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[입시도움이]

Chapter 1 The Maid in Chains

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