Let us then examine the evidence as to the origin and nature of the alleged phenomena.
I shall begin with the letter of the Senechal de Berry, Perceval de Boulainvilliers, to the Duke of Milan.* The date is June 21st, 1429, six weeks after the relief of Orleans. After a few such tales as that the cocks crowed when Jeanne was born, and that her flock was lucky, he dates her first vision peractis aetatis suae duodecim annis, ‘after she was twelve.’ Briefly, the tale is that, in a rustic race for flowers, one of the other children cried, ‘Joanna, video te volantem juxta terrain,’ ‘Joan, I see you flying near the ground.’ This is the one solitary hint of ‘levitation’ (so common in hagiology and witchcraft) which occurs in the career of the Maid. This kind of story is so persistent that I knew it must have been told in connection with the Irvingite movement in Scotland. And it was! There is, perhaps, just one trace that flying was believed to be an accomplishment of Jeanne’s. When Frere Richard came to her at Troyes, he made, she says, the sign of the cross.** She answered, ‘Approchez hardiment, je ne m’envouleray pas.’ Now the contemporary St. Colette was not infrequently ‘levitated’!
*Proces, v. 115.
**Proces, i. 100.
To return to the Voices. After her race, Jeanne was quasi rapta et a sensibus alienata (‘dissociated’), then juxta eam affuit juvenis quidam, a youth stood by her who bade her ‘go home, for her mother needed her.’
‘Thinking that it was her brother or a neighbour’ (apparently she only heard the voice, and did not see the speaker), she hurried home, and found that she had not been sent for. Next, as she was on the point of returning to her friends, ‘a very bright cloud appeared to her, and out of the cloud came a voice,’ bidding her take up her mission. She was merely puzzled, but the experiences were often renewed. This letter, being contemporary, represents current belief, based either on Jeanne’s own statements before the clergy at Poictiers (April 1429) or on the gossip of Domremy. It should be observed that till Jeanne told her own tale at Rouen (1431) we hear not one word about saints or angels. She merely spoke of ‘my voices,’ ‘my counsel,’ ‘my Master.’ If she was more explicit at Poictiers, her confessions did not find their way into surviving letters and journals, not even into the journal of the hostile Bourgeois de Paris. We may glance at examples.
The ‘Journal du Siege d’Orleans’ is in parts a late document, in parts ‘evidently copied from a journal kept in presence of the actual events.‘* The ‘Journal,’ in February 1429, vaguely says that, ‘about this time’ our Lord used to appear to a maid, as she was guarding her flock, or ‘cousant et filant.’ A St. Victor MS. has courant et saillant (running and jumping), which curiously agrees with Boulainvilliers. The ‘Journal,’ after telling of the Battle of the Herrings (February 12th, 1429), in which the Scots and French were cut up in an attack on an English convoy, declares that Jeanne ‘knew of it by grace divine,’ and that her vue a distance induced Baudricourt to send her to the Dauphin.** This was attested by Baudricourt’s letters.***
*Quicherat. In Proces, iv. 95.
**Proces, iv. 125.
***Proces, iv. 125.
All this may have been written as late as 1468, but a vague reference to an apparition of our Lord rather suggests contemporary hearsay, before Jeanne came to Orleans. Jeanne never claimed any such visions of our Lord. The story of the clairvoyance as to the Battle of the Herrings is also given in the ‘Chronique de la Pucelle.‘* M. Quicherat thinks that the passage is amplified from the ‘Journal du Siege.’ On the other hand, M. Vallet (de Viriville) attributes with assurance the ‘Chronique de la Pucelle’ to Cousinot de Montreuil, who was the Dauphin’s secretary at Poictiers, when the Maid was examined there in April 1429.** If Cousinot was the author, he certainly did not write his chronicle till long after date. However, he avers that the story of clairvoyance was current in the spring of 1429. The dates exactly harmonise; that is to say, between the day of the battle, February 12th, and the setting forth of the Maid from Vaucouleurs, there is just time for the bad news from Rouvray to arrive, confirming her statement, and for a day or two of preparation. But perhaps, after the arrival of the bad news, Baudricourt may have sent Jeanne to the King in a kind of despair. Things could not be worse. If she could do no good, she could do no harm.
*Proces, iv. 206.
**Histoire de Charles VII., ii. 62.
The documents, whether contemporary or written later by contemporaries, contain none of the references to visions of St. Margaret, St. Catherine, and St. Michael, which we find in Jeanne’s own replies at Rouen. For this omission it is not easy to account, even if we suppose that, except when giving evidence on oath, the Maid was extremely reticent. That she was reticent, we shall prove from evidence of d’Aulon and Dunois. Turning to the Maid’s own evidence in court (1431) we must remember that she was most averse to speaking at all, that she often asked leave to wait for advice and permission from her voices before replying, that on one point she constantly declared that, if compelled to speak, she would not speak the truth. This point was the King’s secret. There is absolutely contemporary evidence, from Alain Chartier, that, before she was accepted, she told Charles SOMETHING which filled him with surprise, joy, and belief.* The secret was connected with Charles’s doubts of his own legitimacy, and Jeanne at her trial was driven to obscure the truth in a mist of allegory, as, indeed, she confessed. Jeanne’s extreme reluctance to adopt even this loyal and laudable evasion is the measure of her truthfulness in general. Still, she did say some words which, as they stand, it is difficult to believe, to explain, or to account for. From any other prisoner, so unjustly menaced with a doom so dreadful, from Mary Stuart, for example, at Fotheringay, we do not expect the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Maid is a witness of another kind, and where we cannot understand her, we must say, like herself, passez outre!