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2 DEBORAH MCGRADY

Joan of Arc and the literary imagination

When Joan of Arc entered history as a peasant girl divinely inspired to free Orléans and see the exiled and disinherited ‘King of Bourges’ crowned Charles VII, King of France, she did so as a fantastical creature; one that sparked the creative imagination of all who heard of her existence. In the brief time spanning her meeting with the king in March 1429 to her execu- tion in May 1431, many wrote about Joan, but most did so having never met her.

A presumed Lombard cleric living in the Normandy region declared in July 1429 that Joan’s extraordinary story was hampered by the silence surrounding her, which he complained was imposed by unnamed forces.1

This silence did not deter him or his contemporaries from speaking about her. In his case, he addressed his questions directly to an imaginary Joan: ‘If I might dare to ask, what was your state of mind, your feelings, your thoughts when you first heard the angelic voices?’ (p. 11). Drawing on his own creative devices, he entertained her possible responses and shared with Joan his assumptions. What occupied her thoughts? ‘Perhaps nothing less than heaven, nothing more than the responsibility ordered by a poor father to look over the herd, nothing other than thinking of yourself’ (p. 11). How did she react to the voices? ‘Suddenly, startled by a divine breath, you trembled’ (p. 11). But what did the voices say and how did Joan respond? To these questions, our cleric exclaimed, ‘if only you could tell me the things you heard!’ (p. 12). This raw frustration speaks for genera- tions of writers who have confronted the gaps in Joan’s incomparable tale. As our Lombard cleric attempted to flesh out circulated rumours in an imaginary conversation with his subject, so too biographers, poets, and dramatists have ceaselessly negotiated historical record and human psyche in an effort to tell Joan’s story.

At the origin of Joan’s story, fact and fiction have always been intertwined and from this concoction has emerged a historical figure that repeatedly bends to the imagination of her many authors. Within the French tradition

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alone, there is a wide range of well-known novelists, poets, and playwrights, including Voltaire, whose scandalous La Pucelle d’Orléans (1752) simulta- neously mocked the excessive lyricism of Jean Chaplain’s recent poem to the heroine, railed against the staid social and religious structures in pre- Revolutionary France, and lodged a damning assessment of female speech and empowerment. Most Johannic writings, however, offer a powerful counterweight to Voltaire’s cynical view. French poets ranging from Christine de Pizan to Alfred de Musset and Alphonse de Lamartine, play- wrights from Charles Péguy to Paul Claudel to Jean Anouilh, and novelists from Alexandre Dumas to Joseph Delteil to Michel Tournier have repeatedly resurrected this unparalleled French heroine to propose creative alternatives to the plethora of historical accounts produced from 1429 to the present day. To appreciate the unique challenge of writing on Joan and the attraction that has enticed both established writers and novices, one must consider Joan’s emergence as a historic and literary figure as early as the summer of 1429 when she amazed and perplexed her contemporaries. We arguably know more about Joan of Arc than any other medieval

figure. She was the subject of three trials: the reported Poitiers Trial of 1429, for which there is no extant copy, which prompted Charles’ decision to give her an army; the Interrogation of 1431 that culminated in her execution by fire; and the 1455–6 Rehabilitation Trial that sought to re-establish her reputation. Through extant records, we can trace her genealogy: we have details concerning her upbringing, ranging from her religious training, the womanly skills she mastered, the village activities she enjoyed and those she avoided, and the opinions of family, neighbours, soldiers, and judges regarding her conduct. Owing to the trial records, we have many answers to the earlier questions our Lombard cleric longed to have answered: Joan’s Interrogation reserved pride of place to her voices, her first meeting with the king, and details about her battle activity. And yet, with so much of her life part of the legal record, she still remains a mystery. So diffuse and malleable was Joan’s character at the time of her 1920

canonization that Maurice Barrès could claim that all parties were free to shape her narrative according to their beliefs:

Are you a royalist? She is the heroine who made it possible for the son of Saint Louis to be consecrated according to the Gallican sacrament at Reims. Do you reject the supernatural? Never was anyone more realistic than this mystic; she was practical, indisciplined, and sly, as soldiers are in every period . . . For republicans, she is a child of the people, more magnificent than any of the acknowledged great . . . Finally, socialists cannot forget that she said: ‘I have

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been sent to console the poor and unfortunate.’ Thus all parties can lay claim to Joan of Arc. But she transcends them all. No one can confiscate her. Around her banner the miracle of national reconciliation can be accomplished today, just as it was accomplished five centuries ago.2

Barrès brazenly exploited the creative impulse at the core of Johannic litera- ture. He freely blended conflicting versions of her story, adopted flagrant anachronisms, and unabashedly attributed unspoken words to his heroine.

This manipulation of Joan by one of her most fervent admirers who had long lobbied for a national holiday in her honour demands that we take another look at Joan’s reception history. Scholarly treatment of Joan of Arc’s role as a political and religious icon has long shrouded her status as an unparalleled creative force. For writers such as Jules Michelet, who inter- rupted his multi-volume History of France to compose an impassioned biographical fiction of Joan of Arc, or Péguy, who was driven to theatre by his desire to document Joan’s ‘inner life’,3 Joan was not their creation but their creator. Rejecting the impulse to bend Joan to their desires as advocated by Barrès, many authors speak of a debt and a responsibility to Joan to correct the self-serving narrative promoted by religious and political institu- tions by calling on their creative imagination.

Joan’s appearance on the political stage in 1429 was a literary event of surprising magnitude that seems never to have lost its aura of wonder. Joan of Arc took shape in and through contemporary texts, a reality, as we shall see, of which she appeared cognizant at the time of her 1431 Trial. Let us first consider two texts written in the summer of 1429: one believed to be authored by the theologian Jean Gerson; the other, by the well-known writer Christine de Pizan. These texts, along with the Lombard’s letter, document the emerging narrative that would come to define Joan during her lifetime. The 1431 Interrogation can then be approached as more than the interroga- tion of Joan as a person, since it engaged heavily with her portrayal in these early texts. The Interrogation record suggests a hint of creative liberty insofar as the extant version witnessed in three manuscripts represents a revised account in Latin of the official trial minutes recorded in French. These minutes are available in two later manuscripts dating from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.4 The closing section will focus on her twentieth- century reception. The nineteenth century prepared the way for a radically new encounter with Joan. Between 1841 and 1849, Jules Quicherat provided the first complete edition of her trial. His edition offered partial access to her voice and contemporary testimony. This documentation ulti- mately freed Joan from her secondary role in history. She quickly emerged as an iconic figure in French art and literature, as witnessed by Michelet’s

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biographical fiction of her, published in 1853, and Ingre’s 1854 Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII. But it is perhaps in drama that one sees the greatest impact of Quicherat’s work. Access to the presumed voice of Joan registered in the trial transcripts inspired a cottage industry of dramatic works over the next century, of which plays by Péguy and Jean Anouilh are among the most memorable. Their works, written over the first half of the twentieth century, provide rich examples of how modern authors unwittingly followed in the Lombard cleric’s footsteps. Where he expressed frustration before the unknown – ‘if only you could tell me the things you heard!’ – so they found her registered words in the trial documents to leave so many questions unanswered and in need of exploration.

Joan’s unfolding story

The summer of 1429 was abuzz with word of Joan. Her entrance into the exiled king’s confidences required explanation, as did her leadership in the French army’s victory in Orléans on 8 May 1429. A great diversity of voices emerged to fill the narrative gap. Theological summations, official communiqués, personal letters, diaries, and lyric accounts provide a dizzying array of first ‘readings’ of the young woman who quickly came to be known as ‘la Pucelle’ [the Maid]. Many of these voices drew from an established corpus of scriptural and

classical literature to make sense of Joan. Take the examples of two royalist intellectuals chased from the capital in 1418 by the Burgundians: Jean Gerson, former chancellor of the University of Paris, and Christine de Pizan, prolific writer closely linked to the Valois princes, both of whom suggest in their writings that they were compelled, in part, to write on Joan to address both her opponents as well as her cautious supporters, including the king. Both relied heavily on Scripture and classical models to make sense of Joan’s behaviour and actions. The widely circulated treatise ‘About a Marvellous Victory’ dates itself six

days after Joan’s first victory. It proclaims that the recent battlefield success overwrote the ‘rumours’ circulating about Joan and set the stage for a new narrative.5 Gerson, the likely author, reminded readers of the many who met Joan and ‘believe[d] in the word of the Maid’, including the king’s council, his soldiers, and the people.6 Where our Lombard cleric turned to his imagination to give voice to Joan, the author of the ‘Marvellous Victory’ directed readers to established ‘sacred and secular history’ to flesh out the tale of this famed girl they had not yet met.7 Readers were directed to study and sing well-known hymns that would provide the tools for structuring ‘a devotion suitable to the present event’.8 The author then provided the

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ingredients of an appropriate narrative for Joan by evoking the feats of biblical figures, including Deborah, Judith, and even Judas Maccabaeus, as well as saints (St Katherine and St Cecile) and mythological warrior women, from the virgin warrior Camilla in Virgil’s Aeneid to the Amazonian female warriors. No longer subject to rumour, Joan was shown to have clear literary antecedents and, in effect, her story was already written.

Christine de Pizan’s ‘Tale of Joan of Arc’, internally dated to the final days of July 1429, visited similar literary terrain, but she went further by making an explicit link between her story and Joan’s. Joan not only liberated the people of Orléans, she also freed our poet. Christine announced at the outset of the poem that because of Joan, she broke an eleven-year silence, trans- forming her ‘language from one of tears to one of song’.9 The resulting poem recounts two extraordinary events: that of a young girl who performed uncommon heroic feats, past and future; and a silenced poet who resurfaced as an inspired prophet.10

Joan’s actions beg for a poet to assure that her story be told. These events should be ‘told everywhere, for it is worthy of being remembered, and may it be written down – . . . in many a chronicle and history book’ (stanza 7). Christine, however, left this history writing to others; she was more con- cerned with alerting the living to the extraordinary moment they were experiencing. In her estimation, there was no established narrative that could encapsulate this story. Here was a ‘wonderful’ thing (stanza 8), an ‘extraordinary’ occurrence (stanza 10), and ‘a miracle’ (stanza 11) that had been achieved not by the expected hero, but by a ‘young virgin’ (stanza 11). Christine rehearsed the list of expected biblical models only to reject these narratives as insufficient. Among Moses, Gideon, Joseph, Esther, Judith, and Deborah, there are ‘none who can compare with her . . . He has accomplished more through this Maid’ (stanza 28). Nor do the stories of Hector or Achilles match the Maid, since she surpassed them in strength (stanza 36). With known narratives failing, Christine turned to an unexpected textual legacy authored by a triumvirate of illustrious prophets – Merlin, the Sibyl, and Bede – who ‘foresaw her coming, entered her in their writings’ (stanza 31). Distinct from the biblical and classical narratives, these prophecies announced Joan’s ‘coming’, but they left no tale. It fell solely to Christine to author the yet-untold story.

It has been rightly pointed out that Christine’s unprecedented authorita- tive voice in this work owed much to Joan as she became a sibyl to her heroine.11 What has been ignored in this reading, however, is the extent to which Joan’s exceptionality ruptured the poet’s relationship to established narrative. Whereas many of her earlier writings detailed the heroic lives of past women – including those listed as inferior examples to Joan – Christine

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turned away from authoritative texts to claim for Joan an entirely new narrative that projected Joan into the future, where Christine predicted that she would conquer both Jerusalem (stanza 43) and Paris (stanzas 53–4). That Christine got the history wrong matters little. What this poem reveals is the extent to which Joan’s story exposed past heroic accounts as conservative. Christine needed to shed this literary past and her status as learned poet to speak as a visionary, thereby joining her heroine in embark- ing on a new path. Little did either woman know that soon an organized effort would be made to suppress this emerging narrative.

A woman of her word

Joan’s story did not follow the plot lines imagined by Christine. Captured outside Compiègne on 23 May 1430, Joan was to be subjected to a radical retelling of her story that took shape in the trial records produced after her execution on 30 May 1431. Qualifying the trial as a highly mediated docu- ment, scholars have described it both as ‘a literary text of the highest merit’ and a ‘masterpiece of dramatic tension’.12 To understand these claims, it is important to keep in mind that we lack a direct transcription of Joan’s trial. Instead we have two main sources that come to us in the form of later copies produced of the now lost originals: the French minute, identified as such because the document was a summary in French that had been produced each evening of the daily proceedings; and the Latin account of the trial produced following Joan’s execution, which was heavily dependent on the French minute.13 The relationship between the two versions is complex, but a comparison of the two makes apparent that the authors of the official Latin version took a number of creative liberties. Most obvious was the selective use of direct discourse to register Joan’s voice. To the extent, there- fore, that we hear Joan speak, it is due to her interrogators’ decision to cite selectively. Nonetheless, these legal documents strongly suggest that both Joan and her interrogators regarded the trial record as key to her legacy. It was not only in producing the official version of the trial that we see

Joan’s interrogators concerned with shaping Joan’s story to justify their final decision. This intention manifested itself from the very first days of the trial, where the judges strove to debunk the narrative fleshed out in the contem- porary texts examined thus far. The judges made a public display of Joan from the outset when they decided to hold open court. On the first day, Joan entered the room ‘bound in iron chains and fetters’14 – what better way to override the heroic image of the victorious maiden? On the second day, the record informs us that the image of Joan as a shepherdess was based on a misconception since she informed her judges that she ‘did not go to the fields

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with the sheep and other animals’ (p. 53). On the following day, the inter- rogators strove to construe her claims of divine inspiration as evidence of heretical activity and thus she was long interrogated on village beliefs con- cerning fairies, local prophecies, and magical trees. On 28 March 1431, judges brought forward seventy accusations against Joan, which would eventually be whittled down to twelve. In its first iteration, the list repeatedly accused Joan of making heretical claims, telling lies and tall tales, boasting, and making prophecies (pp. 123–55). In short, she was accused of authoring a false account of her life.

The judges manipulated Joan’s responses to author a new account of her story. For example, her first cited words in the trial record suggest a refusal to tell the truth; when asked to take an oath to tell all, Joan refused, explaining: ‘I don’t know what you wish to ask me. Perhaps you might ask me things I can’t tell you’ (p. 49). Direct citation often highlights Joan’s refusal to speak, as well as providing powerful examples of her belligerence. On 27 February, when asked about her fasting practices, she retorted: ‘What does this have to do with your trial?’ (p. 64). On 3 March, Joan’s words registered a determi- nation to evade questioning: ‘This doesn’t concern your trial’ (p. 78); ‘You will get nothing more out of me now’ (p. 79); and ‘I’m not advised to answer you now’ (p. 80). The line of questioning, the formal accusations, and even Joan’s cited responses reveal an attentive engagement not simply with the young woman before them, but also the narrative constructed by Joan’s supporters.

It is not only Joan’s interrogators who were concerned with the dissemina- tion of her story. In spite of her being illiterate, Joan made astonishing use of the written word in shaping her identity. Nowhere is this more obvious than when a letter addressed to the English and dated 22 March 1429 entered into evidence. This letter represents the earliest extant text on Joan, but is all the more distinctive because Joan ‘authored’ the text. On the heels of her first interrogation in Poitiers, she composed a letter that charged the English to ‘surrender to the Maid sent by God, the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns you have taken and violated in France’ (p. 134). The letter identified three divinely inspired intentions Joan intended to undertake: to chase the English from France; to return the land to Charles, ‘the true heir’ (p. 134); and to lead the French king into occupied Paris. Joan’s bellicose words were justified by her close alliance with God: the letter registers on four occasions her status as God’s messenger. Perhaps most striking is Joan’s self-naming. In a letter of just over 600 words, Joan identified herself in the third person six times. Rather than use her common name, Joan adopted the evocative sobriquet, the Maid, a title that removed her from the everyday and placed her in a celestial realm where she loomed as a prophetic figure of the

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greatest purity. As we have seen, these very qualities would find an echo in the writings of her learned contemporaries, Gerson and Christine, composed that same summer. The letter played a pivotal role early in the 1431 trial. During the fifth

session of her Interrogation Trial (1 March 1431), the document was read out loud. Joan acknowledged her authorship of the letter, but qualified this by indicating that in three instances the letter they cited contained ‘words [that] were not in the letter she sent’ (p. 72). These three passages were critical in the case against Joan since they provided evidence of her inap- propriate adoption of masculine behaviour and her support of violence over peaceful negotiations. Two of the contested phrases (where she identified herself as captain and as ready to kill) are also of interest because they represent a unique instance where the first-person voice of Joan replaced the third-person account: ‘If you refuse this, I am a captain of war, and wherever I find your men in France, I will force them to leave, whether they wish to or not. If they refuse to obey, I will have them all killed. I am sent by God, the King of Heaven, to chase you one and all from France’ (p. 134). In denying authorship of the very passage that asserted to be in her voice, Joan introduced the real possibility of deliberate manipulation of her words by others and signals a need to proceed cautiously in interpreting Joan’s recorded words as truly her own. The letter incident is only the first example of Joan confronting her textual

self. As the Interrogation continued, she became increasingly aware of the many texts representing her. On 14 March 1431, when enduring her third day of interrogation in the closed quarters of her cell rather than the open courtroom, Joan referred to the scribes in the room recording her answers. Anticipating that she would be sent to Paris for further questioning, Joan requested that a copy of the transcript be made available for her future judges so they could read her past responses (p. 101). The following day, she responded to repetitive questioning by reminding them that she had already answered their questions and that they had access to her words in their ‘book’: ‘You have my answer to this. Read your book very carefully and you will find it’ (p. 107). On the same day, she proposed that she would consult with her voices and over the weekend, if a clerk returned, her answers would ‘be put into writing’ (p. 106). Months later when Joan lay near death, the interrogators arrived at her bedside to read the preliminary list of seventy accusations. Too sick to defend herself, Joan called on her judges to ‘read [their] book’, which the scribe of the Latin text explained in a marginal comment was a reference to ‘the schedule the reverend archdeacon was holding’ (p. 171). During the same confrontation, when questioned about her claims of prophecy, Joan declared that her previous statement on this

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matter stood as ‘written in the book’ (p. 177). These moments of textual self- awareness reveal Joan taking stock of her status as a textual being – as a subject constructed by these documents. This textual referencing assigned weight to her recorded words and claimed for them an enduring role in assuring that her story would remain alive in written form, but it also introduced a complex and problematic version of auto-citation. Joan’s belief that this text was a faithful record of her words led her to understand ‘their’ book as really her own.

In her final days, Joan’s relationship with text would become more cir- cumspect. As is well known, Joan abjured only to recant, claiming that she did not recognize the oath she was said to have taken and signed (p. 196). It is an interesting twist to Joan’s story that the oath is not on the official record, instead it references an unrecorded ‘text of a certain schedule in French that was read to her, which she pronounced and signed with her own hand’ (p. 192). Here we find her accusers quite literally putting words into her mouth that she would first repeat only to later deny as her own. In the end, the record suggestively equates Joan’s refusal to accept authorship of this text to signing her death warrant.

If the carefully mediated account of the 1431 trial cannot be said to provide a transparent record of Joan’s own words, it certainly testifies to her complex textual existence. The trial reveals that she was conscious of the important role text played in shaping her identity and increasingly aware that she would live on in texts. In recanting her abjuration, Joan’s final act was as an author; granted, one who denied a text she had signed. In the brief intervening time before her execution, Joan’s textual presence substantially diminished from the court record. In a rare moment in the trial record, Joan’s final words before execution were partially recorded in French rather than Latin. She was first cited in French as hesitating over her voices: ‘whether good, whether bad spirits, they came to me’ (p. 206). But as the bishop continued to interrogate her, Joan would be recorded in Latin as having repeated thrice that she knew herself to have been deceived by her voices. Joan’s final words, in the official trial record, show her wavering over the veracity of the voices that had dictated her story from the beginning. In spite of this self-denouncement, this self-erasure, Joan would have many more chances as a literary subject to retell the tale.

Giving voice to Joan

Joan as a textual being whose words shaped her existence – whether declared in letters, linked with prophecies, or recorded in the trial – emerged as a lasting theme over the centuries. Interest in Joan’s story never waned, but

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post-Revolutionary France, where politicians, clerics, and artists struggled to reconstruct a new narrative for the nation, emerged as particularly fertile ground for Johannic literature. Some of the most memorable portrayals of the Maid in modern French literature echo Christine’s attraction to a story perceived as not yet told. But what distinguishes this tradition in particular is the fascination with Joan’s voice, an interest undoubtedly influenced by Quicherat’s edition of the trial. Following the edition, Johannic literature increasingly favoured dialogue over narrative, and we see an important shift towards theatre as a favoured genre for telling Joan’s tale. Charles Péguy looms large in Johannic studies but rarely for the literary

experimentation manifest in his haunting portrait of Joan. It is not an exaggeration to claim that Joan converted Péguy first to literature and then to Catholicism. While attending France’s prestigious École normale supérieure, the institution that forms future lycée and university teachers, Péguy announced a planned leave of absence so that he could dedicate his full energies to writing the story of his hometown heroine after having read Quicherat’s 1849 five-volume work on the trial and most likely Michelet’s influential biography of the heroine.15 Initially intending to write a historical study, Péguy changed course, explaining in a letter to a friend that history writing was not equipped to address Joan’s ‘inner life’.16 Experimenting with theatre and poetry, he composed a three-part drama on Joan published in 1897. The play has never been performed in its entirety, in large part because of length (the first edition consisted of 752 pages), but also because of the work’s experimental nature. In a rare moment of self-mockery, Péguy wrote a fictional dialogue entitled Entre deux trains [Between Two Trains] in 1900, in which he imagined two school friends summarizing his first attempt to tell Joan’s story. They describe it as ‘a drama in three parts that includes an incalculable number of bizarre acts, with ridiculous cues, requiring, all things considered, six or eight hours of performance, a performance that will never happen’.17 This description only begins to account for this play’s experi- mentation. The 1897 work is an ambitious hybrid theatrical production that mixes prose and alexandrine verse, voice and staged silences, to create a distinctive work that not only registers one of the most sensitive and spiritual accounts of Joan in her own voice, but that breaks with dramatic conventions to question the ability of voice and performance to narrate a life. Georges Bernanos evocatively described Péguy’s play as ‘Joan of Arc overheard by Péguy’.18

Jeanne d’Arc, drame en trois pièces [Joan of Arc, a Drama in Three Plays] attempts to tell Joan’s full story. Each play shifts to a new town: first Domrémy, where Joan answers her voices; Orléans, the site of her first victory (entitled ‘Les Batailles’); and finally Rouen, where she is interrogated.

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Careful to recite the key moments in Joan’s biography, Péguy’s theatre nonetheless favours the heroine’s thought process over her action. For exam- ple, ‘À Domrémy’ privileges Joan’s internal discussions with God and her voices as well as debates on spiritual matters with the fictional character Mme Gervaise, who represents a spiritual alternative to the church. These reflective moments regularly erupt into alexandrine verse. In fact, by Act iii of the ‘À Domrémy’ play, Joan’s inner lyric voice takes centre stage and her poetic meditations will be the text registered in the final two acts (Acts iv and v).

Lyric is further enhanced by repetition and marked silences, a technique Gilles Deleuze interpreted as serving to cultivate interiority and intimacy.19

In the 1897 play, measured silences, as indicated in the stage directions, enhance the function of repetition in Péguy’s writing. Here stage directions regularly interrupt dialogue to introduce moments of silence that are some- times prescribed as ‘brief’, ‘long’, or ‘pretty long’ (see, for example, ‘À Domrémy’, Act ii, scene iii) or timed pauses between scenes and acts that range from fifteen seconds to twenty minutes.

If Péguy’s signature usage of lyric, repetition, and silence serve in the production to bring us closer to Joan through intimate interaction with her thought processes, these techniques eventually signal an impenetrable divide separating Joan from her audience. In ‘ À Rouen’ these same techniques track Joan’s progressive fading from view. ‘ À Rouen’ consists of two Parts. Part i, Act i opens with Joan’s interrogators discussing her at length before she appears on stage. When she finally enters the courtroom, Joan’s silence, prominently indicated in the script by ellipses, dominates the ‘dialogue’ of Part i, Act i. When she finally begins to speak, Péguy draws her interventions directly from the 1431 trial transcripts. These highly scripted responses introduce a marked degree of repetition; as was the case with the trial, Péguy’s Joan is prone to remind repeatedly her judges that some issues ‘are not of their concern’ (‘À Rouen’, Part i, Act i). These rote responses join with the signalled silences to create a very different Joan from that witnessed in ‘À Domrémy’ and ‘Les Batailles’. Through repetition of known citations, Joan becomes increasingly distant and the silences emphasize the growing void between the audience and Joan, who is disempowered by the interrogation process. Part i, Acts ii to v afford only rare speaking moments to Joan. In this final play, verse rarely appears and when it does, it is Joan’s interrogators who control poetic expression. In Part i, Act ii, a lyric sermon is delivered in which Joan’s eternal damnation is vividly detailed, as are Joan’s imagined cries for help in Hell. Master Evrard concludes his threats by informing Joan that her cries will be ‘drowned in silence on Waves of Suffering’.20 It is only after this sermon that Joan’s lyric voice re-emerges, but only to register her

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extended meditation on Evrard’s threats; midway through her lament, her guards demand her silence, thereby confirming Evrard’s final threat and announcing the end of Part i, Act ii. ‘À Rouen’, Part i, Acts iv and v take place in Joan’s prison cell, but she remains silent, uttering only the final line in which she expresses disbelief at her sentence of life imprisonment. When Part ii (which is made up of a single act) begins, much has transpired in the interim. This final act concludes with Joan praying before she heads off stage to face her execution. The curtain falls, leaving the audience to contemplate the discrepancies between the scripted account of Joan’s life and death, and the intensely intimate scene we have just witnessed. In Péguy’s theatrical world, Joan’s execution is supplanted by a lasting silence that invites the audience to imagine the appropriate endpoint of her tale. Writing in the 1950s, Jean Anouilh envisioned a dramatically different

theatrical affiliation for Joan in L’Alouette [The Lark]. In the thirty years following Joan’s canonization in 1920, the theatre world experienced a Johannic renaissance: George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan premiered in 1923; Bertolt Brecht’s Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe [Saint Joan of the Stockyards] was broadcast in 1932; and Paul Claudel’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher [Joan of Arc at the Stake] premiered in 1938. Nonetheless, Anouilh took pains to profess his indifference to this theatrical legacy in a later essay entitled ‘An Inexplicable Joy’, in which he tells of a village priest who advised him to write about Joan, a summer spent in a country house buttressed against a church, and an attic study where he closed himself off entirely from the world to write his Joan play ‘without a plan, without dates, without documents, with my boyhood memories, without anything but an “inexplic- able joy”’.21

Where Péguy staged her growing silence and the receding trace of her story as a collection of historical events, Anouilh casts Joan as the stage director of her own lived performance. In the process, Anouilh draws our attention to Joan as a literary construction reinvented over time by her public, whether her judges, her comrades in arms, or herself. He casts her in a tragic frame- work that foregrounds the shared awareness of playwright and audience of her imminent demise. Anouilh’s longstanding preoccupation with what he termed the artificial theatre – theatre that is self-consciously aware of its imitation of reality – takes on greater vigour with Joan’s performance as both character and director of her life story. L’Alouette opens with the cast appearing on a stage cluttered with the

necessary props to tell Joan’s entire story – benches for the trial, a throne for the coronation, and even wood bundled for the execution scene. The inqui- sitors, the king, fellow soldiers, and family members crowd the stage, ready to intervene in what will become Joan’s narration of events, either as

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performers or as potential directors of events. Warwick, as the representative of the English crown, takes charge from the outset. He confirms the presence of all participants and, like a director, calls for the ‘trial’ to begin so that they can get to the point of the gathering: ‘the faster she is judged and burned, the better it will be’.22 Cauchon, the leading inquisitor, calls for patience, reminding Warwick that ‘there is the whole story to play’ (p. 9) and ‘her whole life to play’ (p. 10). To Warwick’s complaint that performing all of the battles would take too long, Cauchon pacifies him: ‘Put your mind at rest, my Lord, we are too few to play the battles’ (p. 11). Cauchon then designates Joan as the principal storyteller and invites her to begin the story as she sees fit. Joan chooses to go further back in time than even Warwick imagined: ‘The beginning it is. That is always what is most beautiful: beginnings. At the house of my father, when I was still young. In the field where I looked after the sheep, the first time I heard the Voices’ (p. 10). In the absence of available scenery, Joan verbally sets the scene: ‘it is after the evening Angelus. I am very young. I still have my braids’ (p. 11). When someone from that cast asks ‘who is going to be the voice?’ (p. 12), Joan assumes the role herself. Following a ventriloquized command from the Archangel that she leave her village (delivered by her in a ‘deep voice’, p. 13), Joan falls to the ground sobbing before the imaginary Archangel: ‘Have pity on me sir! I am just a little girl’ (p. 13). But, just as suddenly, Joan breaks character to acknowledge the failure of her performance. Did she sway the Archangel? ‘Yeah, right! No pity for me. He was already gone and I had all of France on my back’ (p. 14). Taking time to comment on her past performance, Joan entertains the play- wright’s preoccupation with the artificiality of the theatre experience – a hallmark of Anouilh’s drama. But in Joan’s own case, this meta-reflective moment brings attention to the enduring struggle in the telling of Joan’s story. Where writers have traditionally portrayed Joan as a victim, a puppet of her persecutors, Anouilh created a self-conscious Joan, adept at playing her role, aware of her performance, and, as we shall see, keen on directing events.

In a masterfully staged scene recalling her early encounter with Baudricourt who would eventually lead her to the king’s court, Joan casts herself as director and leads the dull-witted squire of Vaucouleurs to assume a new character and to obey her directions. In retelling this key moment in her story, Joan jumps directly to the moment of her private conversation with the squire. When Baudricourt casts about for a fitting narrative to explain Joan, she interrupts his efforts and informs him that he has ‘an idea’ (p. 41). But such a concept is outside his character and Joan will need to provide the script. ‘I have an idea?’ he asks (p. 41). Joan assumes his role and informs him of what he is thinking. ‘You say to yourself’, she begins (p. 42). Having

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persuaded Baudricourt to play the role she assigns him, she heads off to the king, where she must also direct his performance. When the king enacts the prescribed role she has detailed, Joan breaks out in applause over his perfor- mance before his stunned audience (p. 76). Given the freedom at the outset of the play to tell her own tale, Joan

takes full advantage to give the performance of her life. But her stage audience regularly questions her account. The promoter and the inqui- sitor from the trial regularly point out incriminating remarks. Warwick never tires of calling attention to the time passing: ‘If we continue at this speed, we will never arrive at the trial. We will never burn her. Let her play her little story since it seems necessary, but quickly!’ (p. 21). Characters also comment on her staging of events. As for the ‘scene’ with Baudricourt, Cauchon finds it ‘a bit crude’ while Warwick finds it immensely entertaining (pp. 44–5). And following the encounter with the king, Warwick bursts into laughter, adding ‘evidently, in reality, things didn’t really happen like that’ (p. 77). Regardless of Joan’s efforts to alter or embellish the story, all players as

well as the audience know that history cannot be rewritten. Joan thus endures the interrogation to arrive at the scene of her execution – the scene all have been expecting. As the fire is about to be lit, Baudricourt runs to the centre of the stage to call for a stay of execution. He criticizes the absence of the coronation scene in this account, arguing that ‘Joan has a right to per- form the coronation, it is in her story!’ (p. 129). A now silent Joan is guided to her position beside the king while the king is dressed for the coronation. Reproducing the scene made famous in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s 1854 portrait of Joan at the coronation, Anouilh’s play stalls history, thwarts the tragic conclusion. It is on this scene, ‘as in a prize book’ (p. 131) offered to schoolchildren, that the final curtain falls. As with the other writers studied here, Anouilh draws our attention to the

deep affinity that writers have had not simply with Joan as a heroine or a muse, but as someone who shared with writers the struggle of telling one’s own story, who experienced the risk of narration, and who was forced to accept that her version would not be registered. These writers recognized Joan as a textual being, one created through the writings of others and one often shaped by the words assigned to her. Each writer sought to recreate her silenced story rather than retell the sanctioned account. That these retellings often end with a silenced Joan marks both the promise and limits of the literary imagination: giving voice to Joan opens us to new versions, renews – even if temporarily – hope, calls attention to the invention of history; but what these texts also reveal is how struggling with these issues inevitably

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leads writers self-consciously to negotiate history and imagination, to make sense not only of her story but of the literary enterprise.

Perhaps Joseph Delteil best summed up the power of Joan when confessing that in envisioning the scene of her execution, she came to inhabit him fully and her story became his own: ‘Your eyes stare into the depths of my soul. Your lips are silent, yet my ears are ringing with the sound of your voice . . . you live in me, and I in you, and the pages of this book shall preserve us both eternally in one ink and one body!’23 Joan clearly paved the way for this degree of creative intimacy given her own early awareness of her textual existence. Commanding in the last days of her trial that her interrogators consult ‘the book’ to find answers to questions already asked, Joan seems to have invited generations of authors to write the book that she believed to exist but whose grand narrative she rejected in her final moments. From a medieval Lombard cleric to Delteil, authors who have tackled the story of Joan may be better understood if we appreciate the abiding need to breathe life into a tale shrouded in secrecy, and silenced from the outset.

NOTES

1. Patrick Gilli, ‘L’épopée de Jeanne d’Arc d’après un document italien contempor- ain: Édition et traduction de la lettre du pseudo-Barbaro (1429)’, Bulletin de l’Association des amis du Centre Jeanne d’Arc, 20 (1996), 4–26 (p. 18). My translation. Subsequent references to Latin text indicated by page number in the text.

2. Qtd in Michel Winock, ‘Joan of Arc’, in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora and trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 433–82 (pp. 467–8).

3. From Péguy’s letter to Camille Bidault dated 1895. Qtd in Bernard Guyon, Péguy devant Dieu (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1974), p. 45. My translation.

4. On the textual witnesses, see Daniel Hobbins, ed. and trans., The Trial of Joan of Arc (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 9–13.

5. Deborah A. Fraoli, Joan of Arc: The Early Debate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), p. 209.

6. Fraoli, Joan of Arc, p. 209. 7. Fraoli, Joan of Arc, pp. 211–12. 8. Fraoli, Joan of Arc, p. 210. 9. Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth

Varty (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977), stanza 2. Stanza numbers are henceforth given in parentheses in the text.

10. On Christine’s use of Joan to establish her own prophetic voice, see Anne D. Lutku and Julia M. Walker, ‘PR pas PC: Christine de Pizan’s Pro-Joan Propaganda’, in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 145–60.

11. Kevin Brownlee, ‘Structures of Authority in Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc’, in The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. and trans. Renate

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Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 371–90.

12. Citations are, respectively, from Jelle Koopmans, ‘Jeanne d’Arc auteur de sa propre légende’, in Jeanne d’Arc entre les nations, ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Jelle Koopmans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 5–15 (p. 8), and Jean-Pierre Barricelli, ‘Transcript, Legend, and Art: The Thematology of Joan of Arc’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 88 (1988), 176–200 (p. 179). See also Barbara A. Hanawalt and Susan Noakes, ‘Trial Transcript, Romance, Propaganda: Joan of Arc and the French Body Politic’, Modern Language Quarterly 57.4 (1996), 605–31 (pp. 613–14).

13. See Daniel Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For a discussion of the various extant trial versions, see pp. 7–13.

14. Hobbins, The Trial of Joan of Arc, p. 51. Hobbins’ translation referenced here- after in the text by page number.

15. See Albert Béguin, ‘Jeanne d’Arc écoutée par Péguy’, in Mémorial du ve cente- naire de la réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, 1456–1956 (Paris: Forêt, 1958), pp. 47–58.

16. Guyon, Péguy, p. 45. 17. Charles Péguy, Entre deux trains, in Œuvres en prose complètes, vol. 1, ed.

Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 495–526 (p. 509). My translation. 18. Albert Béguin, ‘Jeanne d’Arc écoutée par Péguy’, p. 47. My translation. 19. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1993), pp. 34 and 373. 20. Charles Péguy, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marcel Péguy (Paris: Gallimard,

1957, rpt. 1975), ‘À Rouen’, Part i, Act ii, p. 302. My translation. 21. Pol Vandromme, Un auteur et ses personnages: Essai suivi d’un recueil de textes

critiques de Jean Anouilh (Paris: Table Ronde, 1965), p. 221. My translation. 22. Jean Anouilh, L’Alouette, in Pièces costumées (Paris: Table Ronde, 2008),

pp. 7–131 (p. 9). Subsequent references to original are indicated by page number in the text. Translations are my own.

23. Joseph Delteil, Joan of Arc, trans. Malcolm Cowley (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926), p. 259.

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