Saint Joan of Arc

by Vita Sackville-West

  Now the curious thing is, that Jeanne in the course of her trial had denied her share in this occupation, and, since Jeanne had been dead for twenty-four years, the representatives of the Pope were unable to confront her with her former acquaintances in order that she should explain the discrepancy between her answers and theirs. Why Jeanne should have denied this perfectly respectable and indeed praiseworthy pursuit, which her obedience as a daughter exacted of her and her duties as a citizen enjoined, is difficult to understand – unless M Louis Bertrand has made a lucky hit in his suggestion that ‘the games played by the shepherds and shepherdesses in the fields were not always entirely innocent.’fn14 Some support is given to his theory by the fact that, in so far as her judges were then trying to prove the immorality of her life, she was being cautious to make no answer which might lend colour to their insinuations. Personally, I cannot wholly agree with this explanation. Jeanne, although frequently shrewd inher replies, was never so cautious as to grow sly. Almost invariably, she was forth-right and sincere, even rash, giving the impression that she had nothing to hide, except, indeed, when she replied that her voices would not allow her to answer, and said ‘Passez outre.’ Nor was she ever intimidated to the extent of trying to placate her judges by untruths; indeed, she frequently answered their questions in a fashion better calculated to annoy than to placate. Besides, the untruth on this particular point could readily have been unmasked by a dozen witnesses, as she must herself have known. I believe the explanation to be much simpler than has been held by those who take a pleasure in looking for midi à quatorze heures. I believe that both Jeanne and the Domremy witnesses were speaking the truth according to the best of their recollection; only. Jeanne’s recollection being more recent, she spoke it more accurately than they. There is no reason to suspect the Domremy witnesses of any desire to falsify their account of what they remembered of her youth; after all, they were appearing as witnesses for her defence, for the guidance of judges determined to give her a favourable verdict ifthey possibly could. The Domremy witnesses, however, were all advanced in age when the twist of history caused their obscure hamlet to be invaded by the representatives of formidable prelates, armed with a questionnaire which should oblige them to search their memories on behalf of a little girl who had once been one of themselves. Jeanne herself, on the other hand, was young, very young, only nineteen, when hostile judges at Rouen asked her questions on the same subject, though in a very different spirit. The answers she gave them were drawn from a fresh memory, a memory obliged to look only nine or ten years back. The Domremy witnesses were obliged to look some thirty-four years back. Memory, with advancing age, might become a little confused, though not necessarily mendacious. Jeanne, when she appeared before her judges, had been at an age to answer presumably more accurately than her former friends; besides, it was her own personal life that she was remembering, and, as such, more vivid to her; whereas the Domremy witnesses in their old age were recalling only the life of one little girl out of many little girls in their village. It is reasonably arguable, I think, that Jeanne’s answers give on the whole a more accurate account of her early life than the later depositions of her friends, and that neither she nor her friends meant intentionally to mislead, despite the apparent contradiction of their statements.

  Jeanne, in short, while admitting freely that she had helped in the domestic duties of her father’s house, and even boasting that she feared no woman in Rouen as a rival at the needle or the spindle, denied that she had accompanied the cattle or other animals into the fields. Her words are quite clear: ‘And she added, that when she was in her father’s house, she went about the familiar business of the house, and did not go into the fields with the sheep and other animals.’fn15 That was her first statement on the subject in response to her judges. Two days later, when they revived it, she contributed a qualifying clause. She had, she said, already answered the question, but added that when she had grown older, and had come to years of discretion, she did not watch the communal cattle, although she helped to lead them into the fields and to a castle called the Island, for fear of the armed men; she did not remember whether as a child she had watched them, or no.fn16 Thus her two statements, at first sight contradictory, are really perfectly consistent: she was merely splitting hairs in the interest of a scrupulous accuracy. There were evidently two very important distinctions present in her mind, and, being a conscientious person (anxious, also, at the moment, not to be trapped into any unnecessary admission which might further endanger her life), she took trouble to make these distinctions as clear as possible. First she wanted it to be understood that although as a girl she had not been in the habit of remaining in the fields with the cows, she had occasionally helped to drive them there, or into the Château de l’Ile; secondly, she wanted it to be understood that she could not remember whether she had ever guarded them all day, even as a child, though she was not prepared to deny this suggestion as categorically as the other. She evidently distinguished very definitely between the comparative dignity of driving cows out in the morning and the comparative indignity of guarding them throughout the day; also between the difference in propriety of a girl or a child being employed in so ignoble a task. It may seem strange that Jeanne, the professed associate of saints, and, at the moment, in terror of her life, should have set so much value on so incommensurable a distinction. But it is precisely the kind of distinction which would assume a disproportionate importance to the peasant mind, and precisely the kind which is so difficult for the more elastic-minded to estimate. And Jeanne, apart from her especial guidance, was, as I conceive her, a very simple person. Had she not been so simple a person it is in fact unlikely that she could have lain so readily open to the influence of that especial guidance. She shared both the simplicity and the inexplicability of the genius; only, in her case, the simplicity was paradoxically complicated by her peasant mind, which saw a real difference between driving cows to pasture and remaining to watch them while they ate. fn17

  The replies of her Domremy friends were less confusingly scrupulous. They, evidently, saw very little difference between an occasional and a regular cowherd, between a child and a girl. What did it matter whether you were nine or thirteen? At thirteen you were still a child of the village, under the orders of your father, and his obligations were still yours. They were old themselves when called upon to give their evidence, and had forgotten the enormous and pathetic difference a few years can make in the eyes of the very young.

  There is no ambiguity about their statements, nor is there a single one which disagrees with the others. They disagree only with Jeanne’s own statements, and it is still difficult to make out why. Another point, which increases the difficulty, is this: had Jeanne flatly refused to take her tum with the rest, such a refusal would surely have been noticed in the village, and would have been remembered by her contemporaries even when they had reached old age. In a small village every circumstance is known and provides matter for current gossip: if Jacques d’Arc’s young daughter had struck against her father’s orders, Jacques d’Arc would certainly have boxed her ears, and the echo of that slap would have echoed all over Domremy. Either he or his wife would have confided to some crony the inexplicable rebelliousness of their daughter’s behaviour. And the ancients would have remembered. Small events make an impression on small minds. Jeanne would naturally have been singled out in their recollection by her extraordinary subsequent career, the notoriety she had conferred on their humble village, the dramatic rush of her victories, capture, trial, and death. Besides, several of the witnesses were her own godparents, intimate friends of her family, who, as such, would have been doubly distressed on hearing of the unusual insubordination of their spiritual daughter. The only possible inference, I think, is that Jeanne never openly rebelled. I think she merely evaded, without making an open fuss, because she already had more important matters on hand. She already wanted to be alone, in a solitude to be filled by a richer company than the company of mater
ially and even ribaldly minded youths and girls. In short, she played truant. It was her quiet way of getting what she wanted without saying anything about it to anybody. This is no fanciful explanation of the mistake made later on by the Domremy villagers: it is clear from the evidence of her godfather, Jean Morel, that sometimes when her parents believed her to be in the fields, she was somewhere quite different. She was at the shrine of Our Lady of Bermont when her parents believed her to be in the fields looking after the ducks and other things (quod, prout vidit, ipsa Johanneta libentur et sæpe ibat ad ecclesiam sive heremum Beatæ Mariæ de Bermont, dum sui parentes credebant ipsam fore in campis, ad ararum, aut alias).fn18

  It is quite a long walk from Domremy to Bermont, so Jeanne’s absences must have been considerably prolonged. One wonders that she dared take the risk; one wonders why, at her trial, she did not give this very simple explanation, since, however much she may once have feared being punished for truancy, that childish dread must certainly have vanished, only to be replaced by far greater dreads; one wonders, also, why no one, noticing her absence or meeting her on the way, ever got her into trouble with her unsuspecting parents. Judging by the evidence, her godfather was the only one to discover or to remember her truancies, although other witnesses remember accompanying her to Bermont on open occasions, and both Michel Lebuiu and Perrin le drapier say that she sometimes took her sister with her.fn19 She must have been either extremely wily or extremely lucky.

  Bermont, when she got there, was, and still is, a lost little chapel in the heart of the woods. To reach it, and to avoid passing through the village or through the next village of Greux, she certainly took a short cut through the fields and woods, which was quicker than the road, as well as more secret. There is no road up to the chapel itself, nothing but a steep scrambling track, which first rushes down into a swampy little valley overhung by trees, overgrown by reeds, and then, after passing a spring where Jeanne must often have paused, rushes up the opposite hill, to emerge on an unexpected clearing and the white rough-cast building which is the hermitage. Poor, simple, deserted, and utterly countrified, it is a strangely moving place. In the tiny white-washed chapel, above the alter, hangs a crucifix upon which her eyes may have rested; on a bracket stands a crude wooden statue of Notre Dame de Bermont herself, which is said to have been the object of her special veneration. It is perhaps at Bermont, on a still afternoon, with no other company than the rabbits nibbling beside the gorse, that one comes closest to the spirit of Jeanne d’Arc and of the influences that made her.

  VI

  The legend of the shepherdess, meanwhile, is destroyed by Jeanne herself. She cuts it down with her words as surely as she cut down the harlot with the slash of her sword. It is replaced by the red-skirted figure making off surreptitiously towards the woods of Bermont; by the figure of the little girl whose companions teased her for being too pious;fn20 by the figure of the little maid-of-all-work (not yet the Maid of Orleans), busy with her duster in her mother’s house, then sitting down to her stitching and her spinning, unable to run away just then, since her mother had her within doors, under her eye. It is replaced, above all, by the figure of the little girl most astonishingly and terrifyingly addressed by a disembodied voice speaking to her in the open air, at the most dramatic and significant moment of her whole career.

  Jeanne stated that she was in her thirteenth year when this event occurred. fn21 On the other hand, when asked her age, at the beginning of her trial, she replied rather vaguely that, so far as she knew, she was about nineteen. fn22 Interrogated again, she replied that she could not tell at what age she had left her father’s house. Such uncertainty on the part of the person principally concerned diminishes, to say the least of it, the realiability of her statement. Her uncertainty, however, does not seem to have extended to the date when she first heard her voices: she says repeatedly that she was in her thirteenth year, i.e. twelve years old. She may have hesitated over her age on other occasions, but there was never any doubt in her mind that Saint Michael first visited her when she was twelve. Both Perceval de Boulainvilliers and Alain Chartier, her contemporaries, believed her to have been somewhere near that age (tandem peractis ætatis suæ duodecim annisfn23; and ubi vero duodecimum annum attigit),fn24 so, taking one thing with another, we must calculate this extraordinary experience to have befallen her in the year 1424.

  Two separate and slightly different accounts of it have come down to us: Jeanne’s own, which is one of the most moving and poetical paragraphs of autobiography it is possible to read anywhere, and that of Perceval de Boulainvilliers in his previously quoted letter to the Duke of Milan. Nobody could regard Boulainvilliers as a very well-balanced or credible reporter – in fact more credulous than credible, remembering the wild fairy-tale he repeated in perfect good faith about her birth on Twelfth Night – but since the pretty story he recorded seems to have gained some popular credence, it can scarcely be omitted here. This is his account, transcribed almost textually from the words of his letter:fn25

  ‘She was keeping her parents’ sheep, with the other girls, some of whom were playing about in the meadows. They called to her, suggesting that she should join in their races, the prize being a handful of flowers, or something of that sort. She, having consented to accept their challenge, ran the course two or three times at such a speed that one of the girls cried out, “Jeanne” (for that was her name), “I see you flying above the ground”’ (video te volantem juxta terram).

  This curious remark, which seems to demand a literal rather than a metaphorical rendering, suggests an allusion, unconscious on the part of the speaker, to the puzzling phenomenon known as levitation. Jeanne, among saints and visionaries, is by no means unique in having given this impression to onlookers. Her contemporary, Colette de Corbie and her predecessor, Guillemette de la Rochelle, were both credited with the same accomplishment. So was Saint Catherine of Siena. So was Saint Teresa, and about two hundred others. Jeanne herself never laid claim to it, unless we may read some hint into her words to Brother Richard as he came to meether at Troyesfn26:’ Approach boldly,’ she said, ‘I shall not fly away.’ But these words, I am sure, were innocently spoken, without any meaning that Jeanne believed herself to be possessed of these miraculous powers. They were spoken because Brother Richard, on seeing her, made the sign of the cross – the usual procedure when one believed oneself to be in the presence of a witch or other evil thing; now, witches, by common superstition, were supposed to levitate at will – in plain English, to fly. Jeanne’s remark was therefore sarcastic rather than boastful.

  Of course, if she were really independent of the laws of gravity, it would do everything to explain how she could jump off a tower seventy feet high without breaking any limbs.fn27

  To return to the letter from Boulainvilliers:

  ‘She then, the race over, retired to the edge of the meadow in order to rest her tired body and to regain her breath; she seemed as one rapt and deprived of her senses [quasi rapta et a sensibus alienata]. Then came a youth, who, approaching her, addressed her in this fashion: “Jeanne, go home; your mother has need of your help.” She, believing it to be her brother or some other boy of the neighbourhood, hastened home. Her mother, meeting her, enquired the reason for her neglect of the sheep, and scolded her. The innocent child replied, “Did you not send for me?” Her mother said “No.”

  ‘Thinking then that the boy had played a trick on her, she started back to rejoin her companions, when suddenly a luminous cloud [nubes prælucida] appeared before her eyes, and out of the cloud came a voice, saying, “Jeanne, you are destined to lead a different kind of life and to accomplish miraculous things, for you are she who has been chosen by the King of Heaven to restore the Kingdom of France, and to aid and protect King Charles, who has been driven from his domains. You shall put on masculine clothes; you shall bear arms and become the head of the army; all things shall be guided by your counsel.” After these words had been spoken, the cloud vanished, and the girl, astounded by
such a marvel, at first could not give credence to it, but, in her ignorant innocence, remained perplexed as to whether she should believe it or no. Night and day similar visions appeared to her, renewing and repeating their words. She kept her own counsel; to none, save to her priest, did she speak; and in this perplexity she continued for the space of five years.’

  Her own account, as reported at her trial, is briefer, less sentimentally pretty perhaps, but in its brevity far more poignant:

  ‘I was in my thirteenth year when God sent a voice to guide me. At first, I was very much frightened. The voice came towards the hour of noon, in summer, in my father’s garden. I had fasted the preceding day. I heard the voice on my right hand, in the direction of the church. I seldom hear it without [seeing] a light. That light always appears on the side from which I hear the voice.’fn28

  VII

  But for the utter simplicity which invests this statement with a poetry of its own, it would be regrettable to have to destroy the picture suggested at the beginning of Boulainvilliers’ letter. Boulainvilliers’ picture has a fresh and rather Botticellesque charm: the sheep, the flowery grass, the happy children, their voices, their laughter, their innocent sports – in so care-free, vernal, and idyllic a scene, armed men and the troubles of France seem very far away. It would be regrettable to destroy it, were we not able to replace it by that other and simpler picture of Jeanne alone in her father’s garden, in summer, at the hour of noon. I wonder, in fact, whether it is necessary to destroy it altogether? It is true that Jeanne herself never mentions the delusive boy who had sent her hurrying off to her mother. It is true, also, that Perceval de Boulainvilliers reports her as having mistaken that boy for her brother or for one of the village children; a statement which, on the face of it, is scarcely credible, for how could she have mistaken so familiar a figure as that of her own brother or even one of her daily playmates?-unless, indeed, we accept the perfectly logical contention that an apparition could adopt the semblance of a brother or a play-mate as easily as the semblance of an archangel or a saint. Apart from this slight and easily dismissed difficulty, and apart from the fact that Boulainvilliers entertained a romantic though understandable cult for Jeanne, apart also from the fact that he betrays his inaccuracy in some other particulars – a great many ‘aparts,’ I admit – still I can see no reason to query the plain nature of his account. I can see no reason for supposing that Jeanne herself had not privately and personally told him the story of the children’s races and of the delusive boy, even though she made no mention of them in her examination by her judges. Probably she came to regard the delusive boy as unimportant. She may have come to regard him as a mere freakish prelude to the far more important things which subsequently happened. She may have told Boulainvilliers about him, lightly, as a frivolous anecdote, not worth repeating to her judges, and entirely superseded in her mind by the far more impressive personages who succeeded him. She may not ever have accorded him recognition as the messenger of God: according to her view, as reported by Boulainvilliers, he had tricked her. He was a fraud. He could not have come from God, and, so far as we know, he never reappeared.fn29