Jeanne D'Arc: Her Life And Death

by Mrs. Oliphant

Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we hope had her piece of bread and her eau rougie. In the afternoon these indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions throw a fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which this wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.

She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with the troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and held her in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point except that of her affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also said that her mother had told her what her father had said to her brothers: "If I could think that the thing would happen of which I have dreamed, I wish she might be drowned first; and if you would not do it, I would drown her with my own hands"; and that he nearly lost his senses when she went to Vaucouleurs.

How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern, and unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and pure may not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of personal degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in the intensity of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to us in many lands, always one of the most impressive of human pictures, with no trust of love in him but an overwhelming faith in every vicious possibility. If there is no evidence to prove that, even at the moment when Jeanne was supreme, when he was induced to go to Rheims to see the coronation, Jacques d'Arc was still dark, unresponsive, never more sure than any of the Inquisitors that his daughter was not a witch, or worse, a shameless creature linked to the captains and the splendid personages about her by very different ties from those which appeared—there is at least not a word to prove that he had changed his mind. She does not add anything to soften the description here given. The sudden appearance of this dark remorseless figure, looking on from his village, who probably in all Domremy—when Domremy got to hear the news—would be the only person who would in his desperation almost applaud that stake and devouring flame, is too startling for words.

The end of this day's examination was remarkable also for a sudden light upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke of Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most cherished hopes to deliver.

Asked, how she meant to rescue the Duc d'Orléans: she answered, that by that time she hoped to have taken English prisoners enough to exchange for him: and if she had not taken enough she should have crossed the sea, in power, to search for him in England. Asked, if St. Catherine and St. Margaret had told her absolutely and without condition that she should take enough prisoners to exchange for the Duc d'Orléans, who was in England, or otherwise, that she should cross the sea to fetch him and bring him back within three years; she answered yes: and that she had told the King and had begged him to permit her to make prisoners. She said further that if she had lasted three years without hindrance, she should have delivered him. Otherwise she said she had not thought of so long a time as three years, although it should have been more than one; but she did not at present recollect exactly.

There is a curious story existing, though we do not remember whence it comes and there is not a scrap of evidence for it, which suggests a rumour that Jeanne was not the child of the d'Arc family at all, but in fact an abandoned and illegitimate child of the Queen, Isabel of Bavaria, and that her real father was the murdered Duc d'Orléans. This suggestion might explain the ease with which she fell into the way of Courts, a sort of air à la Princesse which certainly was about her, and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared in history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are certain fanciful suggestions in the thought.

After the above, Jeanne was again questioned and at great length upon the sign given to the King, upon the angel who brought it, the manner of his coming and going, the persons who saw him, those who saw the crown bestowed upon the King, and so on, in the most minute detail. That the purpose of the sign was that "they should give up arguing and so let her proceed on her mission," she repeated again and again; but here is a curious additional note.

She was asked how the King and the people with him were convinced that it was an angel; and answered, that the King knew it by the instruction of the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign of the crown. Asked, how the ecclesiastics (gens d'église) knew it was an angel she answered, "By their knowledge (science), and because they were priests."

Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind? We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the strange tale.

She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices that she attacked La Charité, and afterwards Paris, her two points of failure; the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her that those voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no. To Paris she went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a skirmish, or assault of arms (vaillance d'armes); but she intended to go farther, and to pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting and make the skirmish into a serious assault; the same was the case before La Charité. She was asked whether she had no revelation concerning Pont l'Evêque, and said that since it was revealed to her at Melun that she should be taken, she had had more recourse to the will of the captains than to her own; but she did not tell them that it was revealed to her that she should be taken. Asked, if she thought it was well done to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity of our Lady, which was a festival of the Church; she answered, that it was always well to keep the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience it seemed to her that it was and always would be a good thing to keep the feasts of our Lady, from one end to the other.