Part 32 (1/2)
Then the word fell to Brother Guillaume Aimery: ”According to what you have said, the Voice told you that G.o.d will deliver the people of France from their distress; but if G.o.d will deliver them he has no need of men-at-arms.”
”In G.o.d's name,” replied the Maid, ”the men-at-arms will fight, and G.o.d will give the victory.”
Maitre Guillaume declared himself satisfied.[748]
[Footnote 748: _Ibid._, pp. 203, 204.]
On the 22nd of March, Maitre Pierre de Versailles and Maitre Jean erault went together to Jean Rabateau's lodging. The squire, Gobert Thibault, whom Jeanne had already seen at Chinon, came with them. He was a young man and very simple, one who believed without asking for a sign. As they came in Jeanne went to meet them, and, striking the squire on the shoulder, in a friendly manner, she said: ”I wish I had many men as willing as you.”[749]
[Footnote 749: _Ibid._, p. 74.]
With men-at-arms she felt at her ease. But the doctors she could not tolerate, and she suffered torture when they came to argue with her.
Although these theologians showed her great consideration, their eternal questions wearied her; their slowness and heaviness exasperated her. She bore them a grudge for not believing in her straightway, without proof, and for asking her for a sign, which she could not give them, since neither Saint Michael nor Saint Catherine nor Saint Margaret appeared during the examination. In retirement, in the oratory, and in the lonely fields the heavenly visitants came to her in crowds; angels and saints, descending from heaven, flocked around her. But when the doctors came, immediately the Jacob's ladder was drawn up. Besides, the clerks were theologians, and she was a saint. Relations are always strained between the heads of the Church Militant and those devout women who communicate directly with the Church Triumphant. She realised that the revelations granted to her so abundantly inspired her most favourable judges with doubts, suspicion, and even mistrust. She dared not confide to them much of the mystery of her Voices, and when the Churchmen were not present she told Alencon, her fair Duke, that she knew more and could do more than she had ever told all those clerks.[750] It was not to them she had been sent; it was not for them that she had come. She felt awkward in their presence, and their manners were the occasion of that irritation which is discernible in more than one of her replies.[751] Sometimes when they questioned her she retreated to the end of her bench and sulked.
[Footnote 750: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 92.]
[Footnote 751: _Chronique de la Pucelle_, p. 275.]
”We come to you from the King,” said Maitre Pierre de Versailles.
She replied with a bad grace: ”I am quite aware that you are come to question me again. I don't know A from B.”[752] But to the question: ”Wherefore do you come?” she made answer eagerly: ”I come from the King of Heaven to raise the siege of Orleans, and take the King to be crowned and anointed at Reims. Maitre Jean erault, have you ink and paper? Write what I shall tell you.” And she dictated a brief manifesto to the English captains: ”You, Suffort, Clasdas, and La Poule, in the name of the King of Heaven I call upon you to return to England.”[753]
[Footnote 752: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 74 (evidence of Gobert Thibault).]
[Footnote 753: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 74. Boucher de Molandon and A. de Beaucorps, _L'armee anglaise_, p. 111. La Poule, as he is called here, is identical with Suffort, and is none other than William Pole, Earl of Suffolk, unless John Pole, William's brother, be intended, but he was not one of the three organisers of the siege. As for Clasdas or Glasdale, as the French called him, he served under the orders of the Commander of Les Tourelles. These errors may have been Jeanne's, or possibly they were made by the witness. They do not recur in the letter to the English.]
Maitre Jean erault, who wrote at her dictation, was, like most of the clerks, favourably disposed towards her. Further, he had his own ideas. He recollected that Marie of Avignon, surnamed La Gasque, had uttered true and memorable prophecies to King Charles VI. Now La Gasque had told the King that the realm was to suffer many sorrows; and she had seen weapons in the sky. Her story of her vision had concluded with these words: ”While I was afeard, believing myself called upon to take these weapons, a voice comforted me, saying: 'They are not for thee, but for a Virgin, who shall come and with these weapons deliver the realm of France.'” Maitre Jean erault meditated on these marvellous revelations and came to believe that Jeanne was the Virgin announced by Marie of Avignon.[754]
[Footnote 754: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 83.]
Maitre Gerard Machet, the King's Confessor, had found it written that a Maid should come to the help of the King of France. He remarked on it to Gobert Thibault, the Squire, who was no very great personage;[755] and he certainly spoke of it to several others.
Gerard Machet, Doctor of Theology, sometime Vice Chancellor of the University, from which he was now excluded, was regarded as one of the lights of the Church. He loved the court,[756] although he would not admit it, and enjoyed the favour of the King, who had just rewarded his services by giving him money with which to purchase a mule.[757]
All doubts concerning the disposition of these doctors are removed by the discovery that the King's Confessor himself put into circulation those prophecies which had been distorted in favour of the Maid from the Bois-Chenu.
[Footnote 755: _Ibid._, p. 75.]
[Footnote 756: _Lettres de Gerard Machet_, Bibl. nat. Latin doc.u.ments, no. 8577. Launoy, _Regii Navarrae Gymnasii Parisiensis historia_, Paris, 1682 (2 vols. in 4to), vol. ii, pp. 533, 557. Du Boulay, _Hist.
Univ. Parisiensis_, vol. v, p. 875. Vallet de Viriville, in _Nouvelle biographie generale_.]
[Footnote 757: De Beaucourt, _Extrait du catalogue des actes de Charles VII_, p. 18.]
The damsel was interrogated concerning her Voices, which she called her Council, and her saints, whom she imagined in the semblance of those sculptured or painted figures peopling the churches.[758] The doctors objected to her having cast off woman's clothing and had her hair cut round in the manner of a page. Now it is written: ”The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy G.o.d” (Deuteronomy xxii, 5). The Council of Gangres, held in the reign of the Emperor Valens, had anathematised women who dressed as men and cut short their hair.[759] Many saintly women, impelled by a strange inspiration of the Holy Ghost, had concealed their s.e.x by masculine garb. At Saint-Jean-des-Bois, near Compiegne, was preserved the reliquary of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who lived for thirty-eight years in man's attire in the monastery of the Abbot Theodosius.[760] For these reasons, and because of these precedents, the doctors argued: since Jeanne had put on this clothing not to offend another's modesty but to preserve her own, we will put no evil interpretation on an act performed with good intent, and we will forbear to condemn a deed justified by purity of motive.
[Footnote 758: _Trial_, vol. i, pp. 71, 72, 73, 171.]
[Footnote 759: Labbe, _Sacro-Sancta Consilia_ (1671), vol. ii, pp.
413, 434.]
[Footnote 760: Surius, _Vitae S.S._ (1618), vol. i, pp. 21-24. Gabriel Brosse, _Histoire abregee de la vie et de la translation de Sainte Euphrosine, Vierge d'Alexandrie, patronne de l'abbaye de Beaulieu-les-Compiegne_, Paris, 1649, in 8vo.]
Certain of her questioners inquired why she called Charles Dauphin instead of giving him his t.i.tle of King. This t.i.tle had been his by right since the 30th of October, 1422; for on that day, the ninth since the death of the King his father, at Mehun-sur-Yevre, in the chapel royal, he had put off his black gown and a.s.sumed the purple robe, while the heralds, raising aloft the banner of France, cried: ”Long live the King!”