Jeanne D'Arc: Her Life And Death

by Mrs. Oliphant

The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Èrard, from his pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called upon Massieu to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own deposition), "after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her to refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not. Which thing she did, saying to Èrard, 'I refer to the Church universal whether I should abjure or not.' To which Èrard answered, 'You shall abjure at once or you will be burnt.' Massieu gives further particulars in another part of the Rehabilitation process. Èrard, he says, asked what he was saying to the prisoner, and he answered that she would sign if the schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that she could not write, and then added that she wished it to be decided by the Church, and ought not to sign unless that was done: and also required that she should be placed in the custody of the Church, and freed from the hands of the English. The same Èrard answered that there had been ample delay, and that if she did not sign at once she should be burned, and forbade Massieu to say any more."

Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to have promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the Church. "Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save yourself?" was called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast, but her heart failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering. Once she called out over their heads, "All that I did was done for good, and it was well to do it:"—her last cry. Then she would seem to have recovered in some measure her composure. Probably her agitated brain was unable to understand the formula of recantation which was read to her amid all the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the condition she had herself stated, that the paper should be submitted to the Church, and that she should at once be transferred to an ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made, namely, that it was a very short document upon which she hastily in her despair made a cross, and that it was a long one, consisting of several pages, which was shown afterwards with Jehanne scribbled underneath. "In fact," says Massieu, "she abjured and made a cross with the pen which the witness handed to her:" he, if any one must have known exactly what happened.

No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform. But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals, seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had gone on reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve her—which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English were impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they had desired at once to get her out of their way. But the idea of her perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a prisoner was more than they chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are some things a churchman cannot do. When it was seen that Jeanne had yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do? There was but one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne's natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to penitence was the only practicable way.

Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs of the crowd. The cédule to which she put her sign "contained eight lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; "for the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite different." This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined to the necessary points and expressed in few words—was afterwards published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions, as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an abjuration at all.

When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison, with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all those crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There seems even to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials. Some of them congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, "You have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul." She herself, excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go. She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual imprisonment with complete faith and content. It meant to her instant relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church—gens de' Église—lead me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English," she cried with feverish anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her thought. The men about her could not answer this appeal. Some of them no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure. But perhaps flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop to ask where they were to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar of Longueville. Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing, perhaps in Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a "fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "this fellow was also one of them." Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her abjuration, which by no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.

Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms—but for what? to escape those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of Dionysius, its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going back was beyond words. We hear of no word that she said when she realised the hideous fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter waters closed over her head. Again the chains to be locked and double locked that bound her to her dreadful bed, again the presence of those men who must have been all the more odious to her from the momentary hope that she had got free from them for ever.

The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard upon her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor, Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though with a word of warning that should she change her mind and return to her evil ways there would be no further place for repentance. As a return for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he required her immediately to put on the female dress which his attendants had brought. There is something almost ludicrous, could we forget the tragedy to follow, in the bundle of humble clothing brought by such exalted personages, with the solemnity which became a thing upon which hung the issues of life or death. Jeanne replied with the humility of a broken spirit. "I take them willingly," she said, "and in everything I will obey the Church." Then silence closed upon her, the horrible silence of the prison, full of hidden listeners and of watching eyes.

Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain have seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but Monseigneur de Beauvais had to hold head against the great English authorities who were out of all patience, fearing that the witch might still slip through their fingers and by her spells and incantations make the heart of the troops melt once more within them. If the mind of the Church had been as charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if all the power of Rome could have got the Maid now out of the English grip. They were exasperated, and felt that they too, as well as the prisoner, had been played with. But the Bishop had good hope in his mind, still to be able to content his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it was true, but the more he inquired into that act, the less secure he must have felt about it. And she might relapse; and if she relapsed there would be no longer any place for repentance. And it is evident that his confidence in the power of the clothes was boundless. In any case a few days more would make all clear.

They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance, well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One account is given by Frère Isambard, whom she told in the presence of several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a Millourt Anglois, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again the man's dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be released from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards took away her female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack containing the other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding them that these were forbidden to her; but got no answer except a brutal order to get up. It is very probable that both stories are true. Frère Isambard found her weeping and agitated, and nothing is more probable than this was the occasion on which Warwick heard her cries, and interfered to save her. Massieu's version, of which he is certain, was communicated to him a day or two after when they happened to be alone together. It was on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday that she put on the female dress, but it would seem that rumours on the subject of a relapse had begun to spread even before the Sunday on which that event happened: and Beaupère and Midi were sent by the Bishop to investigate. But they were very ill-received in the Castle, sworn at by the guards, and forced to go back without seeing Jeanne, there being as yet, it appeared, nothing to see. On the morning of the Monday, however, the rumours arose with greater force; and no doubt secret messages must have informed the Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight of the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt with much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle was all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event so trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her, and humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an outcry of astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes," she replied, "she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no triumph in what she said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of one who in the most desperate strait has taken her resolution and must abide by it, whether she likes it or not. She was asked why she had resumed that dress, and who had made her do so. There was no question of anything else at first. The tunic and gippon were at once enough to decide her fate.

She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a woman.