W. Bartlett JOAN OF ARC (Illustrations in color) By L. M. Boutet de Monvel THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC FOR BOYS AND GIRLS By K. E. Carpenter JOAN OF ARC By Thomas De Quincey MAID OF FRANCE By Andrew Lang THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC By Andrew Lang |
JOAN OF ARC
(Heroines that Every Child Should Know series)
Edited by H. W. Mabie JEANNE D'ARC By M. R. Bangs JOAN OF ARC By F. C. Lowell JOAN OF ARC Translated from the French of Jules Michelet JEANNE D'ARC By M. M. Maxwell-Scott PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC By S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain) |
⁂ Information concerning the above books and articles may be had on application to the Editor of The Mentor.