The Life of Joan of Arc Part 6

Every one thought first of himself. Whoever possessed land owed himself to his land; his neighbour was his enemy. The burgher thought only of his town. The peasant changed his master without knowing it.

The three orders were not yet united closely enough to form, in the modern sense of the word, a state.

Little by little the royal power united the French. This union became stronger in proportion as royalty grew more powerful. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that desire to think and act in common, which creates great nations, became very strong among us--at least in those families which furnished officers to the Crown--and it even spread among the lower orders of society. Rabelais introduces Francois Villon and the King of England into a tale so inflamed with military bravado that it might have been told over the camp fire in an almost identical manner by one of Napoleon's grenadiers.[140] In his preface to the poem we have just quoted, Chapelain writes of the occasions when "_la patrie_ who is our common mother, has need of all her children." Already the old poet expresses himself like the author of the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_.[141]

[Footnote 140: _Pantagruel_, book iv, chap. lxvii.]

[Footnote 141: _La Pucelle_, Preface.]

It cannot be denied that the feeling for _la patrie_ did exist under the old _regime_. The impulse imparted to this sentiment by the Revolution was none the less immense. It added to it the idea of national unity and national territorial integrity. It extended to all the right of property hitherto reserved to a small number, and thus, so to speak, divided _la patrie_ among the citizens. While rendering the peasant capable of possessing, the new _regime_ imposed upon him the obligations of defending his actual or potential possessions.

Recourse to arms is a necessity alike for whomsoever acquires or wishes to acquire territory. Hardly had the Frenchman come to enjoy the rights of a man and of a citizen, hardly had he entered into possession or thought he might enter into possession of a home and lands of his own, when the armies of the Coalition arrived "to drive him back to ancient slavery." Then the patriot became a soldier.

Twenty-three years of warfare, with the inevitable alternations of victories and defeats, built up our fathers in their love of _la patrie_ and their hatred of the foreigner.

Since then, as the result of industrial progress, there have arisen in one country and another, rivalries which are every day growing more bitter. The present methods of production by multiplying antagonism among nations, have given rise to imperialism, to colonial expansion and to armed peace.

But how many contrary forces are at work in this formidable creation of a new order of things! In all countries the great development of trade and manufactures has given birth to a new cla.s.s. This cla.s.s, possessing nothing, having no hope of ever possessing anything, enjoying none of the good things of life, not even the light of day, does not share the fear which haunted the peasant and burgher of the Revolution, of being despoiled by an enemy coming from abroad; the members of this new cla.s.s, having no wealth to defend, regard foreign nations with neither terror nor hatred. At the same time over all the markets of the world there have arisen financial powers, which, although they often affect respect for old traditions, are by their very functions essentially destructive of the national and patriotic spirit. The universal capitalist system has created in France, as everywhere else, the internationalism of the workers and the cosmopolitanism of the financiers.

To-day, just as two thousand years ago, in order to discern the future, we must regard not the enterprises of the great but the confused movements of the working cla.s.ses. The nations will not indefinitely endure this armed peace which weighs so heavily upon them. Every day we behold the organising of an universal community of workers.

I believe in the future union of nations, and I long for it with that ardent charity for the human race, which, formed in the Latin conscience in the days of Epictetus and Seneca, and through so many centuries extinguished by European barbarism, has been revived in the n.o.blest b.r.e.a.s.t.s of modern times. And in vain will it be argued against me that these are the mere dream-illusions of desire: it is desire that creates life and the future is careful to realise the dreams of philosophers. Nevertheless, that we to-day are a.s.sured of a peace that nothing will disturb, none but a madman would maintain. On the contrary, the terrible industrial and commercial rivalries growing up around us indicate future conflicts, and there is nothing to a.s.sure us that France will not one day find herself involved in a great European or world conflagration. Her obligation to provide for her defence increases not a little those difficulties which arise from a social order profoundly agitated by compet.i.tion in production and antagonism between cla.s.ses.

An absolute empire obtains its defenders by inspiring fear; democracy only by bestowing benefits. Fear or interest lies at the root of all devotion. If the French proletariat is to defend the Republic heroically in the hour of peril, then it must either be happy or have the hope of becoming so. And what use is it to deceive ourselves? The lot of the workman to-day is no better in France than in Germany, and not so good as in England or America.

On these important subjects I have not been able to forbear expressing the truth as it appears to me; there is a great satisfaction in saying what one believes useful and just.

It now only remains for me to submit to my readers a few reflections on the difficult art of writing history, and to explain certain peculiarities of form and language which will be found in this work.

To enter into the spirit of a period that has pa.s.sed away, to make oneself the contemporary of men of former days, deliberate study and loving care are necessary. The difficulty lies not so much in what one must know as in what one must not know. If we would really live in the fifteenth century, how many things we must forget: knowledge, methods, all those acquisitions which make moderns of us. We must forget that the earth is round, and that the stars are suns, and not lamps suspended from a crystal vault; we must forget the cosmogony of Laplace, and believe in the science of Saint Thomas, of Dante, and of those cosmographers of the Middle Age who teach the Creation in seven days and the foundation of kingdoms by the sons of Priam, after the destruction of Great Troy. Such and such a historian or paleographer is powerless to make us understand the contemporaries of the Maid. It is not knowledge he lacks, but ignorance--ignorance of modern warfare, of modern politics, of modern religion.

But when we have forgotten, as far as possible, all that has happened since the youth of Charles VII, in order to think like a clerk in exile at Poitiers, or a burgher at Orleans serving on the ramparts of his city, we must recover all our intellectual resources in order to embrace the entirety of events, and discover that sequence between cause and effect which escape the clerk or the burgher. "I have contracted my horizon," says the Chatterton of Alfred de Vigny, when he explains how he is conscious of nothing that has happened since the days of the old Saxons. But Chatterton wrote poems, pseudo chronicles, and not history. The historian must alternately contract his horizon and widen it. If he undertake to tell an old story, he must needs successively--or sometimes at one and the same moment--a.s.sume the credulity of the folk he restores to life, and the discernment of the most accomplished critic. By a strange process, he must divide his personality. He must be at once the ancient man and the modern man; he must live on two different planes, like that curious character in a story by Mr. H.G. Wells, who lives and moves in a little English town, and all the time sees herself at the bottom of the ocean.

I have carefully visited cities and countries in which the events I propose to relate took place. I have seen the valley of the Meuse amidst the flowers and perfumes of spring, and I have seen it again beneath a ma.s.s of mist and cloud. I have travelled along the smiling banks of the Loire, so full of renown; through La Beauce, with its vast horizons bordered with snow-topped mountains; through l'ile-de-France, where the sky is serene; through La Champagne, with its stony hills covered with those low vines which, trampled upon by the coronation army, bloomed again into leaves and fruit, says the legend, and by St. Martin's Day yielded a late but rich vintage.[142]

I have lingered in barren Picardy, along the Bay of the Somme so sad and bare beneath the flight of its birds of pa.s.sage. I have wandered through the fat meadows of Normandy to Rouen with its steeples and towers, its ancient charnel houses, its damp streets, its last remaining timbered houses with high gables. I have imagined these rivers, these lands, these chateaux and these towns as they were five hundred years ago.

[Footnote 142: Germain Lefevre-Pontalis, _Les sources allemandes de l'histoire de Jeanne d'Arc_, p. 93.]

I have accustomed my gaze to the forms a.s.sumed by the beings and the objects of those days. I have examined all that remains of stone, of iron, or of wood worked by the hands of those old artisans, who were freer and consequently more ingenious than ours, and whose handicraft reveals a desire to animate and adorn everything. To the best of my ability I have studied figures carved and painted, not exactly in France--for there, in those days of misery and death, art was little practised--but in Flanders, in Burgundy, in Provence, where the workmanship is often in a style at once affected and _naif_, and frequently beautiful. As I gazed at the old miniatures, they seemed to live before me, and I saw the n.o.bles in the absurd magnificence of their _etoffes a tripes_,[143] the dames and the damoiselles somewhat devilish with their horned caps and their pointed shoes; clerks seated at the desk, men-at-arms riding their chargers and merchants their mules, husbandmen performing from April till March all the tasks of the rural calendar; peasant women, whose broad coifs are still worn by nuns. I drew near to these folk, who were our fellows, and who yet differed from us by a thousand shades of sentiment and of thought; I lived their lives; I read their hearts.

[Footnote 143: Imitation velvet.]

It is hardly necessary to say that there exists no authentic representation of Jeanne. In the art of the fifteenth century all that relates to her amounts to very little: hardly anything remains--a small piece of _bestion_ tapestry, a slight pen-and-ink figure on a register, a few illuminations in ma.n.u.scripts of the reigns of Charles VII, Louis XI, and Charles VIII, that is all. I have found it necessary to contribute to this very meagre iconography of Jeanne d'Arc, not because I had anything to add to it, but in order to expunge the contributions of the forgers of that period. In Appendix IV, at the end of this work, will be found the short article in which I point out the forgeries which, for the most part, are already old, but had not been previously denounced. I have limited my researches to the fifteenth century, leaving to others the task of studying those pictures of the Renaissance in which the Maid appears decked out in the German fashion, with the plumed hat and slashed doubtlet of a Saxon ritter or a Swiss mercenary.[144] I cannot say who served as a prototype for these portraits, but they closely resemble the woman accompanying the mercenaries in _La Danse des morts_, which Nicholas Manuel painted at Berne, on the wall of the Dominican Monastery, between 1515 and 1521.[145] In _le Grand Siecle_ Jeanne d'Arc becomes Clorinda, Minerva, Bellona in ballet costume.[146]

[Footnote 144: See the picture of 1581, preserved in the Orleans Museum and reproduced in Wallon's _Jeanne d'Arc_, p. 466.]

[Footnote 145: _La Danse des Morts_, painted at Berne between 1515 and 1520 by Nicolas Manuel, lithographed by Guillaume Stettler, s.d. in folio oblong, engraving xx. M. Salomon Reinach believes this prototype may be found in the Judiths of Cranach.]

[Footnote 146: Lanery d'Arc, _Le livre d'Or de Jeanne d'Arc_, Iconography, Nos. 2080-2112.]

To my mind a continuous story is more likely than any controversy or discussion to make my subject live, and bring home its verities to my readers. It is true that the doc.u.ments relating to the Maid do not lend themselves very easily to this kind of treatment. As I have just shown, they may nearly all be regarded as doubtful from several points of view, and objections to them arise at every moment. Nevertheless, I think that by making a cautious and judicious use of these doc.u.ments one may obtain material sufficient for a truthful history of considerable extent. Besides, I have always indicated the sources of my facts, so that every one may judge for himself of the trustworthiness of my authorities.

In the course of my story I have related many incidents which, without having a direct relation to Jeanne, reveal the spirit, the morals, and the beliefs of her time. These incidents are usually of a religious order. They must necessarily be so, for Jeanne's story--and I cannot repeat it too often--is the story of a saint, just like that of Colette of Corbie, or of Catherine of Sienna.

I have yielded frequently, perhaps too frequently, to the desire to make the reader live among the men and things of the fifteenth century. And in order not to distract him suddenly from them, I have avoided suggesting any comparison with other periods, although many such occurred to me.

My history is founded on the form and substance of ancient doc.u.ments; but I have hardly ever introduced into it literal quotations; I believe that unless it possesses a certain unity of language a book is unreadable, and I want to be read.

It is neither affectation of style nor artistic taste that has led me to adhere as far as possible to the tone of the period and to prefer archaic forms of language whenever I thought they would be intelligible, it is because ideas are changed when words are changed and because one cannot subst.i.tute modern for ancient expressions without altering sentiments and characters.

I have endeavoured to make my style simple and familiar. History is too often written in a high-flown manner that renders it wearisome and false. Why should we imagine historical facts to be out of the ordinary run of things and on a scale different from every-day humanity?

The writer of a history such as this is terribly tempted to throw himself into the battle. There is hardly a modern account of these old contests, in which the author, be he ecclesiastic or professor, does not with pen behind ear, rush into the _melee_ by the side of the Maid. Even at the risk of missing the revelation of some of the beauties of her nature, I deem it better to keep one's own personality out of the action.

I have written this history with a zeal ardent and tranquil; I have sought truth strenuously, I have met her fearlessly. Even when she a.s.sumed an unexpected aspect, I have not turned from her. I shall be reproached for audacity, until I am reproached for timidity.

I have pleasure in expressing my grat.i.tude to my ill.u.s.trious _confreres_, MM. Paul Meyer and Ernest Lavisse, who have given me valuable advice. I owe much to M. Pet.i.t Dutaillis for certain kindly observations which I have taken into consideration. I am also greatly indebted to M. Henri Jadart, Secretary of the Reims Academy; M. E.

Langlois, Professor at the Faculte des Lettres of Lille; M. Camille Bloch, some time archivist of Loiret, M. Noel Charavay, autographic expert, and M. Raoul Bonnet.

M. Pierre Champion, who albeit still young is already known as the author of valuable historical works, has placed the result of his researches at my disposal with a disinterestedness I shall never be able adequately to acknowledge. He has also carefully read the whole of my work. M. Jean Brousson has given me the advantage of his perspicacity which far surpa.s.ses what one is ent.i.tled to expect from one's secretary.

In the century which I have endeavoured to represent in this work, there was a fiend, by name t.i.tivillus. Every evening this fiend put into a sack all the letters omitted or altered by the copyists during the day. He carried them to h.e.l.l, in order that, when Saint Michael weighed the souls of these negligent scribes, the share of each one might be put in the scale of his iniquities. Should he have survived the invention of printing, surely this most properly meticulous fiend must to-day be a.s.suming the heavy task of collecting the misprints scattered throughout the books which aspire to exact.i.tude; it would be very foolish of him to trouble about others. As occasion requires he will place those misprints to the account of reader or author. I am infinitely indebted to my publishers and friends MM. Calmann, Levy and to their excellent collaborators for the care and experience they have employed in lightening the burden, which t.i.tivillus will place on my back on the Day of Judgment.

PARIS, February, 1908.

CONTENTS

VOL. I

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE v

INTRODUCTION vii

I. CHILDHOOD 1

II. VOICES 29

III. FIRST VISIT TO VAUCOULEURS. FLIGHT TO NEUFCHaTEAU.

JOURNEY TO TOUL. SECOND VISIT TO VAUCOULEURS 61

IV. JOURNEY TO NANCY. ITINERARY FROM VAUCOULEURS TO SAINTE-CATHERINE-DE-FIERBOIS 91

V. THE SIEGE OF ORLeANS FROM THE 12TH OF OCTOBER, 1428, TO THE 6TH OF MARCH, 1429 106

VI. THE MAID AT CHINON--PROPHECIES 145