Intercourse (16 page)

*Carrying her combat banner, Joan stood next to Charles at his coronation. Asked at her trial why her banner was given such prominence, she answered: “It had borne the pain, it was reason enough it should have the honor. ” Warner, Joan of Arc, p. 166.

She was the third daughter of farmers Jacques Dare (or Tart or d’Arc) and Isabelle Romee (a surname often taken by those who had made a pilgrimage to Rome, according to Michelet). She had three brothers and several godmothers and godfathers. She learned her prayers and her faith from her mother: “Nobody taught me my belief, if not my mother. ”
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She also learned and did female work: sewing, spinning, and housework. At her trial, she bragged about the excellence of her sewing and spinning: “for spinning and sewing let me alone against any woman in Rouen. ”
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She also did plowing and harvesting and guarded animals in the fields. She was devout from childhood; went to church and to confession. Her father had dreamed that she would run away with soldiers and so her parents “kept me close and in great subjection... ”
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Her father told her brothers that he would rather they drown her than let her run off with soldiers.

She was thirteen when she first heard voices; and it was then she “promised to keep my virginity for as long as it should please God... ”
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She heard the voice of St. Michael, saw him, saw angels, saw light: “I heard the voice on the right-hand side, towards the church; and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. ”
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She heard this voice and the voices of two female saints who became her inspiration, several times a week. She was told to go to church, to practice good conduct, that she must leave home and go to France, and that she must not tell her father. She was told that she would free the city of Orleans from the English, and also told to whom she must go for equipment, men, and access to the king: “And me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride or lead in war. ”
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Her father tried to force her to marry, and at sixteen she publicly defied him. A man sued her for breach of promise, a promise to marry having the force of a binding contract in the Middle Ages. Joan defended herself in court against the charge and won.

It was in 1429, at the age of seventeen, that Joan made her escape from her father’s house and authority. Joan’s voice told her that she must find Robert de Baudricourt, who would take her to Charles. She left Domremy knowing it was for good, deceiving her parents. She went to an uncle and persuaded him to take her to Vaucouleurs, where she knew she would find de Baudricourt;

whereas never before had I seen him and by my voice I knew this Robert, for the voice told me that it was him. And I told this same Robert that I must go into France. This Robert twice refused and repulsed me.
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She virtually laid siege to him twice, for prolonged periods of time; and eventually he sent her to the king escorted by men-at-arms. He gave her a sword, and the people of Vaucouleurs gave her money for a horse and equipment. She had arrived in Vaucouleurs wearing a red peasant dress made out of a coarse material; she left dressed like a man, never to dress of her own free will like a woman again. At her trial, tormented on the issue of her male dress, she would not capitulate. It was, she said,

but a small matter; and that she had not taken it by the advice of any living man; and that she did not take this dress nor do anything at all save by the command of Our Lord and the angels.
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According to the stories of the time, Joan entered the king’s room, which was crowded with men dressed finer and looking more royal than the king; but Joan knew him and addressed him immediately as her sovereign: “she made bows and reverences which it is customary to make to kings, just as if she had been brought up at court all her life. ”
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He then denied that he was king and pointed to another man: “To which she answered: 'It is you who are king, and no other; I know you well. ’”
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She then told the king that she would end the siege of Orleans and have him crowned at Rheims.

The king had her examined by clergy, theologians, and scholars as to her faith. She was physically examined by women to ascertain that she was, as she claimed, a virgin. It was a common belief that the devil could not make a pact with a virgin; and so virginity would put Joan on God’s side, making it lawful for Charles to accept her. Her interrogators were persuaded of her authenticity. Joan then asked Charles for the sword of St. Catherine of Fierbois, a patron saint of escaped criminals and prisoners of war; the sword was found where Joan said it would be, in a nearby shrine to St. Catherine, hidden behind the altar, covered with rust that disappeared when it was rubbed; on the sword there were five crosses and the names of Jesus and Mary. Joan received the sword and fought with it.

She dictated a letter to the English king and the Duke of Bedford, head of the occupying army in Orleans, demanding that the English leave: “and if you do not do so, you will remember it by reason of your great sufferings. ”
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On April 28, 1429, the march on Orleans, led by Joan the Maid, began. On April 29, Joan entered Orleans at the head of her army. On May 8, the English retreated. She then led and won a series of other victories over a period of months, securing for the French several villages and towns and driving the English back. Joan then persuaded Charles to go to Rheims to be crowned. Rheims was far away, through territory occupied by the English. Combat and famine nearly caused the men to turn back, but Joan persisted in her strategizing and persuasion; and the English abdicated yet more territory. Charles became King of France in Rheims. Joan continued to fight for the king in many campaigns, including an assault, which she led, on Paris: it failed. On May 23, 1430, at the age of eighteen, she was captured in Compiegne. Some say that French soldiers, jealous of her, blocked her escape. It was her courage, according to an enemy eyewitness, that led to her capture. The French were retreating and Joan,

passing the nature of women, took all the brunt, and took great pains to save her company, remaining behind as captain and bravest of her troop. And there Fortune allowed that her glory at last come to an end and that she bear arms no longer; an archer, a rough man and a sour, full of spite because a woman of whom so much had been heard should have overthrown (broken the bones of) so many valiant men, dragged her to one side by her cloth-of-gold cloak and pulled her from her horse, throwing her flat on the ground; never could she find recourse or succor in her men, try though they might to remount her...
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Her captors were not the English themselves, but their allies, the Burgundians, vassals of the Duke of Burgundy. It was the custom in those days to ransom prisoners, so Joan might have been freed had Charles paid a ransom. He never tried to free her. The King of England, on the other hand, did want her enough to pay for her. He demanded she be turned over to the English, but her captors did not comply, perhaps disquieted by her legend and her virginity. The English king then persuaded the Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, to try her for heresy. In a letter to Cauchon, who eventually prosecuted her, Henry VI articulated the charges against her in broad strokes:

It is sufficiently notorious and well-known that for some time past a woman calling herself Jeanne the Pucelle, leaving off the dress and clothing of the feminine sex, a thing contrary to divine law and abominable before God, and forbidden by all laws, wore clothing and armour such as is worn by men; has caused and occasioned cruel murders; and, so it is said, has seduced and abused simple people by giving them to understand that she was sent from God and had knowledge of His holy secrets...
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The Maid, as a living emblem of resistance, was so dangerous to the English that they actually “had a woman burnt alive, simply for having spoken well of her. ”
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Succumbing to the monumental pressure, which included the threat of an embargo, and then being well paid for capitulating, the Burgundians turned Joan over to the Inquisition in November 1430. Against the Church’s own rules, she was kept in a civil prison, guarded by English soldiers, male, who slept in her cell. She was kept in chains. There is some evidence that she was put in a special iron cage too small for her to stand in; and there is the word of a locksmith who said that he built an iron cage “in which she was
kept standing
, chained by her neck, her hands and her feet... ”
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[italics mine] According to the rules of the Inquisition, she had a right to be in a Church prison, guarded by women.

The Inquisitors, no doubt, felt justified. Imprisoned by the Burgundians for nearly seven months, Joan had tried to escape twice from two different prisons. In her second escape, she had jumped from a castle tower in which she was imprisoned. During her trial, the Inquisitors tried to make this second escape into a suicide attempt or to show that she was a witch because she expected to be able to fly. The Inquisitors tried to elicit a promise from her that she would not try to escape again; this she refused to give, saying it was her right to try to escape.

On January 9, 1431, the judges assembled to evaluate her and her case, a process that took over a month, during which Joan languished in jail. On February 21 Joan was brought into open court. She had no advocate at any point. Indeed, anyone who tried to help her in any way was threatened or punished. One of the clergy, allowing Joan to make the sign of the cross in a chapel on the way to her interrogation, was told: “Truant, who maketh thee so bold to allow that excommunicated whore to approach the church without permission. I shall have thee put in a tower so that thou shalt see neither sun nor moon for a month if thou dost so again. ”
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From March 10 through March 17, the sessions were conducted in the prison itself, in camera. All of this interrogation preceded the bringing of any charges. The Inquisitors examined an accused person to see what she was guilty of and then charged the person on the basis of what they found. The charges were then read to the accused, who could admit all, repent, and be punished—with life imprisonment or burning, depending on the crimes, but with the certainty that she had done the right thing and was still loved by Church and God; or the accused could be intransigent and deny (or try to explain) her behavior or beliefs as expressed in the charges, in which case she would be burned alive in the hope that she would repent before dying. Torture was frequently used to get a confession of guilt, since the confession helped to save the person’s soul and saving the heretic’s soul was the Church’s divine purpose in these proceedings.

The Church made seventy charges against Joan. They ranged from stealing a horse to sorcery. Being faced with these charges and answering them was called the “ordinary trial. ” For Joan, this phase of her ordeal began on March 26. The sixty-sixth charge was a summing up of all the charges. Joan answered: “I am a good Christian. I will answer all these accusations before God. ”
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She refused to answer the last charges, and the Inquisitors interpreted this silence as an admission of guilt. This part of the “ordinary trial” ended on March 31.

On April 2, the seventy charges were shortened to twelve: Pierre Cauchon got rid of the charges that could not be linked to her actual behavior and created an indictment that was politically stronger, more defensible, not based on rumor or hyperbole.

On April 18, the “ordinary trial” continued in Joan’s cell, where she was admonished by the Inquisitors; told to reform and repent. On May 2, she was admonished in public, a formal proceeding that amounted to a public threat on her life:

In conclusion, she was abundantly and newly admonished to submit to the Church, under pain of being abandoned by the Church. And if the Church abandoned her, she would be in great danger both of body and soul; her soul in peril of everlasting fire, and her body in danger of the flames of this world...

To which she answered: You will not do as you say against me without suffering evil, both of body and soul.
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On May 9, she was threatened with torture—she was brought into the torture chamber and shown the instruments of torture; and on May 12 the judges deliberated in private on whether or not she should be tortured. They decided that torture was not “expedient at the moment. ”
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On May 19, Joan was condemned as a heretic by the University of Paris, its great scholars and theologians; and the twelve charges against her, now officially sanctioned by the University of Paris, were read to Joan on May 23. She was again admonished “to correct and amend your faults... ”
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Joan stood firm: “As for my words and deeds, I refer to what I said at my trial, and I will maintain them. ”
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On May 24, Joan was taken to a cemetery where a scaffold and tribune had been erected; and she was threatened with death if she did not submit to the earthly authority of the Church. Joan’s spoken answers to the Inquisitors were humbler than they had ever been but not humble enough; so she was handed a paper with writing on it and told to put her mark on it (she could not read or write). She was told that she would be burned that day if she did not sign it. It was read to her; she signed. According to witnesses, the document she signed was short, perhaps six lines; the document published in the trial record was forty-seven lines.