University of Virginia Library

11. CHAPTER XI.
THE DEATH OF LA PUCELLE.

Three months had elapsed, since, in the flower of youth
and beauty, in the flush of conquest, and in the accomplishment
of all her own — of all her country's aspirations — the
Maid of Arc had fallen, through the envious treason of the
count de Flavy — he who had shut the gates and raised the
bridges of Compiègne against her — into the hands of John de
Ligny-Luxembourg — since he, false gentleman and recreant
knight, had sold the heroine of France — sold her, despite the
prayers, despite the tears and the reproaches of his high-minded
lady — sold her for base and sordid lucre to her unsparing foemen.
Three months had elapsed of wearisome confinement — not in a
guarded chamber — not with the blessed light of heaven streaming,
albeit, through grates of iron into her prison-casements —
not with the miserable semblance of freedom that might be fancied
to exist in the permission to pace the narrow floor — not
with the wonted dungeon-fare of the worst malefactor — not with
the consolations of religion vouchsafed even to the dying murderer
— not even with the wretched boon of solitude! No;
in a dungeon many a foot beneath the surface of the frozen
earth, with naught of air but what descended through a deep-cut
funnel — with naught of light but what was furnished by a
pale and winking lamp — loaded with a weight of fetters that

would have bowed the strongest man-at-arms to child-like
helplessness — bound with a massive chain about her waist,
linking her to the rocky floor — fed on the bread of bitterness,
her thirst slaked with the waters of sorrow — her feelings out-raged
by the continual presence of a brutal soldier, violating
the privacies, alike by day and night, of her sad condition, the
noble girl had languished without a hope of rescue, without
even a dream of liberty or life — taunted by her foes and persecuted
— deserted by her friends and utterly forgotten. Yet,
though her frame was shrunken with disease, and worn with
famine, though her bright eyes were dimmed by premature
old age, her stature bent to half its former height, and her
whole appearance deprived of that high and lustrous beauty
that had of yore been so peculiarly her own; her confidence
in Him, whom she believed, erroneously perhaps, but not
therefore the less fervently, to have sent her on that especial
mission which she had so gloriously accomplished — her confidence
in that being whose decrees are, of a truth, inscrutable
— was all unshaken. If she had formerly displayed the courage
to endure — if she had proved herself the equal of men in
the mêlée of active valor, she now showed herself to be endowed
in no secondary degree with the calm fortitude of her sex, the
uncomplaining, patient resignation to inevitable pain, or inconsolable
affliction, which is so much harder to put on than the
bold front which rushes forth to meet the coming danger.
Day after day she had been led forth from her cold dungeon,
to undergo examination, to hear accusations the most inconceivably
absurd, to confute arguments, the confutation of which
aided her cause in nothing; for when did prejudice, or, yet
worse than prejudice — fanatic bigotry — hear the voice of
reason, and hear it to conviction. Night after night she had
been led back to the chilly atmosphere of that dank cell, hopeless
of rescue or acquittal, harassed by persecution, feeble of
frame, and sick at heart, yet high and firm in her uncompromising
spirit as when she first rode forth with consecrated blade
and banner to raise the siege of Orleans. From the very commencement
of her protracted trial she had felt a sure foreknowledge
of its termination! She had known that, in the
hearts of her judges, her doom was written down already;
yet, with a calm confidence that would have well become a
Socrates, ay, or the apostle of a holier creed, she had striven
to prove her innocence to posterity, at least, if not to the passing
day — to eternity, at least, if not to time! When reviled,
she answered not — when taunted, her replies were meek but
pertinent — when harassed by the simultaneous questioning of
her hard-hearted judges, eager to confuse by clamor the weak
woman whom they could not confound by sophistry, she was
collected as the sagest jurist, undisturbed as though she were
pleading another's cause, and not her own. The base Cauchon,
the bishop of Beauvais, the bigoted, bribed, fanatic, to
whom had been committed the conduct of her judicial murder,
strove hard, but strove in vain, to wring from her pale lips
some evidence of unholy dealings, for which he might condemn
her to the stake — some word of petulance which he
might construe into treason.

“Swear,” he cried, in haughty and imperious tones, from his
crimson chair of state to the fair, frail girl, who, clad in sack-cloth,
with bare feet and dishevelled hair, stood at his footstool,
upheld by the supporting might of conscious innocence —
“swear to speak truth, question thee as we may!”

“I may not swear, most holy bishop,” she replied, and her
eye flashed for a moment, and her lip curled as she spoke, so
that men deemed it irony — “I may not swear, most righteous
judge, since you may question me of that, which to reveal be
foul perjury, so should I, if I swore, stand perjured in the
same by speech or silence!”

“Swear, Joan of Domremi — most falsely styled of Orleans
and of Arc — swear to thy judges that thou wilt seek no rescue
— attempt no escape!”

“Be not your fetters strong enough?” she asked in answer;
and she half raised her feeble arm to show the weight of rusty
steel that had already well-nigh crippled it. “Be not your fetters
strong enough — your rock-hewn vaults, where never comes
the first-created gift of natural light — your iron cages, and
your steel-clad warders — be they not guards enough, that ye
would bind me yet more straitly? This will I not swear, O
thou most merciful, so shall you not condemn me of faith
broken.”

“Then thou dost look to rescue — dost hope for liberty —
wouldst evade, hadst thou the power, the bonds of Holy
Church?”

“To whom should I look for rescue, save to Him who has
abandoned his frail servant for her own transgression.”

“Ha! she confesses!”

“Mark well the words, sir scribe!”

“Judgment, lord president; a judgment!”

“No need for further question!”

“She has avowed it!”

Such were the disjointed clamors that burst at once in fiendish
exultation from the lips of that holy-seeming conclave; but
ere the wily bishop could express his sentiments, the maiden
again took up the word.

“I have confessed, great sirs, I have confessed transgression.
And make not ye the same at prime, at matin, and at
vesper, the same avowal? Riddle me, then, the difference,
ye holy men, between the daily penitence ye proffer, for the
daily sins which even ye confess, and this the free confession
of a prisoner — a helpless, friendless, persecuted prisoner!
Tell me, lord bishop, what am I that I should suffer judgment

to the uttermost, for the same avowal that thou makest daily,
if thou dost obey the bidding of Him whose cross thou hast
uplifted! But ye did ask me if I hope for liberty; if I would
exchange the prison-house, the hall of condemnation, and the
bread of tears, for the free air, the blessed sunshine, and the
humblest peasant's fare! Go, ask the wild herds of the forest
will they prefer the yoke and the goad, the halter and the stall,
to the green-woods and liberal pastures in which their Maker
set them! Go, ask the eagle will he endure the jesses and
the hood of the trained goss-hawk, will he choose the perch
and mew before the boundless azure; will he list to the whistle,
or regard the lure of the falconer when the thunder is rolling
beneath him, when the lightning, which he alone can gaze
upon undazzled, is flashing round the aërie his Creator made
him to inhabit. If these shall answer yea, then will I do your
bidding, and swear to keep my prison, though the chains
should be stricken from my limbs, and the door of deliverance
opened; though the fagot were kindled to consume me on the
one hand, and the throne of your monarch were tendered on
the other! Then will I swear, sir priest, and not till then!”

Such was the tone, and such the tenor of all her speeches;
ever submissive to the forms, to the ordinances, and to the
spirit of religion; ever professing her faith in Holy Writ; her
whole and sole reliance on the Virgin and her blessed Son;
ever denying and disproving the charge of witchery or demon-worship;
offering to confess under the sacramental seal; to
confess to her very judges, she yet suffered them to know at
all times, to perceive by every glance of her eye, to hear in
every word of her mouth, that it was the religion they professed,
and not the men who professed it, to which her deference
was paid, to which her veneration was due.

Still, though they labored to the utmost to force her into
such confession as might be a pretext for her condemnation,

the court could by no means so far confuse her understanding,
or so corrupt the judges, as to effect its nefarious purpose.
With a clear understanding of her own cause, she refused at
once, and boldly, to answer those questions on nice points of
doctrine which she perceived to have no bearing on her case.
On every other matter, she spoke openly and with the confidence
of innocence, maintaining to the last, however, that
“spirits, were they good or evil, had appeared to her;” but
denying that she had ever by sign or periapt, by spell or
charm, invoked the aid of supernatural powers, otherwise than
by the prayers of the church offered in Christian purity of
purpose to the most holy Virgin and her everlasting Son It
was at length proposed that the question should be enforced
by the means of torture! But by Cauchon himself the proposition
was overruled — not in mercy, however — not in charity
toward a weak and suffering woman, but in the deepest
refinement of cruelty. Confident, as he then was, that she
would be condemned to the fierce ordeal of the fagot and the
stake, he spared her the rack, lest, by exhausting her powers
of endurance, it might diminish the duration of her mortal
agonies. Bitterly, however, was that corrupt judge and false
shepherd disappointed when the decisive verdict was pronounced
— “Perpetual chains, the bread of sorrow, and the
waters of misery!” The courts ecclesiastic had no weapon
to affect her life, and for the present the secular arm had dismissed
her beyond the reach of its tyrannic violence. The
sentence was heard by the meek prisoner in the silence of
despair. She was remanded to her living tomb. She passed
through the gloomy archway; she deemed that all was over;
that she should perish there — there, in that dark abyss, uncheered
by the fresh air, or the fair daylight, unpitied by her
relentless foemen, unsuccored by her faithless friends; and
she felt that death — any death, so it were but speedy — had
been preferable to the endurance of that protracted torture
which life had now become to her, who lately fought and
feasted at the right hand of princes.

Not all the sufferings, however, of the wretched girl — not
all the mental agonies and corporeal pains, that she must bear
in silence, could satisfy the fears of England, or the policy of
England's regent. It was not in revenge, much less in hatred,
that the wise Bedford urged it on the court that they should
destroy, not her body only, but her fame. He well knew it
was enthusiasm only that had thus far supported her and liberated
France. He deemed not for a moment, that she was
either heavenly messenger, or mortal champion; but he felt
that France believed in joy, England in trembling! He felt
that, dead or living, so she died a martyr, Joan would be
equally victorious. Her death, if attributed to vengeance,
would but stir up the kindling blood of Gaul to hotter anger,
would but beat down the doggedness of Saxon valor with remorse
and superstitious terror!

“Ill hast thou earned thy see,” he cried, at their first interview,
“false bishop! As well she were a horse, and in the
field, as living thus a famous prisoner! She must die! —
die, sir priest, not as a criminal, but as a witch and heretic!
Her name must be a scoff and a reproach to France; her
death an honor to her slayers; a sacrifice acceptable to Mother
Church, and laudable throughout all Christentie! See it be
done, sir! Nay, interrupt me not, nor parley, and thou mayest
not accomplish it; others more able, or perchance more
willing, may be found, and that right speedily; the revenues
of Beauvais's bishopric might serve a prince's turn! See that
thou lose them not!” And he swept proudly from the chamber,
leaving the astounded churchman to plot new schemes,
to weave more subtle meshes for the life of the innocent. Nor
did it occupy that crafty mind long time, nor did it need deep

counsel! The sentence of the church decreed that she should
never more don arms, or masculine attire! The bishop's eye
flashed as it lighted on that article. “Ha!” he muttered.
“Here, then, we have her on the hip! Anselm, what, ho!
Let them bid Gaspard hither, the warden of the sorceress, and
let us be alone!”

He came, and with closed doors they sat in conclave; the
highest officer, save one, of holy church; the lowest and most
truculent official of state policy! Ear heard not, nor eye saw,
the secrets of that meeting; but on the morrow, when the first
glimpse of sickly daylight fell through the tunnelled window
of her dungeon, the maiden's female garb was gone, and by
the pallet bed lay morion and corslet, cuishes, and greaves,
and sword — her own bright azure panoply! At the first moment,
ancient recollection filled her whole soul with gladness!
Joy, triumph, exultation, throbbed in her burning veins; and
the tears that rained down full and frequent, tarnishing the
polished surface, were tears of gratitude and momentary bliss.
Then came the cold reaction, the soul-sickening terror, the
prophetic sense of danger, the certainty of treachery. She
donned them not, she rose not from her wretched couch,
though her limbs were cramped, and her very bones were sore
with lying on the hard and knotted pallet. Noon came, and
her guards entered; but it was in vain that she besought
them, as they would not slaughter a poor maiden, slaughter
her, soul and body, to render back the only vestments she
might wear in safety.

“'Tis but another miracle, fair Joan;” sneered the grim
warden. “St. Katharine, of Ferbois, hath returned the sword
she gave thee erst, for victory. Tête Dieu, 'tis well she left
thee not the destrier, to boot of spurs, and espaldron, else
wouldst thou have won through wall of stone and grate of iron!
Don them, then, holy maiden; don the saint's gift, and fear
not; she will preserve thee!”

And, with a hoarse and chuckling laugh, the churl laid
down the scanty meal his cruelty vouchsafed her, and departed.

Thus three days passed away; her prayers for fitting raiment
were unheeded; or, if heeded, scoffed at. Meantime
the chill air of the dungeon paralyzed her as she lay, with
scanty covering, cramped limbs, and curdling blood, on the
straw mattress that alone was interposed between her delicate
frame and the damp, rock-hewn pavement. On the third day
she rose; she donned the fatal armor, all save the helm and
falchion, she might not otherwise enjoy the wretched liberty
of moving to and fro across the dungeon floor. Scarce had
she fastened the last rivet when the door flew open. A dozen
men-at-arms rushed in, and dragged her to the chamber of the
council. The board was spread with all the glittering mockery
of judgment — the brass-bound volumes of the law, the
crosier of the church, the mace of state, the two-edged blade
of justice, and the pointless sword of mercy. The judges
were in session, waiting the moment when necessity should
force her to don the fatal armor. From without the clang of
axe and hammer might be heard framing the pile for execution,
prepared already ere the sentence was pronounced on
that doomed victim, condemned before her trial.

“Lo! there, my lords!” cried Cauchon, as she entered,
dragged like a lamb to the slaughter. “Lo! there, my lords!
What need of further trial? Even now she bears the interdicted
arms, obtained as they must have been by sorcery!
Sentence, my lords; a judgment!”

And with one consent they cried aloud, corrupt and venal
Frenchmen, “Judgment, a sentence!”

Then rose again the bishop, and the lust of gain twinkled
in his deep gray eye, and his lip curled with an ill-dissembled
smile, as he pronounced the final judgment of the church.

“Joan of Domremi — sorceress, apostate, heretic! Liar,
idolater, blasphemer of thy God! The Church hath cast thee
from her bosom, excommunicated and accurst! Thou art delivered
to the arm of secular justice. And may the temporal
flames which shall, this hour, consume thy mortal body, preserve
thy soul from fires everlasting! Her doom is said;
hence with her, to the fagot!”

Steadfastly she gazed on the face of the speaker, and her
eye closed not, nor did her lips pale as she heard that doom,
the most appalling, that flesh can not endure.

“Ye have conquered,” she said slowly, but firmly; “ye
have prevailed, and I shall perish. But think not that ye
harm me; for ye but send me to my glory! And believe not,
vain that ye are, and senseless, believe not that, in destroying
me, ye can subdue my country. The fires that shall shrivel
up this weak and worthless carcase, shall but illume a blaze
of vengeance in every Frenchman's heart that will never
waste, nor wink, nor weary, till France again be free! This
death of mine shall cost thousands — hundreds of thousands of
the best lives of Britain! Living, have I conquered your best
warriors heretofore! Dead, will I vanquish them hereafter!
Dead, will I drive ye out of Paris, Normandy, Guyenne.
Dead, will I save my king, and liberate my country! Lead
on, assassins — lead me to the pile! the flesh is weak and
fearful, yet it trembles not, nor falters; so does the spirit pine
for liberty and bliss!”

Who shall describe the scene that followed; or, if described,
who would peruse a record so disgraceful to England, to
France, to human nature? England, from coward policy, condemned
to ignominious anguish a captive foe! France, baser
and more cruel yet, abandoned without one effort, one offer of
ransom, one stroke for rescue, a savior and a friend! and human
nature witnessed the fell deed, pitying, perhaps, in

silence, but condemning not, much less opposing the decree of
murder, sanctioned as it was, and sanctified by the assent of
holy church.

It is enough! she perished — perished as she had lived, undauntedly
and nobly. Her fame, which they would have destroyed,
lives when the very titles of her judges are forgotten.
The place of her torture is yet branded with her name. Her
dying prophecy has been fulfilled. A century had not elapsed
ere Paris, Normandy, Guyenne, were free from England's
yoke; and every battle-field of France hath reeked, from that
day downward to red Waterloo, with blood of England, poured
forth like water on the valleys of her hereditary foe.

The maiden perished, and the terror-stricken soldiery who
gazed on her unmurmuring agonies beheld, or fancied they beheld,
a saintly light, paler but brighter than the lurid glare of
the fagots, circling her dark locks and lovely features; they
imagined that her spirit visible to mortal eyes, soared upward,
dove-like, on white pinions, into the viewless heavens; and
they shuddered, when they found, amid the cinders of the pile,
that heart which had defied the bravest, unscathed by fire, and
ominous to them of fearful retribution.