An archer of Picardy was her immediate captor, and he delivered her, for a price, to his commander, Jean de Luxembourg. A great prize was this witch who had all but ruined the English cause in France, and proud must have been her captor: his prisoner was a girl of eighteen. But had she not fallen into good hands? Jean de Luxembourg was not only a member of one of the most distinguished families of Europe, but he was a knight, a leader in that grand organization of chivalry whose first object and proudest boast was protection of the weak, and gentleness and courtesy toward women. As Michelet remarks: "It was a hard trial for the chivalry of the day." The age of chivalry was already gone, though the name was on the lips of all: chivalry, even if it could have withstood the phenomenal progress in the condition of the lower orders of society,--have we not said that the peasant brothers of Jeanne were ennobled by royal letters patent?--and the invention of firearms, which tended to equalize all men on the field of battle, could not have withstood the debasing influence of years of guerrilla warfare. The knight had not only lost his physical superiority on the battlefield, but he had lost something infinitely more precious--his lofty ideals. Knightly orders continued to be founded, but they were the amusements of dilettanti in honor and ancient custom. Furthermore, even had chivalry not faded from its theoretic brilliancy, it is entirely possible that Jeanne would have been deemed beyond the pale of its protection. As the leper was shunned, as the Jewish usurer was persecuted by mediaeval society, so was the witch outlawed by public sentiment; and it was as a witch that the English were resolved to treat the deliverer of Orléans.
Confined at first in the camp at Margny, near Compiègne, Jeanne was subsequently removed to the Château de Beaulieu, near Loches, the very place from which Agnes Sorel took her title of Dame de Beaulieu. The Maid was removed again to Beaurevoir, and it is pleasant to record the kindly sympathy displayed by the ladies of Jean de Luxembourg's family, who ministered to her comfort, provided her with women's clothes, and did whatever charity suggested to calm her distressed mind. But nothing could reconcile Jeanne to captivity; she felt that she was in danger of falling into the hands of the English, and she yearned for an opportunity to succor Compiègne. In one of her attempted escapes she threw herself from a high tower, though her conscience warned her against the sin of self-destruction. Hurt in the fall, she was unable to make good her escape, and was taken and nursed back to health by the ladies of Luxembourg.
Meanwhile, the great ones of the earth were haggling over the price which should be paid for their victim, and Charles VII. made no effort to save her. Jean de Luxembourg sold her to Philippe de Bourgogne, and he treated with the English representative. This representative has had heaped upon his head the contemptuous anathemas of historians, both French and English; nor is he undeserving of the most severe phrases yet coined to express reprobation. Pierre Cauchon--it is a wonder so few have thought of the swinish suggestiveness of the very name--was merely a time-serving priest whose shameless policy of intrigue had already got him made Bishop of Beauvais, and would soon, he fondly hoped, give him the archbishopric of Rouen. In furtherance of his ambitious projects he had become thoroughly English, and fawned upon the rich Cardinal Winchester; but though Winchester nominated him to the archbishopric, neither the Pope nor the cathedral chapter of Rouen would consent to receive him as archbishop. Cauchon, as Bishop of Beauvais, claimed the right to try the heretical sorceress who had been captured on the borders of the diocese. In the same document in which he preferred this claim he made offers, on behalf of the English, to buy his victim. A king's ransom, ten thousand livres in gold, was offered for Jeanne, and as refusal would have involved not only the loss of this sum, but the loss of English friendship, the Duke of Burgundy sold his captive, who was delivered up to the ecclesiastical authorities and the English party in November, 1430.
Under the barbarous customs then in vogue it would not have been impossible for the English to put her to death under military law; the inviolability of prisoners of war was by no means an established principle among the nations. But La Pucelle's death alone would not suffice; she must first be discredited in the eyes of the world; it must be shown that the consecration of Charles VII. had been effected with the aid of one condemned by the laws of God and of the Church, that the consecration was, in fact, but an impious mockery of religious rites, because a sorceress had led him to the altar. For this reason it was determined to deliver Jeanne to the mercies of the ecclesiastical courts. Cauchon was rector of the University of Paris, and could command the assent of that body to whatever seemed to him expedient; the representative of the Inquisition, who seemed decidedly averse to having anything to do with the proceedings, was likewise overawed by Cauchon and by the English cardinal. All that remained to do was to constitute the court and to bring the accused before it for trial.
Rouen was to be the scene of the trial, and here Cauchon began his proceedings early in January, 1431. The charge against Jeanne was to be the working of magic; but the acute and punctilious Norman lawyers picked so many flaws in the paltry charges and in the documents presented in their support, that Cauchon was compelled to change his intention, and substituted the charge of heresy. It was under this preposterous indictment that the pious Jeanne was brought face to face with her judges on February 21st. For months she had been kept in close confinement, loaded with fetters, and kept under the guardianship of men. The sturdy girl had lost much of her vigor, as, indeed, had been the intention of her captors. But though the body was weakened, the spirit was yet unbroken; and Jeanne met the accusing judges, whom she knew to be already resolved upon her destruction, with the same firmness and untutored practical sagacity that had marked her bearing in the first encounter with those who sought to entangle her in the subtleties of metaphysics and theology. Of metaphysics and theology she knew not so much as the names, but she had a clear head and a thorough understanding of the fundamental principles of justice and of faith. So long as her physical strength lasted, the most adroit and insinuating queries of the prosecution could not trap her into compromising answers. Counsel for the defendant there was none; her own wit must defend her in the contest with judges who were at the same time prosecutors.
Being admonished by the insidious Cauchon to answer truly and without evasion or subterfuge whatever should be asked, she checkmated this move at once: "I do not know what you mean to question me about; you might ask me things which I would not tell you." She would speak the truth on all things, she said, and the whole truth, except on those things concerning her king or concerning her visions. Not till she had been brought before them for the third time, worn out by their persistence and by the increasing horrors of imprisonment, did she modify this so far as to consent to tell what she knew, but not all that she knew, and to answer unreservedly on points of faith. Never would she consent to testify against herself on the points which she saw that they wished to establish: "It is a common saying, even in the mouths of children, that people are often hanged for telling the truth." Complaining of the hardship of being kept in irons, she was told it was because she had attempted to escape. "It is true, and it is allowable for any prisoner." Asked to repeat those divinely sincere and simple prayers which constituted the main part of the faith she had learned as a little child, she pronounced herself quite willing to repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary, if Bishop Cauchon would first hear her in confession, an office which he declined.
Throughout the tedious, soul-racking trial, lasting, in various forms,--now before the whole court, now in her prison, now in private inquests,--from the end of February till the end of May, the same steadfastness and caution prevailed in her answers. She told them freely of her visions, for now her saints had come back to her and inspired her, as she said, to answer boldly. If she came from God, they asked, did she think herself in a state of grace, incapable of committing a mortal sin? "If I am not in a state of grace," she replied, "may God be pleased to receive me into it; if I am, may God be pleased to keep me in it." Not one of the theologians present could have devised an answer more truly orthodox, more truly Christian in spirit, or more discomfiting to the casuists. On this occasion the judges were struck dumb, and very prudently adjourned the court for that day. Not hesitating at any meanness, one of her persecutors asked whether Saint Michael appeared to her naked? She answered him in the very spirit and almost in the very words of the Scriptures, as we learn from the record: "Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that it might be the costliness of suitable robes which caused the demur, asked them if they fancied God, who clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his servants." Again and again, questions were put to her, in answering which, if she had been tainted with the least suspicion of imposture, she would have been tempted to pretend to powers greater than she had: "Do Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret hate the English?" "They love what our Lord loves, and hate what He hates."
Proof of her guilt, in the legal sense, there was none, and so much even the lawyers of Rouen recognized; but out of her own answers the ministers of the God of Justice were enabled, after months of juggling, to torture proof sufficient to convict her in their own eyes. When the wolf in Æsop's fable, seeks a pretext for devouring the lamb, we know from the beginning that that pretext will be found: "You have muddied the stream," cries the wolf, as he raises his head from drinking. "Nay, good sir, I am lower down the stream than you are." "If it was not you, it was one of your family." There was no hope for this lamb of France. "Never from the foundations of the earth," says De Quincey, "was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! Trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning to its mark,... confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!... 'Would you examine me as a witness against myself?' was the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her."
In the midst of the proceedings, about Palm Sunday, the poor girl fell ill, and there was some fear that through death she might escape the exemplary punishment they were preparing for her against the anticipated conviction. Her illness may have been chiefly mental and nervous exhaustion, helped on by what would have been to her one of the most severe trials, homesickness. This is the impression left upon our minds by Lamartine and by Michelet as well as by De Quincey: "A country girl, born on the skirts of a forest, and having ever lived in the open air of heaven, she was compelled to pass this fine Palm Sunday hi the depths of a dungeon." In the general rejoicing of Easter, while the bells of Rouen steeples rang forth the glad tidings of salvation for all, of relief from pain and sorrow, there lay in the castle dungeon a peasant girl, sick in body, sick in mind, dreaming of the fresh green fields, and the forests just now beginning to put forth their tender leaves, hearing the bells of her own far-away church in Domremy, and the homely talk of old friends as they plodded by on their way to that church. She woke in the morning with the sound of the bells in her ears, and on that holy morning, as oh many another for many weary weeks, there were the double chains upon her limbs padlocked to a transverse beam at the foot of her rough bed. And in the room, watching every move and torturing her with coarse jests or terrifying her with yet more cruel threats, were four or five soldiers, no woman near to minister to her wants or to shield her modesty. With such torture, with the added mental torture of almost daily cross-questioning whose object was to force her into the jaws of death, is it any wonder that Jeanne was ill, well-nigh reduced to the frenzy of despair? Yet this forlorn creature, even when confronted with the threat of actual torture, never made an admission that would seriously conflict with the simple statement of her faith and of her mission which she had volunteered at the very beginning. Refusing to retract anything, she yet signified her willingness to submit to the authority of the Church. This was all that Cauchon had been able to accomplish after more than two months' labor. A highly theatrical ceremony was arranged to dignify what they called her formal abjuration. Two scaffolds were erected in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen. On one sat Cardinal Winchester, Cauchon, and the other dignitaries. On the other, chained hand and foot and fastened at the waist to a post, surrounded by clerks who might take down any chance words and by the ministers of torture with their dread instruments, stood the poor child whom they had dragged from the prison. After a tedious and impious harangue by a famous preacher, whose false statements she would not listen to in silence, Jeanne consented to sign an abjuration which did not affect the validity of her claim. When the notary presented the pen to her unpractised fingers she smiled and blushed a little at her ignorance and awkwardness. She drew a circle upon the parchment at the place indicated, and then, the notary guiding her hand, made a cross within the circle. Then the Church admitted her to its grace, and the sentence was read to her: imprisonment for the rest of her life, "on the bread of grief and the water of anguish."
And so, being now received into the mercy of the Church, she was conducted back to her prison. It is a relief, in the midst of this cruel scene, to hear some expressing compassion and imploring her to sign the abjuration to save herself, though some there are who clamor loudly: "Let her be burnt!" The test of her sincerity in the new penitence was to be her willingness to wear garments befitting her sex. She had clung to her man's attire as the best, and indeed the only, safeguard to her honor, constantly threatened by her keepers and even attempted, we are told, by one brutal knight. Relying upon the good faith of her ecclesiastical custodians, now that she had done what they asked, Jeanne consented to put on the women's clothes they gave her. But Cauchon had no intention of allowing her to escape the last punishment. His judges had assured the English, who complained that Jeanne would not be burned after all: "Do not fear, we shall soon have her again."