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Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
BOOK 3: TRIAL AND MARTYRDOM
Chapter 1
I CANNOT bear to dwell at great length upon the shameful history of the
summer and winter following the capture. For a while I was not much
troubled, for I was expecting every day to hear that Joan had been put to
ransom, and that the King--no, not the King, but grateful France--had
come eagerly forward to pay it. By the laws of war she could not be
denied the privilege of ransom. She was not a rebel; she was a
legitimately constituted soldier, head of the armies of France by her
King's appointment, and guilty of no crime known to military law;
therefore she could not be detained upon any pretext, if ransom were
proffered.
But day after day dragged by and no ransom was offered! It seems
incredible, but it is true. Was that reptile Tremouille busy at the
King's ear? All we know is, that the King was silent, and made no offer
and no effort in behalf of this poor girl who had done so much for him.
But, unhappily, there was alacrity enough in another quarter. The news of
the capture reached Paris the day after it happened, and the glad English
and Burgundians deafened the world all the day and all the night with the
clamor of their joy-bells and the thankful thunder of their artillery,
and the next day the Vicar-General of the Inquisition sent a message to
the Duke of Burgundy requiring the delivery of the prisoner into the
hands of the Church to be tried as an idolater.
The English had seen their opportunity, and it was the English power that
was really acting, not the Church. The Church was being used as a blind,
a disguise; and for a forcible reason: the Church was not only able to
take the life of Joan of Arc, but to blight her influence and the
valor-breeding inspiration of her name, whereas the English power could
but kill her body; that would not diminish or destroy the influence of
her name; it would magnify it and make it permanent. Joan of Arc was the
only power in France that the English did not despise, the only power in
France that they considered formidable. If the Church could be brought to
take her life, or to proclaim her an idolater, a heretic, a witch, sent
from Satan, not from heaven, it was believed that the English supremacy
could be at once reinstated.
The Duke of Burgundy listened--but waited. He could not doubt that the
French King or the French people would come forward presently and pay a
higher price than the English. He kept Joan a close prisoner in a strong
fortress, and continued to wait, week after week. He was a French prince,
and was at heart ashamed to sell her to the English. Yet with all his
waiting no offer came to him from the French side.
One day Joan played a cunning truck on her jailer, and not only slipped
out of her prison, but locked him up in it. But as she fled away she was
seen by a sentinel, and was caught and brought back.
Then she was sent to Beaurevoir, a stronger castle. This was early in
August, and she had been in captivity more than two months now. Here she
was shut up in the top of a tower which was sixty feet high. She ate her
heart there for another long stretch--about three months and a half. And
she was aware, all these weary five months of captivity, that the
English, under cover of the Church, were dickering for her as one would
dicker for a horse or a slave, and that France was silent, the King
silent, all her friends the same. Yes, it was pitiful.
And yet when she heard at last that Compiegne was being closely besieged
and likely to be captured, and that the enemy had declared that no
inhabitant of it should escape massacre, not even children of seven years
of age, she was in a fever at once to fly to our rescue. So she tore her
bedclothes to strips and tied them together and descended this frail rope
in the night, and it broke, and she fell and was badly bruised, and
remained three days insensible, meantime neither eating nor drinking.
And now came relief to us, led by the Count of Vend"me, and Compiegne was
saved and the siege raised. This was a disaster to the Duke of Burgundy.
He had to save money now. It was a good time for a new bid to be made for
Joan of Arc. The English at once sent a French bishop--that forever
infamous Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais. He was partly promised the
Archbishopric of Rouen, which was vacant, if he should succeed. He
claimed the right to preside over Joan's ecclesiastical trial because the
battle-ground where she was taken was within his diocese. By the military
usage of the time the ransom of a royal prince was 10,000 livres of gold,
which is 61,125 francs--a fixed sum, you see. It must be accepted when
offered; it could not be refused.
Cauchon brought the offer of this very sum from the English--a royal
prince's ransom for the poor little peasant-girl of Domremy. It shows in
a striking way the English idea of her formidable importance. It was
accepted. For that sum Joan of Arc, the Savior of France, was sold; sold
to her enemies; to the enemies of her country; enemies who had lashed and
thrashed and thumped and trounced France for a century and made holiday
sport of it; enemies who had forgotten, years and years ago, what a
Frenchman's face was like, so used were they to seeing nothing but his
back; enemies whom she had whipped, whom she had cowed, whom she had
taught to respect French valor, new-born in her nation by the breath of
her spirit; enemies who hungered for her life as being the only puissance
able to stand between English triumph and French degradation. Sold to a
French priest by a French prince, with the French King and the French
nation standing thankless by and saying nothing.
And she--what did she say? Nothing. Not a reproach passed her lips. She
was too great for that--she was Joan of Arc; and when that is said, all
is said.
As a soldier, her record was spotless. She could not be called to account
for anything under that head. A subterfuge must be found, and, as we have
seen, was found. She must be tried by priests for crimes against
religion. If none could be discovered, some must be invented. Let the
miscreant Cauchon alone to contrive those.
Rouen was chosen as the scene of the trial. It was in the heart of the
English power; its population had been under English dominion so many
generations that they were hardly French now, save in language. The place
was strongly garrisoned. Joan was taken there near the end of December,
1430, and flung into a dungeon. Yes, and clothed in chains, that free
spirit!
Still France made no move. How do I account for this? I think there is
only one way. You will remember that whenever Joan was not at the front,
the French held back and ventured nothing; that whenever she led, they
swept everything before them, so long as they could see her white armor
or her banner; that every time she fell wounded or was reported
killed--as at Compiegne--they broke in panic and fled like sheep. I argue
from this that they had undergone no real transformation as yet; that at
bottom they were still under the spell of a timorousness born of
generations of unsuccess, and a lack of confidence in each other and in
their leaders born of old and bitter experience in the way of treacheries
of all sorts--for their kings had been treacherous to their great vassals
and to their generals, and these in turn were treacherous to the head of
the state and to each other. The soldiery found that they could depend
utterly on Joan, and upon her alone. With her gone, everything was gone.
She was the sun that melted the frozen torrents and set them boiling;
with that sun removed, they froze again, and the army and all France
became what they had been before, mere dead corpses--that and nothing
more; incapable of thought, hope, ambition, or motion.
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