Joan of Arc, page 11
In connecting Joan’s cross-dressing to the sin of idolatry, the judges were accusing Joan of making an idol of herself. In this, they were taking a rather sophisticated approach, arguing rationally as scholastics rather than appealing to biblical authority. They had to prove that her cross-dressing was of the forbidden rather than the tolerated kind. Not all transvestism was frowned on by Church authority; there is a tradition of “holy transvestites,” women who passed themselves off as men in order to preserve their virginity. The details of some of their biographies have unavoidably comic touches. Take the case of St. Margaret, a.k.a. Pelagius, which comes to us from a thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend, by Jacobus de Voraigne. Margaret decided on her wedding night that she couldn’t bear giving up her virginity, so she escaped the bridal bed and betook herself to a monastery, where she passed herself off as Brother Pelagius. She was rewarded for her exemplary conduct by becoming the chaplain at a convent. But enemies accused her/him of impregnating one of the nuns. She allowed herself to be exiled to a cave rather than reveal her secret, which was made manifest only at her death.
Another holy transvestite was St. Uncumber, originally named Willevirgis. The daughter of the king of Portugal, she refused to marry the king of Sicily and prayed that God would allow her to preserve her vow of virginity. Whereupon she was blessed with the gift of a beard and mustache and became St. Uncumber, the patroness of unhappywives who wished to be unencumbered of their husbands.
But sanctioned transvestism escaped the accusation of idolatry because the woman’s female identity became invisible, subsumed in the task that the disguise was meant to effect. She became, to the world, entirely male, not drawing attention to herself but disappearing into the job of making herself safe from male desire. Joan never passed as a man. Her cross-dressing made her femaleness a contradiction rather than an erasure; in taking on the power and authority of men, she refused to give up the identity of a woman.
Questioned as to whether she wanted a woman’s dress, Joan answered in a way that is hard to make clear sense of. “If you give me permission, give me one, and I will take it and go. Otherwise no. I am content with this one, since it is God’s will that I wear it.”7 Could she have meant to say, It’s God will for me to dress as I am, that is as a man, but if you tell me not to, I will disobey God’s will if you agree to let me go? The same ambiguity occurred when she was asked if the voice had ordered her to wear men’s dress. She answered, “Dress is but a small matter,” but said that she had not “taken it by the advice of any living man.”8
Most often, when she talked about why she wouldn’t give up male dress, she explained that it was because in female dress she was afraid for her chastity. It is as if, bearing the sign of a female, she was subject to a female’s vulnerabilities;signed as male, she was safe. Like her virginity, this seems to be a pact in which both Joan and her enemies agree to a definition of bodily terms that is about the idea of the body rather than its existence in space.
The importance of Joan’s chastity to her idea of herself must be measured by her protection of it at the expense of receiving the sacraments. She was, for her time, unusually devoted to the Eucharist; she received great sustenance from receiving Communion and from hearing Mass. At a time when she would have been more than ever in need of spiritual consolation, she forwent it rather than take the risk of sexual violation. Her faith that God would claim her as his own was unshakable enough for her to risk displeasing him by refusing the sacraments; her faith in the stability of her own identity if she lost her virginity was far less secure.
Asked which she would rather do, wear a woman’s dress and hear mass or continue in her man’s clothing and not hear mass, she engaged in a tricky dance:
“Promise me that I may hear Mass if I wear a woman’s dress, and then I will answer you.”
She was promised.
She then responded, “And what do you say, if I have sworn and promised our King not to put off these clothes? Nevertheless, I say, Make me a long dress, right down to the ground, without a train, and give it to me to go to Mass and then when I come back I will put on the clothes I now have.”
She was told that she must give up male clothes unconditionally.
She replied: “Bring me a dress like that of a citizen’s daughter; that is, a long houppelande, and I will wear it, and also a woman’s hood, to go and hear Mass.”9
But she would not agree to wear women’s clothes once she had left the chapel and was back in her cell.
What this seems to suggest, although the terms are shifty, is that she didn’t object to wearing women’s clothing in the safe zone of a church but that she would not wear it in the hostile environment of her cell. What happened after her abjuration, when she agreed in her defeat to put on women’s clothes, seems to support her instinct for self-preservation. There are two stories, one by Martin Ladvenu, her confessor, and one by the usher Massieu. They conflict, but they both support Joan’s notion that her chastity was dependent on her cross-dressing.
Joan was dressed in women’s clothing, but a parcel of men’s clothing was left at the foot of her bed. She told Ladvenu that one of her guards tried to rape her and that was why she put on men’s clothing again. Massieu’s story is that the guards pulled her female clothes off her, kept them from her, and gave her no choice when she was forced to get up to answer “a demand of nature” but to wear men’s clothes again or be naked. Whichever story is true, the presence of male clothing in her cell is a puzzle. Was the clothing left there to tempt her, a temptation that her judges, understanding the importance of male dress to her, well understood she wouldn’t be able to resist?
The same ambivalence about dress occurs when Joan begs her judges to grant her the grace of a woman’s dress and a hood for her head if she is to die. When she’s asked why she wants a woman’s dress for her last hours, she answers, “It suffices that it be long.”10 As if the issue were not gender but modesty.
A moment later, she says that if they let her go in a woman’s dress, she’d put on a man’s clothing as soon as she was free. And she would “not for anything take the oath that she will not take up arms or wear male dress to do our Lord’s will.”11
It is difficult to get a firm grip on Joan’s position in relation to men’s clothes. Sometimes it seems that she was only wearing male clothing as a practical measure and that if her judges had allowed her to resume male clothing in the cell when she was in the presence of her hostile guards, she would wear female clothing in order to hear Mass and do so until her death. But she never agreed to appear before her judges in female dress, and she never agreed to give up male dress for good. Sometimes she said that her voices told her to put on male dress, so if she failed to wear it, she would be disobeying them. Sometimes she went so far as to say that the issue of dress was of minor importance. The only thing we can say for certain about Joan’s attitude toward male clothing is that it was inconsistent. Perhaps this is because she had a strong desire to wear men’s clothing, but the idea would have been so abhorrent in her time that she knew she couldn’t speak of it, and may have been unable to acknowledge it, even to herself.
The Language of the Trial
Joan’s judges were clerics, the charges against her were doctrinal, and the terms of the trial were ecclesiastical, but her answers escape the formal boundaries of ecclesiastical, juridical language. It often seems that Joan and her judges are literally speaking different languages. But the judges’ language turns dead in their mouths, as when they describe themselves as “benevolent and pitying, wishing and determined to proceed in this matter with gentleness and grace to bring her back to the way of faith and salvation.” 12 Her words come to us sounding as lively as the day they were spoken. It is the language of youth, a girl’s language. But it is also the language of someone with an extremely good memory and a sense of self-preservation. She is talking to keep herself alive. It is innocent language in the sense of being saturated with her conviction of being free of guilt but not of canniness or even a bit of guile.
Unlike her judges, Joan sometimes uses language for play, and she doesn’t avoid exaggeration or passionate words. When refusing to speak about her voices, she says that she “will not reveal them save to Charles . . . and if they cut her head off, she would not reveal them.”13 And when asked if the people in her town sided with the Burgundians, she says she knew only one Burgundian: “whose head she would like to see chopped off, that is if it will please God.”14 When asked if St. Michael wears clothes, she said: “Do you think Our Lord has not wherewithal to clothe him?” When, after hearing the previous day’s transcript read to her, she discovered that the notary had made a mistake in recording what she had said, she told him that if he does it again she’ll “pull his ears.”15 On an important issue, whether she had given or caused to be given money to the man who had taken Franquet d’Arras, whose death was laid at her feet as a brutality, she said, “She is not the master of the mint or the treasurer of France to give him money.”16 She even taunts her persecutor. When asked for details of her vision of St. Michael, she says to Cauchon, “he’s told me some things about you, but I’m not going to tell you right now.”17
When she speaks the words of her prayers for guidance on the manner of dress, a new kind of linguistic intensity enters the record. Her devoutness is made manifest, and its purity enters the courtroom like a red lozenge of stained glass in an opaque window.Most sweet Lord, in honour of thy Holy passion, I beseech thee, as thou lovest me, to reveal unto me what I should answer to these churchmen. I well know, as to my dress, by whose command I took it, but I know not how I should leave it off. Wherefore it may please thee to inform me.18
Her response to being asked if she is in a state of grace has the bell-like clarity of a soul sure of its own destiny. She answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may He keep me there.”19
Joan’s judges were frustrated by the clarity of her responses, by the unshakability of her faith, by her refusal to place herself in their hierarchy. She never mistook her place in relation to God; He is her supreme authority. The same sureness applied to her sense of her judges: They had no jurisdiction over her. When she was asked what the voices said to her on the morning of February 27, she replied: “They said I should answer you boldly.”20
Her diction also included proverbs that indicate peasant morality and common sense: “God helps those who help themselves,” in defense of her jumping from the tower, and “People have been hung for telling the truth before now,” to defend her refusing to tell the judges what they ask.
If we think of the trial as a musical performance, Joan was constantly the only female solo, and she was confronted by a series of more or less interchangeable male singers who could share their part. They could relieve each other, and she had no relief.
No relief. She had two possible modes in which to operate: She had to answer each question as it came along, which required absolute attentiveness at all times, and she had the silence of her cell, unaccompanied and uncomforted, a silence that also required alertness, since she felt under sexual threat by her guards. If one of her judges grew tired of questioning, he would leave off, rest, and give over responsibility to one of his colleagues. She was entirely on her own. At night, the judges had the company of their fellows, good food, rest in a comfortable bed. She had a dark cell, the company of enemies; she slept in fetters. It is remarkable that she kept her composure, her good humor, her health, and her freshness of thought and diction. The source of her strength was her belief that, wherever she was, she was in company far superior to any that her judges might be enjoying. Each morning, therefore, she was ready again to meet her opponents in a battle of words.
Change of Venue: Shift of Tide
Cauchon soon understood that he was losing the battle and that Joan was enjoying the performance aspects of it. So he changed the nature of the performance from a public to a private one. On March 10, three weeks after the trial’s first session, he moved the procedure from the courtroom to her cell; after this, Joan’s language lost much of its playfulness. She lapsed into half promises and apologies; she got confused. Then, occasionally, she rallied, and the moments when we see again her old assertiveness are more poignant against the background of the equivocal others. In her cell, the girl whose métier was the spectacle, the battle in open air with pennants and standards flying, was reduced to a space of a few feet and the regard of only enemies whose focus was growing narrower and more hostile. In this new situation, the judges sharpened their questions and introduced topics that were difficult for her to answer with an easy heart: her leap from the tower at Beaurevoir, the capture and execution of Franquet d’Arras, and her fighting on a feast of Our Lady.
Two of the lesser charges of which she thought she might be guilty have a comic aspect. One is the matter of the bishop of Senlis’s horse, which she took and returned without paying for it, saying that it was a bad nag and not worth the money. She admitted to having done this but then said she really didn’t remember and didn’t think it was a mortal sin, because she claimed, untruthfully, to have paid, and if he didn’t get it, it wasn’t her fault. The second moment with a comic touch occurs when she’s accused of having told someone who asked her which of the warring popes she should support that, in effect, “she’d get back to him later.” She said that she shouldn’t have done it, but she did it when she was in a hurry, when her soldiers needed her, on her way out of town.
The issue of fighting on a feast day was more serious. When asked why she attacked Paris on a feast day and questioned as to whether it was something her voices would have urged her to do, she said, “It is good to keep the feasts of Our Lady from beginning to end.” She didn’t say anything about her not having kept them. Her slipperiness on this point indicates that she knew she did wrong; she herself refused to attack on the feast of the Ascension, but that was when the military tide was in her favor.21
The matter of Franquet d’Arras was more serious still. When she was asked “whether taking a man prisoner and holding him to ransom and then putting him to death is not a mortal sin,”22 she said she’d never done such a thing, then said that he deserved to be put to death and that the ransom was no longer valid because the prisoner she was going to exchange him for was dead. She spoke about it as a peasant would a horse trade; then she became testy when asked if she gave money to the man who had taken Franquet d’Arras prisoner.
The matters of her attempted suicide, her executing a prisoner she had promised to give up for ransom, and her going to battle on a feast day could, even by a sympathetic judge, be considered mortal sins. In waiting until she was worn down by questioning, in presenting her with these troublesome accusations not in the public courtroom but alone in her cell, in bringing up offenses that, unlike the ones of sorcery and heresy, Joan would have cause to worry about (they were, interestingly enough, faults concerned with bodies rather than ideas), the judges knew that they were playing on Joan’s vulnerabilities. They were weakening her when she was already weak.
She had no hesitancy about the other crimes against living bodies of which she was accused. She asserted that she had never killed a man and that she loved her banner twenty times more than her sword.
The King’s Crown
Joan’s most glaring inconsistencies have to do with the nature of the sign that she gave to the king and the way in which this sign was made known to him. For a long time, she refused to give details about the sign, saying that this was one of the things her judges had no right to know: It was between Charles and her. Her first answers about the nature of the sign were vague enough so that she could not be hurt by them. She said that the sign would exist for a thousand years, that it was in the king’s treasury but that she would tell him nothing more.
But in the latter interrogations that took place in her cell, she seemed, almost out of exhaustion, to adopt not only the language but her accusers’ imagery. They mentioned an angel; she agreed there was an angel. They brought up a crown; she described it. It is the one lie she admitted to, and on the day before her death, she said in her prison, “It was I who brought the message of the crown to my King. I was the angel and there was no other, and the crown was no more than the promise of the king’s coronation which I made to him.”23
Vita Sackville-West and other scholars say that Joan’s lie was not really a lie, only a confusion of metaphor for reality. Her effect on Charles was otherworldly; its goodness and power seemed angelic. Why, therefore, should she not name herself the angel? But it seems to me this confusion is a symptom of her exhaustion and one of the first signs of an intermittent series of breakages that would finally lead to her denial of everything she stood for.
In the middle of April, Joan fell ill, probably of food poisoning. The promoter d’Estivet, Joan’s most intransigent enemy, went to her cell to visit her, accompanied by several physicians. One asked what was wrong with her, and Joan blamed a carp that had been sent to her by Cauchon. D’Estivet attacked her. He called her a camp follower and said that she had brought her sickness upon herself by eating herrings. When the physicians told the earl of Warwick, who was representing the British interests at the trial, that she should be bled, he advised them to be careful; she was cunning, and he didn’t want the bleeding to be an excuse for another suicide attempt. He wanted her death public, and he wanted credit for it.
While she was still weak but recovering, Cauchon visited her in her cell and exhorted her. Her answers to his accusation were among her most despairing, but within two days she rallied again, and when shown the instruments of torture, she said that they could pull her limb from limb and she wouldn’t change her story.
