THE HOME OF JOAN OF ARC AT DOMRÉMY, FRANCE
A modern Photograph
THE DOORWAY TO THE HOUSE
Full of subtleties and mysteries as the story is, there is none in history more perfectly documented. We have not merely the proofs of what the Holy Maid claimed to be and what she did, but the details of her childhood, the inmost experiences of her spiritual and physical life. And these events and experiences stand on the evidences of not one, but of many, of those who were with her from her birth on January 6, 1412, in the little village of Domrémy, some 125 miles southeast of Paris, to the day nineteen years later, when, before the eyes of a great multitude of the people of Rouen (roo-ong), she was burned at the stake. She suffered her fate because a body of eminent lawyers and divines had found that she was, as their restrained and Christian language has it, "a liar, an inventor of revelations and apparitions, a deceiver, pernicious, presumptuous, light of faith, rash, superstitious, a soothsayer, a blasphemer against God and His saints, a contemner of God even in His sacraments, a prevaricator of divine law and of sacred doctrines and of ecclesiastical sanction, seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic, having committed a thousand errors against religion, and by all these tokens rashly guilty towards God and Holy Church!"
THE VOICES
JOAN OF ARC
Admonished by an angel to liberate France by the sword. From the painting by J. E. Lenepveu
The girl against whom these vindictive and hysterical charges were made was of peasant origin, not yet twenty years of age, and knew not A from B. She had come to her cruel end because from the time she was thirteen she had heard Voices—the Voices of saints—which she never had doubted had come from God and had never failed to obey, though the orders they gave her were so extraordinary that they had at the beginning filled her with terror. She had wept and pled her youth, her ignorance, her unfitness for the mission on which they would send her.
It was an amazing mission; nothing less than to save France from the clutches of England. Her instructions were detailed. She was to go to the governor of a nearby town and ask for an escort to conduct her to Charles VII, who called himself king of France, though he had never been crowned. She was to go to Charles and announce herself as sent by God to raise the siege of Orléans and to conduct him to Rheims (Reemz), where he was to be crowned. The English in the end were to be driven from all France, the Voices assured her.