Read Ebook: The Mentor: Joan of Arc v. 3 Num. 22 Serial No. 98 January 1 1916 by Tarbell Ida M Ida Minerva

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 89 lines and 12772 words, and 2 pages

THE CAPTURE OF THE MAID

Monograph Number Five in The Mentor Reading Course

Joan had often prophesied that her mission would last but a year, and this year was now fast drawing to a close. Her Voices also spoke to her about this time, saying that she would be taken prisoner soon. They would never tell her when. Joan prayed that she might die before she was captured; for the English had often threatened that they would burn her as a witch if they caught her. She fought on bravely, however, and did not allow her fear to overcome her courage.

When the Duke of Burgundy began to besiege Compi?gne, Joan, before dawn, on May 23, 1430, stole into the city with two or three hundred men. The people were overjoyed to see her.

That evening she led her little force out of Compi?gne in a sortie against the besiegers. She charged the Burgundians at Margny, which is near Compi?gne, and drove them twice back to another village called Clairoix . But her enemies were there reinforced and finally drove her back. Again she rallied her men and charged them. But there were very few of her followers with her this time, and she was surrounded and captured. She would not yield at first, hoping to be killed; but the Burgundians did not wish this, as she was more valuable to them alive than dead. They hoped to get a great ransom for her.

It might be imagined that the king and the people of France would have been glad to pay any sum for the safe return of the Maid, who had so greatly helped their native land. But Charles was indolent, and his advisers, who did not like Joan, counseled him not to ransom her. Therefore, he never made an effort to save her, nor did he show any interest in her fate.

Jean de Luxembourg was Joan's captor, and he sold her to the English. She knew what her fate would be in their hands, and one day when she was taking the air on the flat roof of the great tower at Beaurevoir, , where she was imprisoned, she leaped, hoping to kill herself. Strangely, she was not hurt,--not a bone in her body was broken,--but after the fall she found that she could not move a limb. It was destined that she should not escape. She was recaptured and turned over to the English, who put her into a new prison.

THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF THE MAID

Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course

The English turned Joan of Arc over to the Inquisition on January 3, 1431. The Inquisition was a court which tried people for religious offenses against the church. They put her into a cage in the castle of Rouen. Chains were placed on her legs, and five rough soldiers kept watch in the room day and night. Her captors wished to prove her a witch to take away the sting of having been defeated by a girl. The principal enemy of Joan was Pierre Cauchon , the Bishop of Beauvais , who hoped to be made Archbishop of Rouen by the English.

Her examination by the Court of the Inquisition began on January 9th. For three months these wise men examined the Maid every day. She had no advocate, and was forced to defend herself. But she showed that she was far wiser than her learned judges. She would never answer questions about her Saints and Voices except when the Voices gave her permission to do so.

In particular the judges wished to know the secret of the king, which secret they knew Joan possessed. But in spite of the king's neglect of the Maid, she would never betray him. Finally they told her they would torture her. They took her to the torture chamber and asked her if she would tell them then. But Joan said:

"Torture me if you please. Tear my body to pieces. Whatever I say in my pains will not be true, and as soon as I am released I will deny that it was true. Now go on!"

They did not torture her, but continued to harass her with questions. They said she should not wear man's dress as she did. She answered that when among men in war it was better and more proper. Once during the trial she seemed to hear her Voices and stopped speaking suddenly. Then after listening a moment she said, "Before seven years are passed the English will lose a greater stake than they have lost at Orl?ans: they will lose everything in France." This prophecy came true, as we know.

At last, on May 24, 1431, her judges took Joan to the graveyard of the Church of St. Ouen at Rouen. There was a stake and faggots all ready for the burning, and they said that she would be burned to death unless she signed a paper saying that she would wear woman's dress and would submit to the judges. She said that she would be willing to do this if she would receive pardon. But as Joan could not read, the judges substituted another paper for her to make her mark on. On this paper was a statement that her saints were evil spirits, and that she had done all sorts of wrong things.

She was still a prisoner of the English, and they kept her in prison. Her jailers by trickery induced her to put on her man's dress once more. When she had done this she was judged to have relapsed. This was the greatest crime, and she was sentenced to death.

On May 30, 1431, she was burned to death in the marketplace of Rouen. Eight hundred soldiers surrounded the stake for fear that someone might attempt to save her. Only one kind priest who pitied her brought a cross and held it before her eyes while she was burning.

In 1436 a woman appeared who said she was Joan of Arc escaped from the flames. Many people believed her; but afterward she confessed to being an impostor.

On July 7, 1456, the pope revoked the sentence passed on the Maid. In February, 1903, a formal proposal was entered for her canonization, and on December 13, 1908, she was made a saint.

JOAN OF ARC

THE MENTOR ? DEPARTMENT OF BIOGRAPHY JANUARY 1, 1916

Aside from the story of the Christ there is none in history which offers so complete a picture of the heights and depths of human character as that of Joan of Arc. So perfect is its symbolism that one coming for the first time to the records of the world might well believe it the invention of some consummate master of the intricacies of human nature, intent on showing to men the extremes of evil and of good of which they are capable.

Full of subtleties and mysteries as the story is, there is none in history more perfectly documented. We have not merely the proofs of what the Holy Maid claimed to be and what she did, but the details of her childhood, the inmost experiences of her spiritual and physical life. And these events and experiences stand on the evidences of not one, but of many, of those who were with her from her birth on January 6, 1412, in the little village of Domr?my, some 125 miles southeast of Paris, to the day nineteen years later, when, before the eyes of a great multitude of the people of Rouen , she was burned at the stake. She suffered her fate because a body of eminent lawyers and divines had found that she was, as their restrained and Christian language has it, "a liar, an inventor of revelations and apparitions, a deceiver, pernicious, presumptuous, light of faith, rash, superstitious, a soothsayer, a blasphemer against God and His saints, a contemner of God even in His sacraments, a prevaricator of divine law and of sacred doctrines and of ecclesiastical sanction, seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic, having committed a thousand errors against religion, and by all these tokens rashly guilty towards God and Holy Church!"

THE VOICES

The girl against whom these vindictive and hysterical charges were made was of peasant origin, not yet twenty years of age, and knew not A from B. She had come to her cruel end because from the time she was thirteen she had heard Voices--the Voices of saints--which she never had doubted had come from God and had never failed to obey, though the orders they gave her were so extraordinary that they had at the beginning filled her with terror. She had wept and pled her youth, her ignorance, her unfitness for the mission on which they would send her.

To Joan of Arc this mission was of supremest importance. She lived in the path of war, and, like many a Belgian, a French, or a Polish girl of today, she had seen her village sacked, her family and her friends obliged to flee saving what they could. Domr?my lived in constant danger of the Burgundian allies of England and of all the pitiless riffraff war breeds. Joan was an ardent patriot and suffered with her country; she loved her king too, looking on him as sent of God. To rescue him was the noblest work which one could be given. After the first revolt she accepted the call without misgivings. It was not for her to question Voices sent by God.

The key to the career of Joan of Arc is this unfaltering confidence. She did things from the start utterly preposterous by human standards of conduct. What more unlikely of success than that the governor of a tormented district should turn over for the asking to a child of seventeen, of whom he had never heard, an escort to take her to the king of the land! yet the governor of Vaucouleurs did this: not on the first or second asking, to be sure, but on the third, and Joan had never doubted that she would get her escort--"the Voices had told me it would be thus."

THE MAID AND THE KING

Her mind was so full of the command laid upon her that once accepted nothing could divert or frighten her. One might expect a girl of her origin to be awestruck at the thought of presenting herself before a court and a king; but not Joan. She passed unabashed through the throng that had gathered to witness her first meeting with Charles, and kneeling told him composedly, "Most noble Lord Dauphin, I am come, and am sent to you from God to give succor to the kingdom and to you."

She won Charles from the start, for he was much of a person in spite of his vacillating and his weakness, and he answered to the nobility of her call. She won the better part of his court, and as for the people they flocked to her. She was sent to be examined by experts in law and religion; for without assurance that her Voices were indeed from God Charles did not dare risk it. Joan might of course be what the English and the cynical of the court declared,--a witch and her Voices of the devil.

For six weeks the girl was questioned by the ablest lawyers and churchmen of the kingdom. A selected body of women gave her a physical examination. The end of it was complete justification: "It is found and hereby declared that Joan of Arc, called the Maid, is a Christian and a Catholic, and that there is nothing in her presence or her words contrary to the faith, and that the king may and ought to accept the succor she offers; for to repel it would be to offend the Holy Spirit, and render him unworthy of the aid of God."

The complete ascendancy Joan of Arc had won in France in two months from the time of her first interview with the king lasted from the fall of Orl?ans to the coronation of Charles at Rheims, on July 17, 1429. The march which proceeded the crowning was most of it through land which the English held. There were sieges and battles, dangers and escapes. It was managed by the Maid with a calm authority, an unwavering reliance on her Voices, which lifted her even in the minds of her most cynical associates quite out of the ranks of human leaders. She was a greater general than them all. She foresaw all, she never feared nor hesitated--and she a girl of seventeen! She must be of God! And when finally the impossible had been accomplished, and, in spite of English, Burgundians, and the plotters, Charles was crowned, there were few of the French who even secretly denied her claim.

How could they when all she foretold promptly came true? It was by the success or failure of their prophesying that men of those days judged largely whether one came from God or not. It was because she told the governor of Vaucouleurs of a distant battle on the day it occurred and days before the news could reach him that he finally yielded to her demands for an escort. It was because she selected the king from a throng in which he mingled and told him that which no one but he knew that he accepted her. She had said that she would be wounded at Orl?ans--and she was. She had warned a wicked fellow that he would be dead shortly--and he was. Who could deny the holy origin of such a Maid? Certainly not the average man or woman of the fifteenth century; certainly not the loyal and devout French she succored. As for the English who fled before her, they acknowledged her powers; but they declared them to be of the devil--as was natural, since they were the sufferers!

THE CHARACTER OF JOAN

But outside of her divine guidance and her unquestionable military and political genius, Joan of Arc had human qualities calculated to make even the roughest of men love and respect her. Peasant though she was, she was beautiful to see. This fresh, untouched young girl with the flame of inspiration in her eye and the authority of the divine in her bearing, clad in her pure-white armor and mounted on a warhorse as spirited as the best of them, must have been a sight to stir the heart.

Her sympathy for the afflicted poor of the country was as genuine as her devotion to the king. They knew it, and no little of her power came from their perception. There was no shadow of self-seeking in her; she never asked honor or wealth or pleasure. There were clever and designing ones who sought to trap her with such baubles,--a well-known and usually quite successful method of sidetracking troublesome people with ideas of their own,--but Joan was quite outside of all worldliness. It looked small and thin to one who consorted with saints and followed the orders of the Most High. What she took of the gifts showered upon her she gave to the poor. When at the coronation the king told her to ask what she would, she asked that Domr?my be freed forever from taxes.

She was devout. No Catholic in France was more faithful to the church, no one partook of its holy mysteries with more humility or with more worship in his heart.

But good and devout and charitable as she was she was no colorless person. There are numerous delightful human outbreaks recorded in the documents of her life. She wept like an ordinary girl when she received her first wound. She flew often into a passion when her commands had been disobeyed. She was particularly hard on the wanton women who followed the camp, often herself chasing them off. Once she broke a sword over the head of one, and again killed one by the blow she gave.

She guarded her own divine prerogative with quite human jealousy. As there were many women prophesying in those days, a company of them were enlisted to help the king after Joan's first success. Joan never liked them. "Folly and futility," was her characterization of the work of the most prominent of these women, Catherine de la Rochelle. "Send her home to her husband and children," was her order. A common enough point of view of the Maid who has made a career for herself and sees a married woman seeking to do the same! However, in Catherine's case Joan suspected fraud, and there seems to have been reason.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet