Part 98 (1/2)
Interrogated as to the occupations of her childhood, she replied that she was busy with household duties and seldom went into the fields with the cattle.
”For spinning and sewing,” she said, ”I am as good as any woman in Rouen.”[2229]
[Footnote 2229: _Ibid._]
Thus even in things domestic she displayed her ardour and her chivalrous zeal; at the spinning-wheel and with the needle she challenged all the women in a town, without knowing one of them.
Questioned as to her confessions and her communions, she answered that she confessed to her parish priest or to another priest when the former was not able to hear her. But she refused to say whether she had received the communion on other feast-days than Easter.[2230]
[Footnote 2230: _Ibid._, pp. 51, 52.]
In order to take her unawares, Maitre Jean Beaupere proceeded without method, pa.s.sing abruptly from one subject to another. Suddenly he spoke of her Voices. She gave him the following reply:
”Being thirteen years of age, I heard the Voice of G.o.d, bidding me lead a good life. And the first time I was sore afeard. And the Voice came almost at the hour of noon, in summer, in my father's garden....”
She heard the Voice on the right towards the church. Rarely did she hear it without seeing a light. This light was in the direction whence the Voice came.[2231]
[Footnote 2231: _Trial_, vol. i, p. 52.]
When Jeanne said that her Voice spoke to her from the right, a doctor more learned and more kindly disposed than Maitre Jean would have interpreted this circ.u.mstance favourably; for do we not read in Ezekiel that the angels were upon the right hand of the dwelling; do we not find in the last chapter of Saint Mark, that the women beheld the Angel seated on the right, and finally does not Saint Luke expressly state that the Angel appeared unto Zacharias on the right of the altar burning with incense; whereupon the Venerable Bede observes: ”he appeared on the right as a sign that he was the bringer of divine mercy.”[2232] But such things never occurred to the examiner. Thinking to embarra.s.s Jeanne, he asked how she came to see the light if it appeared at her side.[2233] Jeanne made no reply, and as if distraught, she said:
”If I were in a wood I should easily hear the Voices coming towards me.... It seems to me to be a Voice right worthy. I believe that this Voice was sent to me by G.o.d. After having heard it three times I knew it to be the voice of an angel.”
[Footnote 2232: Brehal, _Memoires et consultations en faveur de Jeanne d'Arc_, ed. Lanery d'Arc, p. 409.]
[Footnote 2233: See Appendix I, Letter from Doctor G. Dumas.]
”What instruction did this Voice give you for the salvation of your soul?”
”It taught me to live well, to go to church, and it told me to fare forth into France.”[2234]
[Footnote 2234: _Trial_, vol. i, p. 52.]
Then Jeanne related how, by the command of her Voice, she had gone to Vaucouleurs, to Sire Robert de Baudricourt, whom she had recognised without ever having seen him before, how the Duke of Lorraine had summoned her to cure him, and how she had come into France.[2235]
[Footnote 2235: _Ibid._, pp. 53, 54.]
Thereafter she was brought to say that she knew well that G.o.d loved the Duke of Orleans and that concerning him she had had more revelations than concerning any man living, save the King; that she had been obliged to change her woman's dress for man's attire and that her _Council_ had advised her well.[2236]
[Footnote 2236: _Ibid._, p. 54.]
The letter to the English was read before her. She admitted having dictated it in those terms, with the exception of three pa.s.sages. She had not said _body for body_ nor _chieftain of war_; and she had said _surrender to the King_ in the place _of surrender to the Maid_. That the judges had not tampered with the text of the letter we may a.s.sure ourselves by comparing it with other texts, which did not pa.s.s through their hands, and which contain the expressions challenged by Jeanne.[2237]
[Footnote 2237: _Ibid._, pp. 55, 56; vol. v, p. 95.]
In the beginning of her career, she believed that Our Lord, the true King of France, had ordained her to deliver the government of the realm to Charles of Valois, as His deputy. The words in which she gave utterance to this idea are reported by too many persons strangers one to another for us to doubt her having spoken them. ”The King shall hold the kingdom as a fief (_en commande_); the King of France is the lieutenant of the King of Heaven.” These are her own words and she did actually say to the Dauphin: ”Make a gift of your realm to the King of Heaven.”[2238] But we are bound to admit that at Rouen not one of these mystic ideas persists, indeed there they seem altogether beyond her.
In all her replies to her examiners, she seems incapable of any abstract reasoning whatsoever and of any speculation however simple, so that it is hard to understand how she should ever have conceived the idea of the temporal rule of Jesus Christ over the Land of the Lilies. There is nothing in her speech or in her thoughts to suggest such meditations, wherefore we are led to believe that this politico-theology had been taught her in her tender, teachable years by ecclesiastics desiring to remove the woes of Church and kingdom, but that she had failed to seize its spirit or grasp its inner meaning. Now, in the midst of a hard life lived with men-at-arms, whose simple souls accorded better with her own than the more cultivated minds of the early directors of her meditations, she had forgotten even the phraseology in which those suggested meditations were expressed. Interrogated concerning her coming to Chinon, she replied:
”Without let or hindrance I went to my King. When I reached the town of Sainte-Catherine de Fierbois, I sent first to the town of Chateau-Chinon, where my King was. I arrived there about the hour of noon and lodged in an inn, and, after dinner, I went to my King who was in his castle.”
[Footnote 2238: _Trial_, vol. ii, p. 456; vol. iii, pp. 91, 92.