The sentence of the court was then amended; instead of being burned she was to be held in prison on bread and water and to wear woman’s clothes. She herself thought that she was to be put into an ecclesiastical prison and be kept in the charge of women, but there is nothing to be found of this in the official report of the first trial. As she had been wearing men’s clothes by direct command of God her sin in recanting began to loom enormous before her during the night; she had forsaken her God even as Peter had forsaken Jesus Christ in the hour of his need, and hell-fire would be her portion—a fire ten thousand times worse than anything that the executioner could devise for her. She got up in the morning and threw aside the pretty dress which the Duchess of Bedford had procured for her—all women loved Jeanne d’Arc—and put on her war-worn suit of male clothing. The English soldiers who guarded her immediately spread abroad the bruit that Jeanne had relapsed, and she was brought to trial for this contumacious offence against the Holy Church. The second trial was short and to the point; she tried to show that her jailers had not kept faith with her, but her pleadings were brushed aside, and finally she gave the responsio mortifera—the fatal answer—which legalized the long attempts to murder her. Thus spoke she: “God hath sent me word by St. Catherine and St. Margaret of the great pity it is, this treason to which I have consented to abjure and save my life! I have damned myself to save my life! Before last Thursday my Voices did indeed tell me what I should do and what I did then on that day. When I was on the scaffold on Thursday my Voices said to me: ‘Answer him boldly, this preacher!’ And in truth he is a false preacher; he reproached me with many things I never did. If I said that God had not sent me I should damn myself, for it is true that God has sent me; my Voices have said to me since Thursday: ‘Thou hast done great evil in declaring that what thou hast done was wrong.’ All I said and revoked I said for fear of the fire.”
To me this is the most poignant thing in the whole trial, which I have read with a frightful interest many times. It seems to bring home the pathos of the poor struggling child, and her blind faith in things which could not help her in her hour of sore distress.
Jules Quicherat published a very complete edition of the Trial in 1840, which has been the basis for all the accounts of Jeanne d’Arc that have appeared since. An English translation was published some years ago which professed to be complete and to omit nothing of importance. But this work was edited in a fashion so vehemently on Jeanne’s side, with no apparent attempt to ascertain the exact truth of the judgments, that I ventured to compare it with Quicherat, and I have found some omissions which to the translator, as a layman, may have seemed unimportant, but which, to a doctor, seem of absolutely vital importance in considering the truth about the Maid. These omissions are marked in the English by a row of three dots, which might be considered to mark an omission,—but on the other hand might not. Probably the translator considered them too indecent, too earthly, too physiological, to be introduced in connexion with the Maid of God. But Jeanne had a body, which was subject to the same peculiarities and abnormalities as the bodies of other people; and upon the peculiarities of her physiology depended the peculiarities of her mind.
Jean d’Aulon, her steward and loyal admirer, said definitely in the Rehabilitation Trial, in 1456:—
“Qu’il oy dire a plusiers femmes, qui ladicte Pucelle ont veue par plusiers foiz nues, et sceue de ses secretz, que oncques n’avoit eu la secret maladie de femmes et que jamais nul n’en peut rien cognoistre ou appercevoir par ses habillements, ne aultrement.”
I leave this unpleasantly frank statement in the original Old French, merely remarking that it means that Jeanne never menstruated. D’Aulon must have had plenty of opportunities for knowing this, in his position as steward of her household in the field. He guards himself from innuendo by saying that several women had told him. Jeanne’s failing to become mature must have been the topic of amazed conversation among all the women of her neighbourhood, and no doubt she herself took it as a sign from God that she was to remain virgin. It is especially significant that she first heard her Voices when she was about thirteen years of age, at the very time that she should have begun to menstruate; and that at first they did not come regularly, but came at intervals, just as menstruation itself often begins. Some months later she was informed by the Voices that she was to remain virgin, and thereby would she save France, in accordance with a prophecy that a woman should ruin France, and a virgin should save it. Is it not probable that the idea of virginity must have been growing in her mind from the time when she first realized that she was not to be as other women? Probably the delusion as to the Voices first began as a sort of vicarious menstruation; probably it recurred when menstruation should have reappeared; we can put the idea of virginity into the jargon of psycho-analysis by saying that Jeanne had well-marked “repression of the sex-complex.” The mighty forces which should have manifested themselves in normal menstruation manifested themselves in her furious religious zeal and her Voices. Repression of the sex-complex is like locking up a giant in a cellar; sooner or later he may destroy the whole house. He ended by driving Jeanne d’Arc to the stake. That was a nobler fate than befalls some girls, whom the same giant drives to the streets; nobler, because Jeanne the peasant was of essentially noble stock. Her mother was Isabel Romée—the “Romed woman”—the woman who had had sufficient religious fervour to make the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Rome that she might acquire the merit of seeing the Holy Father; Jeanne herself made a still more dangerous pilgrimage, which has won for her the love of mankind at the cost of her bodily anguish. Madame her mother saved her own soul by her pilgrimage, and bore an heroic daughter; Jeanne saved France by her courage and devotion to her idea of God. And this would have been impossible had she not suffered from repression of the sex-complex and seen visions therefore.
Another remarkable piece of evidence has been omitted from the English translation. It was given by the Demoiselle Marguerite la Thoroulde, who had taken Jeanne to the baths and seen her unclothed. Madame la Thoroulde said, in the Latin translation of the Rehabilitation Trial which has survived: “Quod cum pluries vidit in balneo et stuphis [sweating-bath] et, ut percipere potuit, credit ipse fore virginem.”
That is to say, she saw her naked in the baths and could see that she was a virgin! What on earth did the good lady think that a virgin would look like? Did she think that because Jeanne did not look like a stout French matron she must therefore be a virgin? Or did she see a strong and boyish form, with little development of hips and bust, which she thought must be nothing else but that of a virgin? That is the explanation that occurs to me; and probably it also explains Jeanne’s idea that by wearing men’s clothes she would render herself less attractive to the mediæval soldiery among whom her lot was to be cast. An ordinary buxom young woman would certainly not be less attractive because she displayed her figure in doublet and hose; Rosalind is none the less winsome when she acts the boy; and I should have thought that Jeanne, by wearing men’s clothes, would simply have proclaimed to her male companions that she was a very woman. But if the idea be correct that she was shaped like a boy, with little feminine development, the whole mystery is at once solved. It is to be remembered that we know absolutely nothing about Jeanne’s appearance[4]; the only credible hint we have is that she had a gentle voice.
In the Rehabilitation Trial several of her companions in arms swore that she had had no sexual attraction for them. It is quaint to read the evidence of these respectable middle-aged gentlemen that in their hot and lusty youth they had once upon a time met at least one young girl after whom they had not lusted; they seem to consider that the fact proved that she must have come from God. Anatole France makes great play with them, but it would appear that his ingenuity is in this direction misplaced. Is it not possible that Jeanne was unattractive to men because she was immature—that she never became more than a child in mind and body? Even mediæval soldiery would not lust after a child, especially a child whom they firmly believed to have come straight from God! It must be remembered that to half of her world Jeanne was unspeakably sacred; to the other half she was undeniably a most frightful witch. Even the executioner would not imperil his immortal soul by touching her. It was the custom to spare a woman the anguish of the fire, by smothering her, or rendering her unconscious by suddenly compressing her carotids with a rope before the flames leaped around her. But Jeanne was far too wicked for anybody to touch in this merciful office; they had to let her die unaided; and afterwards, so wicked was her heart, they had to rescue it from the ashes and throw it into the Seine. Is it conceivable that men who thought thus would have ventured hell-fire by making love to her? Yet more—it is quite possible that she had no bodily charms whatever; we know nothing of her appearance. The story that she was charming and beautiful is simply sentimental legend. Indeed, it is difficult not to become sentimental over Jeanne d’Arc.
A noteworthy feature in her character was her Puritanism. She prohibited her soldiers from consorting with the prostitutes that followed the army; sometimes she even forced them to marry these women. Naturally the soldiers objected most strongly, and in the end this was one of the causes that led to her downfall. Jeanne used to run after the prohibited girls and strike them with the flat of her sword; in one case the girl was killed. In another the sword broke, and King Charles asked, very sensibly, “Would not a stick have done quite as well?” This is believed by some people to have been the very sword of Charles Martel which the priests had found for her at St. Catherine’s command, and naturally the soldiers, deprived of their female companions, wondered what sort of a holy sword could it have been which could not even stand the smiting of a prostitute? When people suffer from repression of the sex-complex the trouble may show itself either by constant indirect attempts to find favour in the eyes of individuals of the opposite sex, or sometimes by actually forbidding all sexual matters; Puritanism in sexual affairs is often an indication that all is not quite well with a woman’s subconscious mind; nor can one confine this generalization to one sex. It is not for one moment to be thought that Jeanne ever had the slightest idea of what was the matter with her; the whole of her delusions and Puritanism were to her quite conscious and real; the only thing that she did not know was that her delusions were entirely subjective—that her Voices had no existence outside her own mind. Her frantic belief in them led her to an heroic career and to the stake. She did not consciously repress her sex; Nature did that for her.