The Last Days of Jeanne d'Arc

by Ali Alizadeh

  Jeanne. Listen. I don’t…I think I was wrong. I’ve been wrong. I’ve misled you and I’ve misled myself. I thought I was like you, you know, a woman like you. But I’m not sure anymore. I’m so sorry, Jeanne.

  What do you mean, Piéronne?

  You moved your hand to touch my face. Jeanne pushes it way. You then turned your back to me. Piéronne whimpers.

  Talk to me, Piéronne.

  Jeanne, I’m so sorry, but maybe I want to be married and have children. I just don’t want you to…I don’t want you to want me anymore. I care for you, but if you love me as you say you do, then please, Jeanne, please let me go.

  Jeanne sees the darkness inside the tent turn into an absolute blackness and swallow the sliver of moonlight that has crept in through a fissure in the canvas. The murmur of Piéronne’s breathing and her own, and the distant din of drunken soldiers, now silenced by an immense stillness. Jeanne then hears herself speak. Her voice is the voice of a dying animal.

  Do you love me, Piéronne?

  Did you ever love me, Piéronne?

  Impenetrable silence. There is no response from Piéronne.

  16

  Jeanne buries her face in her hands. When she lifts them she finds herself outside the tent, behind a ditch, on her knees. I can’t remember how I’d got there. I can’t remember for how long I wept there. She is sobbing, begging.

  Sister. Saint Catherine, please tell me…please tell me…you promised me I’d be loved, Sister. You promised me.

  she

  the woman from Brittany

  she with hair of flames

  and eyes of the sea

  she

  Piéronne

  the beloved

  of my prophecy

  But she wants me to let go of her. I can’t do that, Saint Catherine. I can’t live without her. She’s my life.

  the truth of passion

  the act of sacrifice

  testament to the submission

  of base desire

  to the eternity of love

  No, Sister. Why? What am I to do now…tell me. I can’t live without her. I won’t live without her. Tell me where to go then, guide me.

  Compiègne

  your last battle

  to end your war

  if you attack that city

  your enemy

  awaits you

  will martyr you

  Jeannedaughter of God

  you will be free

  to ascend to Heaven

  In the morning, the Maid tells d’Aulon to take Piéronne the Breton to the nearest friendly town, away from the fighting. Away from me. She does not have the strength to say farewell to her. To watch you leave my life. Is Piéronne sad or thankful? Did you smile on your journey away from me, or did you shiver and cry like me?

  When d’Aulon returns the Maid tells him that they will attack the enemy outside Compiègne. He shakes his head vehemently, reminds Jeanne that they have four hundred men at the most, and the enemy perhaps up to six thousand. Jeanne repeats her command, tells him that she is doing what God wants her to do. She fights back more tears and mounts her horse.

  And they drag Jeanne the Maid off her horse outside Compiègne. By the scruff of her blue cape, by which she is recognised. She has seen to her soldiers’ safe entry into the city, has seen the city gates close before her dark eyes. She has told her squire this is her final day of fighting. It’s an enemy archer who steps forward from the circle of excited Burgundians around the famed female warrior. She has drawn her sword, but doesn’t use it. The archer tugs at her cape. She doesn’t resist, her feet slip out of the stirrups. A complete, painful fall from the saddle.

  They chained and detained me. Then I heard they’d sold me to the English. I tried to escape by jumping out of the window of the tower where I was kept. They found me, handed me over. The English put me on trial for heresy, Piéronne, just as you said. Threatened me with torture, made me renounce my Voices. They threatened me with burning two days ago, Piéronne, forced me to sign a letter of lies. They made me give up my true clothes to become a normal woman, a prisoner. And last night, Piéronne, they dishonoured me. They raped me, my love. Right here, in this room.

  Part IV

  1

  And here she is, in her cell, beneath the treasury tower of Rouen Castle.

  At the end of her battles and public trials. Jeanne’s epic has reached its denouement. In a place of grey stone. The night has passed. And the white gown they’ve forced her to wear. It now has a dark stain, Piéronne. A dark patch of blood, so striking in the morning light. It’s not the first time I’ve bled, my love. All the arrows and wounds of my battles.

  But this wound is different.

  This morning too is different, Piéronne. Look how early the sun has risen. Summer days are long, but Jeanne knows this is not just any dawn in May. The sun, Piéronne, it casts a strange white glow in my cell. My hands are so clean, so pale. The dirt and stains of months of darkness in her filthy prison, all gone.

  This is the start of no ordinary day.

  The prisoner is not sleepy, she is not gloomy. I’ve spent the worst night of my life remembering you, my love. I’m no longer in fear of remembering everything about you. Your smile and your body, Piéronne, your dimples, the birthmark on your thigh.

  Was it a horrible sin? Do I deserve what’s been done to me? The light of the day is really quite spectacular. Jeanne sees movements in it, angels or apparitions. Were my visions false, tricks of a lunatic mind? Piéronne, my chains feel so light this morning. I wonder where you are now. You who didn’t love me, you who wouldn’t love me.

  Yes, you crushed my heart. But it still beats, despite what the English have done to me, and my heart beats for you, Piéronne.

  Listen. I was not simply smitten by your beauty. I was not given to a childhood fantasy. I was not entirely fooled, my love, by your performance. When you first came to me, didn’t you come to use me, to take advantage of my proximity to wealth and power?

  But I know something else too, Piéronne. Jeanne knows the night has absolutely ended and this day is exceptional. I know I loved you with my whole being.

  That’s what I’ve remembered. I will no longer deny why I let the Burgundians take me. You were my life, I did not want a life without you. I did want to die for the truth of my passion, like Saint Catherine and Saint Marguerite.

  I’m not a suicidal dimwit. Jeanne can hear a sparrow, she’s sure of it. I’ll hear Saint Catherine again too. I know I’ve testified to my love for you.

  And I remember that I let go of you. I knew your leaving me would break me, Piéronne, it would end me. But I couldn’t deny you your great wish. I delivered you from the prison of my love. I set you free.

  I remember all of that, I remember how you left me. And I will not forget it again. And I will not forget why I did what I did with my life.

  The sun has fully risen, and there is no denying that the day has triumphed over the night. And let me accept one more thing. Let me confess it to you, Piéronne, wherever you are.

  I still love you. After everything I’ve suffered for this, I admit that I spoke the truth to you that day last year in our lovely home in Orléans. I’ll love you forever, until the day I die.

  You see my love, I’m not insane. I’m not a sinner, I’m not an idolatress, or any of the foolish things the English have said about me.

  I’m just the woman who loves you. Who heard Voices when she was a girl. The peasant who rose up against the English lords and Burgundian dukes. I’m a woman who feels happy when dressed like a man.

  I’m Jeanne the Maid, Piéronne. I’m not evil, heretic, sorceress, unnatural.

  So I’ll renew my oath to the truth of my message. And I know I’ll be visited by an archangel again, very soon, an angel with blue eyes and shimmering red hair. Who’ll play backgammon and chess with me afterwards. Who’ll tell me that she too loves me. When I too become an angel like her.

  2

  On the m
orning of 27 May 1431, Jeanne la Pucelle or Jeanne d’Arc, known in English as Joan the Maid or Joan of Arc, having renounced her male attire and her claim to hearing voices from Heaven according to her abjuration of 24 May, and having been sentenced to perpetual imprisonment by the Ecclesiastical Court as punishment for the crimes admitted to in her abjuration, calls for the prison guards.

  And she demands to have her male attire returned to her.

  The English guards and their captain the Earl of Warwick are delighted to hear this request and are quick to return to the prisoner her tunic and leggings. They unchain her so that she may change out of her female gown into her old garments. They then inform the judges involved in the prisoner’s Trial of Condemnation that she has breached the terms of her punishment.

  On the following day, a team of judges, headed by the man who presided over the trial, the Burgundian bishop Pierre Cauchon, visit Jeanne in her cell to determine if it is true that she has recanted her renunciation. They find that she is indeed dressed in male clothes and they ask her why she has resumed her former attire. She answers that she has done so of her own will. She is asked if she does not realise that she has abjured and promised specifically not to return to a masculine costume. She answers that she would rather be dead than to stay in chains of iron. She is asked if she has heard her Voices again. She answers yes. The clerk transcribing this exchange writes in the margin of his text, in Latin: responsio mortifera – fatal answer.

  Upon interrogating Jeanne in her prison cell, the Bishop tells the English captains outside the dungeon: It is done.

  On the following two days, the bishop convenes an assembly of the judges for the prisoner’s Trial for Relapse. It is put to the assessors that Jeanne has clearly revoked her signed letter of abjuration, in which she agreed to submit to the Church and never again depart from it, and she is therefore a relapsed, and therefore a heretic. A good number of judges recommend that the prisoner be made fully aware of the consequence of her resumption of male clothing. Bishop Cauchon, after hearing the views of these learned religious scholars and professors of law, decides to forgo this recommendation and issues a formal notification that the prisoner is found guilty of relapse and heresy, that she is excommunicated from the Church, and that she is to be handed over to the secular arm for the execution of the punishment suited to the crimes of relapse and heresy.

  On the morning of the next day, Wednesday 30 May, Jeanne is subjected to a final examination in her cell. A remorseful theologian who wishes to delay the enactment of the sentence asks her if she believes her Voices to be from good or malevolent spirits. She answers that she does not know. She is asked if she is certain that her Voices are real. She answers that the Voices are real to her. She is asked if she could once again describe the angel who visited her when she was a child. She breathes deeply before her final reply.

  I’m sure the angel was me. There was no one else.

  She is then visited by two friars and an usher. They inform her of the form her punishment will take. She bursts into tears. She says that she would rather be beheaded seven times. She then dries her eyes, and asks one of the brothers to hear her confession. She asks to receive the Eucharist one last time.

  She is then unchained and led by two soldiers out of her cell and out of the castle. She is placed on a carriage. The carriage takes Jeanne to the city’s market square. Countless spectators and over one hundred soldiers look on as the young woman is led up the scaffold and told to stand still. A doctor of theology gives a sermon, quoting the Bible about the dangers of a body harbouring a diseased part. He is then followed by Bishop Cauchon, who denounces Jeanne as a rotten member of the Christian community, to be severed and mutilated from the body of the Church, and delivered to the secular arm.

  The English soldiers, acting on this day as the Church’s secular power, take charge of the excommunicated woman and place a conical fool’s cap, made of paper, on her head, on which they have written: Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolatress. The English captains have deemed it unnecessary to take the convict, as is customary, to the town hall to have her sentence read out to her. A local bailiff, seated on the scaffold next to the clergymen, tells the soldiers: She’s yours. Take her.

  Jeanne struggles against being marched down the scaffold. She sighs loudly and sobs as soldiers drag her towards a mound of logs. She soon recovers her senses and stops resisting. She climbs a ladder. She allows a masked man to tie her to a long wooden pole. She closes her eyes.

  3

  Rouen’s Place du Vieux-Marché – the Old Market Square – still serves as something of a market.

  There one may find, from late morning until early afternoon, stalls and counters decked with Normandy’s famed cheeses, shiny sea creatures, jams, bottles of very tasty cider, smoked meats and baked goods. These share the wide square with some restored timber-framed, some modern balconied apartment buildings. At the base of these buildings one sees restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. At the centre of the square, a modern church, modelled on the sails and bows of Viking ships which apparently transported the city’s earliest rulers after the collapse of the Roman Empire. It dominates the square, with its sharp, billowing gables and rooftops. In the shadow of the church – named L’église Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc – are stone steps, cobbled paths, patches of shrubs and tulips. One can hear the chirping of sparrows. And one can see a small rectangular plaque, declaring this spot as the place of LE BÛCHER – THE STAKE.

  And a few metres to the right of the sign, rising out of the bed of glistening shrubs and wilting flowers, is a concrete pedestal that supports a tall iron cross. Hacked into the marble wall of one of the passages that leads to the door of the church, words of the twentieth-century novelist and politician, André Malraux: O Jeanne, sans sépulcre et sans portrait, toi qui savais que le tombeau des héros est le coeur des vivants – O Jeanne, without gravestone and without portrait, you who knew that the tomb of heroes is the heart of the living.

  Malraux belongs to a very long list of illustrious writers, politicians, thinkers and ideologues who have made use of Jeanne d’Arc. His political master, Charles de Gaulle, used the image of the heroic martyr to rally the resistance to Nazi occupation. Today, it is a far-right, quasi-fascist party that brandishes her as the mascot for their opposition to European Union policies and their hatred of immigrants. In Rouen, the gift shops that flank the Old Market Square sell postcards featuring the Maid – or, more precisely, imaginary neoclassical depictions of her by painters and sculptors who lived centuries after her – and plaster models and plastic toys of a short-haired, armoured girl on a very large horse. The castle where she was imprisoned has completely vanished, replaced by a modern office building at 102 Rue Jeanne d’Arc, but a gargantuan tower of Rouen Castle, now named Tour Jeanne d’Arc – The Joan of Arc Tower – stands where Jeanne was shown the instruments of torture.

  Inside the tower, one may approach, through the ground-floor vault and up a narrow, spiralling stairway, a small museum dedicated to la Pucelle. There one may learn that among the many writers who have represented her in their works are Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. In the high-tech, multimedia museum Historial Jeanne d’Arc – inside the reconstructed remnants of the archbishop’s castle, possibly the site of the announcement of Jeanne’s condemnation as a heretic – digital maps and holograms of actors and historians inform tourists, in a number of languages, about the life of Jeanne d’Arc, her Voices and visions, her meeting with the king of France, her victories, and her fiery end. In the museum’s second section, posters of a variety of film stars – some very tall, some blonde, some saintly – who have played the part of the famous heroine in far too many movies.

  Apart from all things to do with Jeanne d’Arc, Rouen’s other main attraction for local and international tourists is the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which is older than Paris’s cathedral of the same name. Holidaymakers also come to this Norman city for its charming museum of fine arts, memorials dedicated to its
famed authors and artists – Corneille, Flaubert, Duchamp – and for its cake shops, teashops, and tin-glazed pottery. The millions of tourists who visit France hardly venture beyond the centres of its cities, whether Rouen or Paris, except to see famous resorts and tourist regions. They would never visit, for instance, the suburb of Corbeil-Essonnes, one of the poorest banlieues of today’s Paris. If this little-known township – or, in modern administrative terms, commune – has a popular image, it is one of overpopulated, towering housing projects surrounded in 2005 by battle-ready riot police as they attempt to quell an uprising of disaffected youths.

  But there is a reason why that troubled Parisian township matters to the story of Jeanne the Maid. It has a stone church, also referred to as a cathedral, with a thirteenth-century bell tower, Gothic doorways and rib vaulting inside. The medieval church of Saint-Spire of Corbeil was the episcopal centre of the diocese, before the removal of the bishop’s seat to the postmodern Cathedral of Évry in 1995. And in the late Middle Ages, centuries before suburban conflicts and obsessive administrative zonings of today’s France, this church is understood to have been an abbey.

  A convent housing perhaps twenty nuns and novices; several lay supporters, clerics and servants; and fifteen or so boarders and corrodians at any given time. And one can assume that the nuns spent most of their time doing what medieval Catholic nuns did – attending Officium Divinum, reciting prayers, listening to prayers being recited to them while eating, fantasising about purchasing new and very expensive prayer books handwritten by monks in prestigious monasteries, and so on – while the lay staff swept the floors, administered alms, slaughtered geese and baked bread.

  4

  It is morning. After a breakfast of bread and ale, the abbess and the nuns start the first period of the day’s communal prayer. It is sometime in May 1430, perhaps in the earlier days of the month. The abbess is absorbed in the thick Latin phrases of the Liturgy of the Hours. Then a servant gently taps her on the shoulder. Something is whispered through the fabric of the veil into the solemn woman’s ear. She seems indifferent. Dismisses the gentle intruder and continues to utter the prayer until she’s content that God is pleased with her utterance. She then leaves the chapel to see to the cause of the interruption.