By IDA M. TARBELL

THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF BIOGRAPHY

JANUARY 1, 1916

Aside from the story of the Christ there is none in history which offers so complete a picture of the heights and depths of human character as that of Joan of Arc. So perfect is its symbolism that one coming for the first time to the records of the world might well believe it the invention of some consummate master of the intricacies of human nature, intent on showing to men the extremes of evil and of good of which they are capable.

Full of subtleties and mysteries as the story is, there is none in history more perfectly documented. We have not merely the proofs of what the Holy Maid claimed to be and what she did, but the details of her childhood, the inmost experiences of her spiritual and physical life. And these events and experiences stand on the evidences of not one, but of many, of those who were with her from her birth on January 6, 1412, in the little village of Domrémy, some 125 miles southeast of Paris, to the day nineteen years later, when, before the eyes of a great multitude of the people of Rouen (roo-ong), she was burned at the stake. She suffered her fate because a body of eminent lawyers and divines had found that she was, as their restrained and Christian language has it, "a liar, an inventor of revelations and apparitions, a deceiver, pernicious, presumptuous, light of faith, rash, superstitious, a soothsayer, a blasphemer against God and His saints, a contemner of God even in His sacraments, a prevaricator of divine law and of sacred doctrines and of ecclesiastical sanction, seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic, having committed a thousand errors against religion, and by all these tokens rashly guilty towards God and Holy Church!"

THE VOICES

The girl against whom these vindictive and hysterical charges were made was of peasant origin, not yet twenty years of age, and knew not A from B. She had come to her cruel end because from the time she was thirteen she had heard Voices—the Voices of saints—which she never had doubted had come from God and had never failed to obey, though the orders they gave her were so extraordinary that they had at the beginning filled her with terror. She had wept and pled her youth, her ignorance, her unfitness for the mission on which they would send her.

It was an amazing mission; nothing less than to save France from the clutches of England. Her instructions were detailed. She was to go to the governor of a nearby town and ask for an escort to conduct her to Charles VII, who called himself king of France, though he had never been crowned. She was to go to Charles and announce herself as sent by God to raise the siege of Orléans and to conduct him to Rheims (Reemz), where he was to be crowned. The English in the end were to be driven from all France, the Voices assured her.

To Joan of Arc this mission was of supremest importance. She lived in the path of war, and, like many a Belgian, a French, or a Polish girl of today, she had seen her village sacked, her family and her friends obliged to flee saving what they could. Domrémy lived in constant danger of the Burgundian allies of England and of all the pitiless riffraff war breeds. Joan was an ardent patriot and suffered with her country; she loved her king too, looking on him as sent of God. To rescue him was the noblest work which one could be given. After the first revolt she accepted the call without misgivings. It was not for her to question Voices sent by God.

The key to the career of Joan of Arc is this unfaltering confidence. She did things from the start utterly preposterous by human standards of conduct. What more unlikely of success than that the governor of a tormented district should turn over for the asking to a child of seventeen, of whom he had never heard, an escort to take her to the king of the land! yet the governor of Vaucouleurs (vo-koo-lurr) did this: not on the first or second asking, to be sure, but on the third, and Joan had never doubted that she would get her escort—"the Voices had told me it would be thus."

THE MAID AND THE KING

Her mind was so full of the command laid upon her that once accepted nothing could divert or frighten her. One might expect a girl of her origin to be awestruck at the thought of presenting herself before a court and a king; but not Joan. She passed unabashed through the throng that had gathered to witness her first meeting with Charles, and kneeling told him composedly, "Most noble Lord Dauphin, I am come, and am sent to you from God to give succor to the kingdom and to you."

She won Charles from the start, for he was much of a person in spite of his vacillating and his weakness, and he answered to the nobility of her call. She won the better part of his court, and as for the people they flocked to her. She was sent to be examined by experts in law and religion; for without assurance that her Voices were indeed from God Charles did not dare risk it. Joan might of course be what the English and the cynical of the court declared,—a witch and her Voices of the devil.

For six weeks the girl was questioned by the ablest lawyers and churchmen of the kingdom. A selected body of women gave her a physical examination. The end of it was complete justification: "It is found and hereby declared that Joan of Arc, called the Maid, is a Christian and a Catholic, and that there is nothing in her presence or her words contrary to the faith, and that the king may and ought to accept the succor she offers; for to repel it would be to offend the Holy Spirit, and render him unworthy of the aid of God."

Before this ratification all opposition to Joan fell. She was proclaimed by the king as one sent by God to assist him. She was given armor, a guard, soldiers, and under her orders a theatrical campaign was conducted. Orléans fell before her; though it was so invested that Charles had ceased to hope for its recovery. The winning of Orléans converted some who had doubted her in spite of learned jurists and theologians. It was with them as with d'Aulon, her steward: "It was not possible for so young a maid to do such things without the will and guidance of our Lord." Those who, because of personal ambition, did not believe in her, those who hated her purity and the habits of restraint and temperance she imposed on the army, those who called her witch, still did not dare oppose her openly. She might be from God, and whether she was or not she was in the saddle, adored of the people, supported by the king, a terror to the English.

CORONATION OF CHARLES VII.

The complete ascendancy Joan of Arc had won in France in two months from the time of her first interview with the king lasted from the fall of Orléans to the coronation of Charles at Rheims, on July 17, 1429. The march which proceeded the crowning was most of it through land which the English held. There were sieges and battles, dangers and escapes. It was managed by the Maid with a calm authority, an unwavering reliance on her Voices, which lifted her even in the minds of her most cynical associates quite out of the ranks of human leaders. She was a greater general than them all. She foresaw all, she never feared nor hesitated—and she a girl of seventeen! She must be of God! And when finally the impossible had been accomplished, and, in spite of English, Burgundians, and the plotters, Charles was crowned, there were few of the French who even secretly denied her claim.

How could they when all she foretold promptly came true? It was by the success or failure of their prophesying that men of those days judged largely whether one came from God or not. It was because she told the governor of Vaucouleurs of a distant battle on the day it occurred and days before the news could reach him that he finally yielded to her demands for an escort. It was because she selected the king from a throng in which he mingled and told him that which no one but he knew that he accepted her. She had said that she would be wounded at Orléans—and she was. She had warned a wicked fellow that he would be dead shortly—and he was. Who could deny the holy origin of such a Maid? Certainly not the average man or woman of the fifteenth century; certainly not the loyal and devout French she succored. As for the English who fled before her, they acknowledged her powers; but they declared them to be of the devil—as was natural, since they were the sufferers!

THE CHARACTER OF JOAN

But outside of her divine guidance and her unquestionable military and political genius, Joan of Arc had human qualities calculated to make even the roughest of men love and respect her. Peasant though she was, she was beautiful to see. This fresh, untouched young girl with the flame of inspiration in her eye and the authority of the divine in her bearing, clad in her pure-white armor and mounted on a warhorse as spirited as the best of them, must have been a sight to stir the heart.

Her sympathy for the afflicted poor of the country was as genuine as her devotion to the king. They knew it, and no little of her power came from their perception. There was no shadow of self-seeking in her; she never asked honor or wealth or pleasure. There were clever and designing ones who sought to trap her with such baubles, —a well-known and usually quite successful method of sidetracking troublesome people with ideas of their own,—but Joan was quite outside of all worldliness. It looked small and thin to one who consorted with saints and followed the orders of the Most High. What she took of the gifts showered upon her she gave to the poor. When at the coronation the king told her to ask what she would, she asked that Domrémy be freed forever from taxes.

She was devout. No Catholic in France was more faithful to the church, no one partook of its holy mysteries with more humility or with more worship in his heart.

But good and devout and charitable as she was she was no colorless person. There are numerous delightful human outbreaks recorded in the documents of her life. She wept like an ordinary girl when she received her first wound. She flew often into a passion when her commands had been disobeyed. She was particularly hard on the wanton women who followed the camp, often herself chasing them off. Once she broke a sword over the head of one, and again killed one by the blow she gave.

She guarded her own divine prerogative with quite human jealousy. As there were many women prophesying in those days, a company of them were enlisted to help the king after Joan's first success. Joan never liked them. "Folly and futility," was her characterization of the work of the most prominent of these women, Catherine de la Rochelle. "Send her home to her husband and children," was her order. A common enough point of view of the Maid who has made a career for herself and sees a married woman seeking to do the same! However, in Catherine's case Joan suspected fraud, and there seems to have been reason.

THE END OF HER MISSION AND CAPTURE

With the crowning of the king at Rheims Joan seemed to feel that her mission was at an end. She was homesick when she saw her father and those who had come from Domrémy to witness her miraculous elevation. She prayed Charles to release her, to send her back to her spinning and her flocks, her mother and her friends. But she was too precious at the moment. The king and his counselors would have more of her aid; but they wanted it without admitting her to their councils and without heeding the orders she gave as coming from her Voices. She was severe and outspoken about this treatment. "Truces have been made," she wrote once to the people of Rheims, "that are not pleasing to me, and I know not whether I shall keep them; but if I keep them, it will be solely to maintain the king's honor."

After Rheims there followed campaigns in which she had little or no support, treaties of which she did not approve, intrigues which, though she frequently divined and frustrated them, slowly produced their effect on king and people. She failed in September to take Paris; though she had been as confident that it would fall as that Orléans would. She scandalized the church by attacking it on the anniversary of the birth of the Virgin Mary. She was sorely wounded too in this attack and had to be carried from the field. It hurt her prestige.

In the winter following the failure to take Paris Joan wrought many marvels in the Loire country to which the king had retreated. The greatest was that, among doubters and flatterers, and in spite of intrigue and discouragement, she kept her purpose clear, her confidence unshaken. She was still Joan, the Maid sent by God to drive the English from all France. But she was no longer a Maid with full power over the king.

She stood it until spring; then the certainty that there was danger of losing all Champagne led her to set out with a band of perhaps a hundred horse and still fewer archers, her objective Compiègne (cong-pyen) which the Duke of Burgundy was threatening. It was the thirteenth of May when she reached Compiègne. The aid she rendered seems futile enough at this distance. The truth was Joan had no knowledge of the situation, and could have no plans for relief. She was not admitted into the counsels of those who defended the town. For her attack on Orléans and her march on Rheims she had had the knowledge which during three years of devout belief in her mission she had collected unconsciously no doubt; but at Compiègne she had nothing but her Voices. She had almost full command from Orléans to Rheims: now she was little more in the minds of the commanding officers than a painted saint, a bejeweled reliquary, to be used on their sallies and in their attacks.

The result was her capture. It came at a moment when she was crying, "Go forward! They are ours!" though as a matter of fact all of the French but her and her little guard had fled.

If in the few months Joan of Arc held sway over the minds of the French king and his people she showed as none outside of the Christ have ever shown the divinity in man and its power to elevate human nature, surely that which followed is as perfect an illustration of the deviltry in the human heart and what it can do to corrupt and harden men. Never were human minds so put to it to prove a saintly thing evil. All the learning that was in the University of Paris, all the authority there was in the church and state in the part of the world where Joan was finally taken for trial, was summoned to find out: not the truth,—they had no interest in the truth,—but plausible reasons for declaring her a heretic. The orders from the English government were that she should not be allowed to die save by what they called "the hand of justice"; that is, she must be proved to be of the devil. This was the business of the church.

TRIAL AND TORTURE AND DEATH

At this noble work there now was set a band of some sixty of the most learned and distinguished scholars, judges, and ministers in the land. There was an occasional one for whom the work was too abominable. One such declared boldly that to force this simple girl to reply without guidance to such great doctors, to so many masters, was mocking justice. "They mean to catch her," was his verdict. "I will stay no longer. I cannot witness it." And indeed they did mean to catch her; but what a chase she gave them! I doubt if there is such a test of wit and courage and faith in all the history of disputation.

At every point they taxed their devilish ingenuity to put her at a disadvantage. They drained her physical strength by abominable prison conditions. Joan had been a captive for seven months when she was finally taken to Rouen to trial. In the dungeon tower room given her it is said she was at first chained in an iron cage in which it was impossible to stand erect; certain it is that shackles were always on her feet, a chain round her waist by which she was padlocked to a beam. Five English guards slept in her room jeering at and insulting her. It was in this room they came to her with promises, bribes, flatteries, and threats.

It was from here that she went in chains in February, 1431, for six public examinations by the sixty or more doctors and lawyers. These open meetings proved too damaging to her judges. She was too truthful, too unafraid, too confident in God and her Voices. The subtlety of some of her answers confused and shamed the most relentless of her examiners. They had that overpowering quality which the direct unadulterated truth gives. What chance in the long run has a university dialectician before the truth?

They took her to closed chambers, and hardly did better. They went to her when she was ill and likely to die. But they could not touch this clean white thing. It slipped through their fingers like a ray of light. And on what unimportant matters they badgered her! Her dress, for one. The trial seems at points to have been hung on the crime of her wearing man's apparel. "Dress is but a little thing, less than nothing," she told them.

They threatened her finally with torture if she did not reply to questions she said her Voices had forbidden her to answer. In the very torture chamber with the horrid irons before her eyes she cried, "Verily, if you were to tear my limbs asunder and drive my soul out of my body, naught else would I tell you, and if I did say anything unto you, I would always maintain afterward that you dragged it from me by force."

For months this unbelievable torment went on, until finally, lost in the maze they had prepared for her, worn by confinement and incessant mental and physical strain, she broke under the threat of burning,—a child's horror of a fate she had persuaded herself God would not permit. Her Voices had deceived her. She signed the deed of abjuration they had prepared for her: only to find it did not mean what she thought.

Back in her prison, her courage and her confidence reasserted themselves and she recanted, "All that I said I uttered through fear of fire, and I recanted nothing that was not contrary to the truth. I had liefer do my penance once and for all, to wit by dying, than endure further anguish in prison. Whatsoever abjuration I have been forced to make, I never did anything against God and religion. I did not understand what was in the deed of abjuration, wherefore I did not mean to abjure anything unless it were Our Lord's will."

It was this that caught her, such is the dexterity of the human intellect bent on proving that which is good to be evil. Joan had been pronounced a heretic, she had confessed to being one, so they declared: now she recanted. The Holy Church could have nothing to do with so monstrous a creature. At last the learned doctors had unimpeachable authority for turning her over to the English, who now had the undeniable right of burning her alive.

They lost no time. It was on a Tuesday (May 29) that she was declared a relapsed heretic. It was on the morning of the following day that she died by fire. A rough wooden cross, fashioned, at her request, by a pitying English soldier, was on her breast, the words "Jesus, Jesus" on her lips. On her head was a great fool's cap on which was written Hérétique, relapse, apostate, idolâtre.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

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