Part 5 (1/2)
[Footnote 112: Rabelais, _Gargantua_, chap. vi; Abbe Thiers, _Traite des superst.i.tions selon l'ecriture sainte_, Paris, 1697, vol. i, p.
109.]
[Footnote 113: Edmond Richer, _Histoire de la Pucelle d'Orleans en 4 livres_, MS. Biblioth. Nat. f. Fr. 10448, fol. 12mo.]
[Footnote 114: ”The Life of Saint Catherine, virgin and martyr, is fabulous throughout from beginning to end,” _Valesiana_, p. 48. ”M. de Launoy, doctor of theology, had cut Saint Catherine, virgin and martyr, out of his calendar. He said that her life was a myth, and to show that he placed no faith in it, every year when the feast of the saint came round, he said a Requiem ma.s.s. This curious circ.u.mstance I learn from his own telling,” _Ibid._, p. 36.]
Take Chapelain, for example, whose poem was first published in 1656.
Chapelain is unconsciously burlesque; he is a Scarron without knowing it. It is none the less interesting to learn from him that he merely treated his subject as an occasion for glorifying the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Orleans. He expressly says in his preface: ”I did not so much regard her (the Maid) as the chief character of the poem, who, strictly speaking, is the Comte de Dunois.” Chapelain was in the pay of the Duc de Longueville, a descendant of Dunois.[115] It is of Dunois that he sings; ”the ill.u.s.trious shepherdess” contributes the marvellous element to his poem, and, according to the good man's own expression, furnishes _les machines necessaires_ for an epic. Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret are too commonplace to be included among _ces machines_. Chapelain tells us that he took particular care so to arrange his poem that ”everything which happens in it by divine favour might be believed to have taken place through human agency carried to the highest degree to which nature is capable of ascending.” Herein we discern the dawn of the modern spirit.
[Footnote 115: Jean Chapelain, _La Pucelle ou la France delivree_, Paris, 1656, in fol.]
Bossuet also is careful not to mention Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. The four or five quarto pages which he devotes to Jeanne d'Arc in his ”Abrege de l'Histoire de France pour l'instruction du Dauphin”[116] are very interesting, not for his statement of facts, which is confused and inexact,[117] but for the care the author takes to represent the miraculous deeds attributed to Jeanne in an incidental and dubious manner. In Bossuet's opinion, as in Gerson's, these things are matters of edification, not of faith. Writing for the instruction of a prince, Bossuet was bound to abridge; but his abridgment goes too far when, representing Jeanne's condemnation to be the work of the Bishop of Beauvais, he omits to say that the Bishop of Beauvais p.r.o.nounced this sentence with the unanimous concurrence of the University of Paris, and in conjunction with the Vice-Inquisitor.[118]
[Footnote 116: _Oeuvres de messire Jacques-Benigne Bossuet_, Paris, in 4to, vol. xi, 1749, numbered pages; vol. xii, pp. 234 _et seq._ Cf.
what he says of inspired persons in _l'Instruction sur les etats d'oraison_, Paris, 1697, in 8vo.]
[Footnote 117: ”This girl called Jeanne d'Arq ... had been a servant in an inn,” _loc. cit._, p. 233.]
[Footnote 118: We must not be too severe on a tutor's note-books. But Bossuet, who places the rehabilitation under the date 1431, does not tell us that it was only p.r.o.nounced twenty-five years later. On the contrary, as far as he is concerned, we might conclude that it occurred before the deliverance of Compiegne. The following are his words: ”In execution of this sentence, she was burned alive at Rouen in 1431. The English spread the rumour that at the last she had admitted the revelations which she had so loudly boasted to be false.
But some time afterwards the Pope appointed commissioners. Her trial was solemnly revised and her conduct approved of by a final sentence which the Pope himself confirmed. The Burgundians were forced to raise the siege of Compiegne,” _loc. cit._ p. 236. Mezeray is more credulous than Bossuet; he mentions ”the Saints Catherine and Margaret, who purified her soul with heavenly conversations, wherefore she venerated them with a particular devotion.” In relating the trial, he like Bossuet, ignores the Vice-Inquisitor (_Histoire de France_, vol. ii, 1746, in folio, pp. 11 _et seq._)]
The eighteenth-century philosophers did not descend on France like a cloud of locusts; they were the result of two centuries of the critical spirit. If the story of Jeanne d'Arc contained too much monkish superst.i.tion for their taste, it was because they had learned their ecclesiastical history from the Baillets and the Tillemonts, who were pious indeed, but very critical of legends. Voltaire, writing of Jeanne, jeered at the rascally monks and their dupes. But if we quote the lines of _La Pucelle_, why not also the article[119] in the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, which contains three pages of profounder truth and n.o.bler thought than certain voluminous modern works in which Voltaire is insulted in clerical jargon?
[Footnote 119: Voltaire ed. Beuchot, vol. xxvi. _Cf._ also _Essai sur les moeurs_, chap. lx.x.x. ”Finally, being accused of having once resumed man's dress, which had been left near her on purpose to tempt her, her judges ... declared her a relapsed heretic and caused to be burnt at the stake one who in heroic ages, when men erected altars to their liberators, would have had an altar raised to her for having served her King. Afterwards Charles VII rehabilitated her memory, which her death itself had sufficiently honoured.”]
It was precisely at the end of the eighteenth century that Jeanne began to be better known and more justly appreciated, first through a little book, which the Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy derived almost wholly from the unpublished history of old Richer,[120] then by l'Averdy's erudite researches into the two trials.[121]
[Footnote 120: L'Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy, _Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc, vierge, herone et martyre d'etat suscitee par la Providence pour retablir la monarchie francaise, tiree des proces et pieces originales du temps_, Paris, 1753-1754, 3 vols. in 12mo.]
[Footnote 121: F. de L'Averdy, _Memorial lu au comite des ma.n.u.scrits concernant la recherche a faire des minutes originales des differentes affaires qui ont eu lieu par rapport a Jeanne d'Arc, appelee communement la Pucelle d'Orleans_, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1787, in 4to; _Notices et extraits des ma.n.u.scrits de la Bibliotheque du roi, lus au comite etabli par sa Majeste dans l'Academie royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres_, Paris, Imp. Royale, 1790, vol. iii.]
Nevertheless humanism, and after humanism the Reformation, and after the Reformation Cartesianism, and after Cartesianism experimental philosophy had banished the old credulity from thoughtful minds. When the Revolution came, the bloom had already long faded from the flower of Gothic legend. It seemed as if the glory of Jeanne d'Arc, so intimately related to the traditions of the royal house of France, could not survive the monarchy, and as if the tempest which scattered the royal ashes of Saint Denys and the treasure of Reims, would also bear away the frail relics and the venerated images of the saint of the Valois. The new _regime_ did indeed refuse to honour a memory so inseparable from royalty and from religion. The festival of Jeanne d'Arc at Orleans, shorn of ecclesiastical pomp in 1791, was discontinued in 1793. Later the Maid's history appeared somewhat too Gothic even to the _emigres_; Chateaubriand did not dare to introduce her into his ”Genie du Christianisme.”[122]
[Footnote 122: ”Modern times present but two fine subjects for an epic poem, the Crusades and the Discovery of the New World” (ed. 1802, Paris, vol. ii, p. 7).]
But in the year XI the First Consul, who had just concluded the Concordat and was meditating the restoration of all the pageantry of the coronation, reinst.i.tuted the festival of the Maid with its incense and its crosses. Glorified of old in Charles VII's letters to his good towns, Jeanne was now exalted in _Le Moniteur_ by Bonaparte.[123]
[Footnote 123: ”The ill.u.s.trious Jeanne d'Arc has proved that there is no miracle which the French genius is incapable of working when national independence is at stake” (_Moniteur_ of 10 Pluviose, year XI, January 30, 1803). For the approval of the First Consul: facsimile in A. Sarrazin, _Jeanne d'Arc et la Normandie_, p. 600. [Original taken from the Reiset collection.]]
Only by constant transformation do the figures of poetry and history live in the minds of nations. Humanity cannot be interested in a personage of old time unless it clothe it in its own sentiments and in its own pa.s.sions. After having been a.s.sociated with the monarchy of divine right, the memory of Jeanne d'Arc came to be connected with the national unity which that monarchy had rendered possible; in Imperial and Republican France she became the symbol of _la patrie_.
Certainly the daughter of Isabelle Romee had no more idea of _la patrie_ as it is conceived to-day than she had of the idea of landed property which lies at its base. She never imagined anything like what we call the nation. That is something quite modern; but she did conceive of the heritage of kings and of the domain of the House of France. And it was there, in that domain and in that heritage, that the French gathered together before forming themselves into _la patrie_.
Under influences which it is impossible for us exactly to discover, the idea came to her of re-establis.h.i.+ng the Dauphin in his inheritance; and this idea appeared to her so grand and so beautiful that in the fulness of her very ingenuous pride, she believed it to have been suggested to her by angels and saints from Paradise. For this idea she gave her life. That is why she has survived the cause for which she suffered. The very highest enterprises perish in their defeat and even more surely in their victory. The devotion, which inspired them, remains as an immortal example. And if the illusion, under which her senses laboured, helped her to this act of self-consecration, was not that illusion the unconscious outcome of her own heart? Her foolishness was wiser than wisdom, for it was that foolishness of martyrdom, without which men have never yet founded anything great or useful. Cities, empires, republics rest on sacrifice. It is not without reason therefore, not without justice that, transformed by enthusiastic imagination, she became the symbol of _la patrie_ in arms.
In 1817, Le Brun de Charmettes,[124] a royalist jealous of imperial glory, wrote the first patriotic history of Jeanne d'Arc. The history is an able work. It has been followed by many others, conceived in the same spirit, composed on the same plan, written in the same style.
From 1841 to 1849, Jules Quicherat, by his publication of the two trials and the evidence, worthily opened an incomparable period of research and discovery. At the same time, Michelet in the fifth volume of his ”Histoire de France,” wrote pages of high colour and rapid movement, which will doubtless remain the highest expression of the romantic art as applied to the Maid.[125]
[Footnote 124: Le Brun de Charmettes, _Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc surnommee la Pucelle d'Orleans_, Paris, 1817, 4 vols. in 8vo.]
[Footnote 125: Michelet, _Histoire de France_, vol. v.]