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Title: Saint Joan
A chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue
Author: Bernard Shaw
Release date: June 16, 2025 [eBook #76323]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Brentano's, 1924
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAINT JOAN ***
SAINT JOAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saint Joan: a Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. By Bernard
Shaw.
[Illustration: a tragedy mask]
BRENTANO’S - New York
MCMXXVI
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
---
All rights reserved
First Printing, June, 1924
Second Printing, October, 1924
Third Printing, November, 1924
Fourth Printing, February, 1925
Fifth Printing, April, 1926
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE TO SAINT JOAN
Joan the Original and Presumptuous.
Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt
for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a
fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908;
and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in
the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric
worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic,
and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one
of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles
of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism
in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry
of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and,
like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of
the Chevalier D’Eon and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised
themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to
accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men
did.
As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force
that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out of her
teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising that
she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital crimes
which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what we call
unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen Joan’s pretensions
were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the haughtiest emperor. She
claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in
effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on
earth. She patronized her own king, and summoned the English king to
repentance and obedience to her commands. She lectured, talked down, and
overruled statesmen and prelates. She poohpoohed the plans of generals,
leading their troops to victory on plans of her own. She had an
unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion, judgment,
and authority, and for War Office tactics and strategy. Had she been a
sage and monarch in whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most
illustrious dynasty converged, her pretensions and proceedings would
have been as trying to the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar
were to Cassius. As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were
only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous: the other
that she was unbearable.
Joan and Socrates.
If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly or stupid, she would have
been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of
the most attractive. If she had been old enough to know the effect she
was producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right when they
were wrong, and had learned to flatter and manage them, she might have
lived as long as Queen Elizabeth. But she was too young and rustical and
inexperienced to have any such arts. When she was thwarted by men whom
she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her
impatience with their folly; and she was naïve enough to expect them to
be obliged to her for setting them right and keeping them out of
mischief. Now it is always hard for superior wits to understand the fury
roused by their exposures of the stupidities of comparative dullards.
Even Socrates, for all his age and experience, did not defend himself at
his trial like a man who understood the long accumulated fury that had
burst on him, and was clamoring for his death. His accuser, if born 2300
years later, might have been picked out of any first class carriage on a
suburban railway during the evening or morning rush from or to the City;
for he had really nothing to say except that he and his like could not
endure being shewn up as idiots every time Socrates opened his mouth.
Socrates, unconscious of this, was paralyzed by his sense that somehow
he was missing the point of the attack. He petered out after he had
established the fact that he was an old soldier and a man of honorable
life, and that his accuser was a silly snob. He had no suspicion of the
extent to which his mental superiority had roused fear and hatred
against him in the hearts of men towards whom he was conscious of
nothing but good will and good service.
Contrast with Napoleon.
If Socrates was as innocent as this at the age of seventy, it may be
imagined how innocent Joan was at the age of seventeen. Now Socrates was
a man of argument, operating slowly and peacefully on men’s minds,
whereas Joan was a woman of action, operating with impetuous violence on
their bodies. That, no doubt, is why the contemporaries of Socrates
endured him so long, and why Joan was destroyed before she was fully
grown. But both of them combined terrifying ability with a frankness,
personal modesty, and benevolence which made the furious dislike to
which they fell victims absolutely unreasonable, and therefore
inapprehensible by themselves. Napoleon, also possessed of terrifying
ability, but neither frank nor disinterested, had no illusions as to the
nature of his popularity. When he was asked how the world would take his
death, he said it would give a gasp of relief. But it is not so easy for
mental giants who neither hate nor intend to injure their fellows to
realize that nevertheless their fellows hate mental giants and would
like to destroy them, not only enviously because the juxtaposition of a
superior wounds their vanity, but quite humbly and honestly because it
frightens them. Fear will drive men to any extreme; and the fear
inspired by a superior being is a mystery which cannot be reasoned away.
Being immeasurable it is unbearable when there is no presumption or
guarantee of its benevolence and moral responsibility: in other words,
when it has no official status. The legal and conventional superiority
of Herod and Pilate, and of Annas and Caiphas, inspires fear; but the
fear, being a reasonable fear of measurable and avoidable consequences
which seem salutary and protective, is bearable; whilst the strange
superiority of Christ and the fear it inspires elicit a shriek of
Crucify Him from all who cannot divine its benevolence. Socrates has to
drink the hemlock, Christ to hang on the cross, and Joan to burn at the
stake, whilst Napoleon, though he ends in St Helena, at least dies in
his bed there; and many terrifying but quite comprehensible official
scoundrels die natural deaths in all the glory of the kingdoms of this
world, proving that it is far more dangerous to be a saint than to be a
conqueror. Those who have been both, like Mahomet and Joan, have found
that it is the conqueror who must save the saint, and that defeat and
capture mean martyrdom. Joan was burnt without a hand lifted on her own
side to save her. The comrades she had led to victory and the enemies
she had disgraced and defeated, the French king she had crowned and the
English king whose crown she had kicked into the Loire, were equally
glad to be rid of her.
Was Joan Innocent or Guilty?
As this result could have been produced by a crapulous inferiority as
well as by a sublime superiority, the question which of the two was
operative in Joan’s case has to be faced. It was decided against her by
her contemporaries after a very careful and conscientious trial; and the
reversal of the verdict twentyfive years later, in form a
rehabilitation of Joan, was really only a confirmation of the validity
of the coronation of Charles VII. It is the more impressive reversal by
a unanimous Posterity, culminating in her canonization, that has quashed
the original proceedings, and put her judges on their trial, which, so
far, has been much more unfair than their trial of her. Nevertheless the
rehabilitation of 1456, corrupt job as it was, really did produce
evidence enough to satisfy all reasonable critics that Joan was not a
common termagant, not a harlot, not a witch, not a blasphemer, no more
an idolater than the Pope himself, and not ill conducted in any sense
apart from her soldiering, her wearing of men’s clothes, and her
audacity, but on the contrary good-humored, an intact virgin, very
pious, very temperate (we should call her meal of bread soaked in the
common wine which is the drinking water of France ascetic), very kindly,
and, though a brave and hardy soldier, unable to endure loose language
or licentious conduct. She went to the stake without a stain on her
character except the overweening presumption, the superbity as they
called it, that led her thither. It would therefore be waste of time now
to prove that the Joan of the first part of the Elizabethan chronicle
play of Henry VI (supposed to have been tinkered by Shakespear) grossly
libels her in its concluding scenes in deference to Jingo patriotism.
The mud that was thrown at her has dropped off by this time so
completely that there is no need for any modern writer to wash up after
it. What is far more difficult to get rid of is the mud that is being
thrown at her judges, and the whitewash which disfigures her beyond
recognition. When Jingo scurrility had done its worst to her, sectarian
scurrility (in this case Protestant scurrility) used her stake to beat
the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition. The easiest way to make
these institutions the villains of a melodrama was to make The Maid its
heroine. That melodrama may be dismissed as rubbish. Joan got a far
fairer trial from the Church and the Inquisition than any prisoner of
her type and in her situation gets nowadays in any official secular
court; and the decision was strictly according to law. And she was not a
melodramatic heroine: that is, a physically beautiful lovelorn parasite
on an equally beautiful hero, but a genius and a saint, about as
completely the opposite of a melodramatic heroine as it is possible for
a human being to be.
Let us be clear about the meaning of the terms. A genius is a person
who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a
different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough
to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever
manner best suits his or her specific talents. A saint is one who having
practised heroic virtues, and enjoyed revelations or powers of the order
which The Church classes technically as supernatural, is eligible for
canonization. If a historian is an Anti-Feminist, and does not believe
women to be capable of genius in the traditional masculine departments,
he will never make anything of Joan, whose genius was turned to
practical account mainly in soldiering and politics. If he is
Rationalist enough to deny that saints exist, and to hold that new ideas
cannot come otherwise than by conscious ratiocination, he will never
catch Joan’s likeness. Her ideal biographer must be free from nineteenth
century prejudices and biases; must understand the Middle Ages, the
Roman Catholic Church, and the Holy Roman Empire much more intimately
than our Whig historians have ever understood them; and must be capable
of throwing off sex partialities and their romance, and regarding woman
as the female of the human species, and not as a different kind of
animal with specific charms and specific imbecilities.
Joan’s Good Looks.
To put the last point roughly, any book about Joan which begins by
describing her as a beauty may be at once classed as a romance. Not one
of Joan’s comrades, in village, court, or camp, even when they were
straining themselves to please the king by praising her, ever claimed
that she was pretty. All the men who alluded to the matter declared most
emphatically that she was unattractive sexually to a degree that seemed
to them miraculous, considering that she was in the bloom of youth, and
neither ugly, awkward, deformed, nor unpleasant in her person. The
evident truth is that like most women of her hardy managing type she
seemed neutral in the conflict of sex because men were too much afraid
of her to fall in love with her. She herself was not sexless: in spite
of the virginity she had vowed up to a point, and preserved to her
death, she never excluded the possibility of marriage for herself. But
marriage, with its preliminary of the attraction, pursuit, and capture
of a husband, was not her business: she had something else to do.
Byron’s formula, “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart: ’tis
woman’s whole existence” did not apply to her any more than to George
Washington or any other masculine worker on the heroic scale. Had she
lived in our time, picture postcards might have been sold of her as a
general: they would not have been sold of her as a sultana. Nevertheless
there is one reason for crediting her with a very remarkable face. A
sculptor of her time in Orleans made a statue of a helmeted young woman
with a face that is unique in art in point of being evidently not an
ideal face but a portrait, and yet so uncommon as to be unlike any real
woman one has ever seen. It is surmised that Joan served unconsciously
as the sculptor’s model. There is no proof of this; but those
extraordinarily spaced eyes raise so powerfully the question “If this
woman be not Joan, who is she?” that I dispense with further evidence,
and challenge those who disagree with me to prove a negative. It is a
wonderful face, but quite neutral from the point of view of the operatic
beauty fancier.
Such a fancier may perhaps be finally chilled by the prosaic fact that
Joan was the defendant in a suit for breach of promise of marriage, and
that she conducted her own case and won it.
Joan’s Social Position.
By class Joan was the daughter of a working farmer who was one of the
headmen of his village, and transacted its feudal business for it with
the neighboring squires and their lawyers. When the castle in which the
villagers were entitled to take refuge from raids became derelict, he
organized a combination of half a dozen farmers to obtain possession of
it so as to occupy it when there was any danger of invasion. As a child,
Joan could please herself at times with being the young lady of this
castle. Her mother and brothers were able to follow and share her
fortune at court without making themselves notably ridiculous. These
facts leave us no excuse for the popular romance that turns every
heroine into either a princess or a beggarmaid. In the somewhat similar
case of Shakespear a whole inverted pyramid of wasted research has been
based on the assumption that he was an illiterate laborer, in the face
of the plainest evidence that his father was a man of business, and at
one time a very prosperous one, married to a woman of some social
pretensions. There is the same tendency to drive Joan into the position
of a hired shepherd girl, though a hired shepherd girl in Domrémy would
have deferred to her as the young lady of the farm.
The difference between Joan’s case and Shakespear’s is that Shakespear
was not illiterate. He had been to school, and knew as much Latin and
Greek as most university passmen retain: that is, for practical
purposes, none at all. Joan was absolutely illiterate. “I do not know A
from B” she said. But many princesses at that time and for long after
might have said the same. Marie Antoinette, for instance, at Joan’s age
could not spell her own name correctly. But this does not mean that Joan
was an ignorant person, or that she suffered from the diffidence and
sense of social disadvantage now felt by people who cannot read or
write. If she could not write letters, she could and did dictate them
and attach full and indeed excessive importance to them. When she was
called a shepherd lass to her face she very warmly resented it, and
challenged any woman to compete with her in the household arts of the
mistresses of well furnished houses. She understood the political and
military situation in France much better than most of our newspaper fed
university women-graduates understand the corresponding situation of
their own country today. Her first convert was the neighboring
commandant at Vaucouleurs; and she converted him by telling him about
the defeat of the Dauphin’s troops at the Battle of Herrings so long
before he had official news of it that he concluded she must have had a
divine revelation. This knowledge of and interest in public affairs was
nothing extraordinary among farmers in a warswept countryside.
Politicians came to the door too often sword in hand to be disregarded:
Joan’s people could not afford to be ignorant of what was going on in
the feudal world. They were not rich; and Joan worked on the farm as her
father did, driving the sheep to pasture and so forth; but there is no
evidence or suggestion of sordid poverty, and no reason to believe that
Joan had to work as a hired servant works, or indeed to work at all when
she preferred to go to confession, or dawdle about waiting for visions
and listening to the church bells to hear voices in them. In short, much
more of a young lady, and even of an intellectual, than most of the
daughters of our petty bourgeoisie.
Joan’s Voices and Visions.
Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation.
They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and
imposter, that she was a sorceress (she was burnt for this), and finally
that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the
variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact
historians know about other people’s minds, or even about their own.
There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when
they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes
uttered by a visible figure. Criminal lunatic asylums are occupied
largely by murderers who have obeyed voices. Thus a woman may hear
voices telling her that she must cut her husband’s throat and strangle
her child as they lie asleep; and she may feel obliged to do what she is
told. By a medico-legal superstition it is held in our courts that
criminals whose temptations present themselves under these illusions are
not responsible for their actions, and must be treated as insane. But
the seers of visions and the hearers of revelations are not always
criminals. The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned
conclusions of genius sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates,
Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint
Francis and Saint Joan did. If Newton’s imagination had been of the same
vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk
into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such an
illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor
Newton’s general sanity. What is more, the visionary method of making
the discovery would not be a whit more miraculous than the normal
method. The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the
reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by
Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would
have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which
fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed
physical facts of the universe, established Newton’s reputation for
extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how
fantastically he had arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not
so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which
establishes him as the king of mental conjurors, but a Bedlamite king
whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn
of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan,
because his imagination was not dramatic but mathematical and therefore
extraordinarily susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were
lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter.
As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?
In the same way Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices
because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her
from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton. We can all
see now, especially since the late war threw so many of our women into
military life, that Joan’s campaigning could not have been carried on in
petticoats. This was not only because she did a man’s work, but because
it was morally necessary that sex should be left out of the question as
between her and her comrades-in-arms. She gave this reason herself when
she was pressed on the subject; and the fact that this entirely
reasonable necessity came to her imagination first as an order from God
delivered through the mouth of Saint Catherine does not prove that she
was mad. The soundness of the order proves that she was unusually sane;
but its form proves that her dramatic imagination played tricks with her
senses. Her policy was also quite sound: nobody disputes that the relief
of Orleans, followed up by the coronation at Rheims of the Dauphin as a
counterblow to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and
consequently of his title, were military and political masterstrokes
that saved France. They might have been planned by Napoleon or any other
illusionproof genius. They came to Joan as an instruction from her
Counsel, as she called her visionary saints; but she was none the less
an able leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way.
The Evolutionary Appetite.
What then is the modern view of Joan’s voices and visions and messages
from God? The nineteenth century said that they were delusions, but that
as she was a pretty girl, and had been abominably ill-treated and
finally done to death by a superstitious rabble of medieval priests
hounded on by a corrupt political bishop, it must be assumed that she
was the innocent dupe of these delusions. The twentieth century finds
this explanation too vapidly commonplace, and demands something more
mystic. I think the twentieth century is right, because an explanation
which amounts to Joan being mentally defective instead of, as she
obviously was, mentally excessive, will not wash. I cannot believe, nor,
if I could, could I expect all my readers to believe, as Joan did, that
three ocularly visible well dressed persons, named respectively Saint
Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael, came down from heaven and
gave her certain instructions with which they were charged by God for
her. Not that such a belief would be more improbable or fantastic than
some modern beliefs which we all swallow; but there are fashions and
family habits in belief, and it happens that, my fashion being Victorian
and my family habit Protestant, I find myself unable to attach any such
objective validity to the form of Joan’s visions.
But that there are forces at work which use individuals for purposes far
transcending the purpose of keeping these individuals alive and
prosperous and respectable and safe and happy in the middle station in
life, which is all any good bourgeois can reasonably require, is
established by the fact that men will, in the pursuit of knowledge and
of social readjustments for which they will not be a penny the better,
and are indeed often many pence the worse, face poverty, infamy, exile,
imprisonment, dreadful hardship, and death. Even the selfish pursuit of
personal power does not nerve men to the efforts and sacrifices which
are eagerly made in pursuit of extensions of our power over nature,
though these extensions may not touch the personal life of the seeker at
any point. There is no more mystery about this appetite for knowledge
and power than about the appetite for food: both are known as facts and
as facts only, the difference between them being that the appetite for
food is necessary to the life of the hungry man and is therefore a
personal appetite, whereas the other is an appetite for evolution, and
therefore a superpersonal need.
The diverse manners in which our imaginations dramatize the approach of
the superpersonal forces is a problem for the psychologist, not for the
historian. Only, the historian must understand that visionaries are
neither impostors nor lunatics. It is one thing to say that the figure
Joan recognized as St Catherine was not really St Catherine, but the
dramatization by Joan’s imagination of that pressure upon her of the
driving force that is behind evolution which I have just called the
evolutionary appetite. It is quite another to class her visions with the
vision of two moons seen by a drunken person, or with Brocken spectres,
echoes and the like. Saint Catherine’s instructions were far too cogent
for that; and the simplest French peasant who believes in apparitions of
celestial personages to favored mortals is nearer to the scientific
truth about Joan than the Rationalist and Materialist historians and
essayists who feel obliged to set down a girl who saw saints and heard
them talking to her as either crazy or mendacious. If Joan was mad, all
Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the
existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad in that sense as
the people who think they see them. Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at
the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk: he had a
more vivid imagination, and had perhaps eaten and slept less: that was
all.
The mere Iconography does not matter.
All the popular religions in the world are made apprehensible by an
array of legendary personages, with an Almighty Father, and sometimes a
mother and divine child, as the central figures. These are presented to
the mind’s eye in childhood; and the result is a hallucination which
persists strongly throughout life when it has been well impressed. Thus
all the thinking of the hallucinated adult about the fountain of
inspiration which is continually flowing in the universe, or about the
promptings of virtue and the revulsions of shame: in short, about
aspiration and conscience, both of which forces are matters of fact more
obvious than electro-magnetism, is thinking in terms of the celestial
vision. And when in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons,
especially those practising certain appropriate austerities, the
hallucination extends from the mind’s eye to the body’s, the visionary
sees Krishna or the Buddha or the Blessed Virgin or St Catherine as the
case may be.
The Modern Education which Joan escaped.
It is important to everyone nowadays to understand this, because modern
science is making short work of the hallucinations without regard to the
vital importance of the things they symbolize. If Joan were reborn today
she would be sent, first to a convent school in which she would be
mildly taught to connect inspiration and conscience with St Catherine
and St Michael exactly as she was in the fifteenth century, and then
finished up with a very energetic training in the gospel of Saints Louis
Pasteur and Paul Bert, who would tell her (possibly in visions but more
probably in pamphlets) not to be a superstitious little fool, and to
empty out St Catherine and the rest of the Catholic hagiology as an
obsolete iconography of exploded myths. It would be rubbed into her that
Galileo was a martyr, and his persecutors incorrigible ignoramuses, and
that St Teresa’s hormones had gone astray and left her incurably
hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal or hysteroid or epileptoid or anything
but asteroid. She would have been convinced by precept and experiment
that baptism and receiving the body of her Lord were contemptible
superstitions, and that vaccination and vivisection were enlightened
practices. Behind her new Saints Louis and Paul there would be not only
Science purifying Religion and being purified by it, but hypochondria,
melancholia, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, muckraking curiosity,
knowledge without wisdom, and everything that the eternal soul in Nature
loathes, instead of the virtues of which St Catherine was the figure
head. As to the new rites, which would be the saner Joan? the one who
carried little children to be baptized of water and the spirit, or the
one who sent the police to force their parents to have the most
villainous racial poison we know thrust into their veins? the one who
told them the story of the angel and Mary, or the one who questioned
them as to their experiences of the Edipus complex? the one to whom the
consecrated wafer was the very body of the virtue that was her
salvation, or the one who looked forward to a precise and convenient
regulation of her health and her desires by a nicely calculated diet of
thyroid extract, adrenalin, thymin, pituitrin, and insulin, with
pick-me-ups of hormone stimulants, the blood being first carefully
fortified with antibodies against all possible infections by
inoculations of infected bacteria and serum from infected animals, and
against old age by surgical extirpation of the reproductive ducts or
weekly doses of monkey gland?
It is true that behind all these quackeries there is a certain body of
genuine scientific physiology. But was there any the less a certain body
of genuine psychology behind St Catherine and the Holy Ghost? And which
is the healthier mind? the saintly mind or the monkey gland mind? Does
not the present cry of Back to the Middle Ages, which has been
incubating ever since the pre-Raphaelite movement began, mean that it is
no longer our Academy pictures that are intolerable, but our credulities
that have not the excuse of being superstitions, our cruelties that have
not the excuse of barbarism, our persecutions that have not the excuse
of religious faith, our shameless substitution of successful swindlers
and scoundrels and quacks for saints as objects of worship, and our
deafness and blindness to the calls and visions of the inexorable power
that made us, and will destroy us if we disregard it? To Joan and her
contemporaries we should appear as a drove of Gadarene swine, possessed
by all the unclean spirits cast out by the faith and civilization of the
Middle Ages, running violently down a steep place into a hell of high
explosives. For us to set up our condition as a standard of sanity, and
declare Joan mad because she never condescended to it, is to prove that
we are not only lost but irredeemable. Let us then once for all drop all
nonsense about Joan being cracked, and accept her as at least as sane as
Florence Nightingale, who also combined a very simple iconography of
religious belief with a mind so exceptionally powerful that it kept her
in continual trouble with the medical and military panjandrums of her
time.
Failures of the Voices.
That the voices and visions were illusory, and their wisdom all Joan’s
own, is shewn by the occasions on which they failed her, notably during
her trial, when they assured her that she would be rescued. Here her
hopes flattered her; but they were not unreasonable: her military
colleague La Hire was in command of a considerable force not so very far
off; and if the Armagnacs, as her party was called, had really wanted to
rescue her, and had put anything like her own vigor into the enterprise,
they could have attempted it with very fair chances of success. She did
not understand that they were glad to be rid of her, nor that the rescue
of a prisoner from the hands of the Church was a much more serious
business for a medieval captain, or even a medieval king, than its mere
physical difficulty as a military exploit suggested. According to her
lights her expectation of a rescue was reasonable; therefore she heard
Madame Saint Catherine assuring her it would happen, that being her way
of finding out and making up her own mind. When it became evident that
she had miscalculated: when she was led to the stake, and La Hire was
not thundering at the gates of Rouen nor charging Warwick’s men at arms,
she threw over Saint Catherine at once, and recanted. Nothing could be
more sane or practical. It was not until she discovered that she had
gained nothing by her recantation but close imprisonment for life that
she withdrew it, and deliberately and explicitly chose burning instead:
a decision which shewed not only the extraordinary decision of her
character, but also a Rationalism carried to its ultimate human tests of
suicide. Yet even in this the illusion persisted; and she announced her
relapse as dictated to her by her voices.
Joan a Galtonic Visualizer.
The most sceptical scientific reader may therefore accept as a flat
fact, carrying no implication of unsoundness of mind, that Joan was what
Francis Galton and other modern investigators of human faculty call a
visualizer. She saw imaginary saints just as some other people see
imaginary diagrams and landscapes with numbers dotted about them, and
are thereby able to perform feats of memory and arithmetic impossible to
non-visualizers. Visualizers will understand this at once.
Non-visualizers who have never read Galton will be puzzled and
incredulous. But a very little inquiry among their acquaintances will
reveal to them that the mind’s eye is more or less a magic lantern, and
that the street is full of normally sane people who have hallucinations
of all sorts which they believe to be part of the normal permanent
equipment of all human beings.
Joan’s Manliness and Militarism.
Joan’s other abnormality, too common among uncommon things to be
properly called a peculiarity, was her craze for soldiering and the
masculine life. Her father tried to frighten her out of it by
threatening to drown her if she ran away with the soldiers, and ordering
her brothers to drown her if he were not on the spot. This extravagance
was clearly not serious: it must have been addressed to a child young
enough to imagine that he was in earnest. Joan must therefore as a child
have wanted to run away and be a soldier. The awful prospect of being
thrown into the Meuse and drowned by a terrible father and her big
brothers kept her quiet until the father had lost his terrors and the
brothers yielded to her natural leadership; and by that time she had
sense enough to know that the masculine and military life was not a mere
matter of running away from home. But the taste for it never left her,
and was fundamental in determining her career.
If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself why a maid charged with a
special mission from heaven to the Dauphin (this was how Joan saw her
very able plan for retrieving the desperate situation of the uncrowned
king) should not have simply gone to the court as a maid, in woman’s
dress, and urged her counsel upon him in a woman’s way, as other women
with similar missions had come to his mad father and his wise
grandfather. Why did she insist on having a soldier’s dress and arms and
sword and horse and equipment, and on treating her escort of soldiers as
comrades, sleeping side by side with them on the floor at night as if
there were no difference of sex between them? It may be answered that
this was the safest way of travelling through a country infested with
hostile troops and bands of marauding deserters from both sides. Such an
answer has no weight, because it applies to all the women who travelled
in France at that time, and who never dreamt of travelling otherwise
than as women. But even if we accept it, how does it account for the
fact that when the danger was over, and she could present herself at
court in feminine attire with perfect safety and obviously with greater
propriety, she presented herself in her man’s dress, and instead of
urging Charles, like Queen Victoria urging the War Office to send
Roberts to the Tranvaal, to send D’Alençon, De Rais, La Hire and the
rest to the relief of Dunois at Orleans, insisted that she must go
herself and lead the assault in person? Why did she give exhibitions of
her dexterity in handling a lance, and of her seat as a rider? Why did
she accept presents of armor and chargers and masculine surcoats, and in
every action repudiate the conventional character of a woman? The simple
answer to all these questions is that she was the sort of woman that
wants to lead a man’s life. They are to be found wherever there are
armies on foot or navies on the seas, serving in male disguise, eluding
detection for astonishingly long periods, and sometimes, no doubt,
escaping it entirely. When they are in a position to defy public opinion
they throw off all concealment. You have your Rosa Bonheur painting in
male blouse and trousers, and George Sand living a man’s life and almost
compelling her Chopins and De Mussets to live women’s lives to amuse
her. Had Joan not been one of those “unwomanly women,” she might have
been canonized much sooner.
But it is not necessary to wear trousers and smoke big cigars to live a
man’s life any more than it is necessary to wear petticoats to live a
woman’s. There are plenty of gowned and bodiced women in ordinary civil
life who manage their own affairs and other people’s, including those of
their menfolk, and are entirely masculine in their tastes and pursuits.
There always were such women, even in the Victorian days when women had
fewer legal rights than men, and our modern women magistrates, mayors,
and members of Parliament were unknown. In reactionary Russia in our own
century a woman soldier organized an effective regiment of amazons,
which disappeared only because it was Aldershottian enough to be against
the Revolution. The exemption of women from military service is founded,
not on any natural inaptitude that men do not share, but on the fact
that communities cannot reproduce themselves without plenty of women.
Men are more largely dispensable, and are sacrificed accordingly.
Was Joan Suicidal.
These two abnormalities were the only ones that were irresistibly
prepotent in Joan; and they brought her to the stake. Neither of them
was peculiar to her. There was nothing peculiar about her except the
vigor and scope of her mind and character, and the intensity of her
vital energy. She was accused of a suicidal tendency; and it is a fact
that when she attempted to escape from Beaurevoir Castle by jumping from
a tower said to be sixty feet high, she took a risk beyond reason,
though she recovered from the crash after a few days fasting. Her death
was deliberately chosen as an alternative to life without liberty. In
battle she challenged death as Wellington did at Waterloo, and as Nelson
habitually did when he walked his quarter deck during his battles with
all his decorations in full blaze. As neither Nelson nor Wellington nor
any of those who have performed desperate feats, and preferred death to
captivity, have been accused of suicidal mania, Joan need not be
suspected of it. In the Beaurevoir affair there was more at stake than
her freedom. She was distracted by the news that Compiègne was about to
fall; and she was convinced that she could save it if only she could get
free. Still, the leap was so perilous that her conscience was not quite
easy about it; and she expressed this, as usual, by saying that Saint
Catherine had forbidden her to do it, but forgave her afterwards for her
disobedience.
Joan Summed Up.
We may accept and admire Joan, then, as a sane and shrewd country girl
of extraordinary strength of mind and hardihood of body. Everything she
did was thoroughly calculated; and though the process was so rapid that
she was hardly conscious of it, and ascribed it all to her voices, she
was a woman of policy and not of blind impulse. In war she was as much a
realist as Napoleon: she had his eye for artillery and his knowledge of
what it could do. She did not expect besieged cities to fall Jerichowise
at the sound of her trumpet, but, like Wellington, adapted her methods
of attack to the peculiarities of the defence; and she anticipated the
Napoleonic calculation that if you only hold on long enough the other
fellow will give in: for example, her final triumph at Orleans was
achieved after her commander Dunois had sounded the retreat at the end
of a day’s fighting without a decision. She was never for a moment what
so many romancers and playwrights have pretended: a romantic young lady.
She was a thorough daughter of the soil in her peasantlike
matter-of-factness and doggedness, and her acceptance of great lords and
kings and prelates as such without idolatry or snobbery, seeing at a
glance how much they were individually good for. She had the respectable
countrywoman’s sense of the value of public decency, and would not
tolerate foul language and neglect of religious observances, nor allow
disreputable women to hang about her soldiers. She had one pious
ejaculation “_En nom Dé!_” and one meaningless oath “_Par mon martin_”;
and this much swearing she allowed to the incorrigibly blasphemous La
Hire equally with herself. The value of this prudery was so great in
restoring the self-respect of the badly demoralized army that, like most
of her policy, it justified itself as soundly calculated. She talked to
and dealt with people of all classes, from laborers to kings, without
embarrassment or affectation, and got them to do what she wanted when
they were not afraid or corrupt. She could coax and she could hustle,
her tongue having a soft side and a sharp edge. She was very capable: a
born boss.
Joan’s Immaturity and Ignorance.
All this, however, must be taken with one heavy qualification. She was
only a girl in her teens. If we could think of her as a managing woman
of fifty we should seize her type at once; for we have plenty of
managing women among us of that age who illustrate perfectly the sort of
person she would have become had she lived. But she, being only a lass
when all is said, lacked their knowledge of men’s vanities and of the
weight and proportion of social forces. She knew nothing of iron hands
in velvet gloves: she just used her fists. She thought political changes
much easier than they are, and, like Mahomet in his innocence of any
world but the tribal world, wrote letters to kings calling on them to
make millennial rearrangements. Consequently it was only in the
enterprises that were really simple and compassable by swift physical
force, like the coronation and the Orleans campaign, that she was
successful.
Her want of academic education disabled her when she had to deal with
such elaborately artificial structures as the great ecclesiastical and
social institutions of the Middle Ages. She had a horror of heretics
without suspecting that she was herself a heresiarch, one of the
precursors of a schism that rent Europe in two, and cost centuries of
bloodshed that is not yet staunched. She objected to foreigners on the
sensible ground that they were not in their proper place in France; but
she had no notion of how this brought her into conflict with Catholicism
and Feudalism, both essentially international. She worked by
commonsense; and where scholarship was the only clue to institutions she
was in the dark and broke her shins against them, all the more rudely
because of her enormous self-confidence, which made her the least
cautious of human beings in civil affairs.
This combination of inept youth and academic ignorance with great
natural capacity, push, courage, devotion, originality and oddity, fully
accounts for all the facts in Joan’s career, and makes her a credible
historical and human phenomenon; but it clashes most discordantly both
with the idolatrous romance that has grown up round her, and the
belittling scepticism that reacts against that romance.
The Maid in Literature.
English readers would probably like to know how these idolizations
and reactions have affected the books they are most familiar with
about Joan. There is the first part of the Shakesperean, or
pseudo-Shakesperean trilogy of Henry VI, in which Joan is one of the
leading characters. This portrait of Joan is not more authentic than
the descriptions in the London papers of George Washington in 1780,
of Napoleon in 1803, of the German Crown Prince in 1917, or of Lenin
in 1917. It ends in mere scurrility. The impression left by it is
that the playwright, having begun by an attempt to make Joan a
beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company
that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation
of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once
introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and
a harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play
could not be produced. As likely as not, this is what actually
happened: indeed there is only one other apparent way of accounting
for the sympathetic representation of Joan as a heroine culminating
in her eloquent appeal to the Duke of Burgundy, followed by the
blackguardly scurrility of the concluding scenes. That other way is
to assume that the original play was wholly scurrilous, and that
Shakespear touched up the earlier scenes. As the work belongs to a
period at which he was only beginning his practice as a tinker of
old works, before his own style was fully formed and hardened, it is
impossible to verify this guess. His finger is not unmistakably
evident in the play, which is poor and base in its moral tone; but
he may have tried to redeem it from downright infamy by shedding a
momentary glamor on the figure of The Maid.
When we jump over two centuries to Schiller, we find Die Jungfrau von
Orleans drowned in a witch’s caldron of raging romance. Schiller’s Joan
has not a single point of contact with the real Joan, nor indeed with
any mortal woman that ever walked this earth. There is really nothing to
be said of his play but that it is not about Joan at all, and can hardly
be said to pretend to be; for he makes her die on the battlefield,
finding her burning unbearable. Before Schiller came Voltaire, who
burlesqued Homer in a mock epic called La Pucelle. It is the fashion to
dismiss this with virtuous indignation as an obscene libel; and I
certainly cannot defend it against the charge of extravagant indecorum.
But its purpose was not to depict Joan, but to kill with ridicule
everything that Voltaire righteously hated in the institutions and
fashions of his own day. He made Joan ridiculous, but not contemptible
nor (comparatively) unchaste; and as he also made Homer and St Peter and
St Denis and the brave Dunois ridiculous, and the other heroines of the
poem very unchaste indeed, he may be said to have let Joan off very
easily. But indeed the personal adventures of the characters are so
outrageous, and so Homerically free from any pretence at or even
possibility of historical veracity, that those who affect to take them
seriously only make themselves Pecksniffian. Samuel Butler believed The
Iliad to be a burlesque of Greek Jingoism and Greek religion, written by
a hostage or a slave; and La Pucelle makes Butler’s theory almost
convincing. Voltaire represents Agnes Sorel, the Dauphin’s mistress,
whom Joan never met, as a woman with a consuming passion for the
chastest concubinal fidelity, whose fate it was to be continually
falling into the hands of licentious foes and suffering the worst
extremities of rapine. The combats in which Joan rides a flying donkey,
or in which, taken unaware with no clothes on, she defends Agnes with
her sword, and inflicts appropriate mutilations on her assailants, can
be laughed at as they are intended to be without scruple; for no sane
person could mistake them for sober history; and it may be that their
ribald irreverence is more wholesome than the beglamored sentimentality
of Schiller. Certainly Voltaire should not have asserted that Joan’s
father was a priest; but when he was out to _écraser l’infâme_ (the
French Church) he stuck at nothing.
So far, the literary representations of The Maid were legendary. But the
publication by Quicherat in 1841 of the reports of her trial and
rehabilitation placed the subject on a new footing. These entirely
realistic documents created a living interest in Joan which Voltaire’s
mock Homerics and Schiller’s romantic nonsense missed. Typical products
of that interest in America and England are the histories of Joan by
Mark Twain and Andrew Lang. Mark Twain was converted to downright
worship of Joan directly by Quicherat. Later on, another man of Genius,
Anatole France, reacted against the Quicheratic wave of enthusiasm, and
wrote a Life of Joan in which he attributed Joan’s ideas to clerical
prompting and her military success to an adroit use of her by Dunois as
a _mascotte_: in short, he denied that she had any serious military or
political ability. At this Andrew saw red, and went for Anatole’s scalp
in a rival Life of her which should be read as a corrective to the
other. Lang had no difficulty in shewing that Joan’s ability was not an
unnatural fiction to be explained away as an illusion manufactured by
priests and soldiers, but a straightforward fact.
It has been lightly pleaded in explanation that Anatole France is a
Parisian of the art world, into whose scheme of things the able,
hardheaded, hardhanded female, though she dominates provincial France
and business Paris, does not enter; whereas Lang was a Scot, and every
Scot knows that the grey mare is as likely as not to be the better
horse. But this explanation does not convince me. I cannot believe that
Anatole France does not know what everybody knows. I wish everybody knew
all that he knows. One feels antipathies at work in his book. He is not
anti-Joan; but he is anti-clerical, anti-mystic, and fundamentally
unable to believe that there ever was any such person as the real Joan.
Mark Twain’s Joan, skirted to the ground, and with as many petticoats as
Noah’s wife in a toy ark, is an attempt to combine Bayard with Esther
Summerson from Bleak House into an unimpeachable American school teacher
in armor. Like Esther Summerson she makes her creator ridiculous, and
yet, being the work of a man of genius, remains a credible human
goodygoody in spite of her creator’s infatuation. It is the description
rather than the valuation that is wrong. Andrew Lang and Mark Twain are
equally determined to make Joan a beautiful and most ladylike Victorian;
but both of them recognize and insist on her capacity for leadership,
though the Scots scholar is less romantic about it than the Mississippi
pilot. But then Lang was, by lifelong professional habit, a critic of
biographies rather than a biographer, whereas Mark Twain writes his
biography frankly in the form of a romance.
Protestant Misunderstandings of the Middle Ages.
They had, however, one disability in common. To understand Joan’s
history it is not enough to understand her character: you must
understand her environment as well. Joan in a nineteenth-twentieth
century environment is as incongruous a figure as she would appear were
she to walk down Piccadilly today in her fifteenth century armor. To see
her in her proper perspective you must understand Christendom and the
Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Feudal System, as they
existed and were understood in the Middle Ages. If you confuse the
Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, and are in the habit of ridiculing your
aunt for wearing “medieval clothes,” meaning those in vogue in the
eighteen-nineties, and are quite convinced that the world has progressed
enormously, both morally and mechanically, since Joan’s time, then you
will never understand why Joan was burnt, much less feel that you might
have voted for burning her yourself if you had been a member of the
court that tried her; and until you feel that you know nothing essential
about her.
That the Mississippi pilot should have broken down on this
misunderstanding is natural enough. Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad, who
saw the lovely churches of the Middle Ages without a throb of emotion,
author of A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, in which the heroes and
heroines of medieval chivalry are guys seen through the eyes of a street
arab, was clearly out of court from the beginning. Andrew Lang was
better read; but, like Walter Scott, he enjoyed medieval history as a
string of border romances rather than as the record of a high European
civilization based on a catholic faith. Both of them were baptized as
Protestants, and impressed by all their schooling and most of their
reading with the belief that Catholic bishops who burnt heretics were
persecutors capable of any villainy; that all heretics were Albigensians
or Husites or Jews or Protestants of the highest character; and that the
Inquisition was a Chamber of Horrors invented expressly and exclusively
for such burnings. Accordingly we find them representing Peter Cauchon,
Bishop of Beauvais, the judge who sent Joan to the stake, as an
unconscionable scoundrel, and all the questions put to her as “traps” to
ensnare and destroy her. And they assume unhesitatingly that the two or
three score of canons and doctors of law and divinity who sat with
Cauchon as assessors, were exact reproductions of him on slightly less
elevated chairs and with a different headdress.
Comparative Fairness of Joan’s Trial.
The truth is that Cauchon was threatened and insulted by the English for
being too considerate to Joan. A recent French writer denies that Joan
was burnt, and holds that Cauchon spirited her away and burnt somebody
or something else in her place, and that the pretender who subsequently
personated her at Orleans and elsewhere was not a pretender but the real
authentic Joan. He is able to cite Cauchon’s pro-Joan partiality in
support of his view. As to the assessors, the objection to them is not
that they were a row of uniform rascals, but that they were political
partisans of Joan’s enemies. This is a valid objection to all such
trials; but in the absence of neutral tribunals they are unavoidable. A
trial by Joan’s French partisans would have been as unfair as the trial
by her French opponents; and an equally mixed tribunal would have
produced a deadlock. Such recent trials as those of Edith Cavell by a
German tribunal and Roger Casement by an English one were open to the
same objection; but they went forward to the death nevertheless, because
neutral tribunals were not available. Edith, like Joan, was an arch
heretic: in the middle of the war she declared before the world that
“Patriotism is not enough.” She nursed enemies back to health, and
assisted their prisoners to escape, making it abundantly clear that she
would help any fugitive or distressed person without asking whose side
he was on, and acknowledging no distinction before Christ between Tommy
and Jerry and Pitou the _poilu_. Well might Edith have wished that she
could bring the Middle Ages back, and have fifty civilians learned in
the law or vowed to the service of God, to support two skilled judges in
trying her case according to the Catholic law of Christendom, and to
argue it out with her at sitting after sitting for many weeks. The
modern military Inquisition was not so squeamish. It shot her out of
hand; and her countrymen, seeing in this a good opportunity for
lecturing the enemy on his intolerance, put up a statue to her, but took
particular care not to inscribe on the pedestal “Patriotism is not
enough,” for which omission, and the lie it implies, they will need
Edith’s intercession when they are themselves brought to judgment, if
any heavenly power thinks such moral cowards capable of pleading to an
intelligible indictment.
The point need be no further labored. Joan was persecuted essentially as
she would be persecuted today. The change from burning to hanging or
shooting may strike us as a change for the better. The change from
careful trial under ordinary law to recklessly summary military
terrorism may strike us as a change for the worse. But as far as
toleration is concerned the trial and execution in Rouen in 1431 might
have been an event of today; and we may charge our consciences
accordingly. If Joan had to be dealt with by us in London she would be
treated with no more toleration than Miss Silvia Pankhurst, or the
Peculiar People, or the parents who keep their children from the
elementary school, or any of the others who cross the line we have to
draw, rightly or wrongly, between the tolerable and the intolerable.
Joan not tried as a Political Offender.
Besides, Joan’s trial was not, like Casement’s, a national political
trial. Ecclesiastical courts and the courts of the Inquisition (Joan was
tried by a combination of the two) were Courts Christian: that is,
international courts; and she was tried, not as a traitress, but as a
heretic, blasphemer, sorceress and idolater. Her alleged offences were
not political offences against England, nor against the Burgundian
faction in France, but against God and against the common morality of
Christendom. And although the idea we call Nationalism was so foreign to
the medieval conception of Christian society that it might almost have
been directly charged against Joan as an additional heresy, yet it was
not so charged; and it is unreasonable to suppose that the political
bias of a body of Frenchmen like the assessors would on this point have
run strongly in favor of the English foreigners (even if they had been
making themselves particularly agreeable in France instead of just the
contrary) against a Frenchwoman who had vanquished them.
The tragic part of the trial was that Joan, like most prisoners tried
for anything but the simplest breaches of the ten commandments, did not
understand what they were accusing her of. She was much more like Mark
Twain than like Peter Cauchon. Her attachment to the Church was very
different from the Bishop’s, and does not, in fact, bear close
examination from his point of view. She delighted in the solaces the
Church offers to sensitive souls: to her, confession and communion were
luxuries beside which the vulgar pleasures of the senses were trash. Her
prayers were wonderful conversations with her three saints. Her piety
seemed superhuman to the formally dutiful people whose religion was only
a task to them. But when the Church was not offering her her favorite
luxuries, but calling on her to accept its interpretation of God’s will,
and to sacrifice her own, she flatly refused, and made it clear that her
notion of a Catholic Church was one in which the Pope was Pope Joan. How
could the Church tolerate that, when it had just destroyed Hus, and had
watched the career of Wycliffe with a growing anger that would have
brought him, too, to the stake, had he not died a natural death before
the wrath fell on him in his grave? Neither Hus nor Wycliffe was as
bluntly defiant as Joan: both were reformers of the Church like Luther;
whilst Joan, like Mrs Eddy, was quite prepared to supersede St Peter as
the rock on which the Church was built, and, like Mahomet, was always
ready with a private revelation from God to settle every question and
fit every occasion.
The enormity of Joan’s pretension was proved by her own unconsciousness
of it, which we call her innocence, and her friends called her
simplicity. Her solutions of the problems presented to her seemed, and
indeed mostly were, the plainest commonsense, and their revelation to
her by her Voices was to her a simple matter of fact. How could plain
commonsense and simple fact seem to her to be that hideous thing,
heresy? When rival prophetesses came into the field, she was down on
them at once for liars and humbugs; but she never thought of them as
heretics. She was in a state of invincible ignorance as to the Church’s
view; and the Church could not tolerate her pretensions without either
waiving its authority or giving her a place beside the Trinity during
her lifetime and in her teens, which was unthinkable. Thus an
irresistible force met an immovable obstacle, and developed the heat
that consumed poor Joan.
Mark and Andrew would have shared her innocence and her fate had they
been dealt with by the Inquisition: that is why their accounts of the
trial are as absurd as hers might have been could she have written one.
All that can be said for their assumption that Cauchon was a vulgar
villain, and that the questions put to Joan were traps, is that it has
the support of the inquiry which rehabilitated her twentyfive years
later. But this rehabilitation was as corrupt as the contrary proceeding
applied to Cromwell by our Restoration reactionaries. Cauchon had been
dug up, and his body thrown into the common sewer. Nothing was easier
than to accuse him of cozenage, and declare the whole trial void on that
account. That was what everybody wanted, from Charles the Victorious,
whose credit was bound up with The Maid’s, to the patriotic Nationalist
populace, who idolized Joan’s memory. The English were gone; and a
verdict in their favor would have been an outrage on the throne and on
the patriotism which Joan had set on foot.
We have none of these overwhelming motives of political convenience and
popularity to bias us. For us the first trial stands valid; and the
rehabilitation would be negligible but for the mass of sincere testimony
it produced as to Joan’s engaging personal character. The question then
arises: how did The Church get over the verdict at the first trial when
it canonized Joan five hundred years later?
The Church uncompromised by its Amends.
Easily enough. In the Catholic Church, far more than in law, there is no
wrong without a remedy. It does not defer to Joanesque private judgment
as such, the supremacy of private judgment for the individual being the
quintessence of Protestantism; nevertheless it finds a place for private
judgment _in excelsis_ by admitting that the highest wisdom may come as
a divine revelation to an individual. On sufficient evidence it will
declare that individual a saint. Thus, as revelation may come by way of
an enlightenment of the private judgment no less than by words of a
celestial personage appearing in a vision, a saint may be defined as a
person of heroic virtue whose private judgment is privileged. Many
innovating saints, notably Francis and Clare, have been in conflict with
the Church during their lives, and have thus raised the question whether
they were heretics or saints. Francis might have gone to the stake had
he lived longer. It is therefore by no means impossible for a person to
be excommunicated as a heretic, and on further consideration canonized
as a saint. Excommunication by a provincial ecclesiastical court is not
one of the acts for which the Church claims infallibility. Perhaps I had
better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal
Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in
existence. Compared to our infallible democracies, our infallible
medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and
our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust
confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as
to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of
information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as
final. The Church may, and perhaps some day will, canonize Galileo
without compromising such infallibility as it claims for the Pope, if
not without compromising the infallibility claimed for the Book of
Joshua by simple souls whose rational faith in more important things has
become bound up with a quite irrational faith in the chronicle of
Joshua’s campaigns as a treatise on physics. Therefore the Church will
probably not canonize Galileo yet awhile, though it might do worse. But
it has been able to canonize Joan without any compromise at all. She
never doubted that the sun went round the earth: she had seen it do so
too often.
Still, there was a great wrong done to Joan and to the conscience of the
world by her burning. _Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner_, which is
the Devil’s sentimentality, cannot excuse it. When we have admitted that
the tribunal was not only honest and legal, but exceptionally merciful
in respect of sparing Joan the torture which was customary when she was
obdurate as to taking the oath, and that Cauchon was far more
self-disciplined and conscientious both as priest and lawyer than any
English judge ever dreams of being in a political case in which his
party and class prejudices are involved, the human fact remains that the
burning of Joan of Arc was a horror, and that a historian who would
defend it would defend anything. The final criticism of its physical
side is implied in the refusal of the Marquesas islanders to be
persuaded that the English did not eat Joan. Why, they ask, should
anyone take the trouble to roast a human being except with that object?
They cannot conceive its being a pleasure. As we have no answer for them
that is not shameful to us, let us blush for our more complicated and
pretentious savagery before we proceed to unravel the business further,
and see what other lessons it contains for us.
Cruelty, Modern and Medieval.
First, let us get rid of the notion that the mere physical cruelty of
the burning has any special significance. Joan was burnt just as dozens
of less interesting heretics were burnt in her time. Christ, in being
crucified, only shared the fate of thousands of forgotten malefactors.
They have no pre-eminence in mere physical pain: much more horrible
executions than theirs are on record, to say nothing of the agonies of
so-called natural death at its worst.
Joan was burnt more than five hundred years ago. More than three hundred
years later: that is, only about a hundred years before I was born, a
woman was burnt on Stephen’s Green in my native city of Dublin for
coining, which was held to be treason. In my preface to the recent
volume on English Prisons under Local Government, by Sidney and Beatrice
Webb, I have mentioned that when I was already a grown man I saw Richard
Wagner conduct two concerts, and that when Richard Wagner was a young
man he saw and avoided a crowd of people hastening to see a soldier
broken on the wheel by the more cruel of the two ways of carrying out
that hideous method of execution. Also that the penalty of hanging,
drawing and quartering, unmentionable in its details, was abolished so
recently that there are men living who have been sentenced to it. We are
still flogging criminals, and clamoring for more flogging. Not even the
most sensationally frightful of these atrocities inflicted on its victim
the misery, degradation, and conscious waste and loss of life suffered
in our modern prisons, especially the model ones, without, as far as I
can see, rousing any more compunction than the burning of heretics did
in the Middle Ages. We have not even the excuse of getting some fun out
of our prisons as the Middle Ages did out of their stakes and wheels and
gibbets. Joan herself judged this matter when she had to choose between
imprisonment and the stake, and chose the stake. And thereby she
deprived The Church of the plea that it was guiltless of her death,
which was the work of the secular arm. The Church should have confined
itself to excommunicating her. There it was within its rights: she had
refused to accept its authority or comply with its conditions; and it
could say with truth “You are not one of us: go forth and find the
religion that suits you, or found one for yourself.” It had no right to
say “You may return to us now that you have recanted; but you shall stay
in a dungeon all the rest of your life.” Unfortunately, The Church did
not believe that there was any genuine soul saving religion outside
itself; and it was deeply corrupted, as all the churches were and still
are, by primitive Calibanism (in Browning’s sense), or the propitiation
of a dreaded deity by suffering and sacrifice. Its method was not
cruelty for cruelty’s sake, but cruelty for the salvation of Joan’s
soul. Joan, however, believed that the saving of her soul was her own
business, and not that of _les gens d’église_. By using that term as she
did, mistrustfully and contemptuously, she announced herself as, in
germ, an anti-Clerical as thoroughgoing as Voltaire or Anatole France.
Had she said in so many words “To the dustbin with the Church Militant
and its blackcoated officials: I recognize only the Church Triumphant in
heaven,” she would hardly have put her view more plainly.
Catholic Anti-Clericalism.
I must not leave it to be inferred here that one cannot be an
anti-Clerical and a good Catholic too. All the reforming Popes have been
vehement anti-Clericals, veritable scourges of the clergy. All the great
Orders arose from dissatisfaction with the priests: that of the
Franciscans with priestly snobbery, that of the Dominicans with priestly
laziness and Laodiceanism, that of the Jesuits with priestly apathy and
ignorance and indiscipline. The most bigoted Ulster Orangeman or
Leicester Low Church bourgeois (as described by Mr Henry Nevinson) is a
mere Gallio compared to Machiavelli, who, though no Protestant, was a
fierce anti-Clerical. Any Catholic may, and many Catholics do, denounce
any priest or body of priests, as lazy, drunken, idle, dissolute, and
unworthy of their great Church and their function as the pastors of
their flocks of human souls. But to say that the souls of the people are
no business of the Churchmen is to go a step further, a step across the
Rubicon. Joan virtually took that step.
Catholicism not yet Catholic Enough.
And so, if we admit, as we must, that the burning of Joan was a mistake,
we must broaden Catholicism sufficiently to include her in its charter.
Our Churches must admit that no official organization of mortal men
whose vocation does not carry with it extraordinary mental powers (and
this is all that any Church Militant can in the face of fact and history
pretend to be), can keep pace with the private judgment of persons of
genius except when, by a very rare accident, the genius happens to be
Pope, and not even then unless he is an exceedingly overbearing Pope.
The Churches must learn humility as well as teach it. The Apostolic
Succession cannot be secured or confined by the laying on of hands: the
tongues of fire have descended on heathens and outcasts too often for
that, leaving anointed Churchmen to scandalize History as worldly
rascals. When the Church Militant behaves as if it were already the
Church Triumphant, it makes these appalling blunders about Joan and
Bruno and Galileo and the rest which make it so difficult for a
Freethinker to join it; and a Church which has no place for
Freethinkers: nay, which does not inculcate and encourage freethinking
with a complete belief that thought, when really free, must by its own
law take the path that leads to The Church’s bosom, not only has no
future in modern culture, but obviously has no faith in the valid
science of its own tenets, and is guilty of the heresy that theology and
science are two different and opposite impulses, rivals for human
allegiance.
I have before me the letter of a Catholic priest. “In your play,” he
writes, “I see the dramatic presentation of the conflict of the Regal,
sacerdotal, and Prophetical powers, in which Joan was crushed. To me it
is not the victory of any one of them over the others that will bring
peace and the Reign of the Saints in the Kingdom of God, but their
fruitful interaction in a costly but noble state of tension.” The Pope
himself could not put it better; nor can I. We must accept the tension,
and maintain it nobly without letting ourselves be tempted to relieve it
by burning the thread. This is Joan’s lesson to The Church; and its
formulation by the hand of a priest emboldens me to claim that her
canonization was a magnificently Catholic gesture as the canonization of
a Protestant saint by the Church of Rome. But its special value and
virtue cannot be apparent until it is known and understood as such. If
any simple priest for whom this is too hard a saying tells me that it
was not so intended, I shall remind him that the Church is in the hands
of God, and not, as simple priests imagine, God in the hands of the
Church; so if he answers too confidently for God’s intentions he may be
asked “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou
walked in the recesses of the deep?” And Joan’s own answer is also the
answer of old: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him; _but I will
maintain my own ways before Him_.”
The Law of Change is the Law of God.
When Joan maintained her own ways she claimed, like Job, that there was
not only God and the Church to be considered, but the Word made Flesh:
that is, the unaveraged individual, representing life possibly at its
highest actual human evolution and possibly at its lowest, but never at
its merely mathematical average. Now there is no deification of the
democratic average in the theory of the Church: it is an avowed
hierarchy in which the members are sifted until at the end of the
process an individual stands supreme as the Vicar of Christ. But when
the process is examined it appears that its successive steps of
selection and election are of the superior by the inferior (the cardinal
vice of democracy), with the result that great popes are as rare and
accidental as great kings, and that it has sometimes been safer for an
aspirant to the Chair and the Keys to pass as a moribund dotard than as
an energetic saint. At best very few popes have been canonized, or could
be without letting down the standard of sanctity set by the self-elected
saints.
No other result could have been reasonably expected; for it is not
possible that an official organization of the spiritual needs of
millions of men and women, mostly poor and ignorant, should compete
successfully in the selection of its principals with the direct choice
of the Holy Ghost as it flashes with unerring aim upon the individual.
Nor can any College of Cardinals pray effectively that its choice may be
inspired. The conscious prayer of the inferior may be that his choice
may light on a greater than himself; but the sub-conscious intention of
his self-preserving individuality must be to find a trustworthy servant
for his own purposes. The saints and prophets, though they may be
accidentally in this or that official position or rank, are always
really self-selected, like Joan. And since neither Church nor State, by
the secular necessities of its constitution, can guarantee even the
recognition of such self-chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to
make it a point of honor to privilege heresy to the last bearable degree
on the simple ground that all evolution in thought and conduct must at
first appear as heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is
founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the
recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen’s law of
change. And as the law of God, in any sense of the word which can now
command a faith proof against science is a law of evolution, it follows
that the law of God is a law of change, and that when the Churches set
themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against
the law of God.
Credulity, Modern and Medieval.
When Abernethy, the famous doctor, was asked why he indulged himself
with all the habits he warned his patients against as unhealthy, he
replied that his business was that of a direction post, which points out
the way to a place, but does not go thither itself. He might have added
that neither does it compel the traveller to go thither, nor prevent him
from seeking some other way. Unfortunately our clerical direction posts
always do coerce the traveller when they have the political power to do
so. When the Church was a temporal as well as a spiritual power, and for
long after to the full extent to which it could control or influence the
temporal power, it enforced conformity by persecutions that were all the
more ruthless because their intention was so excellent. Today, when the
doctor has succeeded to the priest, and can do practically what he likes
with parliament and the press through the blind faith in him which has
succeeded to the far more critical faith in the parson, legal compulsion
to take the doctor’s prescription, however poisonous, is carried to an
extent that would have horrified the Inquisition and staggered
Archbishop Laud. Our credulity is grosser than that of the Middle Ages,
because the priest had no such direct pecuniary interest in our sins as
the doctor has in our diseases: he did not starve when all was well with
his flock, nor prosper when they were perishing, as our private
commercial doctors must. Also the medieval cleric believed that
something extremely unpleasant would happen to him after death if he was
unscrupulous, a belief now practically extinct among persons receiving a
dogmatically materialist education. Our professional corporations are
Trade Unions without souls to be damned! and they will soon drive us to
remind them that they have bodies to be kicked. The Vatican was never
soulless: at worst it was a political conspiracy to make the Church
supreme temporally as well as spiritually. Therefore the question raised
by Joan’s burning is a burning question still, though the penalties
involved are not so sensational. That is why I am probing it. If it were
only an historical curiosity I would not waste my reader’s time and my
own on it for five minutes.
Toleration, Modern and Medieval.
The more closely we grapple with it the more difficult it becomes. At
first sight we are disposed to repeat that Joan should have been
excommunicated and then left to go her own way, though she would have
protested vehemently against so cruel a deprivation of her spiritual
food; for confession, absolution, and the body of her Lord were first
necessities of life to her. Such a spirit as Joan’s might have got over
that difficulty as the Church of England got over the Bulls of Pope Leo,
by making a Church of her own, and affirming it to be the temple of the
true and original faith from which her persecutors had strayed. But as
such a proceeding was, in the eyes of both Church and State at that
time, a spreading of damnation and anarchy, its toleration involved a
greater strain on faith in freedom than political and ecclesiastical
human nature could bear. It is easy to say that the Church should have
waited for the alleged evil results instead of assuming that they would
occur, and what they would be. That sounds simple enough; but if a
modern Public Health Authority were to leave people entirely to their
own devices in the matter of sanitation, saying, “We have nothing to do
with drainage or your views about drainage; but if you catch smallpox or
typhus we will prosecute you and have you punished very severely like
the authorities in Butler’s Erewhon,” it would either be removed to the
County Asylum or reminded that A’s neglect of sanitation may kill the
child of B two miles off, or start an epidemic in which the most
conscientious sanitarians may perish.
We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. There are
glaring cases of the abuse of intolerance; but they are quite as
characteristic of our own age as of the Middle Ages. The typical modern
example and contrast is compulsory inoculation replacing what was
virtually compulsory baptism. But compulsion to inoculate is objected to
as a crudely unscientific and mischievous anti-sanitary quackery, not in
the least because we think it wrong to compel people to protect their
children from disease. Its opponents would make it a crime, and will
probably succeed in doing so; and that will be just as intolerant as
making it compulsory. Neither the Pasteurians nor their opponents the
Sanitarians would leave parents free to bring up their children naked,
though that course also has some plausible advocates. We may prate of
toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere
between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of
mistaking sages for lunatics and saviors for blasphemers. We must
persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger
of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and
second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock
conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of
originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be
apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which
will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive
violence.
Variability of Toleration.
The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain
under which society is maintaining its cohesion. In war, for instance,
we suppress the gospels and put Quakers in prison, muzzle the
newspapers, and make it a serious offence to shew a light at night.
Under the strain of invasion the French Government in 1792 struck off
4000 heads, mostly on grounds that would not in time of settled peace
have provoked any Government to chloroform a dog; and in 1920 the
British Government slaughtered and burnt in Ireland to persecute the
advocates of a constitutional change which it had presently to effect
itself. Later on the Fascisti in Italy did everything that the Black and
Tans did in Ireland, with some grotesquely ferocious variations, under
the strain of an unskilled attempt at industrial revolution by
Socialists who understood Socialism even less than Capitalists
understand Capitalism. In the United States an incredibly savage
persecution of Russians took place during the scare spread by the
Russian Bolshevik revolution after 1917. These instances could easily be
multiplied; but they are enough to shew that between a maximum of
indulgent toleration and a ruthlessly intolerant Terrorism there is a
scale through which toleration is continually rising or falling, and
that there was not the smallest ground for the self-complacent
conviction of the nineteenth century that it was more tolerant than the
fifteenth, or that such an event as the execution of Joan could not
possibly occur in what we call our own more enlightened times. Thousands
of women, each of them a thousand times less dangerous and terrifying to
our Governments than Joan was to the Government of her day, have within
the last ten years been slaughtered, starved to death, burnt out of
house and home, and what not that Persecution and Terror could do to
them, in the course of Crusades far more tyrannically pretentious than
the medieval Crusades which proposed nothing more hyperbolical than the
rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens. The Inquisition, with
its English equivalent the Star Chamber, are gone in the sense that
their names are now disused; but can any of the modern substitutes for
the Inquisition, the Special Tribunals and Commissions, the punitive
expeditions, the suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, the proclamations
of martial law and of minor states of siege, and the rest of them, claim
that their victims have as fair a trial, as well considered a body of
law to govern their cases, or as conscientious a judge to insist on
strict legality of procedure as Joan had from the Inquisition and from
the spirit of the Middle Ages even when her country was under the
heaviest strain of civil and foreign war? From us she would have had no
trial and no law except a Defence of The Realm Act suspending all law;
and for judge she would have had, at best, a bothered major, and at
worst a promoted advocate in ermine and scarlet to whom the scruples of
a trained ecclesiastic like Cauchon would seem ridiculous and
ungentlemanly.
The Conflict between Genius and Discipline.
Having thus brought the matter home to ourselves, we may now consider
the special feature of Joan’s mental constitution which made her so
unmanageable. What is to be done on the one hand with rulers who will
not give any reason for their orders, and on the other with people who
cannot understand the reasons when they are given? The government of the
world, political, industrial, and domestic, has to be carried on mostly
by the giving and obeying of orders under just these conditions. “Dont
argue: do as you are told” has to be said not only to children and
soldiers, but practically to everybody. Fortunately most people do not
want to argue: they are only too glad to be saved the trouble of
thinking for themselves. And the ablest and most independent thinkers
are content to understand their own special department. In other
departments they will unhesitatingly ask for and accept the instructions
of a policeman or the advice of a tailor without demanding or desiring
explanations.
Nevertheless, there must be some ground for attaching authority to an
order. A child will obey its parents, a soldier his officer, a
philosopher a railway porter, and a workman a foreman, all without
question, because it is generally accepted that those who give the
orders understand what they are about, and are duly authorized and even
obliged to give them, and because, in the practical emergencies of daily
life, there is no time for lessons and explanations, or for arguments as
to their validity. Such obediences are as necessary to the continuous
operation of our social system as the revolutions of the earth are to
the succession of night and day. But they are not so spontaneous as they
seem: they have to be very carefully arranged and maintained. A bishop
will defer to and obey a king; but let a curate venture to give him an
order, however necessary and sensible, and the bishop will forget his
cloth and damn the curate’s impudence. The more obedient a man is to
accredited authority the more jealous he is of allowing any unauthorized
person to order him about.
With all this in mind, consider the career of Joan. She was a village
girl, in authority over sheep and pigs, dogs and chickens, and to some
extent over her father’s hired laborers when he hired any, but over no
one else on earth. Outside the farm she had no authority, no prestige,
no claim to the smallest deference. Yet she ordered everybody about,
from her uncle to the king, the archbishop, and the military General
Staff. Her uncle obeyed her like a sheep, and took her to the castle of
the local commander, who, on being ordered about, tried to assert
himself, but soon collapsed and obeyed. And so on up to the king, as we
have seen. This would have been unbearably irritating even if her orders
had been offered as rational solutions of the desperate difficulties in
which her social superiors found themselves just then. But they were not
so offered. Nor were they offered as the expression of Joan’s arbitrary
will. It was never “I say so,” but always “God says so.”
Joan as Theocrat.
Leaders who take that line have no trouble with some people, and no end
of trouble with others. They need never fear a lukewarm reception.
Either they are messengers of God, or they are blasphemous impostors. In
the Middle Ages the general belief in witchcraft greatly intensified
this contrast, because when an apparent miracle happened (as in the case
of the wind changing at Orleans) it proved the divine mission to the
credulous, and proved a contract with the devil to the sceptical. All
through, Joan had to depend on those who accepted her as an incarnate
angel against those who added to an intense resentment of her
presumption a bigoted abhorrence of her as a witch. To this abhorrence
we must add the extreme irritation of those who did not believe in the
voices, and regarded her as a liar and impostor. It is hard to conceive
anything more infuriating to a statesman or a military commander, or to
a court favorite, than to be overruled at every turn, or to be robbed of
the ear of the reigning sovereign, by an impudent young upstart
practising on the credulity of the populace and the vanity and silliness
of an immature prince by exploiting a few of those lucky coincidences
which pass as miracles with uncritical people. Not only were the envy,
snobbery, and competitive ambition of the baser natures exacerbated by
Joan’s success, but among the friendly ones that were clever enough to
be critical a quite reasonable scepticism and mistrust of her ability,
founded on a fair observation of her obvious ignorance and temerity,
were at work against her. And as she met all remonstrances and all
criticisms, not with arguments or persuasion, but with a flat appeal to
the authority of God and a claim to be in God’s special confidence, she
must have seemed, to all who were not infatuated by her, so insufferable
that nothing but an unbroken chain of overwhelming successes in the
military and political field could have saved her from the wrath that
finally destroyed her.
Unbroken Success essential in Theocracy.
To forge such a chain she needed to be the King, the Archbishop of
Rheims, the Bastard of Orleans, and herself into the bargain; and that
was impossible. From the moment when she failed to stimulate Charles to
follow up his coronation with a swoop on Paris she was lost. The fact
that she insisted on this whilst the king and the rest timidly and
foolishly thought they could square the Duke of Burgundy, and effect a
combination with him against the English, made her a terrifying nuisance
to them; and from that time onward she could do nothing but prowl about
the battlefields waiting for some lucky chance to sweep the captains
into a big move. But it was to the enemy that the chance came: she was
taken prisoner by the Burgundians fighting before Compiègne, and at once
discovered that she had not a friend in the political world. Had she
escaped she would probably have fought on until the English were gone,
and then had to shake the dust of the court off her feet, and retire to
Domrémy as Garibaldi had to retire to Caprera.
Modern Distortions of Joan’s History.
This, I think, is all that we can now pretend to say about the prose of
Joan’s career. The romance of her rise, the tragedy of her execution,
and the comedy of the attempts of posterity to make amends for that
execution, belong to my play and not to my preface, which must be
confined to a sober essay on the facts. That such an essay is badly
needed can be ascertained by examining any of our standard works of
reference. They give accurately enough the facts about the visit to
Vaucouleurs, the annunciation to Charles at Chinon, the raising of the
siege of Orleans and the subsequent battles, the coronation at Rheims,
the capture at Compiègne, and the trial and execution at Rouen, with
their dates and the names of the people concerned; but they all break
down on the melodramatic legend of the wicked bishop and the entrapped
maiden and the rest of it. It would be far less misleading if they were
wrong as to the facts, and right in their view of the facts. As it is,
they illustrate the too little considered truth that the fashion in
which we think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that it is
difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in
the fashion of their own period.
History always out of Date.
This, by the way, is why children are never taught contemporary history.
Their history books deal with periods of which the thinking has passed
out of fashion, and the circumstances no longer apply to active life.
For example, they are taught history about Washington, and told lies
about Lenin. In Washington’s time they were told lies (the same lies)
about Washington, and taught history about Cromwell. In the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries they were told lies about Joan, and by this time
might very well be told the truth about her. Unfortunately the lies did
not cease when the political circumstances became obsolete. The
Reformation, which Joan had unconsciously anticipated, kept the
questions which arose in her case burning up to our own day (you can see
plenty of the burnt houses still in Ireland), with the result that Joan
has remained the subject of anti-Clerical lies, of specifically
Protestant lies, and of Roman Catholic evasions of her unconscious
Protestantism. The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is
served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at
all.
The Real Joan not Marvellous Enough for Us.
But even in its simplicity, the faith demanded by Joan is one which the
anti-metaphysical temper of nineteenth century civilization, which
remains powerful in England and America, and is tyrannical in France,
contemptuously refuses her. We do not, like her contemporaries, rush to
the opposite extreme in a recoil from her as from a witch self-sold to
the devil, because we do not believe in the devil nor in the possibility
of commercial contracts with him. Our credulity, though enormous, is not
boundless; and our stock of it is quite used up by our mediums,
clairvoyants, hand readers, slate writers, Christian Scientists,
psycho-analysts, electronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all
schools registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell
us that the sun is nearly a hundred million miles away and that
Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe, physicists who
balance Betelgeuse by describing the incredible smallness of the atom,
and a host of other marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved
the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment. In the Middle Ages
people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the
evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many
as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a
belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is
obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable,
extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is
scientific.
I must not, by the way, be taken as implying that the earth is flat, or
that all or any of our amazing credulities are delusions or impostures.
I am only defending my own age against the charge of being less
imaginative than the Middle Ages. I affirm that the nineteenth century,
and still more the twentieth, can knock the fifteenth into a cocked hat
in point of susceptibility to marvels and miracles and saints and
prophets and magicians and monsters and fairy tales of all kinds. The
proportion of marvel to immediately credible statement in the latest
edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is enormously greater than in the
Bible. The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle
how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor
figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern
physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every
movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds
would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the
existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a
warning to me against such heresy. But why the men who believe in
electrons should regard themselves as less credulous than the men who
believed in angels is not apparent to me. If they refuse to believe,
with the Rouen assessors of 1431, that Joan was a witch, it is not
because that explanation is too marvellous, but because it is not
marvellous enough.
The Stage Limits of Historical Representation.
For the story of Joan I refer the reader to the play which follows. It
contains all that need be known about her; but as it is for stage use I
have had to condense into three and a half hours a series of events
which in their historical happening were spread over four times as many
months; for the theatre imposes unities of time and place from which
Nature in her boundless wastefulness is free. Therefore the reader must
not suppose that Joan really put Robert de Baudricourt in her pocket in
fifteen minutes, nor that her excommunication, recantation, relapse, and
death at the stake were a matter of half an hour or so. Neither do I
claim more for my dramatizations of Joan’s contemporaries than that some
of them are probably slightly more like the originals than those
imaginary portraits of all the Popes from Saint Peter onward through the
Dark Ages which are still gravely exhibited in the Uffizi in Florence
(or were when I was there last). My Dunois would do equally well for the
Duc d’Alençon. Both left descriptions of Joan so similar that, as a man
always describes himself unconsciously whenever he describes anyone
else, I have inferred that these goodnatured young men were very like
one another in mind; so I have lumped the twain into a single figure,
thereby saving the theatre manager a salary and a suit of armor. Dunois’
face, still on record at Châteaudun, is a suggestive help. But I really
know no more about these men and their circle than Shakespear knew about
Falconbridge and the Duke of Austria, or about Macbeth and Macduff. In
view of the things they did in history, and have to do again in the
play, I can only invent appropriate characters for them in Shakespear’s
manner.
A Void in the Elizabethan Drama.
I have, however, one advantage over the Elizabethans. I write in full
view of the Middle Ages, which may be said to have been rediscovered in
the middle of the nineteenth century after an eclipse of about four
hundred and fifty years. The Renascence of antique literature and art in
the sixteenth century, and the lusty growth of Capitalism, between them
buried the Middle Ages; and their resurrection is a second Renascence.
Now there is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in Shakespear’s
histories. His John of Gaunt is like a study of the old age of Drake.
Although he was a Catholic by family tradition, his figures are all
intensely Protestant, individualist, sceptical, self-centered in
everything but their love affairs, and completely personal and selfish
even in them. His kings are not statesmen: his cardinals have no
religion: a novice can read his plays from one end to the other without
learning that the world is finally governed by forces expressing
themselves in religions and laws which make epochs rather than by
vulgarly ambitious individuals who make rows. The divinity which shapes
our ends, rough hew them how we will, is mentioned fatalistically only
to be forgotten immediately like a passing vague apprehension. To
Shakespear as to Mark Twain, Cauchon would have been a tyrant and a
bully instead of a Catholic, and the inquisitor Lemaître would have been
a Sadist instead of a lawyer. Warwick would have had no more feudal
quality than his successor the King Maker has in the play of Henry VI.
We should have seen them all completely satisfied that if they would
only to their own selves be true they could not then be false to any man
(a precept which represents the reaction against medievalism at its
intensest) as if they were beings in the air, without public
responsibilities of any kind. All Shakespear’s characters are so: that
is why they seem natural to our middle classes, who are comfortable and
irresponsible at other people’s expense, and are neither ashamed of that
condition nor even conscious of it. Nature abhors this vacuum in
Shakespear; and I have taken care to let the medieval atmosphere blow
through my play freely. Those who see it performed will not mistake the
startling event it records for a mere personal accident. They will have
before them not only the visible and human puppets, but the Church, the
Inquisition, the Feudal System, with divine inspiration always beating
against their too inelastic limits: all more terrible in their dramatic
force than any of the little mortal figures clanking about in plate
armor or moving silently in the frocks and hoods of the order of St
Dominic.
Tragedy not Melodrama.
There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like disease, is not
interesting: it is something to be done away with by general consent,
and that is all about it. It is what men do at their best, with good
intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will
do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us. The rascally
bishop and the cruel inquisitor of Mark Twain and Andrew Lang are as
dull as pickpockets; and they reduce Joan to the level of the even less
interesting person whose pocket is picked. I have represented both of
them as capable and eloquent exponents of The Church Militant and The
Church Litigant, because only by doing so can I maintain my drama on the
level of high tragedy and save it from becoming a mere police court
sensation. A villain in a play can never be anything more than a
_diabolus ex machina_, possibly a more exciting expedient than a _deus
ex machina_, but both equally mechanical, and therefore interesting only
as mechanism. It is, I repeat, what normally innocent people do that
concerns us; and if Joan had not been burnt by normally innocent people
in the energy of their righteousness her death at their hands would have
no more significance than the Tokyo earthquake, which burnt a great many
maidens. The tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed by
murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murders; and this
contradiction at once brings an element of comedy into the tragedy: the
angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers.
The Inevitable Flatteries of Tragedy.
Here then we have a reason why my drama of Saint Joan’s career, though
it may give the essential truth of it, gives an inexact picture of some
accidental facts. It goes almost without saying that the old Jeanne
d’Arc melodramas, reducing everything to a conflict of villain and hero,
or in Joan’s case villain and heroine, not only miss the point entirely,
but falsify the characters, making Cauchon a scoundrel, Joan a prima
donna, and Dunois a lover. But the writer of high tragedy and comedy,
aiming at the innermost attainable truth, must needs flatter Cauchon
nearly as much as the melodramatist vilifies him. Although there is, as
far as I have been able to discover, nothing against Cauchon that
convicts him of bad faith or exceptional severity in his judicial
relations with Joan, or of as much anti-prisoner, pro-police, class and
sectarian bias as we now take for granted in our own courts, yet there
is hardly more warrant for classing him as a great Catholic churchman,
completely proof against the passions roused by the temporal situation.
Neither does the inquisitor Lemaître, in such scanty accounts of him as
are now recoverable, appear quite so able a master of his duties and of
the case before him as I have given him credit for being. But it is the
business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to
themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can
they be made intelligible to the audience. And in this case Cauchon and
Lemaître have to make intelligible not only themselves but the Church
and the Inquisition, just as Warwick has to make the feudal system
intelligible, the three between them having thus to make a twentieth
century audience conscious of an epoch fundamentally different from its
own. Obviously the real Cauchon, Lemaître, and Warwick could not have
done this: they were part of the Middle Ages themselves, and therefore
as unconscious of its peculiarities as of the atomic formula of the air
they breathed. But the play would be unintelligible if I had not endowed
them with enough of this consciousness to enable them to explain their
attitude to the twentieth century. All I claim is that by this
inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude I have secured in the only
possible way sufficient veracity to justify me in claiming that as far
as I can gather from the available documentation, and from such powers
of divination as I possess, the things I represent these three exponents
of the drama as saying are the things they actually would have said if
they had known what they were really doing. And beyond this neither
drama nor history can go in my hands.
Some well-meant Proposals for the Improvement of the Play.
I have to thank several critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including
some whose admiration for my play is most generously enthusiastic, for
their heartfelt instructions as to how it can be improved. They point
out that by the excision of the epilogue and all the references to such
undramatic and tedious matters as the Church, the feudal system, the
Inquisition, the theory of heresy and so forth, all of which, they point
out, would be ruthlessly blue pencilled by any experienced manager, the
play could be considerably shortened. I think they are mistaken. The
experienced knights of the blue pencil, having saved an hour and a half
by disembowelling the play, would at once proceed to waste two hours in
building elaborate scenery, having real water in the river Loire and a
real bridge across it, and staging an obviously sham fight for
possession of it, with the victorious French led by Joan on a real
horse. The coronation would eclipse all previous theatrical displays,
shewing, first, the procession through the streets of Rheims, and then
the service in the cathedral, with special music written for both. Joan
would be burnt on the stage, as Mr Matheson Lang always is in The
Wandering Jew, on the principle that it does not matter in the least why
a woman is burnt provided she is burnt, and people can pay to see it
done. The intervals between the acts whilst these splendors were being
built up and then demolished by the stage carpenters would seem eternal,
to the great profit of the refreshment bars. And the weary and
demoralized audience would lose their last trains and curse me for
writing such inordinately long and intolerably dreary and meaningless
plays. But the applause of the press would be unanimous. Nobody who
knows the stage history of Shakespear will doubt that this is what would
happen if I knew my business so little as to listen to these well
intentioned but disastrous counsellors: indeed it probably will happen
when I am no longer in control of the performing rights. So perhaps it
will be as well for the public to see the play while I am still alive.
The Epilogue.
As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by
implying that Joan’s history in the world ended unhappily with her
execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crook
to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one; for many a
woman has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into
the drawing room fireplace, but getting canonized is a different matter,
and a more important one. So I am afraid the epilogue must stand.
To the Critics, lest they should feel Ignored.
To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the
curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of
his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better. This would seem to
place him in irreconcilable opposition to the paying playgoer, from
whose point of view the longer the play, the more entertainment he gets
for his money. It does in fact so place him, especially in the
provinces, where the playgoer goes to the theatre for the sake of the
play solely, and insists so effectively on a certain number of hours’
entertainment that touring managers are sometimes seriously embarrassed
by the brevity of the London plays they have to deal in.
For in London the critics are reinforced by a considerable body of
persons who go to the theatre as many others go to church, to display
their best clothes and compare them with other people’s; to be in the
fashion, and have something to talk about at dinner parties; to adore a
pet performer; to pass the evening anywhere rather than at home: in
short, for any or every reason except interest in dramatic art as such.
In fashionable centres the number of irreligious people who go to
church, of unmusical people who go to concerts and operas, and of
undramatic people who go to the theatre, is so prodigious that sermons
have been cut down to ten minutes and plays to two hours; and, even at
that, congregations sit longing for the benediction and audiences for
the final curtain, so that they may get away to the lunch or supper they
really crave for, after arriving as late as (or later than) the hour of
beginning can possibly be made for them.
Thus from the stalls and in the Press an atmosphere of hypocrisy
spreads. Nobody says straight out that genuine drama is a tedious
nuisance, and that to ask people to endure more than two hours of it
(with two long intervals of relief) is an intolerable imposition. Nobody
says “I hate classical tragedy and comedy as I hate sermons and
symphonies; but I like police news and divorce news and any kind of
dancing or decoration that has an aphrodisiac effect on me or on my wife
or husband. And whatever superior people may pretend, I cannot associate
pleasure with any sort of intellectual activity; and I dont believe
anyone else can either.” Such things are not said; yet nine-tenths of
what is offered as criticism of the drama in the metropolitan Press of
Europe and America is nothing but a muddled paraphrase of it. If it does
not mean that, it means nothing.
I do not complain of this, though it complains very unreasonably of me.
But I can take no more notice of it than Einstein of the people who are
incapable of mathematics. I write in the classical manner for those who
pay for admission to a theatre because they like classical comedy or
tragedy for its own sake, and like it so much when it is good of its
kind and well done that they tear themselves away from it with
reluctance to catch the very latest train or omnibus that will take them
home. Far from arriving late from an eight or half-past eight o’clock
dinner so as to escape at least the first half-hour of the performance,
they stand in queues outside the theatre doors for hours beforehand in
bitingly cold weather to secure a seat. In countries where a play lasts
a week, they bring baskets of provisions and sit it out. These are the
patrons on whom I depend for my bread. I do not give them performances
twelve hours long, because circumstances do not at present make such
entertainments feasible; though a performance beginning after breakfast
and ending at sunset is as possible physically and artistically in
Surrey or Middlesex as in Ober-Ammergau; and an all-night sitting in a
theatre would be at least as enjoyable as an all-night sitting in the
House of Commons, and much more useful. But in St Joan I have done my
best by going to the well-established classical limit of three and a
half hours practically continuous playing, barring the one interval
imposed by considerations which have nothing to do with art. I know that
this is hard on the pseudo-critics and on the fashionable people whose
playing is a hypocrisy. I cannot help feeling some compassion for them
when they assure me that my play, though a great play, must fail
hopelessly, because it does not begin at a quarter to nine and end at
eleven. The facts are overwhelmingly against them. They forget that all
men are not as they are. Still, I am sorry for them; and though I cannot
for their sakes undo my work and help the people who hate the theatre to
drive out the people who love it, yet I may point out to them that they
have several remedies in their own hands. They can escape the first part
of the play by their usual practice of arriving late. They can escape
the epilogue by not waiting for it. And if the irreducible minimum thus
attained is still too painful, they can stay away altogether. But I
deprecate this extreme course, because it is good neither for my pocket
nor for their own souls. Already a few of them, noticing that what
matters is not the absolute length of time occupied by a play, but the
speed with which that time passes, are discovering that the theatre,
though purgatorial in its Aristotelian moments, is not necessarily
always the dull place they have so often found it. What do its
discomforts matter when the play makes us forget them?
AYOT ST LAWRENCE,
_May 1924_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Saint Joan was performed for the first time by The Theatre Guild in the
Garrick Theatre, New York City, on the 28th December 1923, with Winifred
Lenihan in the title-part. Its first performance in London took place on
the 26th March 1924 in the New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, with Sybil
Thorndike as the Saint._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Preface— PAGE
Joan the Original and Presumptuous v
Joan and Socrates vii
Contrast with Napoleon viii
Was Joan Innocent or Guilty? x
Joan’s Good Looks xiii
Joan’s Social Position xiv
Joan’s Voices and Visions xvii
The Evolutionary Appetite xx
The mere Iconography does not matter xxiii
The Modern Education which Joan escaped xxiii
Failures of the Voices xxvi
Joan a Galtonic Visualizer xxviii
Joan’s Manliness and Militarism xxviii
Was Joan Suicidal? xxxi
Joan Summed Up xxxii
Joan’s Immaturity and Ignorance xxxiv
The Maid in Literature xxxv
Protestant Misunderstandings of the Middle Ages xl
Comparative Fairness of Joan’s Trial xlii
Joan not tried as a Political Offender xliv
The Church uncompromised by its Amends xlviii
Cruelty, Modern and Medieval l
Catholic Anti-Clericalism liii
Catholicism not yet Catholic Enough liv
The Law of Change is the Law of God lvi
Credulity, Modern and Medieval lviii
Toleration, Modern and Medieval lix
Variability of Toleration lxi
The Conflict between Genius and Discipline lxiv
Joan as Theocrat lxvi
Unbroken Success essential in Theocracy lxvii
Modern Distortions of Joan’s History lxviii
History always out of Date lxix
The Real Joan not Marvellous Enough for Us lxx
The Stage Limits of Historical Representation lxxii
A Void in the Elizabethan Drama lxxiii
Tragedy, not Melodrama lxxv
The Inevitable Flatteries of Tragedy lxxvi
Some well-meant Proposals for the Improvement of the Play lxxviii
The Epilogue lxxx
To the Critics, lest they should feel Ignored lxxx
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAINT JOAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAINT JOAN
SCENE I
_A fine spring morning on the river Meuse, between Lorraine and
Champagne, in the year 1429 A.D., in the castle of Vaucouleurs._
_Captain Robert de Baudricourt, a military squire, handsome and
physically energetic, but with no will of his own, is disguising that
defect in his usual fashion by storming terribly at his steward, a
trodden worm, scanty of flesh, scanty of hair, who might be any age from
18 to 55, being the sort of man whom age cannot wither because he has
never bloomed._
_The two are in a sunny stone chamber on the first floor of the castle.
At a plain strong oak table, seated in chair to match, the captain
presents his left profile. The steward stands facing him at the other
side of the table, if so deprecatory a stance as his can be called
standing. The mullioned thirteenth-century window is open behind him.
Near it in the corner is a turret with a narrow arched doorway leading
to a winding stair which descends to the courtyard. There is a stout
fourlegged stool under the table, and a wooden chest under the window._
ROBERT. No eggs! No eggs!! Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by
no eggs?
STEWARD. Sir: it is not my fault. It is the act of God.
ROBERT. Blasphemy. You tell me there are no eggs; and you blame your
Maker for it.
STEWARD. Sir: what can I do? I cannot lay eggs.
ROBERT [_sarcastic_] Ha! You jest about it.
STEWARD. No, sir, God knows. We all have to go without eggs just as you
have, sir. The hens will not lay.
ROBERT. Indeed! [_Rising_] Now listen to me, you.
STEWARD [_humbly_] Yes, sir.
ROBERT. What am I?
STEWARD. What are you, sir?
ROBERT [_coming at him_] Yes: what am I? Am I Robert, squire of
Baudricourt and captain of this castle of Vaucouleurs: or am I a cowboy?
STEWARD. Oh, sir, you know you are a greater man here than the king
himself.
ROBERT. Precisely. And now, do you know what you are?
STEWARD. I am nobody, sir, except that I have the honor to be your
steward.
ROBERT [_driving him to the wall, adjective by adjective_] You have not
only the honor of being my steward, but the privilege of being the
worst, most incompetent, drivelling snivelling jibbering jabbering idiot
of a steward in France. [_He strides back to the table._]
STEWARD [_cowering on the chest_] Yes, sir: to a great man like you I
must seem like that.
ROBERT [_turning_] My fault, I suppose. Eh?
STEWARD [_coming to him deprecatingly_] Oh, sir: you always give my most
innocent words such a turn!
ROBERT. I will give your neck a turn if you dare tell me, when I ask you
how many eggs there are, that you cannot lay any.
STEWARD [_protesting_] Oh sir, oh sir—
ROBERT. No: not oh sir, oh sir, but no sir, no sir. My three Barbary
hens and the black are the best layers in Champagne. And you come and
tell me that there are no eggs! Who stole them? Tell me that, before I
kick you out through the castle gate for a liar and a seller of my goods
to thieves. The milk was short yesterday, too: do not forget that.
STEWARD [_desperate_] I know, sir. I know only too well. There is no
milk: there are no eggs: tomorrow there will be nothing.
ROBERT. Nothing! You will steal the lot: eh?
STEWARD. No, sir: nobody will steal anything. But there is a spell on
us: we are bewitched.
ROBERT. That story is not good enough for me. Robert de Baudricourt
burns witches and hangs thieves. Go. Bring me four dozen eggs and two
gallons of milk here in this room before noon, or Heaven have mercy on
your bones! I will teach you to make a fool of me. [_He resumes his seat
with an air of finality_].
STEWARD. Sir: I tell you there are no eggs. There will be none—not if
you were to kill me for it—as long as The Maid is at the door.
ROBERT. The Maid! What maid? What are you talking about?
STEWARD. The girl from Lorraine, sir. From Domremy.
ROBERT [_rising in fearful wrath_] Thirty thousand thunders! Fifty
thousand devils! Do you mean to say that that girl, who had the
impudence to ask to see me two days ago, and whom I told you to send
back to her father with my orders that he was to give her a good hiding,
is here still?
STEWARD. I have told her to go, sir. She wont.
ROBERT. I did not tell you to tell her to go: I told you to throw her
out. You have fifty men-at-arms and a dozen lumps of ablebodied servants
to carry out my orders. Are they afraid of her?
STEWARD. She is so positive, sir.
ROBERT [_seizing him by the scruff of the neck_] Positive! Now see here.
I am going to throw you downstairs.
STEWARD. No, sir. Please.
ROBERT. Well, stop me by being positive. It’s quite easy: any slut of a
girl can do it.
STEWARD [_hanging limp in his hands_] Sir, sir: you cannot get rid of
her by throwing me out. [_Robert has to let him drop. He squats on his
knees on the floor, contemplating his master resignedly._] You see, sir,
you are much more positive than I am. But so is she.
ROBERT. I am stronger than you are, you fool.
STEWARD. No, sir: it isnt that: it’s your strong character, sir. She is
weaker than we are: she is only a slip of a girl; but we cannot make her
go.
ROBERT. You parcel of curs: you are afraid of her.
STEWARD [_rising cautiously_] No, sir: we are afraid of you; but she
puts courage into us. She really doesnt seem to be afraid of anything.
Perhaps you could frighten her, sir.
ROBERT [_grimly_] Perhaps. Where is she now?
STEWARD. Down in the courtyard, sir, talking to the soldiers as usual.
She is always talking to the soldiers except when she is praying.
ROBERT. Praying! Ha! You believe she prays, you idiot. I know the sort
of girl that is always talking to soldiers. She shall talk to me a bit.
[_He goes to the window and shouts fiercely through it_] Hallo, you
there!
A GIRL’S VOICE [_bright, strong and rough_] Is it me, sir?
ROBERT. Yes, you.
THE VOICE. Be you captain?
ROBERT. Yes, damn your impudence, I be captain. Come up here. [_To the
soldiers in the yard_] Shew her the way, you. And shove her along quick.
[_He leaves the window and returns to his place at the table, where he
sits magisterially._]
STEWARD [_whispering_] She wants to go and be a soldier herself. She
wants you to give her soldier’s clothes. Armor, sir! And a sword!
Actually! [_He steals behind Robert_].
_Joan appears in the turret doorway. She is an ablebodied country girl
of 17 or 18, respectably dressed in red, with an uncommon face: eyes
very wide apart and bulging as they often do in very imaginative people,
a long well-shaped nose with wide nostrils, a short upper lip, resolute
but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin. She comes eagerly to
the table, delighted at having penetrated to Baudricourt’s presence at
last, and full of hope as to the result. His scowl does not check or
frighten her in the least. Her voice is normally a hearty coaxing voice,
very confident, very appealing, very hard to resist._
JOAN [_bobbing a curtsey_] Good morning, captain squire. Captain: you
are to give me a horse and armor and some soldiers, and send me to the
Dauphin. Those are your orders from my Lord.
ROBERT [_outraged_] Orders from your lord! And who the devil may your
lord be? Go back to him, and tell him that I am neither duke nor peer at
his orders: I am squire of Baudricourt; and I take no orders except from
the king.
JOAN [_reassuringly_] Yes, squire: that is all right. My Lord is the
King of Heaven.
ROBERT. Why, the girl’s mad. [_To the steward_] Why didnt you tell me
so, you blockhead?
STEWARD. Sir: do not anger her: give her what she wants.
JOAN [_impatient, but friendly_] They all say I am mad until I talk to
them, squire. But you see that it is the will of God that you are to do
what He has put into my mind.
ROBERT. It is the will of God that I shall send you back to your father
with orders to put you under lock and key and thrash the madness out of
you. What have you to say to that?
JOAN. You think you will, squire; but you will find it all coming quite
different. You said you would not see me; but here I am.
STEWARD [_appealing_] Yes, sir. You see, sir.
ROBERT. Hold your tongue, you.
STEWARD [_abjectly_] Yes, sir.
ROBERT [_to Joan, with a sour loss of confidence_] So you are presuming
on my seeing you, are you?
JOAN [_sweetly_] Yes, squire.
ROBERT [_feeling that he has lost ground, brings down his two fists
squarely on the table, and inflates his chest imposingly to cure the
unwelcome and only too familiar sensation_] Now listen to me. I am going
to assert myself.
JOAN [_busily_] Please do, squire. The horse will cost sixteen francs.
It is a good deal of money; but I can save it on the armor. I can find a
soldier’s armor that will fit me well enough: I am very hardy; and I do
not need beautiful armor made to my measure like you wear. I shall not
want many soldiers: the Dauphin will give me all I need to raise the
siege of Orleans.
ROBERT [_flabbergasted_] To raise the siege of Orleans!
JOAN [_simply_] Yes, squire: that is what God is sending me to do. Three
men will be enough for you to send with me if they are good men and
gentle to me. They have promised to come with me. Polly and Jack and—
ROBERT. Polly!! You impudent baggage, do you dare call squire Bertrand
de Poulengey Polly to my face?
JOAN. His friends call him so, squire: I did not know he had any other
name. Jack—
ROBERT. That is Monsieur John of Metz, I suppose?
JOAN. Yes, squire. Jack will come willingly: he is a very kind
gentleman, and gives me money to give to the poor. I think John Godsave
will come, and Dick the Archer, and their servants John of Honecourt and
Julian. There will be no trouble for you, squire: I have arranged it
all: you have only to give the order.
ROBERT [_contemplating her in a stupor of amazement_] Well, I am damned!
JOAN [_with muffled sweetness_] No, squire: God is very merciful; and
the blessed saints Catherine and Margaret, who speak to me every day
[_he gapes_], will intercede for you. You will go to paradise; and your
name will be remembered for ever as my first helper.
ROBERT [_to the steward, still much bothered, but changing his tone as
he pursues a new clue_] Is this true about Monsieur de Poulengey?
STEWARD [_eagerly_] Yes, sir, and about Monsieur de Metz too. They both
want to go with her.
ROBERT [_thoughtful_] Mf! [_He goes to the window, and shouts into the
courtyard_] Hallo! You there: send Monsieur de Poulengey to me, will
you? [_He turns to Joan_]. Get out; and wait in the yard.
JOAN [_smiling brightly at him_] Right, squire. [_She goes out_].
ROBERT [_to the steward_] Go with her, you, you dithering imbecile. Stay
within call; and keep your eye on her. I shall have her up here again.
STEWARD. Do so in God’s name, sir. Think of those hens, the best layers
in Champagne; and—
ROBERT. Think of my boot; and take your backside out of reach of it.
_The steward retreats hastily and finds himself confronted in the
doorway by Bertrand de Poulengey, a lymphatic French gentleman-at-arms,
aged 36 or thereabout, employed in the department of the
provost-marshal, dreamily absent-minded, seldom speaking unless spoken
to, and then slow and obstinate in reply: altogether in contrast to the
self-assertive, loud-mouthed, superficially energetic, fundamentally
will-less Robert. The steward makes way for him, and vanishes._
_Poulengey salutes, and stands awaiting orders._
ROBERT [_genially_]. It isnt service, Polly. A friendly talk. Sit down.
[_He hooks the stool from under the table with his instep_].
_Poulengey, relaxing, comes into the room; places the stool between the
table and the window; and sits down ruminatively. Robert, half sitting
on the end of the table, begins the friendly talk._
ROBERT. Now listen to me, Polly. I must talk to you like a father.
_Poulengey looks up at him gravely for a moment, but says nothing._
ROBERT. It’s about this girl you are interested in. Now, I have seen
her. I have talked to her. First, she’s mad. That doesnt matter.
Second, she’s not a farm wench. She’s a bourgeoise. That matters a good
deal. I know her class exactly. Her father came here last year to
represent his village in a lawsuit: he is one of their notables. A
farmer. Not a gentleman farmer: he makes money by it, and lives by it.
Still, not a laborer. Not a mechanic. He might have a cousin a lawyer,
or in the Church. These sort of people may be of no account socially;
but they can give a lot of bother to the authorities. That is to say, to
me. Now no doubt it seems to you a very simple thing to take this girl
away, humbugging her into the belief that you are taking her to the
Dauphin. But if you get her into trouble, you may get me into no end of
a mess, as I am her father’s lord, and responsible for her protection.
So friends or no friends, Polly, hands off her.
POULENGEY [_with deliberate impressiveness_] I should as soon think of
the Blessed Virgin herself in that way, as of this girl.
ROBERT [_coming off the table_] But she says you and Jack and Dick have
offered to go with her. What for? You are not going to tell me that you
take her crazy notion of going to the Dauphin seriously, are you?
POULENGEY [_slowly_] There is something about her. They are pretty
foulmouthed and foulminded down there in the guardroom, some of them.
But there hasnt been a word that has anything to do with her being a
woman. They have stopped swearing before her. There is something.
Something. It may be worth trying.
ROBERT. Oh, come, Polly! pull yourself together. Commonsense was never
your strong point; but this is a little too much. [_He retreats
disgustedly_].
POULENGEY [_unmoved_] What is the good of commonsense? If we had any
commonsense we should join the Duke of Burgundy and the English king.
They hold half the country, right down to the Loire. They have Paris.
They have this castle: you know very well that we had to surrender it to
the Duke of Bedford, and that you are only holding it on parole. The
Dauphin is in Chinon, like a rat in a corner, except that he wont
fight. We dont even know that he is the Dauphin: his mother says he
isnt; and she ought to know. Think of that! the queen denying the
legitimacy of her own son!
ROBERT. Well, she married her daughter to the English king. Can you
blame the woman?
POULENGEY. I blame nobody. But thanks to her, the Dauphin is down and
out; and we may as well face it. The English will take Orleans: the
Bastard will not be able to stop them.
ROBERT. He beat the English the year before last at Montargis. I was
with him.
POULENGEY. No matter: his men are cowed now; and he cant work miracles.
And I tell you that nothing can save our side now but a miracle.
ROBERT. Miracles are all right, Polly. The only difficulty about them is
that they dont happen nowadays.
POULENGEY. I used to think so. I am not so sure now. [_Rising and moving
ruminatively towards the window_] At all events this is not a time to
leave any stone unturned. There is something about the girl.
ROBERT. Oh! You think the girl can work miracles, do you?
POULENGEY. I think the girl herself is a bit of a miracle. Anyhow, she
is the last card left in our hand. Better play her than throw up the
game. [_He wanders to the turret_].
ROBERT [_wavering_] You really think that?
POULENGEY [_turning_] Is there anything else left for us to think?
ROBERT [_going to him_] Look here, Polly. If you were in my place would
you let a girl like that do you out of sixteen francs for a horse?
POULENGEY. I will pay for the horse.
ROBERT. You will!
POULENGEY. Yes: I will back my opinion.
ROBERT. You will really gamble on a forlorn hope to the tune of sixteen
francs?
POULENGEY. It is not a gamble.
ROBERT. What else is it?
POULENGEY. It is a certainty. Her words, and her ardent faith in God
have put fire into me.
ROBERT [_giving him up_] Whew! You are as mad as she is.
POULENGEY [_obstinately_] We want a few mad people now. See where the
sane ones have landed us!
ROBERT [_his irresoluteness now openly swamping his affected
decisiveness_] I shall feel like a precious fool. Still, if you feel
sure—?
POULENGEY. I feel sure enough to take her to Chinon—unless you stop me.
ROBERT. This is not fair. You are putting the responsibility on me.
POULENGEY. It is on you whichever way you decide.
ROBERT. Yes: that’s just it. Which way am I to decide. You dont see how
awkward this is for me. [_Snatching at a dilatory step with an
unconscious hope that Joan will make up his mind for him_] Do you think
I ought to have another talk to her?
POULENGEY [_rising_] Yes. [_He goes to the window and calls_] Joan!
JOAN’S VOICE. Will he let us go, Polly?
POULENGEY. Come up. Come in. [_Turning to Robert_] Shall I leave you
with her?
ROBERT. No: stay here; and back me up.
_Poulengey sits down on the chest. Robert goes back to his magisterial
chair, but remains standing to inflate himself more imposingly. Joan
comes in, full of good news._
JOAN. Jack will go halves for the horse.
ROBERT. Well!! [_He sits, deflated_].
POULENGEY [_gravely_] Sit down, Joan.
JOAN [_checked a little, and looking to Robert_] May I?
ROBERT. Do what you are told.
_Joan curtsies and sits down on the stool between them. Robert outfaces
his perplexity with his most peremptory air._
ROBERT. What is your name?
JOAN [_chattily_] They always call me Jenny in Lorraine. Here in France
I am Joan. The soldiers call me The Maid.
ROBERT. What is your surname?
JOAN. Surname? What is that? My father sometimes calls himself d’Arc;
but I know nothing about it. You met my father. He—
ROBERT. Yes, yes; I remember. You come from Domremy in Lorraine, I
think.
JOAN. Yes; but what does it matter? we all speak French.
ROBERT. Dont ask questions: answer them. How old are you?
JOAN. Seventeen: so they tell me. It might be nineteen. I dont
remember.
ROBERT. What did you mean when you said that St Catherine and St
Margaret talked to you every day?
JOAN. They do.
ROBERT. What are they like?
JOAN [_suddenly obstinate_] I will tell you nothing about that: they
have not given me leave.
ROBERT. But you actually see them; and they talk to you just as I am
talking to you?
JOAN. No: it is quite different. I cannot tell you: you must not talk to
me about my voices.
ROBERT. How do you mean? voices?
JOAN. I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
ROBERT. They come from your imagination.
JOAN. Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
POULENGEY. Checkmate.
ROBERT. No fear! [_To Joan_] So God says you are to raise the siege of
Orleans?
JOAN. And to crown the Dauphin in Rheims Cathedral.
ROBERT. [_gasping_] Crown the D⸺! Gosh!
JOAN. And to make the English leave France.
ROBERT [_sarcastic_] Anything else?
JOAN [_charming_] Not just at present, thank you, squire.
ROBERT. I suppose you think raising a siege is as easy as chasing a cow
out of a meadow. You think soldiering is anybody’s job?
JOAN. I do not think it can be very difficult if God is on your side,
and you are willing to put your life in His hand. But many soldiers are
very simple.
ROBERT [_grimly_] Simple! Did you ever see English soldiers fighting?
JOAN. They are only men. God made them just like us; but He gave them
their own country and their own language; and it is not His will that
they should come into our country and try to speak our language.
ROBERT. Who has been putting such nonsense into your head? Dont you
know that soldiers are subject to their feudal lord, and that it is
nothing to them or to you whether he is the duke of Burgundy or the king
of England or the king of France? What has their language to do with it?
JOAN. I do not understand that a bit. We are all subject to the King of
Heaven; and He gave us our countries and our languages, and meant us to
keep them. If it were not so it would be murder to kill an Englishman in
battle; and you, squire, would be in great danger of hell fire. You must
not think about your duty to your feudal lord, but about your duty to
God.
POULENGEY. It’s no use, Robert: she can choke you like that every time.
ROBERT. Can she, by Saint Dennis! We shall see. [_To Joan_] We are not
talking about God: we are talking about practical affairs. I ask you
again, girl, have you ever seen English soldiers fighting? Have you ever
seen them plundering, burning, turning the countryside into a desert?
Have you heard no tales of their Black Prince who was blacker than the
devil himself, or of the English king’s father?
JOAN. You must not be afraid, Robert—
ROBERT. Damn you, I am not afraid. And who gave you leave to call me
Robert?
JOAN. You were called so in church in the name of our Lord. All the
other names are your father’s or your brother’s or anybody’s.
ROBERT. Tcha!
JOAN. Listen to me, squire. At Domremy we had to fly to the next village
to escape from the English soldiers. Three of them were left behind,
wounded. I came to know these three poor goddams quite well. They had
not half my strength.
ROBERT. Do you know why they are called goddams?
JOAN. No. Everyone calls them goddams.
ROBERT. It is because they are always calling on their God to condemn
their souls to perdition. That is what goddam means in their language.
How do you like it?
JOAN. God will be merciful to them; and they will act like His good
children when they go back to the country He made for them, and made
them for. I have heard the tales of the Black Prince. The moment he
touched the soil of our country the devil entered into him and made him
a black fiend. But at home, in the place made for him by God, he was
good. It is always so. If I went into England against the will of God to
conquer England, and tried to live there and speak its language, the
devil would enter into me; and when I was old I should shudder to
remember the wickedness I did.
ROBERT. Perhaps. But the more devil you were the better you might fight.
That is why the goddams will take Orleans. And you cannot stop them, nor
ten thousand like you.
JOAN. One thousand like me can stop them. Ten like me can stop them with
God on our side. [_She rises impetuously, and goes at him, unable to sit
quiet any longer_]. You do not understand, squire. Our soldiers are
always beaten because they are fighting only to save their skins; and
the shortest way to save your skin is to run away. Our knights are
thinking only of the money they will make in ransoms: it is not kill or
be killed with them, but pay or be paid. But I will teach them all to
fight that the will of God may be done in France; and then they will
drive the poor goddams before them like sheep. You and Polly will live
to see the day when there will not be an English soldier on the soil of
France; and there will be but one king there: not the feudal English
king, but God’s French one.
ROBERT [_to Poulengey_] This may be all rot, Polly; but the troops might
swallow it, though nothing that we can say seems able to put any fight
into them. Even the Dauphin might swallow it. And if she can put fight
into him, she can put it into anybody.
POULENGEY. I can see no harm in trying. Can you? And there is something
about the girl—
ROBERT [_turning to Joan_] Now listen you to me; and [_desperately_]
dont cut in before I have time to think.
JOAN [_plumping down on the stool again, like an obedient schoolgirl_]
Yes, squire.
ROBERT. Your orders are, that you are to go to Chinon under the escort
of this gentleman and three of his friends.
JOAN [_radiant, clasping her hands_] Oh, squire! Your head is all
circled with light, like a saint’s.
POULENGEY. How is she to get into the royal presence?
ROBERT [_who has looked up for his halo rather apprehensively_] I dont
know: how did she get into my presence? If the Dauphin can keep her out
he is a better man than I take him for. [_Rising_] I will send her to
Chinon; and she can say I sent her. Then let come what may: I can do no
more.
JOAN. And the dress? I may have a soldier’s dress, maynt I, squire?
ROBERT. Have what you please. I wash my hands of it.
JOAN [_wildly excited by her success_] Come, Polly. [_She dashes out_].
ROBERT [_shaking Poulengey’s hand_] Goodbye, old man, I am taking a big
chance. Few other men would have done it. But as you say, there is
something about her.
POULENGEY. Yes: there is something about her. Goodbye. [_He goes out_].
_Robert, still very doubtful whether he has not been made a fool of by
a crazy female, and a social inferior to boot, scratches his head and
slowly comes back from the door._
_The steward runs in with a basket._
STEWARD. Sir, sir—
ROBERT. What now?
STEWARD. The hens are laying like mad, sir. Five dozen eggs!
ROBERT [_stiffens convulsively; crosses himself; and forms with his pale
lips the words_] Christ in heaven! [_Aloud but breathless_] She did come
from God.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE II
_Chinon, in Touraine. An end of the throne-room in the castle,
curtained off to make an antechamber. The Archbishop of Rheims, close on
50, a full-fed political prelate with nothing of the ecclesiastic about
him except his imposing bearing, and the Lord Chamberlain, Monseigneur
de la Trémouille, a monstrous arrogant wineskin of a man, are waiting
for the Dauphin. There is a door in the wall to the right of the two
men. It is late in the afternoon on the 8th of March, 1429. The
Archbishop stands with dignity whilst the Chamberlain, on his left,
fumes about in the worst of tempers._
LA TRÉMOUILLE. What the devil does the Dauphin mean by keeping us
waiting like this? I dont know how you have the patience to stand there
like a stone idol.
THE ARCHBISHOP. You see, I am an archbishop; and an archbishop is a sort
of idol. At any rate he has to learn to keep still and suffer fools
patiently. Besides, my dear Lord Chamberlain, it is the Dauphin’s royal
privilege to keep you waiting, is it not?
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Dauphin be damned! saving your reverence. Do you know how
much money he owes me.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Much more than he owes me, I have no doubt, because you
are a much richer man. But I take it he owes you all you could afford to
lend him. That is what he owes me.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Twentyseven thousand: that was his last haul. A cool
twentyseven thousand!
THE ARCHBISHOP. What becomes of it all? He never has a suit of clothes
that I would throw to a curate.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. He dines on a chicken or a scrap of mutton. He borrows my
last penny; and there is nothing to shew for it. [_A page appears in the
doorway_]. At last!
THE PAGE. No, my lord: it is not His Majesty. Monsieur de Rais is
approaching.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Young Bluebeard! Why announce him?
THE PAGE. Captain La Hire is with him. Something has happened, I think.
_Gilles de Rais, a young man of 25, very smart and self-possessed, and
sporting the extravagance of a little curled beard dyed blue at a
clean-shaven court, comes in. He is determined to make himself
agreeable, but lacks natural joyousness, and is not really pleasant. In
fact when he defies the Church some eleven years later he is accused of
trying to extract pleasure from horrible cruelties, and hanged. So far,
however, there is no shadow of the gallows on him. He advances gaily to
the Archbishop. The page withdraws._
BLUEBEARD. Your faithful lamb, Archbishop. Good day, my lord. Do you
know what has happened to La Hire?
LA TRÉMOUILLE. He has sworn himself into a fit, perhaps.
BLUEBEARD. No: just the opposite. Foul Mouthed Frank, the only man in
Touraine who could beat him at swearing, was told by a soldier that he
shouldnt use such language when he was at the point of death.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Nor at any other point. But was Foul Mouthed Frank on
the point of death?
BLUEBEARD. Yes: he has just fallen into a well and been drowned. La Hire
is frightened out of his wits.
_Captain La Hire comes in: a war dog with no court manners and
pronounced camp ones._
BLUEBEARD. I have just been telling the Chamberlain and the Archbishop.
The Archbishop says you are a lost man.
LA HIRE [_striding past Bluebeard, and planting himself between the
Archbishop and La Trémouille_] This is nothing to joke about. It is
worse than we thought. It was not a soldier, but an angel dressed as a
soldier.
THE ARCHBISHOP }
THE CONSTABLE } [_exclaiming all together_] An angel!
BLUEBEARD }
LA HIRE. Yes, an angel. She has made her way from Champagne with half a
dozen men through the thick of everything: Burgundians, Goddams,
deserters, robbers, and Lord knows who; and they never met a soul except
the country folk. I know one of them: de Poulengey. He says she’s an
angel. If ever I utter an oath again may my soul be blasted to eternal
damnation.
THE ARCHBISHOP. A very pious beginning, Captain.
_Bluebeard and La Trémouille laugh at him. The page returns._
THE PAGE. His Majesty.
_They stand perfunctorily at court attention. The Dauphin, aged 26,
really King Charles the Seventh since the death of his father, but as
yet uncrowned, comes in through the curtains with a paper in his hands.
He is a poor creature physically; and the current fashion of shaving
closely, and hiding every scrap of hair under the head-covering or
headdress, both by women and men, makes the worst of his appearance. He
has little narrow eyes, near together, a long pendulous nose that droops
over his thick short upper lip, and the expression of a young dog
accustomed to be kicked, yet incorrigible and irrepressible. But he is
neither vulgar nor stupid; and he has a cheeky humor which enables him
to hold his own in conversation. Just at present he is excited, like a
child with a new toy. He comes to the Archbishop’s left hand. Bluebeard
and La Hire retire towards the curtains._
CHARLES. Oh, Archbishop, do you know what Robert de Baudricourt is
sending me from Vaucouleurs?
THE ARCHBISHOP [_contemptuously_] I am not interested in the newest
toys.
CHARLES [_indignantly_] It isnt a toy. [_Sulkily_] However, I can get
on very well without your interest.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Your Highness is taking offence very unnecessarily.
CHARLES. Thank you. You are always ready with a lecture, arnt you?
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_roughly_] Enough grumbling. What have you got there?
CHARLES. What is that to you?
LA TRÉMOUILLE. It is my business to know what is passing between you and
the garrison at Vaucouleurs. [_He snatches the paper from the Dauphin’s
hand, and begins reading it with some difficulty, following the words
with his finger and spelling them out syllable by syllable._]
CHARLES [_mortified_] You all think you can treat me as you please
because I owe you money, and because I am no good at fighting. But I
have the blood royal in my veins.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Even that has been questioned, your Highness. One hardly
recognizes in you the grandson of Charles the Wise.
CHARLES. I want to hear no more of my grandfather. He was so wise that
he used up the whole family stock of wisdom for five generations, and
left me the poor fool I am, bullied and insulted by all of you.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Control yourself, sir. These outbursts of petulance are
not seemly.
CHARLES. Another lecture! Thank you. What a pity it is that though you
are an archbishop saints and angels dont come to see you!
THE ARCHBISHOP. What do you mean?
CHARLES. Aha! Ask that bully there [_pointing to La Trémouille._]
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_furious_] Hold your tongue. Do you hear?
CHARLES. Oh, I hear. You neednt shout. The whole castle can hear. Why
dont you go and shout at the English, and beat them for me?
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_raising his fist_] You young—
CHARLES [_running behind the Archbishop_] Dont you raise your hand to
me. It’s high treason.
LA HIRE. Steady, Duke! Steady!
THE ARCHBISHOP [_resolutely_] Come, come! this will not do. My lord
Chamberlain; please! please! we must keep some sort of order. [_To the
Dauphin_] And you, sir: if you cannot rule your kingdom, at least try to
rule yourself.
CHARLES. Another lecture! Thank you.
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_handing the paper to the Archbishop_] Here: read the
accursed thing for me. He has sent the blood boiling into my head: I
cant distinguish the letters.
CHARLES [_coming back and peering round La Trémouille’s left shoulder_]
I will read it for you if you like. I can read, you know.
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_with intense contempt, not at all stung by the taunt_]
Yes: reading is about all you are fit for. Can you make it out,
Archbishop?
THE ARCHBISHOP. I should have expected more commonsense from De
Baudricourt. He is sending some cracked country lass here—
CHARLES [_interrupting_] No: he is sending a saint: an angel. And she is
coming to me: to me, the king, and not to you, Archbishop, holy as you
are. She knows the blood royal if you dont. [_He struts up to the
curtains between Bluebeard and La Hire._]
THE ARCHBISHOP. You cannot be allowed to see this crazy wench.
CHARLES [_turning_] But I am the king; and I will.
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_brutally_] Then she cannot be allowed to see you. Now!
CHARLES. I tell you I will. I am going to put my foot down—
BLUEBEARD [_laughing at him_] Naughty! What would your wise grandfather
say?
CHARLES. That just shews your ignorance, Bluebeard. My grandfather had a
saint who used to float in the air when she was praying, and told him
everything he wanted to know. My poor father had two saints, Marie de
Maillé and the Gasque of Avignon. It is in our family; and I dont care
what you say: I will have my saint too.
THE ARCHBISHOP. This creature is not a saint. She is not even a
respectable woman. She does not wear women’s clothes. She is dressed
like a soldier, and rides round the country with soldiers. Do you
suppose such a person can be admitted to your Highness’s court?
LA HIRE. Stop. [_Going to the Archbishop_] Did you say a girl in armor,
like a soldier?
THE ARCHBISHOP. So De Baudricourt describes her.
LA HIRE. But by all the devils in hell—Oh, God forgive me, what am I
saying?—by Our Lady and all the saints, this must be the angel that
struck Foul Mouthed Frank dead for swearing.
CHARLES [_triumphantly_] You see! A miracle.
LA HIRE. She may strike the lot of us dead if we cross her. For Heaven’s
sake, Archbishop, be careful what you are doing.
THE ARCHBISHOP [_severely_] Rubbish! Nobody has been struck dead. A
drunken blackguard who has been rebuked a hundred times for swearing has
fallen into a well, and been drowned. A mere coincidence.
LA HIRE. I do not know what a coincidence is. I do know that the man is
dead, and that she told him he was going to die.
THE ARCHBISHOP. We are all going to die, Captain.
LA HIRE [_crossing himself_] I hope not. [_He backs out of the
conversation._]
BLUEBEARD. We can easily find out whether she is an angel or not. Let us
arrange when she comes that I shall be the Dauphin, and see whether she
will find me out.
CHARLES. Yes: I agree to that. If she cannot find the blood royal I will
have nothing to do with her.
THE ARCHBISHOP. It is for the Church to make saints: let De Baudricourt
mind his own business, and not dare usurp the function of his priest. I
say the girl shall not be admitted.
BLUEBEARD. But, Archbishop—
THE ARCHBISHOP [_sternly_] I speak in the Church’s name. [_To the
Dauphin_] Do you dare say she shall?
CHARLES [_intimidated but sulky_] Oh, if you make it an excommunication
matter, I have nothing more to say, of course. But you havnt read the
end of the letter. De Baudricourt says she will raise the siege of
Orleans, and beat the English for us.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Rot!
CHARLES. Well, will you save Orleans for us, with all your bullying?
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_savagely_] Do not throw that in my face again: do you
hear? I have done more fighting than you ever did or ever will. But I
cannot be everywhere.
THE DAUPHIN. Well, that’s something.
BLUEBEARD [_coming between the Archbishop and Charles_] You have Jack
Dunois at the head of your troops in Orleans: the brave Dunois, the
handsome Dunois, the wonderful invincible Dunois, the darling of all the
ladies, the beautiful bastard. Is it likely that the country lass can do
what he cannot do?
CHARLES. Why doesnt he raise the siege, then?
LA HIRE. The wind is against him.
BLUEBEARD. How can the wind hurt him at Orleans? It is not on the
Channel.
LA HIRE. It is on the river Loire; and the English hold the bridgehead.
He must ship his men across the river and upstream, if he is to take
them in the rear. Well, he cannot, because there is a devil of a wind
blowing the other way. He is tired of paying the priests to pray for a
west wind. What he needs is a miracle. You tell me that what the girl
did to Foul Mouthed Frank was no miracle. No matter: it finished Frank.
If she changes the wind for Dunois, that may not be a miracle either;
but it may finish the English. What harm is there in trying?
THE ARCHBISHOP [_who has read the end of the letter and become more
thoughtful_] It is true that De Baudricourt seems extraordinarily
impressed.
LA HIRE. De Baudricourt is a blazing ass; but he is a soldier; and if he
thinks she can beat the English, all the rest of the army will think so
too.
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_to the Archbishop, who is hesitating_] Oh, let them have
their way. Dunois’ men will give up the town in spite of him if somebody
does not put some fresh spunk into them.
THE ARCHBISHOP. The Church must examine the girl before anything
decisive is done about her. However, since his Highness desires it, let
her attend the Court.
LA HIRE. I will find her and tell her. [_He goes out_].
CHARLES. Come with me, Bluebeard; and let us arrange so that she will
not know who I am. You will pretend to be me. [_He goes out through the
curtains_].
BLUEBEARD. Pretend to be that thing! Holy Michael! [_He follows the
Dauphin_].
LA TRÉMOUILLE. I wonder will she pick him out!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Of course she will.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Why? How is she to know?
THE ARCHBISHOP. She will know what everybody in Chinon knows: that the
Dauphin is the meanest-looking and worst-dressed figure in the Court,
and that the man with the blue beard is Gilles de Rais.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. I never thought of that.
THE ARCHBISHOP. You are not so accustomed to miracles as I am. It is
part of my profession.
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_puzzled and a little scandalized_] But that would not be
a miracle at all.
THE ARCHBISHOP [_calmly_] Why not?
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Well, come; what is a miracle?
THE ARCHBISHOP. A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.
That is the purpose and nature of miracles. They may seem very wonderful
to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform
them. That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are
true miracles.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Even when they are frauds, do you mean?
THE ARCHBISHOP. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not
deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_scratching his neck in his perplexity_] Well, I suppose
as you are an archbishop you must be right. It seems a bit fishy to me.
But I am no churchman, and dont understand these matters.
THE ARCHBISHOP. You are not a churchman; but you are a diplomatist and a
soldier. Could you make our citizens pay war taxes, or our soldiers
sacrifice their lives, if they knew what is really happening instead of
what seems to them to be happening?
LA TRÉMOUILLE. No, by Saint Dennis: the fat would be in the fire before
sundown.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Would it not be quite easy to tell them the truth?
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Man alive, they wouldnt believe it.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Just so. Well, the Church has to rule men for the good
of their souls as you have to rule them for the good of their bodies. To
do that, the Church must do as you do: nourish their faith by poetry.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Poetry! I should call it humbug.
THE ARCHBISHOP. You would be wrong, my friend. Parables are not lies
because they describe events that have never happened. Miracles are not
frauds because they are often—I do not say always—very simple and
innocent contrivances by which the priest fortifies the faith of his
flock. When this girl picks out the Dauphin among his courtiers, it will
not be a miracle for me, because I shall know how it has been done, and
my faith will not be increased. But as for the others, if they feel the
thrill of the supernatural, and forget their sinful clay in a sudden
sense of the glory of God, it will be a miracle and a blessed one. And
you will find that the girl herself will be more affected than anyone
else. She will forget how she really picked him out. So, perhaps, will
you.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Well, I wish I were clever enough to know how much of you
is God’s archbishop and how much the most artful fox in Touraine. Come
on, or we shall be late for the fun; and I want to see it, miracle or no
miracle.
THE ARCHBISHOP [_detaining him a moment_] Do not think that I am a lover
of crooked ways. There is a new spirit rising in men: we are at the
dawning of a wider epoch. If I were a simple monk, and had not to rule
men, I should seek peace for my spirit with Aristotle and Pythagoras
rather than with the saints and their miracles.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. And who the deuce was Pythagoras?
THE ARCHBISHOP. A sage who held that the earth is round, and that it
moves round the sun.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. What an utter fool! Couldnt he use his eyes?
_They go out together through the curtains, which are presently
withdrawn, revealing the full depth of the throne-room with the Court
assembled. On the right are two Chairs of State on a dais. Bluebeard is
standing theatrically on the dais, playing the king, and, like the
courtiers, enjoying the joke rather obviously. There is a curtained arch
in the wall behind the dais; but the main door, guarded by men-at-arms,
is at the other side of the room; and a clear path across is kept and
lined by the courtiers. Charles is in this path in the middle of the
room. La Hire is on his right. The Archbishop, on his left, has taken
his place by the dais: La Trémouille at the other side of it. The
Duchess de la Trémouille, pretending to be the Queen, sits in the
Consort’s chair, with a group of ladies in waiting close by, behind the
Archbishop._
_The chatter of the courtiers makes such a noise that nobody notices
the appearance of the page at the door._
THE PAGE. The Duke of—[_Nobody listens_]. The Duke of—[_The chatter
continues. Indignant at his failure to command a hearing, he snatches
the halberd of the nearest man-at-arms, and thumps the floor with it.
The chatter ceases; and everybody looks at him in silence_]. Attention!
[_He restores the halberd to the man-at-arms_]. The Duke of Vendôme
presents Joan the Maid to his Majesty.
CHARLES [_putting his finger on his lip_] Ssh! [_He hides behind the
nearest courtier, peering out to see what happens_].
BLUEBEARD [_majestically_] Let her approach the throne.
_Joan, dressed as a soldier, with her hair bobbed and hanging thickly
round her face, is led in by a bashful and speechless nobleman, from
whom she detaches herself to stop and look round eagerly for the
Dauphin._
THE DUCHESS [_to the nearest lady in waiting_] My dear! Her hair!
_All the ladies explode in uncontrollable laughter._
BLUEBEARD [_trying not to laugh, and waving his hand in deprecation of
their merriment_] Ssh—ssh! Ladies! Ladies!!
JOAN [_not at all embarrassed_] I wear it like this because I am a
soldier. Where be Dauphin?
_A titter runs through the Court as she walks to the dais._
BLUEBEARD [_condescendingly_] You are in the presence of the Dauphin.
_Joan looks at him sceptically for a moment, scanning him hard up and
down to make sure. Dead silence, all watching her. Fun dawns in her
face._
JOAN. Coom, Bluebeard! Thou canst not fool me. Where be Dauphin?
_A roar of laughter breaks out as Gilles, with a gesture of surrender,
joins in the laugh, and jumps down from the dais beside La Trémouille.
Joan, also on the broad grin, turns back, searching along the row of
courtiers, and presently makes a dive, and drags out Charles by the
arm._
JOAN [_releasing him and bobbing him a little curtsey_] Gentle little
Dauphin, I am sent to you to drive the English away from Orleans and
from France, and to crown you king in the cathedral at Rheims, where all
true kings of France are crowned.
CHARLES [_triumphant, to the Court_] You see, all of you: she knew the
blood royal. Who dare say now that I am not my father’s son? [_To Joan_]
But if you want me to be crowned at Rheims you must talk to the
Archbishop, not to me. There he is [_he is standing behind her_] !
JOAN [_turning quickly, overwhelmed with emotion_] Oh, my lord! [_She
falls on both knees before him, with bowed head, not daring to look up_]
My lord: I am only a poor country girl; and you are filled with the
blessedness and glory of God Himself; but you will touch me with your
hands, and give me your blessing, wont you?
BLUEBEARD [_whispering to La Trémouille_] The old fox blushes.
LA TRÉMOUILLE. Another miracle!
THE ARCHBISHOP [_touched, putting his hand on her head_] Child: you are
in love with religion.
JOAN [_startled: looking up at him_] Am I? I never thought of that. Is
there any harm in it?
THE ARCHBISHOP. There is no harm in it, my child. But there is danger.
JOAN [_rising, with a sunflush of reckless happiness irradiating her
face_] There is always danger, except in heaven. Oh, my lord, you have
given me such strength, such courage. It must be a most wonderful thing
to be Archbishop.
_The Court smiles broadly: even titters a little._
THE ARCHBISHOP [_drawing himself up sensitively_] Gentlemen: your levity
is rebuked by this maid’s faith. I am, God help me, all unworthy; but
your mirth is a deadly sin.
_Their faces fall. Dead silence._
BLUEBEARD. My lord: we were laughing at her, not at you.
THE ARCHBISHOP. What? Not at my unworthiness but at her faith! Gilles de
Rais: this maid prophesied that the blasphemer should be drowned in his
sin—
JOAN [_distressed_] No!
THE ARCHBISHOP [_silencing her by a gesture_] I prophesy now that you
will be hanged in yours if you do not learn when to laugh and when to
pray.
BLUEBEARD. My lord: I stand rebuked. I am sorry: I can say no more. But
if you prophesy that I shall be hanged, I shall never be able to resist
temptation, because I shall always be telling myself that I may as well
be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
_The courtiers take heart at this. There is more tittering._
JOAN [_scandalized_] You are an idle fellow, Bluebeard; and you have
great impudence to answer the Archbishop.
LA HIRE [_with a huge chuckle_] Well said, lass! Well said!
JOAN [_impatiently to the Archbishop_] Oh, my lord, will you send all
these silly folks away so that I may speak to the Dauphin alone?
LA HIRE [_goodhumoredly_] I can take a hint. [_He salutes; turns on his
heel; and goes out_].
THE ARCHBISHOP. Come, gentlemen. The Maid comes with God’s blessing, and
must be obeyed.
_The courtiers withdraw, some through the arch, others at the opposite
side. The Archbishop marches across to the door, followed by the Duchess
and La Trémouille. As the Archbishop passes Joan, she falls on her
knees, and kisses the hem of his robe fervently. He shakes his head in
instinctive remonstrance; gathers the robe from her; and goes out. She
is left kneeling directly in the Duchess’s way._
THE DUCHESS [_coldly_] Will you allow me to pass, please?
JOAN [_hastily rising, and standing back_] Beg pardon, maam, I am sure.
_The Duchess passes on. Joan stares after her; then whispers to the
Dauphin._
JOAN. Be that Queen?
CHARLES. No. She thinks she is.
JOAN [_again staring after the Duchess_] Oo-oo-ooh! [_Her awestruck
amazement at the figure cut by the magnificently dressed lady is not
wholly complimentary_].
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_very surly_] I’ll trouble your Highness not to gibe at
my wife. [_He goes out. The others have already gone_].
JOAN [_to the Dauphin_] Who be old Gruff-and-Grum?
CHARLES. He is the Duke de la Trémouille.
JOAN. What be his job?
CHARLES. He pretends to command the army. And whenever I find a friend I
can care for, he kills him.
JOAN. Why dost let him?
CHARLES [_petulantly moving to the throne side of the room to escape
from her magnetic field_] How can I prevent him? He bullies me. They all
bully me.
JOAN. Art afraid?
CHARLES. Yes: I am afraid. It’s no use preaching to me about it. It’s
all very well for these big men with their armor that is too heavy for
me, and their swords that I can hardly lift, and their muscle and their
shouting and their bad tempers. They like fighting: most of them are
making fools of themselves all the time they are not fighting; but I am
quiet and sensible; and I dont want to kill people: I only want to be
left alone to enjoy myself in my own way. I never asked to be a king: it
was pushed on me. So if you are going to say “Son of St Louis: gird on
the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory,” you may spare your
breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that
way; and there is an end of it.
JOAN [_trenchant and masterful_] Blethers! We are all like that to begin
with. I shall put courage into thee.
CHARLES. But I dont want to have courage put into me. I want to sleep
in a comfortable bed, and not live in continual terror of being killed
or wounded. Put courage into the others, and let them have their
bellyful of fighting; but let me alone.
JOAN. It’s no use, Charlie: thou must face what God puts on thee. If
thou fail to make thyself king, thoult be a beggar: what else art fit
for? Come! Let me see thee sitting on the throne. I have looked forward
to that.
CHARLES. What is the good of sitting on the throne when the other
fellows give all the orders? However! [_he sits enthroned, a piteous
figure_] here is the king for you! Look your fill at the poor devil.
JOAN. Thourt not king yet, lad: thourt but Dauphin. Be not led away by
them around thee. Dressing up dont fill empty noddle. I know the
people: the real people that make thy bread for thee; and I tell thee
they count no man king of France until the holy oil has been poured on
his hair, and himself consecrated and crowned in Rheims Cathedral. And
thou needs new clothes, Charlie. Why does not Queen look after thee
properly?
CHARLES. We’re too poor. She wants all the money we can spare to put on
her own back. Besides, I like to see her beautifully dressed; and I
dont care what I wear myself; I should look ugly anyhow.
JOAN. There is some good in thee, Charlie; but it is not yet a king’s
good.
CHARLES. We shall see. I am not such a fool as I look. I have my eyes
open; and I can tell you that one good treaty is worth ten good fights.
These fighting fellows lose all on the treaties that they gain on the
fights. If we can only have a treaty, the English are sure to have the
worst of it, because they are better at fighting than at thinking.
JOAN. If the English win, it is they that will make the treaty; and then
God help poor France! Thou must fight, Charlie, whether thou will or no.
I will go first to hearten thee. We must take our courage in both hands:
aye, and pray for it with both hands too.
CHARLES [_descending from his throne and again crossing the room to
escape from her dominating urgency_] Oh do stop talking about God and
praying. I cant bear people who are always praying. Isnt it bad enough
to have to do it at the proper times?
JOAN [_pitying him_] Thou poor child, thou hast never prayed in thy
life. I must teach thee from the beginning.
CHARLES. I am not a child: I am a grown man and a father; and I will not
be taught any more.
JOAN. Aye, you have a little son. He that will be Louis the Eleventh
when you die. Would you not fight for him?
CHARLES. No: a horrid boy. He hates me. He hates everybody, selfish
little beast! I dont want to be bothered with children. I dont want to
be a father; and I dont want to be a son: especially a son of St Louis.
I dont want to be any of these fine things you all have your heads full
of: I want to be just what I am. Why cant you mind your own business,
and let me mind mine?
JOAN [_again contemptuous_] Minding your own business is like minding
your own body: it’s the shortest way to make yourself sick. What is my
business? Helping mother at home. What is thine? Petting lapdogs and
sucking sugarsticks. I call that muck. I tell thee it is God’s business
we are here to do: not our own. I have a message to thee from God; and
thou must listen to it, though thy heart break with the terror of it.
CHARLES. I dont want a message; but can you tell me any secrets? Can
you do any cures? Can you turn lead into gold, or anything of that sort?
JOAN. I can turn thee into a king, in Rheims Cathedral; and that is a
miracle that will take some doing, it seems.
CHARLES. If we go to Rheims, and have a coronation, Anne will want new
dresses. We cant afford them. I am all right as I am.
JOAN. As you are! And what is that? Less than my father’s poorest
shepherd. Thourt not lawful owner of thy own land of France till thou
be consecrated.
CHARLES. But I shall not be lawful owner of my own land anyhow. Will the
consecration pay off my mortgages? I have pledged my last acre to the
Archbishop and that fat bully. I owe money even to Bluebeard.
JOAN [_earnestly_] Charlie: I come from the land, and have gotten my
strength working on the land; and I tell thee that the land is thine to
rule righteously and keep God’s peace in, and not to pledge at the
pawnshop as a drunken woman pledges her children’s clothes. And I come
from God to tell thee to kneel in the cathedral and solemnly give thy
kingdom to Him for ever and ever, and become the greatest king in the
world as His steward and His bailiff, His soldier and His servant. The
very clay of France will become holy: her soldiers will be the soldiers
of God: the rebel dukes will be rebels against God: the English will
fall on their knees and beg thee let them return to their lawful homes
in peace. Wilt be a poor little Judas, and betray me and Him that sent
me?
CHARLES [_tempted at last_] Oh, if I only dare!
JOAN. I shall dare, dare, and dare again, in God’s name! Art for or
against me?
CHARLES [_excited_] I’ll risk it. I warn you I shant be able to keep it
up; but I’ll risk it. You shall see. [_Running to the main door and
shouting_] Hallo! Come back, everybody. [_To Joan, as he runs back to
the arch opposite_] Mind you stand by and dont let me be bullied.
[_Through the arch_] Come along, will you: the whole Court. [_He sits
down in the royal chair as they all hurry in to their former places,
chattering and wondering_]. Now I’m in for it; but no matter: here goes!
[_To the page_] Call for silence, you little beast, will you?
THE PAGE [_snatching a halberd as before and thumping with it
repeatedly_] Silence for His Majesty the King. The King speaks.
[_Peremptorily_] Will you be silent there? [_Silence_].
CHARLES [_rising_] I have given the command of the army to The Maid. The
Maid is to do as she likes with it. [_He descends from the dais_].
_General amazement. La Hire, delighted, slaps his steel thigh-piece
with his gauntlet._
LA TRÉMOUILLE [_turning threateningly towards Charles_] What is this?
_I_ command the army.
JOAN [_quickly puts her hand on Charles’s shoulder as he instinctively
recoils_] !
CHARLES [_with a grotesque effort, culminating in an extravagant
gesture, snaps his fingers in the Chamberlain’s face_] !
JOAN. Thourt answered, old Gruff-and-Grum. [_Suddenly flashing out her
sword as she divines that her moment has come_] Who is for God and His
Maid? Who is for Orleans with me?
LA HIRE [_carried away, drawing also_] For God and His Maid! To Orleans!
ALL THE KNIGHTS [_following his lead with enthusiasm_] To Orleans!
_Joan, radiant, falls on her knees in thanksgiving to God. They all
kneel, except the Archbishop, who gives his benediction with a sign, and
La Trémouille, who collapses, cursing._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE III
_Orleans, May 29th, 1429. Dunois, aged 26, is pacing up and down a
patch of ground on the south bank of the silver Loire, commanding a long
view of the river in both directions. He has had his lance stuck up with
a pennon, which streams in a strong east wind. His shield with its bend
sinister lies beside it. He has his commander’s baton in his hand. He is
well built, carrying his armor easily. His broad brow and pointed chin
give him an equilaterally triangular face, already marked by active
service and responsibility, with the expression of a goodnatured and
capable man who has no affectations and no foolish illusions. His page
is sitting on the ground, elbows on knees, cheeks on fists, idly
watching the water. It is evening; and both man and boy are affected by
the loveliness of the Loire._
DUNOIS [_halting for a moment to glance up at the streaming pennon and
shake his head wearily before he resumes his pacing_] West wind, west
wind, west wind. Strumpet: steadfast when you should be wanton, wanton
when you should be steadfast. West wind on the silver Loire: what rhymes
to Loire? [_He looks again at the pennon, and shakes his fist at it_]
Change, curse you, change, English harlot of a wind, change. West, west,
I tell you. [_With a growl he resumes his march in silence, but soon
begins again_] West wind, wanton wind, wilful wind, womanish wind, false
wind from over the water, will you never blow again?
THE PAGE [_bounding to his feet_] See! There! There she goes!
DUNOIS [_startled from his reverie: eagerly_] Where? Who? The Maid?
THE PAGE. No: the kingfisher. Like blue lightning. She went into that
bush.
DUNOIS [_furiously disappointed_] Is that all? You infernal young idiot:
I have a mind to pitch you into the river.
THE PAGE [_not afraid, knowing his man_] It looked frightfully jolly,
that flash of blue. Look! There goes the other!
DUNOIS [_running eagerly to the river brim_] Where? Where?
THE PAGE [_pointing_] Passing the reeds.
DUNOIS [_delighted_] I see.
_They follow the flight until the bird takes cover._
THE PAGE. You blew me up because you were not in time to see them
yesterday.
DUNOIS. You knew I was expecting The Maid when you set up your yelping.
I will give you something to yelp for next time.
THE PAGE. Arnt they lovely? I wish I could catch them.
DUNOIS. Let me catch you trying to trap them, and I will put you in the
iron cage for a month to teach you what a cage feels like. You are an
abominable boy.
THE PAGE [_laughs, and squats down as before_] !
DUNOIS [_pacing_] Blue bird, blue bird, since I am friend to thee,
change thou the wind for me. No: it does not rhyme. He who has sinned
for thee: that’s better. No sense in it, though. [_He finds himself
close to the page_] You abominable boy! [_He turns away from him_] Mary
in the blue snood, kingfisher color: will you grudge me a west wind?
A SENTRY’S VOICE WESTWARD. Halt! Who goes there?
JOAN’S VOICE. The Maid.
DUNOIS. Let her pass. Hither, Maid! To me!
_Joan, in splendid armor, rushes in in a blazing rage. The wind drops;
and the pennon flaps idly down the lance; but Dunois is too much
occupied with Joan to notice it._
JOAN [_bluntly_] Be you Bastard of Orleans?
DUNOIS [_cool and stern, pointing to his shield_] You see the bend
sinister. Are you Joan the Maid?
JOAN. Sure.
DUNOIS. Where are your troops?
JOAN. Miles behind. They have cheated me. They have brought me to the
wrong side of the river.
DUNOIS. I told them to.
JOAN. Why did you? The English are on the other side!
DUNOIS. The English are on both sides.
JOAN. But Orleans is on the other side. We must fight the English there.
How can we cross the river?
DUNOIS [_grimly_] There is a bridge.
JOAN. In God’s name, then, let us cross the bridge, and fall on them.
DUNOIS. It seems simple; but it cannot be done.
JOAN. Who says so?
DUNOIS. I say so; and older and wiser heads than mine are of the same
opinion.
JOAN [_roundly_] Then your older and wiser heads are fatheads: they have
made a fool of you; and now they want to make a fool of me too, bringing
me to the wrong side of the river. Do you not know that I bring you
better help than ever came to any general or any town?
DUNOIS [_smiling patiently_] Your own?
JOAN. No: the help and counsel of the King of Heaven. Which is the way
to the bridge?
DUNOIS. You are impatient, Maid.
JOAN. Is this a time for patience? Our enemy is at our gates; and here
we stand doing nothing. Oh, why are you not fighting? Listen to me: I
will deliver you from fear. I—
DUNOIS [_laughing heartily, and waving her off_] No, no, my girl: if you
delivered me from fear I should be a good knight for a story book, but a
very bad commander for the army. Come! let me begin to make a soldier of
you. [_He takes her to the water’s edge_]. Do you see those two forts at
this end of the bridge? the big ones?
JOAN. Yes. Are they ours or the goddams’?
DUNOIS. Be quiet, and listen to me. If I were in either of those forts
with only ten men I could hold it against an army. The English have more
than ten times ten goddams in those forts to hold them against us.
JOAN. They cannot hold them against God. God did not give them the land
under those forts: they stole it from Him. He gave it to us. I will take
those forts.
DUNOIS. Single-handed?
JOAN. Our men will take them. I will lead them.
DUNOIS. Not a man will follow you.
JOAN. I will not look back to see whether anyone is following me.
DUNOIS [_recognizing her mettle, and clapping her heartily on the
shoulder_] Good. You have the makings of a soldier in you. You are in
love with war.
JOAN [_startled_] Oh! And the Archbishop said I was in love with
religion.
DUNOIS. I, God forgive me, am a little in love with war myself, the ugly
devil! I am like a man with two wives. Do you want to be like a woman
with two husbands?
JOAN [_matter-of-factly_] I will never take a husband. A man in Toul
took an action against me for breach of promise; but I never promised
him. I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will
not dress as a woman. I do not care for the things women care for. They
dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge, and of
placing the big guns. You soldiers do not know how to use the big guns:
you think you can win battles with a great noise and smoke.
DUNOIS [_with a shrug_] True. Half the time the artillery is more
trouble than it is worth.
JOAN. Aye, lad; but you cannot fight stone walls with horses: you must
have guns, and much bigger guns too.
DUNOIS [_grinning at her familiarity, and echoing it_] Aye, lass; but a
good heart and a stout ladder will get over the stoniest wall.
JOAN. I will be first up the ladder when we reach the fort, Bastard. I
dare you to follow me.
DUNOIS. You must not dare a staff officer, Joan: only company officers
are allowed to indulge in displays of personal courage. Besides, you
must know that I welcome you as a saint, not as a soldier. I have
daredevils enough at my call, if they could help me.
JOAN. I am not a daredevil: I am a servant of God. My sword is sacred: I
found it behind the altar in the church of St Catherine, where God hid
it for me; and I may not strike a blow with it. My heart is full of
courage, not of anger. I will lead; and your men will follow: that is
all I can do. But I must do it: you shall not stop me.
DUNOIS. All in good time. Our men cannot take those forts by a sally
across the bridge. They must come by water, and take the English in the
rear on this side.
JOAN [_her military sense asserting itself_] Then make rafts and put big
guns on them; and let your men cross to us.
DUNOIS. The rafts are ready; and the men are embarked. But they must
wait for God.
JOAN. What do you mean? God is waiting for them.
DUNOIS. Let Him send us a wind then. My boats are downstream: they
cannot come up against both wind and current. We must wait until God
changes the wind. Come: let me take you to the church.
JOAN. No. I love church; but the English will not yield to prayers: they
understand nothing but hard knocks and slashes. I will not go to church
until we have beaten them.
DUNOIS. You must: I have business for you there.
JOAN. What business?
DUNOIS. To pray for a west wind. I have prayed; and I have given two
silver candlesticks; but my prayers are not answered. Yours may be: you
are young and innocent.
JOAN. Oh yes: you are right. I will pray: I will tell St Catherine: she
will make God give me a west wind. Quick: shew me the way to the church.
THE PAGE [_sneezes violently_] At-cha!!!
JOAN. God bless you, child! Coom, Bastard.
_They go out. The page rises to follow. He picks up the shield, and is
taking the spear as well when he notices the pennon, which is now
streaming eastward._
THE PAGE [_dropping the shield and calling excitedly after them_]
Seigneur! Seigneur! Mademoiselle!
DUNOIS [_running back_] What is it? The kingfisher? [_He looks eagerly
for it up the river_].
JOAN [_joining them_] Oh, a kingfisher! Where?
THE PAGE. No: the wind, the wind, the wind [_pointing to the pennon_]:
that is what made me sneeze.
DUNOIS [_looking at the pennon_] The wind has changed. [_He crosses
himself_] God has spoken. [_Kneeling and handing his baton to Joan_] You
command the king’s army. I am your soldier.
THE PAGE [_looking down the river_] The boats have put off. They are
ripping upstream like anything.
DUNOIS [_rising_] Now for the forts. You dared me to follow. Dare you
lead?
JOAN [_bursting into tears and flinging her arms round Dunois, kissing
him on both cheeks_] Dunois, dear comrade in arms, help me. My eyes are
blinded with tears. Set my foot on the ladder, and say “Up, Joan.”
DUNOIS [_dragging her out_] Never mind the tears: make for the flash of
the guns.
JOAN [_in a blaze of courage_] Ah!
DUNOIS [_dragging her along with him_] For God and Saint Dennis!
THE PAGE [_shrilly_] The Maid! The Maid! God and The Maid! Hurray-ay-ay!
[_He snatches up the shield and lance, and capers out after them, mad
with excitement_].
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE IV
_A tent in the English camp. A bullnecked English chaplain of 50 is
sitting on a stool at a table, hard at work writing. At the other side
of the table an imposing nobleman, aged 46, is seated in a handsome
chair turning over the leaves of an illuminated Book of Hours. The
nobleman is enjoying himself: the chaplain is struggling with suppressed
wrath. There is an unoccupied leather stool on the nobleman’s left. The
table is on his right._
THE NOBLEMAN. Now this is what I call workmanship. There is nothing on
earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich
black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly
inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A
book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran that you
are scribbling.
THE CHAPLAIN. I must say, my lord, you take our situation very coolly.
Very coolly indeed.
THE NOBLEMAN [_supercilious_] What is the matter?
THE CHAPLAIN. The matter, my lord, is that we English have been
defeated.
THE NOBLEMAN. That happens, you know. It is only in history books and
ballads that the enemy is always defeated.
THE CHAPLAIN. But we are being defeated over and over again. First,
Orleans—
THE NOBLEMAN [_poohpoohing_] Oh, Orleans!
THE CHAPLAIN. I know what you are going to say, my lord: that was a
clear case of witchcraft and sorcery. But we are still being defeated.
Jargeau, Meung, Beugency, just like Orleans. And now we have been
butchered at Patay, and Sir John Talbot taken prisoner. [_He throws down
his pen, almost in tears_] I feel it, my lord: I feel it very deeply. I
cannot bear to see my countrymen defeated by a parcel of foreigners.
THE NOBLEMAN. Oh! you are an Englishman, are you?
THE CHAPLAIN. Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman. Still, like your
lordship, I was born in England; and it makes a difference.
THE NOBLEMAN. You are attached to the soil, eh?
THE CHAPLAIN. It pleases your lordship to be satirical at my expense:
your greatness privileges you to be so with impunity. But your lordship
knows very well that I am not attached to the soil in a vulgar manner,
like a serf. Still, I have a feeling about it; [_with growing
agitation_] and I am not ashamed of it; and [_rising wildly_] by God, if
this goes on any longer I will fling my cassock to the devil, and take
arms myself, and strangle the accursed witch with my own hands.
THE NOBLEMAN [_laughing at him goodnaturedly_] So you shall, chaplain:
so you shall, if we can do nothing better. But not yet, not quite yet.
THE CHAPLAIN [_resumes his seat very sulkily_].
THE NOBLEMAN [_airily_] I should not care very much about the witch—you
see, I have made my pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the Heavenly
Powers, for their own credit, can hardly allow me to be worsted by a
village sorceress—but the Bastard of Orleans is a harder nut to crack;
and as he has been to the Holy Land too, honors are easy between us as
far as that goes.
THE CHAPLAIN. He is only a Frenchman, my lord.
THE NOBLEMAN. A Frenchman! Where did you pick up that expression? Are
these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call
themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call
themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their
countries. T h e i r s, if you please! What is to become of me and you
if that way of thinking comes into fashion?
THE CHAPLAIN. Why, my lord? Can it hurt us?
THE NOBLEMAN. Men cannot serve two masters. If this cant of serving
their country once takes hold of them, goodbye to the authority of their
feudal lords, and goodbye to the authority of the Church. That is,
goodbye to you and me.
THE CHAPLAIN. I hope I am a faithful servant of the Church; and there
are only six cousins between me and the barony of Stogumber, which was
created by the Conqueror. But is that any reason why I should stand by
and see Englishmen beaten by a French bastard and a witch from Lousy
Champagne?
THE NOBLEMAN. Easy, man, easy: we shall burn the witch and beat the
bastard all in good time. Indeed I am waiting at present for the Bishop
of Beauvais, to arrange the burning with him. He has been turned out of
his diocese by her faction.
THE CHAPLAIN. You have first to catch her, my lord.
THE NOBLEMAN. Or buy her. I will offer a king’s ransom.
THE CHAPLAIN. A king’s ransom! For that slut!
THE NOBLEMAN. One has to leave a margin. Some of Charles’s people will
sell her to the Burgundians; the Burgundians will sell her to us; and
there will probably be three or four middlemen who will expect their
little commissions.
THE CHAPLAIN. Monstrous. It is all those scoundrels of Jews: they get in
every time money changes hands. I would not leave a Jew alive in
Christendom if I had my way.
THE NOBLEMAN. Why not? The Jews generally give value. They make you pay;
but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something
for nothing are invariably Christians.
_A page appears._
THE PAGE. The Right Reverend the Bishop of Beauvais: Monseigneur
Cauchon.
_Cauchon, aged about 60, comes in. The page withdraws. The two
Englishmen rise._
THE NOBLEMAN [_with effusive courtesy_] My dear Bishop, how good of you
to come! Allow me to introduce myself: Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of
Warwick, at your service.
CAUCHON. Your lordship’s fame is well known to me.
WARWICK. This reverend cleric is Master John de Stogumber.
THE CHAPLAIN [_glibly_] John Bowyer Spenser Neville de Stogumber, at
your service, my lord: Bachelor of Theology, and Keeper of the Private
Seal to His Eminence the Cardinal of Winchester.
WARWICK [_to Cauchon_] You call him the Cardinal of England, I believe.
Our king’s uncle.
CAUCHON. Messire John de Stogumber: I am always the very good friend of
His Eminence. [_He extends his hand to the chaplain, who kisses his
ring_].
WARWICK. Do me the honor to be seated. [_He gives Cauchon his chair,
placing it at the head of the table_].
_Cauchon accepts the place of honor with a grave inclination. Warwick
fetches the leather stool carelessly, and sits in his former place. The
chaplain goes back to his chair._
_Though Warwick has taken second place in calculated deference to the
Bishop, he assumes the lead in opening the proceedings as a matter of
course. He is still cordial and expansive; but there is a new note in
his voice which means that he is coming to business._
WARWICK. Well, my Lord Bishop, you find us in one of our unlucky
moments. Charles is to be crowned at Rheims, practically by the young
woman from Lorraine; and—I must not deceive you, nor flatter your
hopes—we cannot prevent it. I suppose it will make a great difference to
Charles’s position.
CAUCHON. Undoubtedly. It is a masterstroke of The Maid’s.
THE CHAPLAIN [_again agitated_] We were not fairly beaten, my lord. No
Englishman is ever fairly beaten.
CAUCHON [_raises his eyebrow slightly, then quickly composes his face_].
WARWICK. Our friend here takes the view that the young woman is a
sorceress. It would, I presume, be the duty of your reverend lordship to
denounce her to the Inquisition, and have her burnt for that offence.
CAUCHON. If she were captured in my diocese: yes.
WARWICK [_feeling that they are getting on capitally_] Just so. Now I
suppose there can be no reasonable doubt that she is a sorceress.
THE CHAPLAIN. Not the least. An arrant witch.
WARWICK [_gently reproving the interruption_] We are asking for the
Bishop’s opinion, Messire John.
CAUCHON. We shall have to consider not merely our own opinions here, but
the opinions—the prejudices, if you like—of a French court.
WARWICK [_correcting_] A Catholic court, my lord.
CAUCHON. Catholic courts are composed of mortal men, like other courts,
however sacred their function and inspiration may be. And if the men are
Frenchmen, as the modern fashion calls them, I am afraid the bare fact
that an English army has been defeated by a French one will not convince
them that there is any sorcery in the matter.
THE CHAPLAIN. What! Not when the famous Sir John Talbot himself has been
defeated and actually taken prisoner by a drab from the ditches of
Lorraine!
CAUCHON. Sir John Talbot, we all know, is a fierce and formidable
soldier, Messire; but I have yet to learn that he is an able general.
And though it pleases you to say that he has been defeated by this girl,
some of us may be disposed to give a little of the credit to Dunois.
THE CHAPLAIN [_contemptuously_] The Bastard of Orleans!
CAUCHON. Let me remind—
WARWICK [_interposing_] I know what you are going to say, my lord.
Dunois defeated me at Montargis.
CAUCHON [_bowing_] I take that as evidence that the Seigneur Dunois is a
very able commander indeed.
WARWICK. Your lordship is the flower of courtesy. I admit, on our side,
that Talbot is a mere fighting animal, and that it probably served him
right to be taken at Patay.
THE CHAPLAIN [_chafing_] My lord: at Orleans this woman had her throat
pierced by an English arrow, and was seen to cry like a child from the
pain of it. It was a death wound; yet she fought all day; and when our
men had repulsed all her attacks like true Englishmen, she walked alone
to the wall of our fort with a white banner in her hand; and our men
were paralyzed, and could neither shoot nor strike whilst the French
fell on them and drove them on to the bridge, which immediately burst
into flames and crumbled under them, letting them down into the river,
where they were drowned in heaps. Was this your bastard’s generalship?
or were those flames the flames of hell, conjured up by witchcraft?
WARWICK. You will forgive Messire John’s vehemence, my lord; but he has
put our case. Dunois is a great captain, we admit; but why could he do
nothing until the witch came?
CAUCHON. I do not say that there were no supernatural powers on her
side. But the names on that white banner were not the names of Satan and
Beelzebub, but the blessed names of our Lord and His holy mother. And
your commander who was drowned—Clahz-da I think you call him—
WARWICK. Glasdale. Sir William Glasdale.
CAUCHON. Glass-dell, thank you. He was no saint; and many of our people
think that he was drowned for his blasphemies against The Maid.
WARWICK [_beginning to look very dubious_] Well, what are we to infer
from all this, my lord? Has The Maid converted you?
CAUCHON. If she had, my lord, I should have known better than to have
trusted myself here within your grasp.
WARWICK [_blandly deprecating_] Oh! oh! My lord!
CAUCHON. If the devil is making use of this girl—and I believe he is—
WARWICK [_reassured_] Ah! You hear, Messire John? I knew your lordship
would not fail us. Pardon my interruption. Proceed.
CAUCHON. If it be so, the devil has longer views than you give him
credit for.
WARWICK. Indeed? In what way? Listen to this, Messire John.
CAUCHON. If the devil wanted to damn a country girl, do you think so
easy a task would cost him the winning of half a dozen battles? No, my
lord: any trumpery imp could do that much if the girl could be damned at
all. The Prince of Darkness does not condescend to such cheap drudgery.
When he strikes, he strikes at the Catholic Church, whose realm is the
whole spiritual world. When he damns, he damns the souls of the entire
human race. Against that dreadful design The Church stands ever on
guard. And it is as one of the instruments of that design that I see
this girl. She is inspired, but diabolically inspired.
THE CHAPLAIN. I told you she was a witch.
CAUCHON [_fiercely_] She is not a witch. She is a heretic.
THE CHAPLAIN. What difference does that make?
CAUCHON. You, a priest, ask me that! You English are strangely blunt in
the mind. All these things that you call witchcraft are capable of a
natural explanation. The woman’s miracles would not impose on a rabbit:
she does not claim them as miracles herself. What do her victories prove
but that she has a better head on her shoulders than your swearing
Glass-dells and mad bull Talbots, and that the courage of faith, even
though it be a false faith, will always outstay the courage of wrath?
THE CHAPLAIN [_hardly able to believe his ears_] Does your lordship
compare Sir John Talbot, the heir to the earldom of Shrewsbury, to a mad
bull?!!!
WARWICK. It would not be seemly for you to do so, Messire John, as you
are still six removes from a barony. But as I am an earl, and Talbot is
only a knight, I may make bold to accept the comparison. [_To the
Bishop_] My lord: I wipe the slate as far as the witchcraft goes. None
the less, we must burn the woman.
CAUCHON. I cannot burn her. The Church cannot take life. And my first
duty is to seek this girl’s salvation.
WARWICK. No doubt. But you do burn people occasionally.
CAUCHON. No. When the Church cuts off an obstinate heretic as a dead
branch from the tree of life, the heretic is handed over to the secular
arm. The church has no part in what the secular arm may see fit to do.
WARWICK. Precisely. And I shall be the secular arm in this case. Well,
my lord, hand over your dead branch; and I will see that the fire is
ready for it. If you will answer for the Church’s part, I will answer
for the secular part.
CAUCHON [_with smouldering anger_] I can answer for nothing. You great
lords are too prone to treat the Church as a mere political convenience.
WARWICK [_smiling and propitiatory_] Not in England, I assure you.
CAUCHON. In England more than anywhere else. No, my lord: the soul of
this village girl is of equal value with yours or your king’s before the
throne of God; and my first duty is to save it. I will not suffer your
lordship to smile at me as if I were repeating a meaningless form of
words, and it were well understood between us that I should betray the
girl to you. I am no mere political bishop: my faith is to me what your
honor is to you; and if there be a loophole through which this baptized
child of God can creep to her salvation, I shall guide her to it.
THE CHAPLAIN [_rising in a fury_] You are a traitor.
CAUCHON [_springing up_] You lie, priest. [_Trembling with rage_] If you
dare do what this woman has done—set your country above the holy
Catholic Church—you shall go to the fire with her.
THE CHAPLAIN. My lord: I—I went too far. I—[_he sits down with a
submissive gesture_].
WARWICK [_who has risen apprehensively_] My lord: I apologize to you for
the word used by Messire John de Stogumber. It does not mean in England
what it does in France. In your language traitor means betrayer: one who
is perfidious, treacherous, unfaithful, disloyal. In our country it
means simply one who is not wholly devoted to our English interests.
CAUCHON. I am sorry: I did not understand. [_He subsides into his chair
with dignity._]
WARWICK [_resuming his seat, much relieved_] I must apologize on my own
account if I have seemed to take the burning of this poor girl too
lightly. When one has seen whole countrysides burnt over and over again
as mere items in military routine, one has to grow a very thick skin.
Otherwise one might go mad: at all events, I should. May I venture to
assume that your lordship also, having to see so many heretics burnt
from time to time, is compelled to take—shall I say a professional view
of what would otherwise be a very horrible incident?
CAUCHON. Yes: it is a painful duty: even, as you say, a horrible one.
But in comparison with the horror of heresy it is less than nothing. I
am not thinking of this girl’s body, which will suffer for a few moments
only, and which must in any event die in some more or less painful
manner, but of her soul, which may suffer to all eternity.
WARWICK. Just so; and God grant that her soul may be saved! But the
practical problem would seem to be how to save her soul without saving
her body. For we must face it, my lord: if this cult of The Maid goes
on, our cause is lost.
THE CHAPLAIN [_his voice broken like that of a man who has been crying_]
May I speak, my lord?
WARWICK. Really, Messire John, I had rather you did not, unless you can
keep your temper.
THE CHAPLAIN. It is only this. I speak under correction; but The Maid is
full of deceit: she pretends to be devout. Her prayers and confessions
are endless. How can she be accused of heresy when she neglects no
observance of a faithful daughter of The Church?
CAUCHON [_flaming up_] A faithful daughter of The Church! The Pope
himself at his proudest dare not presume as this woman presumes. She
acts as if she herself were The Church. She brings the message of God to
Charles; and The Church must stand aside. She will crown him in the
cathedral of Rheims: she, not The Church! She sends letters to the king
of England giving him God’s command through her to return to his island
on pain of God’s vengeance, which she will execute. Let me tell you that
the writing of such letters was the practice of the accursed Mahomet,
the anti-Christ. Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The
Church? Never. It is always God and herself.
WARWICK. What can you expect? A beggar on horseback! Her head is turned.
CAUCHON. Who has turned it? The devil. And for a mighty purpose. He is
spreading this heresy everywhere. The man Hus, burnt only thirteen years
ago at Constance, infected all Bohemia with it. A man named WcLeef,
himself an anointed priest, spread the pestilence in England; and to
your shame you let him die in his bed. We have such people here in
France too: I know the breed. It is cancerous: if it be not cut out,
stamped out, burnt out, it will not stop until it has brought the whole
body of human society into sin and corruption, into waste and ruin. By
it an Arab camel driver drove Christ and His Church out of Jerusalem,
and ravaged his way west like a wild beast until at last there stood
only the Pyrenees and God’s mercy between France and damnation. Yet what
did the camel driver do at the beginning more than this shepherd girl is
doing? He had his voices from the angel Gabriel: she has her voices from
St Catherine and St Margaret and the Blessed Michael. He declared
himself the messenger of God, and wrote in God’s name to the kings of
the earth. Her letters to them are going forth daily. It is not the
Mother of God now to whom we must look for intercession, but to Joan the
Maid. What will the world be like when The Church’s accumulated wisdom
and knowledge and experience, its councils of learned, venerable pious
men, are thrust into the kennel by every ignorant laborer or dairymaid
whom the devil can puff up with the monstrous self-conceit of being
directly inspired from heaven? It will be a world of blood, of fury, of
devastation, of each man striving for his own hand: in the end a world
wrecked back into barbarism. For now you have only Mahomet and his
dupes, and the Maid and her dupes; but what will it be when every girl
thinks herself a Joan and every man a Mahomet? I shudder to the very
marrow of my bones when I think of it. I have fought it all my life; and
I will fight it to the end. Let all this woman’s sins be forgiven her
except only this sin; for it is the sin against the Holy Ghost; and if
she does not recant in the dust before the world, and submit herself to
the last inch of her soul to her Church, to the fire she shall go if she
once falls into my hand.
WARWICK [_unimpressed_] You feel strongly about it, naturally.
CAUCHON. Do not you?
WARWICK. I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something
of the Mahometans. They were not so illbred as I had been led to
believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours.
CAUCHON [_displeased_] I have noticed this before. Men go to the East to
convert the infidels. And the infidels pervert them. The Crusader comes
back more than half a Saracen. Not to mention that all Englishmen are
born heretics.
THE CHAPLAIN. Englishmen heretics!!! [_Appealing to Warwick_] My lord:
must we endure this? His lordship is beside himself. How can what an
Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.
CAUCHON. I absolve you, Messire de Stogumber, on the ground of
invincible ignorance. The thick air of your country does not breed
theologians.
WARWICK. You would not say so if you heard us quarrelling about
religion, my lord! I am sorry you think I must be either a heretic or a
blockhead because, as a travelled man, I know that the followers of
Mahomet profess great respect for our Lord, and are more ready to
forgive St Peter for being a fisherman than your lordship is to forgive
Mahomet for being a camel driver. But at least we can proceed in this
matter without bigotry.
CAUCHON. When men call the zeal of the Christian Church bigotry I know
what to think.
WARWICK. They are only east and west views of the same thing.
CAUCHON [_bitterly ironical_] Only east and west! Only!!
WARWICK. Oh, my Lord Bishop, I am not gainsaying you. You will carry The
Church with you; but you have to carry the nobles also. To my mind there
is a stronger case against The Maid than the one you have so forcibly
put. Frankly, I am not afraid of this girl becoming another Mahomet, and
superseding The Church by a great heresy. I think you exaggerate that
risk. But have you noticed that in these letters of hers, she proposes
to all the kings of Europe, as she has already pressed on Charles, a
transaction which would wreck the whole social structure of Christendom?
CAUCHON. Wreck The Church. I tell you so.
WARWICK [_whose patience is wearing out_] My lord: pray get The Church
out of your head for a moment; and remember that there are temporal
institutions in the world as well as spiritual ones. I and my peers
represent the feudal aristocracy as you represent The Church. We are the
temporal power. Well, do you not see how this girl’s idea strikes at us?
CAUCHON. How does her idea strike at you, except as it strikes at all of
us, through The Church?
WARWICK. Her idea is that the kings should give their realms to God, and
then reign as God’s bailiffs.
CAUCHON [_not interested_] Quite sound theologically, my lord. But the
king will hardly care, provided he reign. It is an abstract idea: a mere
form of words.
WARWICK. By no means. It is a cunning device to supersede the
aristocracy, and make the king sole and absolute autocrat. Instead of
the king being merely the first among his peers, he becomes their
master. That we cannot suffer: we call no man master. Nominally we hold
our lands and dignities from the king, because there must be a keystone
to the arch of human society; but we hold our lands in our own hands,
and defend them with our own swords and those of our own tenants. Now by
The Maid’s doctrine the king will take our lands—our lands!—and make
them a present to God; and God will then vest them wholly in the king.
CAUCHON. Need you fear that? You are the makers of kings after all. York
or Lancaster in England, Lancaster or Valois in France: they reign
according to your pleasure.
WARWICK. Yes: but only as long as the people follow their feudal lords,
and know the king only as a travelling show, owning nothing but the
highway that belongs to everybody. If the people’s thoughts and hearts
were turned to the king, and their lords became only the king’s servants
in their eyes, the king could break us across his knee one by one; and
then what should we be but liveried courtiers in his halls?
CAUCHON. Still you need not fear, my lord. Some men are born kings; and
some are born statesmen. The two are seldom the same. Where would the
king find counsellors to plan and carry out such a policy for him?
WARWICK [_with a not too friendly smile_] Perhaps in the Church, my
lord.
CAUCHON [_with an equally sour smile, shrugs his shoulders, and does not
contradict him_].
WARWICK. Strike down the barons; and the cardinals will have it all
their own way.
CAUCHON [_conciliatory, dropping his polemical tone_] My lord: we shall
not defeat The Maid if we strike against one another. I know well that
there is a Will to Power in the world. I know that while it lasts there
will be a struggle between the Emperor and the Pope, between the dukes
and the political cardinals, between the barons and the kings. The devil
divides us and governs. I see you are no friend to The Church: you are
an earl first and last, as I am a churchman first and last. But can we
not sink our differences in the face of a common enemy? I see now that
what is in your mind is not that this girl has never once mentioned The
Church, and thinks only of God and herself, but that she has never once
mentioned the peerage, and thinks only of the king and herself.
WARWICK. Quite so. These two ideas of hers are the same idea at bottom.
It goes deep, my lord. It is the protest of the individual soul against
the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God.
I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it.
CAUCHON [_looking hard at him_] You understand it wonderfully well, my
lord. Scratch an Englishman, and find a Protestant.
WARWICK [_playing the pink of courtesy_] I think you are not entirely
void of sympathy with The Maid’s secular heresy, my lord. I leave you to
find a name for it.
CAUCHON. You mistake me, my lord. I have no sympathy with her political
presumptions. But as a priest I have gained a knowledge of the minds of
the common people; and there you will find yet another most dangerous
idea. I can express it only by such phrases as France for the French,
England for the English, Italy for the Italians, Spain for the Spanish,
and so forth. It is sometimes so narrow and bitter in country folk that
it surprises me that this country girl can rise above the idea of her
village for its villagers. But she can. She does. When she threatens to
drive the English from the soil of France she is undoubtedly thinking of
the whole extent of country in which French is spoken. To her the
French-speaking people are what the Holy Scriptures describe as a
nation. Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will: I can find
you no better name for it. I can only tell you that it is essentially
anti-Catholic and anti-Christian; for the Catholic Church knows only one
realm, and that is the realm of Christ’s kingdom. Divide that kingdom
into nations, and you dethrone Christ. Dethrone Christ, and who will
stand between our throats and the sword? The world will perish in a
welter of war.
WARWICK. Well, if you will burn the Protestant, I will burn the
Nationalist, though perhaps I shall not carry Messire John with me
there. England for the English will appeal to him.
THE CHAPLAIN. Certainly England for the English goes without saying: it
is the simple law of nature. But this woman denies to England her
legitimate conquests, given her by God because of her peculiar fitness
to rule over less civilized races for their own good. I do not
understand what your lordships mean by Protestant and Nationalist: you
are too learned and subtle for a poor clerk like myself. But I know as a
matter of plain commonsense that the woman is a rebel; and that is
enough for me. She rebels against Nature by wearing man’s clothes, and
fighting. She rebels against The Church by usurping the divine authority
of the Pope. She rebels against God by her damnable league with Satan
and his evil spirits against our army. And all these rebellions are only
excuses for her great rebellion against England. That is not to be
endured. Let her perish. Let her burn. Let her not infect the whole
flock. It is expedient that one woman die for the people.
WARWICK [_rising_] My lord: we seem to be agreed.
CAUCHON [_rising also, but in protest_] I will not imperil my soul. I
will uphold the justice of the Church. I will strive to the utmost for
this woman’s salvation.
WARWICK. I am sorry for the poor girl. I hate these severities. I will
spare her if I can.
THE CHAPLAIN [_implacably_] I would burn her with my own hands.
CAUCHON [_blessing him_] Sancta simplicitas!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE V
_The ambulatory in the cathedral of Rheims, near the door of the
vestry. A pillar bears one of the stations of the cross. The organ is
playing the people out of the nave after the coronation. Joan is
kneeling in prayer before the station. She is beautifully dressed, but
still in male attire. The organ ceases as Dunois, also splendidly
arrayed, comes into the ambulatory from the vestry._
DUNOIS. Come, Joan! you have had enough praying. After that fit of
crying you will catch a chill if you stay here any longer. It is all
over: the cathedral is empty; and the streets are full. They are calling
for The Maid. We have told them you are staying here alone to pray: but
they want to see you again.
JOAN. No: let the king have all the glory.
DUNOIS. He only spoils the show, poor devil. No, Joan: you have crowned
him; and you must go through with it.
JOAN [_shakes her head reluctantly_].
DUNOIS [_raising her_] Come come! it will be over in a couple of hours.
It’s better than the bridge at Orleans: eh?
JOAN. Oh, dear Dunois, how I wish it were the bridge at Orleans again!
We lived at that bridge.
DUNOIS. Yes, faith, and died too: some of us.
JOAN. Isnt it strange, Jack? I am such a coward: I am frightened beyond
words before a battle; but it is so dull afterwards when there is no
danger: oh, so dull! dull! dull!
DUNOIS. You must learn to be abstemious in war, just as you are in your
food and drink, my little saint.
JOAN. Dear Jack: I think you like me as a soldier likes his comrade.
DUNOIS. You need it, poor innocent child of God. You have not many
friends at court.
JOAN. Why do all these courtiers and knights and churchmen hate me? What
have I done to them? I have asked nothing for myself except that my
village shall not be taxed; for we cannot afford war taxes. I have
brought them luck and victory: I have set them right when they were
doing all sorts of stupid things: I have crowned Charles and made him a
real king; and all the honors he is handing out have gone to them. Then
why do they not love me?
DUNOIS [_rallying her_] Sim-ple-ton! Do you expect stupid people to love
you for shewing them up? Do blundering old military dug-outs love the
successful young captains who supersede them? Do ambitious politicians
love the climbers who take the front seats from them? Do archbishops
enjoy being played off their own altars, even by saints? Why, I should
be jealous of you myself if I were ambitious enough.
JOAN. You are the pick of the basket here, Jack: the only friend I have
among all these nobles. I’ll wager your mother was from the country. I
will go back to the farm when I have taken Paris.
DUNOIS. I am not so sure that they will let you take Paris.
JOAN [_startled_] What!
DUNOIS. I should have taken it myself before this if they had all been
sound about it. Some of them would rather Paris took you, I think. So
take care.
JOAN. Jack: the world is too wicked for me. If the goddams and the
Burgundians do not make an end of me, the French will. Only for my
voices I should lose all heart. That is why I had to steal away to pray
here alone after the coronation. I’ll tell you something, Jack. It is in
the bells I hear my voices. Not today, when they all rang: that was
nothing but jangling. But here in this corner, where the bells come down
from heaven, and the echoes linger, or in the fields, where they come
from a distance through the quiet of the countryside, my voices are in
them. [_The cathedral clock chimes the quarter_] Hark! [_She becomes
rapt_] Do you hear? “Dear-child-of-God”: just what you said. At the
half-hour they will say “Be-brave-go-on.” At the three-quarters they
will say “I-am-thy-Help.” But it is at the hour, when the great bell
goes after “God-will-save-France”: it is then that St Margaret and St
Catherine and sometimes even the blessed Michael will say things that I
cannot tell beforehand. Then, oh then—
DUNOIS [_interrupting her kindly but not sympathetically_] Then, Joan,
we shall hear whatever we fancy in the booming of the bell. You make me
uneasy when you talk about your voices: I should think you were a bit
cracked if I hadnt noticed that you give me very sensible reasons for
what you do, though I hear you telling others you are only obeying
Madame Saint Catherine.
JOAN [_crossly_] Well, I have to find reasons for you, because you do
not believe in my voices. But the voices come first; and I find the
reasons after: whatever you may choose to believe.
DUNOIS. Are you angry, Joan?
JOAN. Yes. [_Smiling_] No: not with you. I wish you were one of the
village babies.
DUNOIS. Why?
JOAN. I could nurse you for awhile.
DUNOIS. You are a bit of a woman after all.
JOAN. No: not a bit: I am a soldier and nothing else. Soldiers always
nurse children when they get a chance.
DUNOIS. That is true. [_He laughs_].
_King Charles, with Bluebeard on his left and La Hire on his right,
comes from the vestry, where he has been disrobing. Joan shrinks away
behind the pillar. Dunois is left between Charles and La Hire._
DUNOIS. Well, your Majesty is an anointed king at last. How do you like
it?
CHARLES. I would not go through it again to be emperor of the sun and
moon. The weight of those robes! I thought I should have dropped when
they loaded that crown on to me. And the famous holy oil they talked so
much about was rancid: phew! The Archbishop must be nearly dead: his
robes must have weighed a ton: they are stripping him still in the
vestry.
DUNOIS [_drily_] Your Majesty should wear armor oftener. That would
accustom you to heavy dressing.
CHARLES. Yes: the old jibe! Well, I am not going to wear armor: fighting
is not my job. Where is The Maid?
JOAN [_coming forward between Charles and Bluebeard, and falling on her
knee_] Sire: I have made you king: my work is done. I am going back to
my father’s farm.
CHARLES [_surprised, but relieved_] Oh, are you? Well, that will be very
nice.
JOAN [_rises, deeply discouraged_] !
CHARLES [_continuing heedlessly_] A healthy life, you know.
DUNOIS. But a dull one.
BLUEBEARD. You will find the petticoats tripping you up after leaving
them off for so long.
LA HIRE. You will miss the fighting. It’s a bad habit, but a grand one,
and the hardest of all to break yourself of.
CHARLES [_anxiously_] Still, we dont want you to stay if you would
really rather go home.
JOAN [_bitterly_] I know well that none of you will be sorry to see me
go. [_She turns her shoulder to Charles and walks past him to the more
congenial neighborhood of Dunois and La Hire_].
LA HIRE. Well, I shall be able to swear when I want to. But I shall miss
you at times.
JOAN. La Hire: in spite of all your sins and swears we shall meet in
heaven; for I love you as I love Pitou, my old sheep dog. Pitou could
kill a wolf. You will kill the English wolves until they go back to
their country and become good dogs of God, will you not?
LA HIRE. You and I together: yes.
JOAN. No: I shall last only a year from the beginning.
ALL THE OTHERS. What!
JOAN. I know it somehow.
DUNOIS. Nonsense!
JOAN. Jack: do you think you will be able to drive them out?
DUNOIS [_with quiet conviction_] Yes: I shall drive them out. They beat
us because we thought battles were tournaments and ransom markets. We
played the fool while the goddams took war seriously. But I have learnt
my lesson, and taken their measure. They have no roots here. I have
beaten them before; and I shall beat them again.
JOAN. You will not be cruel to them, Jack?
DUNOIS. The goddams will not yield to tender handling. We did not begin
it.
JOAN [_suddenly_] Jack: before I go home, let us take Paris.
CHARLES [_terrified_] Oh no no. We shall lose everything we have gained.
Oh dont let us have any more fighting. We can make a very good treaty
with the Duke of Burgundy.
JOAN. Treaty! [_She stamps with impatience_].
CHARLES. Well, why not, now that I am crowned and anointed? Oh, that
oil!
_The Archbishop comes from the vestry, and joins the group between
Charles and Bluebeard._
CHARLES. Archbishop: The Maid wants to start fighting again.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Have we ceased fighting, then? Are we at peace?
CHARLES. No: I suppose not; but let us be content with what we have
done. Let us make a treaty. Our luck is too good to last; and now is our
chance to stop before it turns.
JOAN. Luck! God has fought for us; and you call it luck! And you would
stop while there are still Englishmen on this holy earth of dear France!
THE ARCHBISHOP [_sternly_] Maid: the king addressed himself to me, not
to you. You forget yourself. You very often forget yourself.
JOAN [_unabashed, and rather roughly_] Then speak, you; and tell him
that it is not God’s will that he should take his hand from the plough.
THE ARCHBISHOP. If I am not so glib with the name of God as you are, it
is because I interpret His will with the authority of the Church and of
my sacred office. When you first came you respected it, and would not
have dared to speak as you are now speaking. You came clothed with the
virtue of humility; and because God blessed your enterprises
accordingly, you have stained yourself with the sin of pride. The old
Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris.
CHARLES. Yes: she thinks she knows better than everyone else.
JOAN [_distressed, but naïvely incapable of seeing the effect she is
producing_] But I do know better than any of you seem to. And I am not
proud: I never speak unless I know I am right.
BLUEBEARD } [_exclaiming { Ha ha!
CHARLES } together_] { Just so.
THE ARCHBISHOP. How do you know you are right?
JOAN. I always know. My voices—
CHARLES. Oh, your voices, your voices. Why dont the voices come to me?
I am king, not you.
JOAN. They do come to you; but you do not hear them. You have not sat in
the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings you
cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from your heart,
and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stop
ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do. [_Turning brusquely
from him_] But what voices do you need to tell you what the blacksmith
can tell you: that you must strike while the iron is hot? I tell you we
must make a dash at Compiègne and relieve it as we relieved Orleans.
Then Paris will open its gates; or if not, we will break through them.
What is your crown worth without your capital?
LA HIRE. That is what I say too. We shall go through them like a red hot
shot through a pound of butter. What do you say, Bastard?
DUNOIS. If our cannon balls were all as hot as your head, and we had
enough of them, we should conquer the earth, no doubt. Pluck and
impetuosity are good servants in war, but bad masters; they have
delivered us into the hands of the English every time we have trusted to
them. We never know when we are beaten: that is our great fault.
JOAN. You never know when you are victorious: that is a worse fault. I
shall have to make you carry looking-glasses in battle to convince you
that the English have not cut off all your noses. You would have been
besieged in Orleans still, you and your councils of war, if I had not
made you attack. You should always attack; and if you only hold on long
enough the enemy will stop first. You dont know how to begin a battle;
and you dont know how to use your cannons. And I do.
_She squats down on the flags with crossed ankles, pouting._
DUNOIS. I know what you think of us, General Joan.
JOAN. Never mind that, Jack. Tell them what you think of me.
DUNOIS. I think that God was on your side; for I have not forgotten how
the wind changed, and how our hearts changed when you came; and by my
faith I shall never deny that it was in your sign that we conquered. But
I tell you as a soldier that God is no man’s daily drudge, and no maid’s
either. If you are worthy of it he will sometimes snatch you out of the
jaws of death and set you on your feet again; but that is all: once on
your feet you must fight with all your might and all your craft. For he
has to be fair to your enemy too: dont forget that. Well, he set us on
our feet through you at Orleans; and the glory of it has carried us
through a few good battles here to the coronation. But if we presume on
it further, and trust to God to do the work we should do ourselves, we
shall be defeated; and serve us right!
JOAN. But—
DUNOIS. Sh! I have not finished. Do not think, any of you, that these
victories of ours were won without generalship. King Charles: you have
said no word in your proclamations of my part in this campaign; and I
make no complaint of that; for the people will run after The Maid and
her miracles and not after the Bastard’s hard work finding troops for
her and feeding them. But I know exactly how much God did for us through
The Maid, and how much He left me to do by my own wits; and I tell you
that your little hour of miracles is over, and that from this time on he
who plays the war game best will win—if the luck is on his side.
JOAN. Ah! if, if, if, if! If ifs and ans were pots and pans there’d be
no need of tinkers. [_Rising impetuously_] I tell you, Bastard, your art
of war is no use, because your knights are no good for real fighting.
War is only a game to them, like tennis and all their other games: they
make rules as to what is fair and what is not fair, and heap armor on
themselves and on their poor horses to keep out the arrows; and when
they fall they cant get up, and have to wait for their squires to come
and lift them to arrange about the ransom with the man that has poked
them off their horse. Cant you see that all the like of that is gone by
and done with? What use is armor against gunpowder? And if it was, do
you think men that are fighting for France and for God will stop to
bargain about ransoms, as half your knights live by doing? No: they will
fight to win; and they will give up their lives out of their own hand
into the hand of God when they go into battle, as I do. Common folks
understand this. They cannot afford armor and cannot pay ransoms; but
they follow me half naked into the moat and up the ladder and over the
wall. With them it is my life or thine, and God defend the right! You
may shake your head, Jack; and Bluebeard may twirl his billygoat’s beard
and cock his nose at me; but remember the day your knights and captains
refused to follow me to attack the English at Orleans! You locked the
gates to keep me in; and it was the townsfolk and the common people that
followed me and forced the gate, and shewed you the way to fight in
earnest.
BLUEBEARD [_offended_] Not content with being Pope Joan, you must be
Caesar and Alexander as well.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Pride will have a fall, Joan.
JOAN. Oh, never mind whether it is pride or not: is it true? is it
commonsense?
LA HIRE. It is true. Half of us are afraid of having our handsome noses
broken; and the other half are out for paying off their mortgages. Let
her have her way, Dunois: she does not know everything; but she has got
hold of the right end of the stick. Fighting is not what it was; and
those who know least about it often make the best job of it.
DUNOIS. I know all that. I do not fight in the old way: I have learnt
the lesson of Agincourt, of Poitiers and Crecy. I know how many lives
any move of mine will cost; and if the move is worth the cost I make it
and pay the cost. But Joan never counts the cost at all: she goes ahead
and trusts to God: she thinks she has God in her pocket. Up to now she
has had the numbers on her side; and she has won. But I know Joan; and I
see that some day she will go ahead when she has only ten men to do the
work of a hundred. And then she will find that God is on the side of the
big battalions. She will be taken by the enemy. And the lucky man that
makes the capture will receive sixteen thousand pounds from the Earl of
Ouareek.
JOAN [_flattered_] Sixteen thousand pounds! Eh, laddie, have they
offered that for me? There cannot be so much money in the world.
DUNOIS. There is, in England. And now tell me, all of you, which of you
will lift a finger to save Joan once the English have got her? I speak
first, for the army. The day after she has been dragged from her horse
by a goddam or a Burgundian, and he is not struck dead: the day after
she is locked in a dungeon, and the bars and bolts do not fly open at
the touch of St Peter’s angel: the day when the enemy finds out that she
is as vulnerable as I am and not a bit more invincible, she will not be
worth the life of a single soldier to us; and I will not risk that life,
much as I cherish her as a companion-in-arms.
JOAN. I dont blame you, Jack: you are right. I am not worth one
soldier’s life if God lets me be beaten; but France may think me worth
my ransom after what God has done for her through me.
CHARLES. I tell you I have no money; and this coronation, which is all
your fault, has cost me the last farthing I can borrow.
JOAN. The Church is richer than you. I put my trust in the Church.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Woman: they will drag you through the streets, and burn
you as a witch.
JOAN [_running to him_] Oh, my lord, do not say that. It is impossible.
I a witch!
THE ARCHBISHOP. Peter Cauchon knows his business. The University of
Paris has burnt a woman for saying that what you have done was well
done, and according to God.
JOAN [_bewildered_] But why? What sense is there in it? What I have done
is according to God. They could not burn a woman for speaking the truth.
THE ARCHBISHOP. They did.
JOAN. But you know that she was speaking the truth. You would not let
them burn me.
THE ARCHBISHOP. How could I prevent them?
JOAN. You would speak in the name of the Church. You are a great prince
of the Church. I would go anywhere with your blessing to protect me.
THE ARCHBISHOP. I have no blessing for you while you are proud and
disobedient.
JOAN. Oh, why will you go on saying things like that? I am not proud and
disobedient. I am a poor girl, and so ignorant that I do not know A from
B. How could I be proud? And how can you say that I am disobedient when
I always obey my voices, because they come from God.
THE ARCHBISHOP. The voice of God on earth is the voice of the Church
Militant; and all the voices that come to you are the echoes of your own
wilfulness.
JOAN. It is not true.
THE ARCHBISHOP [_flushing angrily_] You tell the Archbishop in his
cathedral that he lies; and yet you say you are not proud and
disobedient.
JOAN. I never said you lied. It was you that as good as said my voices
lied. When have they ever lied? If you will not believe in them: even if
they are only the echoes of my own commonsense, are they not always
right? and are not your earthly counsels always wrong?
THE ARCHBISHOP [_indignantly_] It is waste of time admonishing you.
CHARLES. It always comes back to the same thing. She is right, and
everyone else is wrong.
THE ARCHBISHOP. Take this as your last warning. If you perish through
setting your private judgment above the instructions of your spiritual
directors, the Church disowns you, and leaves you to whatever fate your
presumption may bring upon you. The Bastard has told you that if you
persist in setting up your military conceit above the counsels of your
commanders—
DUNOIS [_interposing_] To put it quite exactly, if you attempt to
relieve the garrison in Compiègne without the same superiority in
numbers you had at Orleans—
THE ARCHBISHOP. The army will disown you, and will not rescue you. And
His Majesty the King has told you that the throne has not the means of
ransoming you.
CHARLES. Not a penny.
THE ARCHBISHOP. You stand alone: absolutely alone, trusting to your own
conceit, your own ignorance, your own headstrong presumption, your own
impiety in hiding all these sins under the cloak of a trust in God. When
you pass through these doors into the sunlight, the crowd will cheer
you. They will bring you their little children and their invalids to
heal: they will kiss your hands and feet, and do what they can, poor
simple souls, to turn your head, and madden you with the self-confidence
that is leading you to your destruction. But you will be none the less
alone: they cannot save you. We and we only can stand between you and
the stake at which our enemies have burnt that wretched woman in Paris.
JOAN [_her eyes skyward_] I have better friends and better counsel than
yours.
THE ARCHBISHOP. I see that I am speaking in vain to a hardened heart.
You reject our protection, and are determined to turn us all against
you. In future, then, fend for yourself; and if you fail, God have mercy
on your soul.
DUNOIS. That is the truth, Joan. Heed it.
JOAN. Where would you all have been now if I had heeded that sort of
truth? There is no help, no counsel, in any of you. Yes: I am alone on
earth: I have always been alone. My father told my brothers to drown me
if I would not stay to mind his sheep while France was bleeding to
death: France might perish if only our lambs were safe. I thought France
would have friends at the court of the king of France; and I find only
wolves fighting for pieces of her poor torn body. I thought God would
have friends everywhere, because He is the friend of everyone; and in my
innocence I believed that you who now cast me out would be like strong
towers to keep harm from me. But I am wiser now; and nobody is any the
worse for being wiser. Do not think you can frighten me by telling me
that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my
loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? I see now
that the loneliness of God is His strength: what would He be if He
listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be
my strength too: it is better to be alone with God: His friendship will
not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare,
and dare, and dare, until I die. I will go out now to the common people,
and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours. You
will all be glad to see me burnt; but if I go through the fire I shall
go through it to their hearts for ever and ever. And so, God be with me!
_She goes from them. They stare after her in glum silence for a moment.
Then Gilles de Rais twirls his beard._
BLUEBEARD. You know, the woman is quite impossible. I dont dislike her,
really; but what are you to do with such a character?
DUNOIS. As God is my judge, if she fell into the Loire I would jump in
in full armor to fish her out. But if she plays the fool at Compiègne,
and gets caught, I must leave her to her doom.
LA HIRE. Then you had better chain me up; for I could follow her to hell
when the spirit rises in her like that.
THE ARCHBISHOP. She disturbs my judgment too: there is a dangerous power
in her outbursts. But the pit is open at her feet; and for good or evil
we cannot turn her from it.
CHARLES. If only she would keep quiet, or go home!
_They follow her dispiritedly._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCENE VI
_Rouen, 30th May 1431. A great stone hall in the castle, arranged for a
trial-at-law, but not a trial-by-jury, the court being the Bishop’s
court with the Inquisition participating: hence there are two raised
chairs side by side for the Bishop and the Inquisitor as judges. Rows of
chairs radiating from them at an obtuse angle are for the canons, the
doctors of law and theology, and the Dominican monks, who act as
assessors. In the angle is a table for the scribes, with stools. There
is also a heavy rough wooden stool for the prisoner. All these are at
the inner end of the hall. The further end is open to the courtyard
through a row of arches. The court is shielded from the weather by
screens and curtains._
_Looking down the great hall from the middle of the inner end, the
judicial chairs and scribes’ table are to the right. The prisoner’s
stool is to the left. There are arched doors right and left. It is a
fine sunshiny May morning._
_Warwick comes in through the arched doorway on the judges’ side,
followed by his page._
THE PAGE [_pertly_] I suppose your lordship is aware that we have no
business here. This is an ecclesiastical court; and we are only the
secular arm.
WARWICK. I am aware of that fact. Will it please your impudence to find
the Bishop of Beauvais for me, and give him a hint that he can have a
word with me here before the trial, if he wishes?
THE PAGE [_going_] Yes, my lord.
WARWICK. And mind you behave yourself. Do not address him as Pious
Peter.
THE PAGE. No, my lord. I shall be kind to him, because, when The Maid is
brought in, Pious Peter will have to pick a peck of pickled pepper.
_Cauchon enters through the same door with a Dominican monk and a
canon, the latter carrying a brief._
THE PAGE. The Right Reverend his lordship the Bishop of Beauvais. And
two other reverend gentlemen.
WARWICK. Get out; and see that we are not interrupted.
THE PAGE. Right, my lord [_he vanishes airily_].
CAUCHON. I wish your lordship good-morrow.
WARWICK. Good-morrow to your lordship. Have I had the pleasure of
meeting your friends before? I think not.
CAUCHON [_introducing the monk, who is on his right_] This, my lord, is
Brother John Lemaître, of the order of St Dominic. He is acting as
deputy for the Chief Inquisitor into the evil of heresy in France.
Brother John: the Earl of Warwick.
WARWICK. Your Reverence is most welcome. We have no Inquisitor in
England, unfortunately; though we miss him greatly, especially on
occasions like the present.
_The Inquisitor smiles patiently, and bows. He is a mild elderly
gentleman, but has evident reserves of authority and firmness._
CAUCHON [_introducing the Canon, who is on his left_] This gentleman is
Canon John D’Estivet, of the Chapter of Bayeux. He is acting as
Promoter.
WARWICK. Promoter?
CAUCHON. Prosecutor, you would call him in civil law.
WARWICK. Ah! prosecutor. Quite, quite. I am very glad to make your
acquaintance, Canon D’Estivet.
D’ESTIVET [_bows_] ! [_He is on the young side of middle age, well
mannered, but vulpine beneath his veneer_].
WARWICK. May I ask what stage the proceedings have reached? It is now
more than nine months since The Maid was captured at Compiègne by the
Burgundians. It is fully four months since I bought her from the
Burgundians for a very handsome sum, solely that she might be brought to
justice. It is very nearly three months since I delivered her up to you,
my Lord Bishop, as a person suspected of heresy. May I suggest that you
are taking a rather unconscionable time to make up your minds about a
very plain case? Is this trial never going to end?
THE INQUISITOR [_smiling_] It has not yet begun, my lord.
WARWICK. Not yet begun! Why, you have been at it eleven weeks!
CAUCHON. We have not been idle, my lord. We have held fifteen
examinations of The Maid: six public and nine private.
THE INQUISITOR [_always patiently smiling_] You see, my lord, I have
been present at only two of these examinations. They were proceedings of
the Bishop’s court solely, and not of the Holy Office. I have only just
decided to associate myself—that is, to associate the Holy
Inquisition—with the Bishop’s court. I did not at first think that this
was a case of heresy at all. I regarded it as a political case, and The
Maid as a prisoner of war. But having now been present at two of the
examinations, I must admit that this seems to be one of the gravest
cases of heresy within my experience. Therefore everything is now in
order; and we proceed to trial this morning. [_He moves towards the
judicial chairs_].
CAUCHON. This moment, if your lordship’s convenience allows.
WARWICK [_graciously_] Well, that is good news, gentlemen. I will not
attempt to conceal from you that our patience was becoming strained.
CAUCHON. So I gathered from the threats of your soldiers to drown those
of our people who favor The Maid.
WARWICK. Dear me! At all events their intentions were friendly to y o u,
my lord.
CAUCHON [_sternly_] I hope not. I am determined that the woman shall
have a fair hearing. The justice of the Church is not a mockery, my
lord.
THE INQUISITOR [_returning_] Never has there been a fairer examination
within my experience, my lord. The Maid needs no lawyers to take her
part: she will be tried by her most faithful friends, all ardently
desirous to save her soul from perdition.
D’ESTIVET. Sir: I am the Promoter; and it has been my painful duty to
present the case against the girl; but believe me, I would throw up my
case today and hasten to her defence if I did not know that men far my
superiors in learning and piety, in eloquence and persuasiveness, have
been sent to reason with her, to explain to her the danger she is
running, and the ease with which she may avoid it. [_Suddenly bursting
into forensic eloquence, to the disgust of Cauchon and the Inquisitor,
who have listened to him so far with patronizing approval_] Men have
dared to say that we are acting from hate; but God is our witness that
they lie. Have we tortured her? No. Have we ceased to exhort her; to
implore her to have pity on herself; to come to the bosom of her Church
as an erring but beloved child? Have we—
CAUCHON [_interrupting drily_] Take care, Canon. All that you say is
true; but if you make his lordship believe it I will not answer for your
life, and hardly for my own.
WARWICK [_deprecating, but by no means denying_] Oh, my lord, you are
very hard on us poor English. But we certainly do not share your pious
desire to save The Maid: in fact I tell you now plainly that her death
is a political necessity which I regret but cannot help. If the Church
lets her go—
CAUCHON [_with fierce and menacing pride_] If the Church lets her go,
woe to the man, were he the Emperor himself, who dares lay a finger on
her! The Church is not subject to political necessity, my lord!
THE INQUISITOR [_interposing smoothly_] You need have no anxiety about
the result, my lord. You have an invincible ally in the matter: one who
is far more determined than you that she shall burn.
WARWICK. And who is this very convenient partisan, may I ask?
THE INQUISITOR. The Maid herself. Unless you put a gag in her mouth you
cannot prevent her from convicting herself ten times over every time she
opens it.
D’ESTIVET. That is perfectly true, my lord. My hair bristles on my head
when I hear so young a creature utter such blasphemies.
WARWICK. Well, by all means do your best for her if you are quite sure
it will be of no avail. [_Looking hard at Cauchon_] I should be sorry to
have to act without the blessing of the Church.
CAUCHON [_with a mixture of cynical admiration and contempt_] And yet
they say Englishmen are hypocrites! You play for your side, my lord,
even at the peril of your soul. I cannot but admire such devotion; but I
dare not go so far myself. I fear damnation.
WARWICK. If we feared anything we could never govern England, my lord.
Shall I send your people in to you?
CAUCHON. Yes: it will be very good of your lordship to withdraw and
allow the court to assemble.
_Warwick turns on his heel, and goes out through the courtyard. Cauchon
takes one of the judicial seats; and D’Estivet sits at the scribes’
table, studying his brief._
CAUCHON [_casually, as he makes himself comfortable_] What scoundrels
these English nobles are!
THE INQUISITOR [_taking the other judicial chair on Cauchon’s left_] All
secular power makes men scoundrels. They are not trained for the work;
and they have not the Apostolic Succession. Our own nobles are just as
bad.
_The Bishop’s assessors hurry into the hall, headed by Chaplain de
Stogumber and Canon de Courcelles, a young priest of 30. The scribes sit
at the table, leaving a chair vacant opposite D’Estivet. Some of the
assessors take their seats: others stand chatting, waiting for the
proceedings to begin formally. De Stogumber, aggrieved and obstinate
will not take his seat: neither will the Canon, who stands on his
right._
CAUCHON. Good morning, Master de Stogumber. [_To the Inquisitor_]
Chaplain to the Cardinal of England.
THE CHAPLAIN [_correcting him_] Of Winchester, my lord. I have to make a
protest, my lord.
CAUCHON. You make a great many.
THE CHAPLAIN. I am not without support, my lord. Here is Master de
Courcelles, Canon of Paris, who associates himself with me in my
protest.
CAUCHON. Well, what is the matter?
THE CHAPLAIN [_sulkily_] Speak you, Master de Courcelles, since I do not
seem to enjoy his lordship’s confidence. [_He sits down in dudgeon next
to Cauchon, on his right._]
COURCELLES. My lord: we have been at great pains to draw up an
indictment of The Maid on sixtyfour counts. We are now told that they
have been reduced, without consulting us.
THE INQUISITOR. Master de Courcelles: I am the culprit. I am overwhelmed
with admiration for the zeal displayed in your sixtyfour counts; but in
accusing a heretic, as in other things, enough is enough. Also you must
remember that all the members of the court are not so subtle and
profound as you, and that some of your very great learning might appear
to them to be very great nonsense. Therefore I have thought it well to
have your sixtyfour articles cut down to twelve—
COURCELLES [_thunderstruck_] Twelve!!!
THE INQUISITOR. Twelve will, believe me, be quite enough for your
purpose.
THE CHAPLAIN. But some of the most important points have been reduced
almost to nothing. For instance, The Maid has actually declared that the
blessed saints Margaret and Catherine, and the holy Archangel Michael,
spoke to her in French. That is a vital point.
THE INQUISITOR. You think, doubtless, that they should have spoken in
Latin?
CAUCHON. No: he thinks they should have spoken in English.
THE CHAPLAIN. Naturally, my lord.
THE INQUISITOR. Well, as we are all here agreed, I think, that these
voices of The Maid are the voices of evil spirits tempting her to her
damnation, it would not be very courteous to you, Master de Stogumber,
or to the King of England, to assume that English is the devil’s native
language. So let it pass. The matter is not wholly omitted from the
twelve articles. Pray take your places, gentlemen; and let us proceed to
business.
_All who have not taken their seats, do so._
THE CHAPLAIN. Well, I protest. That is all.
COURCELLES. I think it hard that all our work should go for nothing. It
is only another example of the diabolical influence which this woman
exercises over the court. [_He takes his chair, which is on the
Chaplain’s right_].
CAUCHON. Do you suggest that I am under diabolical influence?
COURCELLES. I suggest nothing, my lord. But it seems to me that there is
a conspiracy here to hush up the fact that The Maid stole the Bishop of
Senlis’s horse.
CAUCHON [_keeping his temper with difficulty_] This is not a police
court. Are we to waste our time on such rubbish?
COURCELLES [_rising, shocked_] My lord: do you call the Bishop’s horse
rubbish?
THE INQUISITOR [_blandly_] Master de Courcelles: The Maid alleges that
she paid handsomely for the Bishop’s horse, and that if he did not get
the money the fault was not hers. As that may be true, the point is one
on which The Maid may well be acquitted.
COURCELLES. Yes, if it were an ordinary horse. But the Bishop’s horse!
how can she be acquitted for that? [_He sits down again, bewildered and
discouraged_].
THE INQUISITOR. I submit to you, with great respect, that if we persist
in trying The Maid on trumpery issues on which we may have to declare
her innocent, she may escape us on the great main issue of heresy, on
which she seems so far to insist on her own guilt. I will ask you,
therefore, to say nothing, when The Maid is brought before us, of these
stealings of horses, and dancings round fairy trees with the village
children, and prayings at haunted wells, and a dozen other things which
you were diligently inquiring into until my arrival. There is not a
village girl in France against whom you could not prove such things:
they all dance round haunted trees, and pray at magic wells. Some of
them would steal the Pope’s horse if they got the chance. Heresy,
gentlemen, heresy is the charge we have to try. The detection and
suppression of heresy is my peculiar business: I am here as an
inquisitor, not as an ordinary magistrate. Stick to the heresy,
gentlemen; and leave the other matters alone.
CAUCHON. I may say that we have sent to the girl’s village to make
inquiries about her; and there is practically nothing serious against
her.
THE CHAPLAIN } [_rising and { Nothing serious, my lord—
COURCELLES } clamoring together_] { What! The fairy tree not—
CAUCHON [_out of patience_] Be silent, gentlemen; or speak one at a
time.
_Courcelles collapses into his chair, intimidated._
THE CHAPLAIN [_sulkily resuming his seat_] That is what The Maid said to
us last Friday.
CAUCHON. I wish you had followed her counsel, sir. When I say nothing
serious, I mean nothing that men of sufficiently large mind to conduct
an inquiry like this would consider serious. I agree with my colleague
the Inquisitor that it is on the count of heresy that we must proceed.
LADVENU [_a young but ascetically fine-drawn Dominican who is sitting
next Courcelles, on his right_] But is there any great harm in the
girl’s heresy? Is it not merely her simplicity? Many saints have said as
much as Joan.
THE INQUISITOR [_dropping his blandness and speaking very gravely_]
Brother Martin: if you had seen what I have seen of heresy, you would
not think it a light thing even in its most apparently harmless and even
lovable and pious origins. Heresy begins with people who are to all
appearance better than their neighbors. A gentle and pious girl, or a
young man who has obeyed the command of our Lord by giving all his
riches to the poor, and putting on the garb of poverty, the life of
austerity, and the rule of humility and charity, may be the founder of a
heresy that will wreck both Church and Empire if not ruthlessly stamped
out in time. The records of the holy Inquisition are full of histories
we dare not give to the world, because they are beyond the belief of
honest men and innocent women; yet they all began with saintly
simpletons. I have seen this again and again. Mark what I say: the woman
who quarrels with her clothes, and puts on the dress of a man, is like
the man who throws off his fur gown and dresses like John the Baptist:
they are followed, as surely as the night follows the day, by bands of
wild women and men who refuse to wear any clothes at all. When maids
will neither marry nor take regular vows, and men reject marriage and
exalt their lusts into divine inspirations, then, as surely as the
summer follows the spring, they begin with polygamy, and end by incest.
Heresy at first seems innocent and even laudable; but it ends in such a
monstrous horror of unnatural wickedness that the most tenderhearted
among you, if you saw it at work as I have seen it, would clamor against
the mercy of the Church in dealing with it. For two hundred years the
Holy Office has striven with these diabolical madnesses; and it knows
that they begin always by vain and ignorant persons setting up their own
judgment against the Church, and taking it upon themselves to be the
interpreters of God’s will. You must not fall into the common error of
mistaking these simpletons for liars and hypocrites. They believe
honestly and sincerely that their diabolical inspiration is divine.
Therefore you must be on your guard against your natural compassion. You
are all, I hope, merciful men: how else could you have devoted your
lives to the service of our gentle Savior? You are going to see before
you a young girl, pious and chaste; for I must tell you, gentlemen, that
the things said of her by our English friends are supported by no
evidence, whilst there is abundant testimony that her excesses have been
excesses of religion and charity and not of worldliness and wantonness.
This girl is not one of those whose hard features are the sign of hard
hearts, and whose brazen looks and lewd demeanor condemn them before
they are accused. The devilish pride that has led her into her present
peril has left no mark on her countenance. Strange as it may seem to
you, it has even left no mark on her character outside those special
matters in which she is proud; so that you will see a diabolical pride
and a natural humility seated side by side in the selfsame soul.
Therefore be on your guard. God forbid that I should tell you to harden
your hearts; for her punishment if we condemn her will be so cruel that
we should forfeit our own hope of divine mercy were there one grain of
malice against her in our hearts. But if you hate cruelty—and if any man
here does not hate it I command him on his soul’s salvation to quit this
holy court—I say, if you hate cruelty, remember that nothing is so cruel
in its consequences as the toleration of heresy. Remember also that no
court of law can be so cruel as the common people are to those whom they
suspect of heresy. The heretic in the hands of the Holy Office is safe
from violence, is assured of a fair trial, and cannot suffer death, even
when guilty, if repentance follows sin. Innumerable lives of heretics
have been saved because the Holy Office has taken them out of the hands
of the people, and because the people have yielded them up, knowing that
the Holy Office would deal with them. Before the Holy Inquisition
existed, and even now when its officers are not within reach, the
unfortunate wretch suspected of heresy, perhaps quite ignorantly and
unjustly, is stoned, torn in pieces, drowned, burned in his house with
all his innocent children, without a trial, unshriven, unburied save as
a dog is buried: all of them deeds hateful to God and most cruel to man.
Gentlemen: I am compassionate by nature as well as by my profession; and
though the work I have to do may seem cruel to those who do not know how
much more cruel it would be to leave it undone, I would go to the stake
myself sooner than do it if I did not know its righteousness, its
necessity, its essential mercy. I ask you to address yourself to this
trial in that conviction. Anger is a bad counsellor: cast out anger.
Pity is sometimes a worse: cast out pity. But do not cast out mercy.
Remember only that justice comes first. Have you anything to say, my
lord, before we proceed to trial?
CAUCHON. You have spoken for me, and spoken better than I could. I do
not see how any sane man could disagree with a word that has fallen from
you. But this I will add. The crude heresies of which you have told us
are horrible; but their horror is like that of the black death: they
rage for a while and then die out, because sound and sensible men will
not under any incitement be reconciled to nakedness and incest and
polygamy and the like. But we are confronted today throughout Europe
with a heresy that is spreading among men not weak in mind nor diseased
in brain: nay, the stronger the mind, the more obstinate the heretic. It
is neither discredited by fantastic extremes nor corrupted by the common
lusts of the flesh; but it, too, sets up the private judgment of the
single erring mortal against the considered wisdom and experience of the
Church. The mighty structure of Catholic Christendom will never be
shaken by naked madmen or by the sins of Moab and Ammon. But it may be
betrayed from within, and brought to barbarous ruin and desolation, by
this arch heresy which the English Commander calls Protestantism.
THE ASSESSORS [_whispering_] Protestantism! What was that? What does the
Bishop mean? Is it a new heresy? The English Commander, he said. Did you
ever hear of Protestantism? etc., etc.
CAUCHON [_continuing_] And that reminds me. What provision has the Earl
of Warwick made for the defence of the secular arm should The Maid prove
obdurate, and the people be moved to pity her?
THE CHAPLAIN. Have no fear on that score, my lord. The noble earl has
eight hundred men-at-arms at the gates. She will not slip through our
English fingers even if the whole city be on her side.
CAUCHON [_revolted_] Will you not add, God grant that she repent and
purge her sin?
THE CHAPLAIN. That does not seem to me to be consistent; but of course I
agree with your lordship.
CAUCHON [_giving him up with a shrug of contempt_] The court sits.
THE INQUISITOR. Let the accused be brought in.
LADVENU [_calling_] The accused. Let her be brought in.
_Joan, chained by the ankles, is brought in through the arched door
behind the prisoner’s stool by a guard of English soldiers. With them is
the Executioner and his assistants. They lead her to the prisoner’s
stool, and place themselves behind it after taking off her chain. She
wears a page’s black suit. Her long imprisonment and the strain of the
examinations which have preceded the trial have left their mark on her;
but her vitality still holds: she confronts the court unabashed, without
a trace of the awe which their formal solemnity seems to require for the
complete success of its impressiveness._
THE INQUISITOR [_kindly_] Sit down, Joan. [_She sits on the prisoner’s
stool_]. You look very pale today. Are you not well?
JOAN. Thank you kindly: I am well enough. But the Bishop sent me some
carp; and it made me ill.
CAUCHON. I am sorry. I told them to see that it was fresh.
JOAN. You meant to be good to me, I know; but it is a fish that does not
agree with me. The English thought you were trying to poison me—
CAUCHON } [_together_] { What!
THE CHAPLAIN } { No, my lord.
JOAN [_continuing_] They are determined that I shall be burnt as a
witch; and they sent their doctor to cure me; but he was forbidden to
bleed me because the silly people believe that a witch’s witchery leaves
her if she is bled; so he only called me filthy names. Why do you leave
me in the hands of the English? I should be in the hands of the Church.
And why must I be chained by the feet to a log of wood? Are you afraid I
will fly away?
D’ESTIVET [_harshly_] Woman: it is not for you to question the court: it
is for us to question you.
COURCELLES. When you were left unchained, did you not try to escape by
jumping from a tower sixty feet high? If you cannot fly like a witch,
how is it that you are still alive?
JOAN. I suppose because the tower was not so high then. It has grown
higher every day since you began asking me questions about it.
D’ESTIVET. Why did you jump from the tower?
JOAN. How do you know that I jumped?
D’ESTIVET. You were found lying in the moat. Why did you leave the
tower?
JOAN. Why would anybody leave a prison if they could get out?
D’ESTIVET. You tried to escape.
JOAN. Of course I did; and not for the first time either. If you leave
the door of the cage open the bird will fly out.
D’ESTIVET [_rising_] That is a confession of heresy. I call the
attention of the court to it.
JOAN. Heresy, he calls it! Am I a heretic because I try to escape from
prison?
D’ESTIVET. Assuredly, if you are in the hands of the Church, and you
wilfully take yourself out of its hands, you are deserting the Church;
and that is heresy.
JOAN. It is great nonsense. Nobody could be such a fool as to think
that.
D’ESTIVET. You hear, my lord, how I am reviled in the execution of my
duty by this woman. [_He sits down indignantly_].
CAUCHON. I have warned you before, Joan, that you are doing yourself no
good by these pert answers.
JOAN. But you will not talk sense to me. I am reasonable if you will be
reasonable.
THE INQUISITOR [_interposing_] This is not yet in order. You forget,
Master Promoter, that the proceedings have not been formally opened. The
time for questions is after she has sworn on the Gospels to tell us the
whole truth.
JOAN. You say this to me every time. I have said again and again that I
will tell you all that concerns this trial. But I cannot tell you the
whole truth: God does not allow the whole truth to be told. You do not
understand it when I tell it. It is an old saying that he who tells too
much truth is sure to be hanged. I am weary of this argument: we have
been over it nine times already. I have sworn as much as I will swear;
and I will swear no more.
COURCELLES. My lord: she should be put to the torture.
THE INQUISITOR. You hear, Joan? That is what happens to the obdurate.
Think before you answer. Has she been shewn the instruments?
THE EXECUTIONER. They are ready, my lord. She has seen them.
JOAN. If you tear me limb from limb until you separate my soul from my
body you will get nothing out of me beyond what I have told you. What
more is there to tell that you could understand? Besides, I cannot bear
to be hurt; and if you hurt me I will say anything you like to stop the
pain. But I will take it all back afterwards; so what is the use of it?
LADVENU. There is much in that. We should proceed mercifully.
COURCELLES. But the torture is customary.
THE INQUISITOR. It must not be applied wantonly. If the accused will
confess voluntarily, then its use cannot be justified.
COURCELLES. But this is unusual and irregular. She refuses to take the
oath.
LADVENU [_disgusted_] Do you want to torture the girl for the mere
pleasure of it?
COURCELLES [_bewildered_] But it is not a pleasure. It is the law. It is
customary. It is always done.
THE INQUISITOR. That is not so, Master, except when the inquiries are
carried on by people who do not know their legal business.
COURCELLES. But the woman is a heretic. I assure you it is always done.
CAUCHON [_decisively_] It will not be done today if it is not necessary.
Let there be an end of this. I will not have it said that we proceeded
on forced confessions. We have sent our best preachers and doctors to
this woman to exhort and implore her to save her soul and body from the
fire: we shall not now send the executioner to thrust her into it.
COURCELLES. Your lordship is merciful, of course. But it is a great
responsibility to depart from the usual practice.
JOAN. Thou art a rare noodle, Master. Do what was done last time is thy
rule, eh?
COURCELLES [_rising_] Thou wanton: dost thou dare call me noodle?
THE INQUISITOR. Patience, Master, patience: I fear you will soon be only
too terribly avenged.
COURCELLES [_mutters_] Noodle indeed! [_He sits down, much
discontented_].
THE INQUISITOR. Meanwhile, let us not be moved by the rough side of a
shepherd lass’s tongue.
JOAN. Nay: I am no shepherd lass, though I have helped with the sheep
like anyone else. I will do a lady’s work in the house—spin or
weave—against any woman in Rouen.
THE INQUISITOR. This is not a time for vanity, Joan. You stand in great
peril.
JOAN. I know it: have I not been punished for my vanity? If I had not
worn my cloth of gold surcoat in battle like a fool, that Burgundian
soldier would never have pulled me backwards off my horse; and I should
not have been here.
THE CHAPLAIN. If you are so clever at woman’s work why do you not stay
at home and do it?
JOAN. There are plenty of other women to do it; but there is nobody to
do my work.
CAUCHON. Come! we are wasting time on trifles. Joan: I am going to put a
most solemn question to you. Take care how you answer; for your life and
salvation are at stake on it. Will you for all you have said and done,
be it good or bad, accept the judgment of God’s Church on earth? More
especially as to the acts and words that are imputed to you in this
trial by the Promoter here, will you submit your case to the inspired
interpretation of the Church Militant?
JOAN. I am a faithful child of the Church. I will obey the Church—
CAUCHON [_hopefully leaning forward_] You will?
JOAN. —provided it does not command anything impossible.
_Cauchon sinks back in his chair with a heavy sigh. The Inquisitor
purses his lips and frowns. Ladvenu shakes his head pitifully._
D’ESTIVET. She imputes to the Church the error and folly of commanding
the impossible.
JOAN. If you command me to declare that all that I have done and said,
and all the visions and revelations I have had, were not from God, then
that is impossible: I will not declare it for anything in the world.
What God made me do I will never go back on; and what He has commanded
or shall command I will not fail to do in spite of any man alive. That
is what I mean by impossible. And in case the Church should bid me do
anything contrary to the command I have from God, I will not consent to
it, no matter what it may be.
THE ASSESSORS [_shocked and indignant_] Oh! The Church contrary to God!
What do you say now? Flat heresy. This is beyond everything, etc., etc.
D’ESTIVET [_throwing down his brief_] My lord: do you need anything more
than this?
CAUCHON. Woman: you have said enough to burn ten heretics. Will you not
be warned? Will you not understand?
THE INQUISITOR. If the Church Militant tells you that your revelations
and visions are sent by the devil to tempt you to your damnation, will
you not believe that the Church is wiser than you?
JOAN. I believe that God is wiser than I; and it is His commands that I
will do. All the things that you call my crimes have come to me by the
command of God. I say that I have done them by the order of God: it is
impossible for me to say anything else. If any Churchman says the
contrary I shall not mind him: I shall mind God alone, whose command I
always follow.
LADVENU [_pleading with her urgently_] You do not know what you are
saying, child. Do you want to kill yourself? Listen. Do you not believe
that you are subject to the Church of God on earth?
JOAN. Yes. When have I ever denied it?
LADVENU. Good. That means, does it not, that you are subject to our Lord
the Pope, to the cardinals, the archbishops, and the bishops for whom
his lordship stands here today?
JOAN. God must be served first.
D’ESTIVET. Then your voices command you not to submit yourself to the
Church Militant?
JOAN. My voices do not tell me to disobey the Church; but God must be
served first.
CAUCHON. And you, and not the Church, are to be the judge?
JOAN. What other judgment can I judge by but my own?
THE ASSESSORS [_scandalized_] Oh! [_They cannot find words_].
CAUCHON. Out of your own mouth you have condemned yourself. We have
striven for your salvation to the verge of sinning ourselves: we have
opened the door to you again and again; and you have shut it in our
faces and in the face of God. Dare you pretend, after what you have
said, that you are in a state of grace?
JOAN. If I am not, may God bring me to it: if I am, may God keep me in
it!
LADVENU. That is a very good reply, my lord.
COURCELLES. Were you in a state of grace when you stole the Bishop’s
horse?
CAUCHON [_rising in a fury_] Oh, devil take the Bishop’s horse and you
too! We are here to try a case of heresy; and no sooner do we come to
the root of the matter than we are thrown back by idiots who understand
nothing but horses. [_Trembling with rage, he forces himself to sit
down_].
THE INQUISITOR. Gentlemen, gentlemen: in clinging to these small issues
you are The Maid’s best advocates. I am not surprised that his lordship
has lost patience with you. What does the Promoter say? Does he press
these trumpery matters?
D’ESTIVET. I am bound by my office to press everything; but when the
woman confesses a heresy that must bring upon her the doom of
excommunication, of what consequence is it that she has been guilty also
of offences which expose her to minor penances? I share the impatience
of his lordship as to these minor charges. Only, with great respect, I
must emphasize the gravity of two very horrible and blasphemous crimes
which she does not deny. First, she has intercourse with evil spirits,
and is therefore a sorceress. Second, she wears men’s clothes, which is
indecent, unnatural, and abominable; and in spite of our most earnest
remonstrances and entreaties, she will not change them even to receive
the sacrament.
JOAN. Is the blessed St Catherine an evil spirit? Is St Margaret? Is
Michael the Archangel?
COURCELLES. How do you know that the spirit which appears to you is an
archangel? Does he not appear to you as a naked man?
JOAN. Do you think God cannot afford clothes for him?
_The assessors cannot help smiling, especially as the joke is against
Courcelles._
LADVENU. Well answered, Joan.
THE INQUISITOR. It is, in effect, well answered. But no evil spirit
would be so simple as to appear to a young girl in a guise that would
scandalize her when he meant her to take him for a messenger from the
Most High? Joan: the Church instructs you that these apparitions are
demons seeking your soul’s perdition. Do you accept the instruction of
the Church?
JOAN. I accept the messenger of God. How could any faithful believer in
the Church refuse him?
CAUCHON. Wretched woman: again I ask you, do you know what you are
saying?
THE INQUISITOR. You wrestle in vain with the devil for her soul, my
lord: she will not be saved. Now as to this matter of the man’s dress.
For the last time, will you put off that impudent attire, and dress as
becomes your sex?
JOAN. I will not.
D’ESTIVET [_pouncing_] The sin of disobedience, my lord.
JOAN [_distressed_] But my voices tell me I must dress as a soldier.
LADVENU. Joan, Joan: does not that prove to you that the voices are the
voices of evil spirits? Can you suggest to us one good reason why an
angel of God should give you such shameless advice?
JOAN. Why, yes: what can be plainer commonsense? I was a soldier living
among soldiers. I am a prisoner guarded by soldiers. If I were to dress
as a woman they would think of me as a woman; and then what would become
of me? If I dress as a soldier they think of me as a soldier, and I can
live with them as I do at home with my brothers. That is why St
Catherine tells me I must not dress as a woman until she gives me leave.
COURCELLES. When will she give you leave?
JOAN. When you take me out of the hands of the English soldiers. I have
told you that I should be in the hands of the Church, and not left night
and day with four soldiers of the Earl of Warwick. Do you want me to
live with them in petticoats?
LADVENU. My lord: what she says is, God knows, very wrong and shocking;
but there is a grain of worldly sense in it such as might impose on a
simple village maiden.
JOAN. If we were as simple in the village as you are in your courts and
palaces, there would soon be no wheat to make bread for you.
CAUCHON. That is the thanks you get for trying to save her, Brother
Martin.
LADVENU. Joan: we are all trying to save you. His lordship is trying to
save you. The Inquisitor could not be more just to you if you were his
own daughter. But you are blinded by a terrible pride and
self-sufficiency.
JOAN. Why do you say that? I have said nothing wrong. I cannot
understand.
THE INQUISITOR. The blessed St Athanasius has laid it down in his creed
that those who cannot understand are damned. It is not enough to be
simple. It is not enough even to be what simple people call good. The
simplicity of a darkened mind is no better than the simplicity of a
beast.
JOAN. There is great wisdom in the simplicity of a beast, let me tell
you; and sometimes great foolishness in the wisdom of scholars.
LADVENU. We know that, Joan: we are not so foolish as you think us. Try
to resist the temptation to make pert replies to us. Do you see that man
who stands behind you [_he indicates the Executioner_] ?
JOAN [_turning and looking at the man_] Your torturer? But the Bishop
said I was not to be tortured.
LADVENU. You are not to be tortured because you have confessed
everything that is necessary to your condemnation. That man is not only
the torturer: he is also the Executioner. Executioner: let The Maid hear
your answers to my questions. Are you prepared for the burning of a
heretic this day?
THE EXECUTIONER. Yes, Master.
LADVENU. Is the stake ready?
THE EXECUTIONER. It is. In the market-place. The English have built it
too high for me to get near her and make the death easier. It will be a
cruel death.
JOAN [_horrified_] But you are not going to burn me now?
THE INQUISITOR. You realize it at last.
LADVENU. There are eight hundred English soldiers waiting to take you to
the market-place the moment the sentence of excommunication has passed
the lips of your judges. You are within a few short moments of that
doom.
JOAN [_looking round desperately for rescue_] Oh God!
LADVENU. Do not despair, Joan. The Church is merciful. You can save
yourself.
JOAN [_hopefully_] Yes: my voices promised me I should not be burnt. St
Catherine bade me be bold.
CAUCHON. Woman: are you quite mad? Do you not yet see that your voices
have deceived you?
JOAN. Oh no: that is impossible.
CAUCHON. Impossible! They have led you straight to your excommunication,
and to the stake which is there waiting for you.
LADVENU [_pressing the point hard_] Have they kept a single promise to
you since you were taken at Compiègne? The devil has betrayed you. The
Church holds out its arms to you.
JOAN [_despairing_] Oh, it is true: it is true: my voices have deceived
me. I have been mocked by devils: my faith is broken. I have dared and
dared; but only a fool will walk into a fire: God, who gave me my
commonsense, cannot will me to do that.
LADVENU. Now God be praised that He has saved you at the eleventh hour!
[_He hurries to the vacant seat at the scribes’ table, and snatches a
sheet of paper, on which he sets to work writing eagerly_].
CAUCHON. Amen!
JOAN. What must I do?
CAUCHON. You must sign a solemn recantation of your heresy.
JOAN. Sign? That means to write my name. I cannot write.
CAUCHON. You have signed many letters before.
JOAN. Yes; but someone held my hand and guided the pen. I can make my
mark.
THE CHAPLAIN [_who has been listening with growing alarm and
indignation_] My lord: do you mean that you are going to allow this
woman to escape us?
THE INQUISITOR. The law must take its course, Master de Stogumber. And
you know the law.
THE CHAPLAIN [_rising, purple with fury_] I know that there is no faith
in a Frenchman. [_Tumult, which he shouts down_]. I know what my lord
the Cardinal of Winchester will say when he hears of this. I know what
the Earl of Warwick will do when he learns that you intend to betray
him. There are eight hundred men at the gate who will see that this
abominable witch is burnt in spite of your teeth.
THE ASSESSORS [_meanwhile_] What is this? What did he say? He accuses us
of treachery! This is past bearing. No faith in a Frenchman! Did you
hear that? This is an intolerable fellow. Who is he? Is this what
English Churchmen are like? He must be mad or drunk, etc., etc.
THE INQUISITOR [_rising_] Silence, pray! Gentlemen: pray silence! Master
Chaplain: bethink you a moment of your holy office: of what you are, and
where you are. I direct you to sit down.
THE CHAPLAIN [_folding his arms doggedly, his face working
convulsively_] I will NOT sit down.
CAUCHON. Master Inquisitor; this man has called me a traitor to my face
before now.
THE CHAPLAIN. So you are a traitor. You are all traitors. You have been
doing nothing but begging this damnable witch on your knees to recant
all through this trial.
THE INQUISITOR [_placidly resuming his seat_] If you will not sit, you
must stand: that is all.
THE CHAPLAIN. I will NOT stand [_he flings himself back into his
chair_].
LADVENU [_rising with the paper in his hand_] My lord: here is the form
of recantation for The Maid to sign.
CAUCHON. Read it to her.
JOAN. Do not trouble. I will sign it.
THE INQUISITOR. Woman: you must know what you are putting your hand to.
Read it to her, Brother Martin. And let all be silent.
LADVENU [_reading quietly_] “I, Joan, commonly called The Maid, a
miserable sinner, do confess that I have most grievously sinned in the
following articles. I have pretended to have revelations from God and
the angels and the blessed saints, and perversely rejected the Church’s
warnings that these were temptations by demons. I have blasphemed
abominably by wearing an immodest dress, contrary to the Holy Scripture
and the canons of the Church. Also I have clipped my hair in the style
of a man, and, against all the duties which have made my sex specially
acceptable in heaven, have taken up the sword, even to the shedding of
human blood, inciting men to slay each other, invoking evil spirits to
delude them, and stubbornly and most blasphemously imputing these sins
to Almighty God. I confess to the sin of sedition, to the sin of
idolatry, to the sin of disobedience, to the sin of pride, and to the
sin of heresy. All of which sins I now renounce and abjure and depart
from, humbly thanking you Doctors and Masters who have brought me back
to the truth and into the grace of our Lord. And I will never return to
my errors, but will remain in communion with our Holy Church and in
obedience to our Holy Father the Pope of Rome. All this I swear by God
Almighty and the Holy Gospels, in witness whereto I sign my name to this
recantation.”
THE INQUISITOR. You understand this, Joan?
JOAN [_listless_] It is plain enough, sir.
THE INQUISITOR. And it is true?
JOAN. It may be true. If it were not true, the fire would not be ready
for me in the market-place.
LADVENU [_taking up his pen and a book, and going to her quickly lest
she should compromise herself again_] Come, child: let me guide your
hand. Take the pen. [_She does so; and they begin to write, using the
book as a desk_] J.E.H.A.N.E. So. Now make your mark by yourself.
JOAN [_makes her mark, and gives him back the pen, tormented by the
rebellion of her soul against her mind and body_] There!
LADVENU [_replacing the pen on the table, and handing the recantation to
Cauchon with a reverence_] Praise be to God, my brothers, the lamb has
returned to the flock; and the shepherd rejoices in her more than in
ninety and nine just persons. [_He returns to his seat_].
THE INQUISITOR [_taking the paper from Cauchon_] We declare thee by this
act set free from the danger of excommunication in which thou stoodest.
[_He throws the paper down to the table_].
JOAN. I thank you.
THE INQUISITOR. But because thou hast sinned most presumptuously against
God and the Holy Church, and that thou mayest repent thy errors in
solitary contemplation, and be shielded from all temptation to return to
them, we, for the good of thy soul, and for a penance that may wipe out
thy sins and bring thee finally unspotted to the throne of grace, do
condemn thee to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the water of
affliction to the end of thy earthly days in perpetual imprisonment.
JOAN [_rising in consternation and terrible anger_] Perpetual
imprisonment? Am I not then to be set free?
LADVENU [_mildly shocked_] Set free, child, after such wickedness as
yours! What are you dreaming of?
JOAN. Give me that writing. [_She rushes to the table; snatches up the
paper; and tears it into fragments_] Light your fire: do you think I
dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? My voices were right.
LADVENU. Joan! Joan!
JOAN. Yes: they told me you were fools [_the word gives great offence_],
and that I was not to listen to your fine words nor trust to your
charity. You promised me my life; but you lied [_indignant
exclamations_]. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead.
It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I
asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean.
Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from
the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain
my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the
hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me
everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness
and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace
in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my
warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the
trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as
they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the
trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the
healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel
voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot
live; and by your wanting to take them a w a y from me, or from any
human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine
is of God.
THE ASSESSORS [_in great commotion_] Blasphemy! blasphemy! She is
possessed. She said our counsel was of the devil. And hers of God.
Monstrous! The devil is in our midst, etc., etc.
D’ESTIVET [_shouting above the din_] She is a relapsed heretic,
obstinate, incorrigible, and altogether unworthy of the mercy we have
shewn her. I call for her excommunication.
THE CHAPLAIN [_to the Executioner_] Light your fire, man. To the stake
with her.
_The Executioner and his assistants hurry out through the courtyard._
LADVENU. You wicked girl: if your counsel were of God would He not
deliver you?
JOAN. His ways are not your ways. He wills that I go through the fire to
His bosom; for I am His child, and you are not fit that I should live
among you. That is my last word to you.
_The soldiers seize her._
CAUCHON [_rising_] Not yet.
_They wait. There is a dead silence. Cauchon turns to the Inquisitor
with an inquiring look. The Inquisitor nods affirmatively. They rise
solemnly, and intone the sentence antiphonally._
CAUCHON. We decree that thou art a relapsed heretic.
THE INQUISITOR. Cast out from the unity of the Church.
CAUCHON. Sundered from her body.
THE INQUISITOR. Infected with the leprosy of heresy.
CAUCHON. A member of Satan.
THE INQUISITOR. We declare that thou must be excommunicate.
CAUCHON. And now we do cast thee out, segregate thee, and abandon thee
to the secular power.
THE INQUISITOR. Admonishing the same secular power that it moderate its
judgment of thee in respect of death and division of the limbs. [_He
resumes his seat_].
CAUCHON. And if any true sign of penitence appear in thee, to permit our
Brother Martin to administer to thee the sacrament of penance.
THE CHAPLAIN. Into the fire with the witch [_he rushes at her, and helps
the soldiers to push her out_].
_Joan is taken away through the courtyard. The assessors rise in
disorder, and follow the soldiers, except Ladvenu, who has hidden his
face in his hands._
CAUCHON [_rising again in the act of sitting down_] No, no; this is
irregular. The representative of the secular arm should be here to
receive her from us.
THE INQUISITOR [_also on his feet again_] That man is an incorrigible
fool.
CAUCHON. Brother Martin: see that everything is done in order.
LADVENU. My place is at her side, my lord. You must exercise your own
authority. [_He hurries out_].
CAUCHON. These English are impossible: they will thrust her straight
into the fire. Look!
_He points to the courtyard, in which the glow and flicker of fire can
now be seen reddening the May daylight. Only the Bishop and the
Inquisitor are left in the Court._
CAUCHON [_turning to go_] We must stop that.
THE INQUISITOR [_calmly_] Yes; but not too fast, my lord.
CAUCHON [_halting_] But there is not a moment to lose.
THE INQUISITOR. We have proceeded in perfect order. If the English
choose to put themselves in the wrong, it is not our business to put
them in the right. A flaw in the procedure may be useful later on: one
never knows. And the sooner it is over, the better for that poor girl.
CAUCHON [_relaxing_] That is true. But I suppose we must see this
dreadful thing through.
THE INQUISITOR. One gets used to it. Habit is everything. I am
accustomed to the fire: it is soon over. But it is a terrible thing to
see a young and innocent creature crushed between these mighty forces,
the Church and the Law.
CAUCHON. You call her innocent!
THE INQUISITOR. Oh, quite innocent. What does she know of the Church and
the Law? She did not understand a word we were saying. It is the
ignorant who suffer. Come, or we shall be late for the end.
CAUCHON [_going with him_] I shall not be sorry if we are: I am not so
accustomed as you.
_They are going out when Warwick comes in, meeting them._
WARWICK. Oh, I am intruding. I thought it was all over. [_He makes a
feint of retiring_].
CAUCHON. Do not go, my lord. It is all over.
THE INQUISITOR. The execution is not in our hands, my lord; but it is
desirable that we should witness the end. So by your leave—[_He bows,
and goes out through the courtyard_].
CAUCHON. There is some doubt whether your people have observed the forms
of law, my lord.
WARWICK. I am told that there is some doubt whether your authority runs
in this city, my lord. It is not in your diocese. However, if you will
answer for that I will answer for the rest.
CAUCHON. It is to God that we both must answer. Good morning, my lord.
WARWICK. My lord: good morning.
_They look at one another for a moment with unconcealed hostility. Then
Cauchon follows the Inquisitor out. Warwick looks round. Finding himself
alone, he calls for attendance._
WARWICK. Hallo: some attendance here! [_Silence_]. Hallo, there!
[_Silence_]. Hallo! Brian, you young blackguard, where are you?
[_Silence_]. Guard! [_Silence_]. They have all gone to see the burning:
even that child.
_The silence is broken by someone frantically howling and sobbing._
WARWICK. What in the devil’s name—?
_The Chaplain staggers in from the courtyard like a demented creature,
his face streaming with tears, making the piteous sounds that Warwick
has heard. He stumbles to the prisoner’s stool, and throws himself upon
it with heartrending sobs._
WARWICK [_going to him and patting him on the shoulder_] What is it,
Master John? What is the matter?
THE CHAPLAIN [_clutching at his hands_] My lord, my lord: for Christ’s
sake pray for my wretched guilty soul.
WARWICK [_soothing him_] Yes, yes: of course I will. Calmly, gently—
THE CHAPLAIN [_blubbering miserably_] I am not a bad man, my lord.
WARWICK. No, no: not at all.
THE CHAPLAIN. I meant no harm. I did not know what it would be like.
WARWICK [_hardening_] Oh! You saw it, then?
THE CHAPLAIN. I did not know what I was doing. I am a hotheaded fool;
and I shall be damned to all eternity for it.
WARWICK. Nonsense! Very distressing, no doubt; but it was not your
doing.
THE CHAPLAIN [_lamentably_] I let them do it. If I had known, I would
have torn her from their hands. You don’t know: you havnt seen: it is
so easy to talk when you dont know. You madden yourself with words: you
damn yourself because it feels grand to throw oil on the flaming hell of
your own temper. But when it is brought home to you; when you see the
thing you have done; when it is blinding your eyes, stifling your
nostrils, tearing your heart, then—then—[_Falling on his knees_] O God,
take away this sight from me! O Christ, deliver me from this fire that
is consuming me! She cried to Thee in the midst of it: Jesus! Jesus!
Jesus! She is in Thy bosom; and I am in hell for evermore.
WARWICK [_summarily hauling him to his feet_] Come come, man! you must
pull yourself together. We shall have the whole town talking of this.
[_He throws him not too gently into a chair at the table_] If you have
not the nerve to see these things, why do you not do as I do, and stay
away?
THE CHAPLAIN [_bewildered and submissive_] She asked for a cross. A
soldier gave her two sticks tied together. Thank God he was an
Englishman! I might have done it; but I did not: I am a coward, a mad
dog, a fool. But he was an Englishman too.
WARWICK. The fool! They will burn him too if the priests get hold of
him.
THE CHAPLAIN [_shaken with convulsion_] Some of the people laughed at
her. They would have laughed at Christ. They were French people, my
lord: I know they were French.
WARWICK. Hush: someone is coming. Control yourself.
_Ladvenu comes back through the courtyard to Warwick’s right hand,
carrying a bishop’s cross which he has taken from a church. He is very
grave and composed._
WARWICK. I am informed that it is all over, Brother Martin.
LADVENU [_enigmatically_] We do not know, my lord. It may have only just
begun.
WARWICK. What does that mean, exactly?
LADVENU. I took this cross from the church for her that she might see it
to the last: she had only two sticks that she put into her bosom. When
the fire crept round us, and she saw that if I held the cross before her
I should be burnt myself, she warned me to get down and save myself. My
lord: a girl who could think of another’s danger in such a moment was
not inspired by the devil. When I had to snatch the cross from her
sight, she looked up to heaven. And I do not believe that the heavens
were empty. I firmly believe that her Savior appeared to her then in His
tenderest glory. She called to Him and died. This is not the end for
her, but the beginning.
WARWICK. I am afraid it will have a bad effect on the people.
LADVENU. It had, my lord, on some of them. I heard laughter. Forgive me
for saying that I hope and believe it was English laughter.
THE CHAPLAIN [_rising frantically_] No: it was not. There was only one
Englishman there that disgraced his country; and that was the mad dog de
Stogumber. [_He rushes wildly out, shrieking_] Let them torture him. Let
them burn him. I will go pray among her ashes. I am no better than
Judas: I will hang myself.
WARWICK. Quick, Brother Martin: follow him: he will do himself some
mischief. After him, quick.
_Ladvenu hurries out, Warwick urging him. The Executioner comes in by
the door behind the judges’ chairs; and Warwick, returning, finds
himself face to face with him._
WARWICK. Well, fellow: who are you?
THE EXECUTIONER [_with dignity_] I am not addressed as fellow, my lord.
I am the Master Executioner of Rouen: it is a highly skilled mystery. I
am come to tell your lordship that your orders have been obeyed.
WARWICK. I crave your pardon, Master Executioner; and I will see that
you lose nothing by having no relics to sell. I have your word, have I,
that nothing remains, not a bone, not a nail, not a hair?
THE EXECUTIONER. Her heart would not burn, my lord; but everything that
was left is at the bottom of the river. You have heard the last of her.
WARWICK [_with a wry smile, thinking of what Ladvenu said_] The last of
her? Hm! I wonder!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EPILOGUE
_A restless fitfully windy night in June 1456, full of summer lightning
after many days of heat. King Charles the Seventh of France, formerly
Joan’s Dauphin, now Charles the Victorious, aged 51, is in bed in one of
his royal chateaux. The bed, raised on a dais of two steps, is towards
the side of the room so as to avoid blocking a tall lancet window in the
middle. Its canopy bears the royal arms in embroidery. Except for the
canopy and the huge down pillows there is nothing to distinguish it from
a broad settee with bed-clothes and a valance. Thus its occupant is in
full view from the foot._
_Charles is not asleep: he is reading in bed, or rather looking at the
pictures in Fouquet’s Boccaccio with his knees doubled up to make a
reading desk. Beside the bed on his left is a little table with a
picture of the Virgin, lighted by candles of painted wax. The walls are
hung from ceiling to floor with painted curtains which stir at times in
the draughts. At first glance the prevailing yellow and red in these
hanging pictures is somewhat flamelike when the folds breathe in the
wind._
_The door is on Charles’s left, but in front of him close to the corner
farthest from him. A large watchman’s rattle, handsomely designed and
gaily painted, is in the bed under his hand._
_Charles turns a leaf. A distant clock strikes the half-hour softly.
Charles shuts the book with a clap; throws it aside; snatches up the
rattle; and whirls it energetically, making a deafening clatter. Ladvenu
enters, 25 years older, strange and stark in bearing, and still carrying
the cross from Rouen. Charles evidently does not expect him; for he
springs out of bed on the farther side from the door._
CHARLES. Who are you? Where is my gentleman of the bedchamber? What do
you want?
LADVENU [_solemnly_] I bring you glad tidings of great joy. Rejoice, O
king; for the taint is removed from your blood, and the stain from your
crown. Justice, long delayed, is at last triumphant.
CHARLES. What are you talking about? Who are you?
LADVENU. I am Brother Martin.
CHARLES. And who, saving your reverence, may Brother Martin be?
LADVENU. I held this cross when The Maid perished in the fire.
Twentyfive years have passed since then: nearly ten thousand days. And
on every one of those days I have prayed God to justify His daughter on
earth as she is justified in heaven.
CHARLES [_reassured, sitting down on the foot of the bed_] Oh, I
remember now. I have heard of you. You have a bee in your bonnet about
The Maid. Have you been at the inquiry?
LADVENU. I have given my testimony.
CHARLES. Is it over?
LADVENU. It is over.
CHARLES. Satisfactorily?
LADVENU. The ways of God are very strange.
CHARLES. How so?
LADVENU. At the trial which sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a
sorceress, the truth was told; the law was upheld; mercy was shewn
beyond all custom; no wrong was done but the final and dreadful wrong of
the lying sentence and the pitiless fire. At this inquiry from which I
have just come, there was shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny
of the dead who did their duty according to their lights, cowardly
evasion of the issue, testimony made of idle tales that could not impose
on a ploughboy. Yet out of this insult to justice, this defamation of
the Church, this orgy of lying and foolishness, the truth is set in the
noonday sun on the hilltop; the white robe of innocence is cleansed from
the smirch of the burning faggots; the holy life is sanctified; the true
heart that lived through the flame is consecrated; a great lie is
silenced for ever; and a great wrong is set right before all men.
CHARLES. My friend: provided they can no longer say that I was crowned
by a witch and a heretic, I shall not fuss about how the trick has been
done. Joan would not have fussed about it if it came all right in the
end: she was not that sort: I knew her. Is her rehabilitation complete?
I made it pretty clear that there was to be no nonsense about it.
LADVENU. It is solemnly declared that her judges were full of
corruption, cozenage, fraud and malice. Four falsehoods.
CHARLES. Never mind the falsehoods: her judges are dead.
LADVENU. The sentence on her is broken, annulled, annihilated, set aside
as non-existent, without value or effect.
CHARLES. Good. Nobody can challenge my consecration now, can they?
LADVENU. Not Charlemagne nor King David himself was more sacredly
crowned.
CHARLES [_rising_] Excellent. Think of what that means to me!
LADVENU. I think of what it means to her!
CHARLES. You cannot. None of us ever knew what anything meant to her.
She was like nobody else; and she must take care of herself wherever she
is; for _I_ cannot take care of her; and neither can you, whatever you
may think: you are not big enough. But I will tell you this about her.
If you could bring her back to life, they would burn her again within
six months, for all their present adoration of her. And you would hold
up the cross, too, just the same. So [_crossing himself_] let her rest;
and let you and I mind our own business, and not meddle with hers.
LADVENU. God forbid that I should have no share in her, nor she in me!
[_He turns and strides out as he came, saying_] Henceforth my path will
not lie through palaces, nor my conversation be with kings.
CHARLES [_following him towards the door, and shouting after him_] Much
good may it do you, holy man! [_He returns to the middle of the chamber,
where he halts, and says quizzically to himself_] That was a funny chap.
How did he get in? Where are my people? [_He goes impatiently to the
bed, and swings the rattle. A rush of wind through the open door sets
the walls swaying agitatedly. The candles go out. He calls in the
darkness_] Hallo! Someone come and shut the windows: everything is being
blown all over the place. [_A flash of summer lightning shews up the
lancet windows. A figure is seen in silhouette against it_] Who is
there? Who is that? Help! Murder! [_Thunder. He jumps into bed, and
hides under the clothes_].
JOAN’S VOICE. Easy, Charlie, easy. What art making all that noise for?
No one can hear thee. Thourt asleep. [_She is dimly seen in a pallid
greenish light by the bedside_].
CHARLES [_peeping out_] Joan! Are you a ghost, Joan?
JOAN. Hardly even that, lad. Can a poor burnt-up lass have a ghost? I am
but a dream that thourt dreaming. [_The light increases: they become
plainly visible as he sits up_] Thou looks older, lad.
CHARLES. I am older. Am I really asleep?
JOAN. Fallen asleep over thy silly book.
CHARLES. That’s funny.
JOAN. Not so funny as that I am dead, is it?
CHARLES. Are you really dead?
JOAN. As dead as anybody ever is, laddie. I am out of the body.
CHARLES. Just fancy! Did it hurt much?
JOAN. Did what hurt much?
CHARLES. Being burnt.
JOAN. Oh, that! I cannot remember very well. I think it did at first;
but then it all got mixed up; and I was not in my right mind until I was
free of the body. But do not thou go handling fire and thinking it will
not hurt thee. How hast been ever since?
CHARLES. Oh, not so bad. Do you know, I actually lead my army out and
win battles? Down into the moat up to my waist in mud and blood. Up the
ladders with the stones and hot pitch raining down. Like you.
JOAN. No! Did I make a man of thee after all, Charlie?
CHARLES. I am Charles the Victorious now. I had to be brave because you
were. Agnes put a little pluck into me too.
JOAN. Agnes! Who was Agnes?
CHARLES. Agnes Sorel. A woman I fell in love with. I dream of her often.
I never dreamed of you before.
JOAN. Is she dead, like me?
CHARLES. Yes. But she was not like you. She was very beautiful.
JOAN [_laughing heartily_] Ha ha! I was no beauty: I was always a rough
one: a regular soldier. I might almost as well have been a man. Pity I
wasnt: I should not have bothered you all so much then. But my head was
in the skies; and the glory of God was upon me; and, man or woman, I
should have bothered you as long as your noses were in the mud. Now tell
me what has happened since you wise men knew no better than to make a
heap of cinders of me?
CHARLES. Your mother and brothers have sued the courts to have your case
tried over again. And the courts have declared that your judges were
full of corruption and cozenage, fraud and malice.
JOAN. Not they. They were as honest a lot of poor fools as ever burned
their betters.
CHARLES. The sentence on you is broken, annihilated, annulled: null,
non-existent, without value or effect.
JOAN. I was burnt all the same. Can they unburn me?
CHARLES. If they could, they would think twice before they did it. But
they have decreed that a beautiful cross be placed where the stake
stood, for your perpetual memory and for your salvation.
JOAN. It is the memory and the salvation that sanctify the cross, not
the cross that sanctifies the memory and the salvation. [_She turns
away, forgetting him_] I shall outlast that cross. I shall be remembered
when men will have forgotten where Rouen stood.
CHARLES. There you go with your self-conceit, the same as ever! I think
you might say a word of thanks to me for having had justice done at
last.
CAUCHON [_appearing at the window between them_] Liar!
CHARLES. Thank you.
JOAN. Why, if it isnt Peter Cauchon! How are you, Peter? What luck have
you had since you burnt me?
CAUCHON. None. I arraign the justice of Man. It is not the justice of
God.
JOAN. Still dreaming of justice, Peter? See what justice came to with
me! But what has happened to thee? Art dead or alive?
CAUCHON. Dead. Dishonored. They pursued me beyond the grave. They
excommunicated my dead body: they dug it up and flung it into the common
sewer.
JOAN. Your dead body did not feel the spade and the sewer as my live
body felt the fire.
CAUCHON. But this thing that they have done against me hurts justice;
destroys faith; saps the foundation of the Church. The solid earth sways
like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when
the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone
by slandering the pure of heart.
JOAN. Well, well, Peter, I hope men will be the better for remembering
me; and they would not remember me so well if you had not burnt me.
CAUCHON. They will be the worse for remembering me: they will see in me
evil triumphing over good, falsehood over truth, cruelty over mercy,
hell over heaven. Their courage will rise as they think of you, only to
faint as they think of me. Yet God is my witness I was just: I was
merciful: I was faithful to my light: I could do no other than I did.
CHARLES [_scrambling out of the sheets and enthroning himself on the
side of the bed_] Yes: it is always you good men that do the big
mischiefs. Look at me! I am not Charles the Good, nor Charles the Wise,
nor Charles the Bold. Joan’s worshippers may even call me Charles the
Coward because I did not pull her out of the fire. But I have done less
harm than any of you. You people with your heads in the sky spend all
your time trying to turn the world upside down; but I take the world as
it is, and say that top-side-up is right-side-up; and I keep my nose
pretty close to the ground. And I ask you, what king of France has done
better, or been a better fellow in his little way?
JOAN. Art really king of France, Charlie? Be the English gone?
DUNOIS [_coming through the tapestry on Joan’s left, the candles
relighting themselves at the same moment, and illuminating his armor and
surcoat cheerfully_] I have kept my word: the English are gone.
JOAN. Praised be God! now is fair France a province in heaven. Tell me
all about the fighting, Jack. Was it thou that led them? Wert thou God’s
captain to thy death?
DUNOIS. I am not dead. My body is very comfortably asleep in my bed at
Chateaudun; but my spirit is called here by yours.
JOAN. And you fought them my way, Jack: eh? Not the old way, chaffering
for ransoms; but The Maid’s way: staking life against death, with the
heart high and humble and void of malice, and nothing counting under God
but France free and French. Was it my way, Jack?
DUNOIS. Faith, it was any way that would win. But the way that won was
always your way. I give you best, lassie. I wrote a fine letter to set
you right at the new trial. Perhaps I should never have let the priests
burn you; but I was busy fighting; and it was the Church’s business, not
mine. There was no use in both of us being burnt, was there?
CAUCHON. Ay! put the blame on the priests. But I, who am beyond praise
and blame, tell you that the world is saved neither by its priests nor
its soldiers, but by God and His Saints. The Church Militant sent this
woman to the fire; but even as she burnt, the flames whitened into the
radiance of the Church Triumphant.
_The clock strikes the third quarter. A rough male voice is heard
trolling an improvised tune._
[Illustration: A short tune, in musical notation.]
Rum tum trumpledum,
Bacon fat and rumpledum,
Old Saint mumpledum,
Pull his tail and stumpledum,
O my Ma-ry Ann!
_A ruffianly English soldier comes through the curtains and marches
between Dunois and Joan._
DUNOIS. What villainous troubadour taught you that doggerel?
THE SOLDIER. No troubadour. We made it up ourselves as we marched. We
were not gentlefolks and troubadours. Music straight out of the heart of
the people, as you might say. Rum tum trumpledum, Bacon fat and
rumpledum, Old Saint mumpledum, Pull his tail and stumpledum: that dont
mean anything, you know; but it keeps you marching. Your servant, ladies
and gentleman. Who asked for a saint?
JOAN. Be you a saint?
THE SOLDIER. Yes, lady, straight from hell.
DUNOIS. A saint, and from hell!
THE SOLDIER. Yes, noble captain: I have a day off. Every year, you know.
That’s my allowance for my one good action.
CAUCHON. Wretch! In all the years of your life did you do only one good
action?
THE SOLDIER. I never thought about it: it came natural like. But they
scored it up for me.
CHARLES. What was it?
THE SOLDIER. Why, the silliest thing you ever heard of. I—
JOAN [_interrupting him by strolling across to the bed, where she sits
beside Charles_] He tied two sticks together, and gave them to a poor
lass that was going to be burnt.
THE SOLDIER. Right. Who told you that?
JOAN. Never mind. Would you know her if you saw her again?
THE SOLDIER. Not I. There are so many girls! And they all expect you to
remember them as if there was only one in the world. This one must have
been a prime sort; for I have a day off every year for her; and so,
until twelve o’clock punctually, I am a saint, at your service, noble
lords and lovely ladies.
CHARLES. And after twelve?
THE SOLDIER. After twelve, back to the only place fit for the likes of
me.
JOAN [_rising_] Back there; You! that gave the lass the cross!
THE SOLDIER [_excusing his unsoldierly conduct_] Well, she asked for it;
and they were going to burn her. She had as good a right to a cross as
they had; and they had dozens of them. It was her funeral, not theirs.
Where was the harm in it?
JOAN. Man: I am not reproaching you. But I cannot bear to think of you
in torment.
THE SOLDIER [_cheerfully_] No great torment, lady. You see I was used to
worse.
CHARLES. What! worse than hell?
THE SOLDIER. Fifteen years’ service in the French wars. Hell was a treat
after that.
_Joan throws up her arms, and takes refuge from despair of humanity
before the picture of the Virgin._
THE SOLDIER [_continuing_] Suits me somehow. The day off was dull at
first, like a wet Sunday. I dont mind it so much now. They tell me I
can have as many as I like as soon as I want them.
CHARLES. What is hell like?
THE SOLDIER. You wont find it so bad, sir. Jolly. Like as if you were
always drunk without the trouble and expense of drinking. Tip top
company too: emperors and popes and kings and all sorts. They chip me
about giving that young judy the cross; but I dont care: I stand up to
them proper, and tell them that if she hadnt a better right to it than
they, she’d be where they are. That dumbfounds them, that does. All they
can do is gnash their teeth, hell fashion; and I just laugh, and go off
singing the old chanty: Rum tum trumple—Hullo! Who’s that knocking at
the door?
_They listen. A long gentle knocking is heard._
CHARLES. Come in.
_The door opens; and an old priest, white-haired, bent, with a silly
but benevolent smile, comes in and trots over to Joan._
THE NEWCOMER. Excuse me, gentle lords and ladies. Do not let me disturb
you. Only a poor old harmless English rector. Formerly chaplain to the
cardinal: to my lord of Winchester. John de Stogumber, at your service.
[_He looks at them inquiringly_] Did you say anything? I am a little
deaf, unfortunately. Also a little—well, not always in my right mind,
perhaps; but still, it is a small village with a few simple people. I
suffice: I suffice: they love me there; and I am able to do a little
good. I am well connected, you see; and they indulge me.
JOAN. Poor old John! What brought thee to this state?
DE STOGUMBER. I tell my folks they must be very careful. I say to them,
“If you only saw what you think about you would think quite differently
about it. It would give you a great shock. Oh, a great shock.” And they
all say “Yes, parson: we all know you are a kind man, and would not harm
a fly.” That is a great comfort to me. For I am not cruel by nature, you
know.
THE SOLDIER. Who said you were?
DE STOGUMBER. Well, you see, I did a very cruel thing once because I did
not know what cruelty was like. I had not seen it, you know. That is the
great thing: you must see it. And then you are redeemed and saved.
CAUCHON. Were not the sufferings of our Lord Christ enough for you?
DE STOGUMBER. No. Oh no: not at all. I had seen them in pictures, and
read of them in books, and been greatly moved by them, as I thought. But
it was no use: it was not our Lord that redeemed me, but a young woman
whom I saw actually burnt to death. It was dreadful: oh, most dreadful.
But it saved me. I have been a different man ever since, though a little
astray in my wits sometimes.
CAUCHON. Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those
that have no imagination?
JOAN. Well, if I saved all those he would have been cruel to if he had
not been cruel to me, I was not burnt for nothing, was I?
DE STOGUMBER. Oh, no; it was not you. My sight is bad: I cannot
distinguish your features: but you are not she: oh no: she was burnt to
a cinder: dead and gone, dead and gone.
THE EXECUTIONER [_stepping from behind the bed curtains on Charles’s
right, the bed being between them_] She is more alive than you, old man.
Her heart would not burn; and it would not drown. I was a master at my
craft: better than the master of Paris, better than the master of
Toulouse; but I could not kill The Maid. She is up and alive everywhere.
THE EARL OF WARWICK [_sallying from the bed curtains on the other side,
and coming to Joan’s left hand_] Madame: my congratulations on your
rehabilitation. I feel that I owe you an apology.
JOAN. Oh, please dont mention it.
WARWICK [_pleasantly_] The burning was purely political. There was no
personal feeling against you, I assure you.
JOAN. I bear no malice, my lord.
WARWICK. Just so. Very kind of you to meet me in that way: a touch of
true breeding. But I must insist on apologizing very amply. The truth
is, these political necessities sometimes turn out to be political
mistakes; and this one was a veritable howler; for your spirit conquered
us, madam, in spite of our faggots. History will remember me for your
sake, though the incidents of the connection were perhaps a little
unfortunate.
JOAN. Ay, perhaps just a little, you funny man.
WARWICK. Still, when they make you a saint, you will owe your halo to
me, just as this lucky monarch owes his crown to you.
JOAN [_turning from him_] I shall owe nothing to any man: I owe
everything to the spirit of God that was within me. But fancy me a
saint! What would St Catherine and St Margaret say if the farm girl was
cocked up beside them!
_A clerical-looking gentleman in black frockcoat and trousers, and tall
hat, in the fashion of the year 1920, suddenly appears before them in
the corner on their right. They all stare at him. Then they burst into
uncontrollable laughter._
THE GENTLEMAN. Why this mirth, gentlemen?
WARWICK. I congratulate you on having invented a most extraordinarily
comic dress.
THE GENTLEMAN. I do not understand. You are all in fancy dress: I am
properly dressed.
DUNOIS. All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?
THE GENTLEMAN. Pardon me: I am here on serious business, and cannot
engage in frivolous discussions. [_He takes out a paper, and assumes a
dry official manner_]. I am sent to announce to you that Joan of Arc,
formerly known as The Maid, having been the subject of an inquiry
instituted by the Bishop of Orleans—
JOAN [_interrupting_] Ah! They remember me still in Orleans.
THE GENTLEMAN [_emphatically, to mark his indignation at the
interruption_]—by the Bishop of Orleans into the claim of the said Joan
of Arc to be canonized as a saint—
JOAN [_again interrupting_] But I never made any such claim.
THE GENTLEMAN [_as before_]—the Church has examined the claim
exhaustively in the usual course, and, having admitted the said Joan
successively to the ranks of Venerable and Blessed,—
JOAN [_chuckling_] Me venerable!
THE GENTLEMAN. —has finally declared her to have been endowed with
heroic virtues and favored with private revelations, and calls the said
Venerable and Blessed Joan to the communion of the Church Triumphant as
Saint Joan.
JOAN [_rapt_] Saint Joan!
THE GENTLEMAN. On every thirtieth day of May, being the anniversary of
the death of the said most blessed daughter of God, there shall in every
Catholic church to the end of time be celebrated a special office in
commemoration of her; and it shall be lawful to dedicate a special
chapel to her, and to place her image on its altar in every such church.
And it shall be lawful and laudable for the faithful to kneel and
address their prayers through her to the Mercy Seat.
JOAN. Oh no. It is for the saint to kneel. [_She falls on her knees,
still rapt_].
THE GENTLEMAN [_putting up his paper, and retiring beside the
Executioner_] In Basilica Vaticana, the sixteenth day of May, nineteen
hundred and twenty.
DUNOIS [_raising Joan_] Half an hour to burn you, dear saint; and four
centuries to find out the truth about you!
DE STOGUMBER. Sir: I was chaplain to the Cardinal of Winchester once.
They always would call him the Cardinal of England. It would be a great
comfort to me and to my master to see a fair statue to The Maid in
Winchester Cathedral. Will they put one there, do you think?
THE GENTLEMAN. As the building is temporarily in the hands of the
Anglican heresy, I cannot answer for that.
_A vision of the statue in Winchester Cathedral is seen through the
window._
DE STOGUMBER. Oh look! look! that is Winchester.
JOAN. Is that meant to be me? I was stiffer on my feet.
_The vision fades._
THE GENTLEMAN. I have been requested by the temporal authorities of
France to mention that the multiplication of public statues to The Maid
threatens to become an obstruction to traffic. I do so as a matter of
courtesy to the said authorities, but must point out on behalf of the
Church that The Maid’s horse is no greater obstruction to traffic than
any other horse.
JOAN. Eh! I am glad they have not forgotten my horse.
_A vision of the statue before Rheims Cathedral appears._
JOAN. Is that funny little thing me too?
CHARLES. That is Rheims Cathedral where you had me crowned. It must be
you.
JOAN. Who has broken my sword? My sword was never broken. It is the
sword of France.
DUNOIS. Never mind. Swords can be mended. Your soul is unbroken; and you
are the soul of France.
_The vision fades. The Archbishop and the Inquisitor are now seen on
the right and left of Cauchon._
JOAN. My sword shall conquer yet: the sword that never struck a blow.
Though men destroyed my body, yet in my soul I have seen God.
CAUCHON [_kneeling to her_] The girls in the field praise thee; for thou
hast raised their eyes; and they see that there is nothing between them
and heaven.
DUNOIS [_kneeling to her_] The dying soldiers praise thee, because thou
art a shield of glory between them and the judgment.
THE ARCHBISHOP [_kneeling to her_] The princes of the Church praise
thee, because thou hast redeemed the faith their wordlinesses have
dragged through the mire.
WARWICK [_kneeling to her_] The cunning counsellors praise thee, because
thou hast cut the knots in which they have tied their own souls.
DE STOGUMBER [_kneeling to her_] The foolish old men on their deathbeds
praise thee, because their sins against thee are turned into blessings.
THE INQUISITOR [_kneeling to her_] The judges in the blindness and
bondage of the law praise thee, because thou hast vindicated the vision
and the freedom of the living soul.
THE SOLDIER [_kneeling to her_] The wicked out of hell praise thee,
because thou hast shewn them that the fire that is not quenched is a
holy fire.
THE EXECUTIONER [_kneeling to her_] The tormentors and executioners
praise thee, because thou hast shewn that their hands are guiltless of
the death of the soul.
CHARLES [_kneeling to her_] The unpretending praise thee, because thou
hast taken upon thyself the heroic burdens that are too heavy for them.
JOAN. Woe unto me when all men praise me! I bid you remember that I am a
saint, and that saints can work miracles. And now tell me: shall I rise
from the dead, and come back to you a living woman?
_A sudden darkness blots out the walls of the room as they all spring
to their feet in consternation. Only the figures and the bed remain
visible._
JOAN. What! Must I burn again? Are none of you ready to receive me?
CAUCHON. The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot
distinguish the saint from the heretic. Spare them. [_He goes out as he
came_].
DUNOIS. Forgive us, Joan: we are not yet good enough for you. I shall go
back to my bed. [_He also goes_].
WARWICK. We sincerely regret our little mistake; but political
necessities, though occasionally erroneous, are still imperative; so if
you will be good enough to excuse me—[_He steals discreetly away_].
THE ARCHBISHOP. Your return would not make me the man you once thought
me. The utmost I can say is that though I dare not bless you, I hope I
may one day enter into your blessedness. Meanwhile, however—[_He goes_].
THE INQUISITOR. I who am of the dead, testified that day that you were
innocent. But I do not see how The Inquisition could possibly be
dispensed with under existing circumstances. Therefore—[_He goes_].
DE STOGUMBER. Oh, do not come back: you must not come back. I must die
in peace. Give us peace in our time, O Lord! [_He goes_].
THE GENTLEMAN. The possibility of your resurrection was not contemplated
in the recent proceedings for your canonization. I must return to Rome
for fresh instructions. [_He bows formally, and withdraws_].
THE EXECUTIONER. As a master in my profession I have to consider its
interest. And, after all, my first duty is to my wife and children. I
must have time to think over this. [_He goes_].
CHARLES. Poor old Joan! They have all run away from you except this
blackguard who has to go back to hell at twelve o’clock. And what can I
do but follow Jack Dunois’ example, and go back to bed too? [_He does
so_].
JOAN [_sadly_] Good night, Charlie.
CHARLES [_mumbling in his pillows_] Goo ni. [_He sleeps. The darkness
envelopes the bed_].
JOAN [_to the soldier_] And you, my one faithful? What comfort have you
for Saint Joan?
THE SOLDIER. Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains
and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch
to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for
all the airs they give themselves. What I say is, you have as good a
right to your notions as they have to theirs, and perhaps better.
[_Settling himself for a lecture on the subject_] You see, it’s like
this. If—[_the first stroke of midnight is heard softly from a distant
bell_]. Excuse me: a pressing appointment—[_He goes on tiptoe_].
_The last remaining rays of light gather into a white radiance
descending on Joan. The hour continues to strike._
JOAN. O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to
receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
George Bernard Shaw had strong beliefs about typography and English
spelling reform. In printing his plays, he insisted on leaving out the
apostrophes (which he called “uncouth bacillae”) in contractions like
“cant” and “dont.” Shaw did use apostrophes in possessives and in some
contractions, such as “it’s,” “I’ll,” “she’s,” and “that’s.” He also
refused to use dashes in numbers like “twentyfive.”
This edition omits apostrophes and dashes where Shaw omitted them,
leaves them in where he left them in, and makes changes only for
consistency, in a few cases listed below. In the HTML version of this
text, these words punctuated in nonstandard ways are marked with an
invisible tag, .
In the HTML version, semantic tagging has been added to the play. The
tags are:
A line of dialogue:
The character speaking:
The remainder of the line:
A stage direction inside a line:
A stage direction on its own line:
The punctuation of stage directions is inconsistent in the printed text
and has been left as printed.
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. Shaw also
sometimes showed emphasis with extra space between the letters of a
word; this is shown in this plain text version like t h i s.
Itemized changes from the original text:
• p. ix: Corrected “St.” to “St” in “though he ends in St Helena” for
consistency.
• p. xxx: Corrected “whereever” to “wherever” in “wherever there are
armies on foot.”
• p. lxiv: Corrected “Don’t” to “Dont” in “Dont argue: do as you are
told” for consistency.
• p. xlvi: Corrected “Mrs.” to “Mrs” in “Joan, like Mrs Eddy” for
consistency.
• p. xlvi: Corrected “very” to “every” in “to settle every question and
fit every occasion.”
• p. lxxxv: Corrected “St.” to “St” in “the New Theatre in St Martin’s
Lane” for consistency.
• p. 17: Corrected “coutryside” to “countryside” in “turning the
countryside into a desert.”
• p. 23: Corrected “has” to “his” in “that was his last haul.”
• p. 25: Corrected semicolon to period after “may my soul be blasted to
eternal damnation.”
• p. 36: Supplied missing period after “presents Joan the Maid to his
Majesty.”
• p. 41: Corrected “don’t” to “dont” in “I dont want to kill people”
for consistency.
• p. 49: Corrected “thats” to “that’s” in “He who has sinned for thee:
that’s better” for consistency.
• p. 53: Corrected period to question mark after “What business?”
• p. 74: Corrected “the” to “The” in “The two are seldom the same.”
• p. 87: Corrected “don’t” to “dont” in “You dont know where to begin”
for consistency with other appearances in the play.
• p. 87: Corrected “don’t” to “dont” in “dont forget that” for
consistency.
• p. 89: Corrected “stock” to “stick” in “she has got hold of the right
end of the stick.”
• p. 97: Corrected “St.” to “St” in “of the order of St Dominic” for
consistency.
• p. 104: Corrected “gentleman” to “gentlemen” in “Pray take your
places, gentlemen.”
• p. 111: Corrected “to-day” to “today” in “we are confronted today
throughout Europe” for consistency.
• p. 128: Corrected “humbling” to “humbly” in “humbly thanking you
Doctors and Masters.”
• p. 133: Corrected “hide” to “side” in “My place is at her side.”
• p. 141: Corrected “Twenty-five” to “Twentyfive” in “Twentyfive years
have passed” for consistency.
• p. 141: Corrected “one on” to “one of” in “And on every one of those
days.”
• p. 144: Corrected “don’t” to “dont” in “Oh, please dont mention it.”
for consistency.
• p. 159: Corrected “courtsey” to “courtesy” in “a matter of courtesey
to the said authorities.”
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public
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