The question of how Jeanne signed her recantation has never been satisfactorily cleared up. According to Massieu,fn23 she signed it with a cross. According to de Macy, she first signed it with a round 0, and then, on Lawrence Calot taking her hand which still held the pen, he made her sign it with a different sign – presumably a cross.fn24 The question very naturally arises, Why did she not sign it with her name? We know that she was able to write her signature, if nothing else.
In an attempt at the elucidation of this mystery, the Rev Father F. Wyndham (in L’héroïsme de la bienheureuse Jeanne d’Arc) advances the theory that in the days of her military career, before she had learnt to write so much as her name, she was in the habit of signing her dictated letters with a cross when she intended them to be read in exactly the opposite sense. In this way, he says, she could give her troops a warning which would be entirely missed by the uninstructed enemy, should the letter chance to fall into his hands. The cross which she first drew at the foot of her recantation would thus, in her own eyes, render it invalid. But what about the round O? Ah, that, says Father Wyndham, with the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the biographer developing a theory, meant absolute zero.
With some psychological shrewdness, the fruit of experience,they must have amicipated that something of the sort was likely to happen at the last moment. They certainly had the document ready, wherever it was lying concealed during the whole of Erard’s address and during the first part of the sentence of condemnation. It was there somewhere, ready to be whipped out at the first sight of human weakness. The only question is, What exactly was written on that document which Jeanne found so hard to understand? Massieu, who ought to know, having read it himself, is quite positive that the words signed by Jeanne were not the words which are reproduced in the procès-verbal. The words written in the procès-verbal occupy nearly fifty lines of small print, and constitute a truly appalling self-indictment.fn25 But five independent witnesses, who saw the original document when it was produced at Saint Ouen, agree that it was not more than six to eight lines in length – about as long, said Migiet, as a paternoster. Taque!, who was standing near Jeanne, and who kept his eyes fixed on her while it was being read aloud, says that there were about six lines of big writing. He adds, whichnobodyelse mentions, that Jeanne repeated the words as Massieu read them, and it is, I think, quite possible that she may have done so under her breath in the effort to understand.fn26 Jean Monnet, who was sitting on the platform at the feet of his master, Beaupère, was able to see the document, which appeared to him una parva schedula of six or seven lines. Finally, de la Chambre, the doctor, who says that he was near enough to see the writing, also deposes to six or seven lines on a folded sheet of paper. Such unanimity of evidence is impressive, especially as none of these men had any motive whatsoever for wishing to throw any doubt on the abjuration as written in the procès-verbal. To do so deliberately would, in fact, have entailed committing perjury, a thing which the witnesses, churchmen as they were, would have been exceedingly reluctant to do. The obvious explanation is that Jeanne gave her consent only to a brief though comprehensive précis, and never saw the amplified version which went into the records of the trial. The judges, after all, had every reason for wishing to abbreviate her actual confession as much as possible: there was more likelihood of her understanding what she was being asked to sign, and less likelihood of her changing her mind half-way through. They had equally every reason for wishing to elaborate it in the official version, in order to leave no possible room for dispute or ambiguity, nor were their consciences so tender as to compel them to declare publicly what they had done.
There it was: the prisoner had recanted, she had humbled herself before the Holy Church, she had saved her skin. Cauchon turned to the Cardinal to ask what he should do next; the Cardinal replied that he must receive her as a penitent.fn27 In place of the sentence of condemnation which he had begun to read, Cauchon then delivered sentence in another form, which had been prepared at the same time as the little document presented to Jeanne. Released from the threat of excommunication, admitted once more into the bosom of the Church, she might well have been forgiven for thinking that some change in her condition would now take place. It was true that the Bishop, at the end of his pronouncement, had condemned her to perpetual imprisonment,fn28 to the bread of pain and the water of sorrow, that she might expiate her faults to the end of her days, but even if, in the emotion of the moment, she grasped the full significance of these harsh terms, she at least had every justification for thinking that the nightmare days of her surveillance by the English were over. Dazed though she must have been, it was the first thing she thought of. Loiselleur himself had the impudence to come up to her, saying, ‘Jeanne, you have spent a good day, please God; you have saved your soul,’ but she disregarded him entirely, and called out, ‘Or ça, entre vous gens d’Eglise, take me to your prison, that I may no longer be in the hands of these English.’ But Cauchon – ‘Take her back to the place you brought her from.’fn29
VIII
The general excitement had by no means died down – indeed it had risen to even greater heights since the news had spread for certain that the witch had wriggled herself out of the grasp of justice. Jeanne herself was insulted by English soldiers as she was being led back to prison with no interference from their captains. All the English leaders, in fact, were in a high state of indignation against the French, and especially against the Bishop of Beauvais, because Jeanne had not been declared guilty, condemned, and given over to the executioner. On his way back, accompanied by his colleagues, the angry English surged round him, threatening him with their swords, and saying that he had ill earned the money their King had spent on him. Warwick, in person, had protested: ‘The King is ill served,’ he said to Cauchon, ‘since Jeanne has escaped us.’ Someone tried to pacify him: ‘My Lord, do not trouble; we will soon have her again.’fn30
Rauen must have been a split, divided city during the whole of the ensuing afternoon.
Jeanne was out of it; Jeanne was back in her dark cell. She was in irons again, chained to her block of wood; and of the five English soldiers who still guarded her, three spent the nights in the cell, and two outside the door.fn31 Cauchon and Warwick might growl over her like dogs over a bone, the swords of the English flash in the May sunshine as the Bishop drew his pontifical robes disdainfully aside, the crowds disperse in an excited babble of argument and of divergent opinions hotly and rowdily expressed, but for the prisoner there was nothing but a broken despair. Her flesh was safe from the flames, but at what a cost! She had betrayed everything she held most sacred. Most bitter of all, she must have wondered whether her guardian saints had really deserted her; whether, in truth, the doctors had not been right when they said that her voices were not the voices of saints at all, but of delusive devils. One shrinks from contemplating the appalling loneliness of soul which must have overcome her in such a moment. The strain of the morning over, she had nothing to do but to look back on what she had done. The Church Militant had praised her, but had she really, in the eyes of the Church Triumphant, abominably sinned? Had her conduct, in fact, been comparable with that of Simon Peter? Had she denied her Lord? It must have been almost a relief when the entry of Lemaistre, Loiselleur, de Courcelles, Nicolas Midi, and Isambard de la Pierre jerked her out of such speculations.
They had come to tell her what great mercy God had shown to her that day, as also they themselves for granting her the grace and forgiveness of their Mother the Church, making it quite clear at the same time that any lapse from grace would shut the doors of the Church on her for ever. Then they came down to their first practical test of her repentance: she must put on a woman’s d:ress, as it had been commanded. She was wholly submissive. She laid her man’s dress aside, exchanging it for the other.fn32 She allowed them to shave her head, so that the shameful symbol of her boyish crop might be removed. The Jeanne d’Arc of popular legend seemed to have disappeared for ever from the pages of history.
/> IX
It was thus with some surprise that the Bishop of Beauvais learned that the prisoner was to be seen in her male dress again. This news was brought to him some time between Thursday, May 24th, the day of the scene at Saint Ouen, and Whit-Sunday, May 27th. He immediately despatched Beaupère and Midi to bring her back to her senses, but, while they were waiting in the courtyard of the prison for the necessary keys to be brought, some Englishmen came up and started saying that anyone who would throw them both into the river would be finding useful employment. The one-handed Beaupère makes no bones about the effect produced by these remarks upon him and his fellow-canon (les dessus dictz furent espouvantez), and came away without having had speech of Jeanne.fn33 Perhaps they were wise, for the temper of the English was extremely sore. André Marguerie met with very much the same reception. When he and :;ome others whom he does not name presented themselves at the prison, full of curiosity, the English raised a great tumult (magnum tumultum); an English soldier raised his sword against him, and, fearing for their persons, they had to withdraw in haste.fn34 Rouen cannot at all have been a comfortable place of residence for the French clerics during those days. Massieu and Manchon both testify to scenes of violent hostility: Massieu and the delegates coming away from the castle, very much astonished and alarmed (moult esbahis et espaourez), saying that the English had driven them away with swords and axes, shouting ‘Traitors!’ and other terms of abuse.fn35 Manchon says that eighty to a hundred Englishmen set upon them, calling them Armagnac traitors and false counsellors, and scaring him personally so much that he refused to return to the prison next day, when sent for, without one of Warwick’s men to escort him.fn36 This heated atmosphere was evidently not congenial to the people of the pen.
It is to Massieu, however, that we owe the most detailed account of what had been taking place within the prison while the malcontent English sulked or ruffied in the courtyard below. Massieu had treated Jeanne as kindly as he dared from the first, even to the extent of imperilling his own safety in order to oblige her. It was he who had always brought her from her prison to the hall of justice, he who had re-conducted her, he who had taken her to Saint Ouen; no man connected with the trial, except possibly Ladvenu, had a better right to claim, as he claimed, a close familiarity with her. The story he tells of the change of clothes which so disturbed the Bishop of Beauvais and brought his deputies into such danger of a thrashing is so circumstantial and so pathetically human that we can scarcely doubt its veracity.
He says that he had it from Jeanne herself – when Warwick and d’Estivet went away leaving him alone with her and he immediately took advantage of their privacy to ask her what had induced her to make this change. And she told him that after the abjuration, when she put on the woman’s dress which was provided, her own boyish clothes were bundled into a sack, which was left in her cell in the keeping of the English guards. She seems to have been allowed to retain the prescribed garments without interference until the morning of Sunday, three days later, when she awoke and asked her jailers to free her chains as she wished to leave her bed for a purpose of nature (ut surgeret a lecto et purgaret ventrem). She had been sleeping in her clothes but one of the soldiers took them from her, emptied the sack containing the man’s dress, threw it on to her bed, telling her meanwhile to get up, and stuffed the woman’s dress into the sack in its place. Then, according to what she told Massieu, she was obliged to put on her old dress, but protested as she did so, saying, ‘Sirs, you know that this is forbidden me; I cannot take it without falling into fault.’ But nothing that she could say would persuade them to restore the other, although she argued with them until noon, when the necessities of the body would no longer be denied and she was compelled to leave the room. And when she returned, she told Massieu, neither her supplications nor her requests were of any avail.fn37
The sympathetic Massieu is not the only one who affords us a sketch of Jeanne in prison. Isambard de la Pierre also saw her there, and heard her say that she had had much to suffor from the English since she had appeared in the guise of a woman, ‘and in fact,’ he added, ‘I saw her in great distress, her face wet with tears, so disfigured and outraged that I was filled with pity and compassion.’fn38 Ladvenu goes further – one hopes too far, though it is undeniable that he had heard her in confession on her last morning – he goes so far as to say that she told him she had been raped by an English nobleman.fn39 Luckily, his incredible assertion that she ‘scarcely knew the paternoster and Ave Maria’ robs his well-meaning evidence of half its value.
X
These were not at all the stories which she told to Cauchon when, braving the English who had already molested his delegates on these several occasions, he entered her prison on Whit-Monday, May 28th, to conduct a personal enquiry. Of course we can never be sure that de Courcdles (who was present) or Boisguillaume, who drew up the Latin version, did not falsify the report of the proceedings on Cauchon’s orders. In view of the evidence of de la Pierre, who was also present, and in view of the additional unpopularity which Cauchon would have incurred with the English, had he allowed too unflatteringly truthful a report to be perpetuated, it seems highly probable. Perhaps he merely left out any complaints that Jeanne proffered against the English as concerning her virtue, for, apart from that not very vital point, most of her answers as given in the official report have the same disastrously haughty ring as in her most uncompromising days. They have Jeanne’s own recognisable stamp upon them. They found her dressed as a man, and, using that as a basis for their examination, immediately asked her when and why she had resumed that habit, and why she had ever adopted it, and by whose advice. She must have been tired of these questions.
‘I took it of my own free will. No one constrained me to take it. I prefer to dress as a man than as a woman.… I never understood that I had sworn not to resume it.… I did so because I thought it more proper, being amongst men, than to dress as a woman.… I resumed it because you did not keep your word to me, that I should go to Mass and receive my Saviour, and that I should be taken out of irons. I would rather die than be in irons, but if you will let me go to Mass and take off my irons, and put me in a pleasant prison (en prison gracieuse), and let me have a woman, I will be good and do whatever the Church wants.’
This last concession promised well, but the next question took her on to dangerous ground: ‘Since last Thursday (the day of the abjuration), have you heard the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret?’
Jeanne: ‘Yes.’
‘What did they say to you?’
‘They told me that, through them, God sent me His piry of the betrayal to which I consented in making the abjuration and revocation to save my life, and that in saving my life I was damning myself. Before Thursday, they had told me what I should do, and what I did that day. They told me when I was on the platform that I should answer that preacher boldly; he was a false preacher, and he said I had done several things which I had not done. If I were to say that God had not sent me, I should be damning myself, for it is true that God did send me. My voices have told me, since then, that I did very wrong in doing that which I did, and that I must confess that I did wrong. It was fear of the fire which made me say that which I said …’fn40
Against the words, They told me that, through them, God sent me His pity, Boisguillaume wrote, Responsio mortifera – fatal answer – in the margin.
17. THE LAST ACT
I
A few formalities remained to be accomplished, and the next day, Tuesday, May 29th, was given up to them. Forty-one voices were heard at the convocation summoned by Cauchon to attend in the archiepiscopal chapel, and in all those forty-one opinions there was only one opinion: ‘Relapsed heretic.’ The first speaker, Nicolas de Vendères, Archdeacon of Eu and Canon of Rouen Cathedral, expressed himself in terms which might seem misleading to any reader unversed in ecclesiastical law: That Jeanne shall be abandoned to secular justice, with the request that they shall act mercifully towards her.
This phrase does not mean what its amiable wording suggests. It is a mere formula, devised by the ingenuity of the Church, a euphemistic way of saying that the culprit shall be burnt. These niceties were perfectly understood between the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities. Thus, while it was recognised that the Church could neither shed blood nor put to death, it was equally well recognised that excommunication was its peculiar weapon, and that, once excommunicated, the outlaw could no longer claim either its protection or its jurisdiction. The handing over of an excommunicate to secular justice, therefore, meant that the Church blandly washed its hands of all further responsibility, knowing full well, as a contemporary judge neatly expressed it, that ‘what the one had begwi, the other would complete.’
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