La Pucelle, The Trial of Joan
A play based on the actual trial transcripts and other original documents of Joan of Arc, called "La Pucelle," - The Maiden.
La Pucelle,
The Trial of Joan
A play based on the actual court documents and the rehabilitation.\
This version has been divided into two acts. The division is arbitrary and may be kept of ignored.
By
Tony Devaney Morinelli
Characters
Joan
St. Michael
St. Margaret
St. Catherine
The Grand Inquisitor Cauchon
4 Other Inquisitors
Christine de Pisan
Baudricourt
Jacquinette
Various Peasants
Soldiers
The action takes place on two levels, the stage and the area immediately in front of the stage (floor or on visible platforms if the pit is very low.) All action not in the courtroom takes place in this front area.
The stage itself is divided in two. Upstage is a platform arrangement for the three head inquisitors. At mid-stage writing desks for the clerks. Down stage is Joan and later Jacquinette and eventually the stake.
Darkness. An off stage voice begins in Latin. Off Stage Choir (or recording) begins the
Dies Irae sung in the traditional chant form.
(Chant:
Dies Irae, Dies illa
Solvet seclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sybilla
Etc.)
In nomine Domini, Amen
Incipit processus in causa fidei
Contra quondam quandam mulierem
IOHANNAM,
Vulgariter dictam “La Pucelle”.
A dim light up stage reveals the shadow of a clerk. He stands and reads:
Clerk 1 In the name of the Lord, AMEN.
Here begin the proceedings
The trial in matters of faith
The trial against the woman
The woman called Joan
Who is commonly called THE MAID.
To all those who shall see these present letters:
Pierre Cauchon, by Divine Mercy,
Bishop of Beauvais.
Brother Jean le maistre, of the Dominican Order
Who, in the diocese of Rouen,
Is especially appointed
To this holy trial.
Jean Craverent
Also a Dominican
Doctor of Theology and most renowned;
By apostolic authority
And lettered learning,
Inquisitor of the Faith
And holy guard against
Heretical error
In all the kingdom of France.
Greetings in that author
And consummation of the Faith
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Clerk 2 Let it be known that on this day
The twenty and first of February
In the year of our Lord and Savior
Fourteen hundred and thirty one
There appeared before us
In the chapel royal
Of the castle of Rouen
The woman by the name of Joan.
The reputation of this woman
Has already gone forth
And spread its treason to many parts.
A woman yet wholly forgetful of womanly modesty!
A woman having thrown off the bonds of shame!
A woman who with monstrous brazenness
Astonishing and blasphemous
Took upon herself the garb and dress
Belonging to the male sex.
And she did perform
And did disseminate
Many such things
Contrary to order,
Not in keeping with a woman’s way
And harmful and vile
To the holy articles
Of our belief.
Clerk 1 Set this down in writing;
Set it out for all to know.
That here we amend
And set aright
Such things as do offend
Our sight and thought and human sway.
Hear now all
Hear all well.
Let no man of rank or station
No person of property, rights or domain
May leave this city of Rouen
Until such time
As we have settled
According to all rights
At the conclusion of this trial
The matter of Joan
Who is called the Maid.
(The clerks and inquisitors part to reveal behind a dimly lit scrim a solitary figure, Joan. From the corner shadows a figure moves towards her.)
Cauchon: As it is our office
To keep and exalt
The Holy faith
And the unity of the Church
Well do call and admonish
The said Joan
Here seated before us
That she should answer in truth
The questions put before her
Eschewing subterfuge
Shift and deceit
Whose wiles do hinder
Truthful confession.
Clerk: Swear Joan,
Swear here upon the word of God
That you will speak in truth
In all those things which concern the faith.
Joan: You ask me to swear
You ask too much
For I do not know
That you may ask me such things
As my soul and conscience
Forbid me to answer.
Cauchon: Your soul and conscience
Are the charge of the church
And the holy faith
Which convenes you here
With us your judges
To reveal your errors
And redeem your soul.
Joan: Then bring me the gospel
And I shall swear.
(They bring her the book, She kneels, her bound hands on its cover)
This shall I swear
To you before God.
That in all those things
Of my life and my home
Of my father and mother
Of my cousin and kin
And of the road I have taken
Since my coming to France,
These I will tell you
As you may ask.
But of those things
Which God has revealed
They are for my king
And for my confessor
And on them you shall have
No word from me.
Inquisitor 1: Tell the court your name.
Joan: In my own country they call me Jeanette
I have been also called Jeanne.
Inquisitor 1: And the surname?
Joan: Of this name I know nothing.
Inquisitor 1: Your father? Your Mother?
Joan: My father is Jacques
My mother Ysabelle
Also Jacques d’Arc
They call him by name.
Inquisitor 1: When were you born?
Joan: On the night of the Epiphany.
Epiphany night.
Inquisitor 1: In what place?
Joan: Domremy.
Domremy by the church of Greux.
(Transition: lights down on the court. Joan is spotted alone.)
Joan: Where is that place?
That place.
That place.
A light comes up on an up-stage figure. This is Cauchon. Slowly, he moves to Joan and positions himself at her side, just behind her ear..
Cauchon: Reflect Joan. Reflect.
Turn memory’s dark eye inward
Turn to the soul’s pale mirror
A play based on the actual court documents and the rehabilitation.\
This version has been divided into two acts. The division is arbitrary and may be kept of ignored.
By
Tony Devaney Morinelli
Characters
Joan
St. Michael
St. Margaret
St. Catherine
The Grand Inquisitor Cauchon
4 Other Inquisitors
Christine de Pisan
Baudricourt
Jacquinette
Various Peasants
Soldiers
The action takes place on two levels, the stage and the area immediately in front of the stage (floor or on visible platforms if the pit is very low.) All action not in the courtroom takes place in this front area.
The stage itself is divided in two. Upstage is a platform arrangement for the three head inquisitors. At mid-stage writing desks for the clerks. Down stage is Joan and later Jacquinette and eventually the stake.
Darkness. An off stage voice begins in Latin. Off Stage Choir (or recording) begins the
Dies Irae sung in the traditional chant form.
(Chant:
Dies Irae, Dies illa
Solvet seclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sybilla
Etc.)
In nomine Domini, Amen
Incipit processus in causa fidei
Contra quondam quandam mulierem
IOHANNAM,
Vulgariter dictam “La Pucelle”.
A dim light up stage reveals the shadow of a clerk. He stands and reads:
Clerk 1 In the name of the Lord, AMEN.
Here begin the proceedings
The trial in matters of faith
The trial against the woman
The woman called Joan
Who is commonly called THE MAID.
To all those who shall see these present letters:
Pierre Cauchon, by Divine Mercy,
Bishop of Beauvais.
Brother Jean le maistre, of the Dominican Order
Who, in the diocese of Rouen,
Is especially appointed
To this holy trial.
Jean Craverent
Also a Dominican
Doctor of Theology and most renowned;
By apostolic authority
And lettered learning,
Inquisitor of the Faith
And holy guard against
Heretical error
In all the kingdom of France.
Greetings in that author
And consummation of the Faith
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Clerk 2 Let it be known that on this day
The twenty and first of February
In the year of our Lord and Savior
Fourteen hundred and thirty one
There appeared before us
In the chapel royal
Of the castle of Rouen
The woman by the name of Joan.
The reputation of this woman
Has already gone forth
And spread its treason to many parts.
A woman yet wholly forgetful of womanly modesty!
A woman having thrown off the bonds of shame!
A woman who with monstrous brazenness
Astonishing and blasphemous
Took upon herself the garb and dress
Belonging to the male sex.
And she did perform
And did disseminate
Many such things
Contrary to order,
Not in keeping with a woman’s way
And harmful and vile
To the holy articles
Of our belief.
Clerk 1 Set this down in writing;
Set it out for all to know.
That here we amend
And set aright
Such things as do offend
Our sight and thought and human sway.
Hear now all
Hear all well.
Let no man of rank or station
No person of property, rights or domain
May leave this city of Rouen
Until such time
As we have settled
According to all rights
At the conclusion of this trial
The matter of Joan
Who is called the Maid.
(The clerks and inquisitors part to reveal behind a dimly lit scrim a solitary figure, Joan. From the corner shadows a figure moves towards her.)
Cauchon: As it is our office
To keep and exalt
The Holy faith
And the unity of the Church
Well do call and admonish
The said Joan
Here seated before us
That she should answer in truth
The questions put before her
Eschewing subterfuge
Shift and deceit
Whose wiles do hinder
Truthful confession.
Clerk: Swear Joan,
Swear here upon the word of God
That you will speak in truth
In all those things which concern the faith.
Joan: You ask me to swear
You ask too much
For I do not know
That you may ask me such things
As my soul and conscience
Forbid me to answer.
Cauchon: Your soul and conscience
Are the charge of the church
And the holy faith
Which convenes you here
With us your judges
To reveal your errors
And redeem your soul.
Joan: Then bring me the gospel
And I shall swear.
(They bring her the book, She kneels, her bound hands on its cover)
This shall I swear
To you before God.
That in all those things
Of my life and my home
Of my father and mother
Of my cousin and kin
And of the road I have taken
Since my coming to France,
These I will tell you
As you may ask.
But of those things
Which God has revealed
They are for my king
And for my confessor
And on them you shall have
No word from me.
Inquisitor 1: Tell the court your name.
Joan: In my own country they call me Jeanette
I have been also called Jeanne.
Inquisitor 1: And the surname?
Joan: Of this name I know nothing.
Inquisitor 1: Your father? Your Mother?
Joan: My father is Jacques
My mother Ysabelle
Also Jacques d’Arc
They call him by name.
Inquisitor 1: When were you born?
Joan: On the night of the Epiphany.
Epiphany night.
Inquisitor 1: In what place?
Joan: Domremy.
Domremy by the church of Greux.
(Transition: lights down on the court. Joan is spotted alone.)
Joan: Where is that place?
That place.
That place.
A light comes up on an up-stage figure. This is Cauchon. Slowly, he moves to Joan and positions himself at her side, just behind her ear..
Cauchon: Reflect Joan. Reflect.
Turn memory’s dark eye inward
Turn to the soul’s pale mirror
Call
up the shadows
The shapes, the ghosts
That led your soul away.
away.
Joan: There beneath the branches leafless,
My wooden shoes, farm girl shoes,
Rustling the sand along the walk,
The sheep, the dung, the scent,
` Lips iced, tasting the cold,
Breathing the damp, dead winter
Cold in my nostrils
My ears burned and open to the wind
Whistling through the branches
Bending boughs and twigs.
Joan: They are too far.
They are too deep.
I despair of them.
They have abandoned me.
Cauchon: Look deeply Joan.
Inward into memory’s womb
Where the demon sowed
His foul bred seed
Whose hideous deformity
Burst forth unaborted
To wreak upon the fields of France
It’s unleashed taste for death.
Joan: It is cold.
My eyes tear.
My nose runs.
My toes are curled
I shiver.
Cauchon: Speak Joan.
Do you hear them?
They wait Joan,
The monsters wait.
They wait to speak.
They call.
Joan: I hear them.
I hear them from the right side.
I hear the silver bells
The great bells
The church bells
Silver notes that break the winter’s freeze.
2nd Inquisitor: Do they call?
Do they speak?
Do you hear them?
Hear them darting
Through the mind’s deep sea
And foaming waves,
Leviathan monsters’
Blackened blood
Spurting from tentacles writhing
Cloud in inky darkness
Light’s bright clarity
That seeks to penetrate
The waves above.
From Stage Right a dark, draped figure appears. It is a woman, but “faceless”, in the shadows.
Temptress: Do you feel the darkness, Joan?
Do you feel the blackness about you?
Hold Joan! Hold and still!
The stilled air
Unmoving air
Motionless air
Black and dark.
The final despair
The despair of the tomb.
It fills your nose
And ebbing pours itself downward
Down through the throat,
From there to the lungs;
Filling, loading, exploding
Hot and bleak and black
In despair’s growing darkness.
Joan: Quiet in your darkness there!
Quiet! Do you not hear?
(Silence)
Do you not hear?
(Silence)
A peasant woman suddenly appears. She is from Joan’s past.
Peasant: Whad are ya starin’ at girl?
Look at ya dumb!
Legs planted sticks in the dirt.
Will ya be growin’ there?
Like a pile the sheep ha’ left in na road!
Wake up girl! Go off to yer work.
Peasant Girl: And she won’t play
Won’t sing with us,
She walks alone,
Twigs and leaves,
Straw and hay,
She weaves and winds
Beneath the trees,
Or by the brook.
And sometimes
Bends and stares
At her reflection.
Then smacks the face
That she finds there
In the water’s flow
And screams and cries
What we can’t understand.
She’s not much fun.
Who’d want to play
With the likes of her.
(Lights return on the court.)
Inquisitor 2 Wake up girl!
Do you hear us?
Do you hear these questions?
Questions of faith,
Questions of holy church?
Cauchon: You claim to hear voices.
The voices of saints.
Holy voices
Voices that guide you.
Joan: Voices that brought me to France.
To my king.
Inquisitor 3 Whose voices?
Inquisitor 4 Saints’ voices?
Cauchon Demons’ voices?
Joan: Holy voices!
That brought me to France,
That raised up my king,
That drove out the English,
That restored the crown.
Inquisitor 1: Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 2: Heresy!
Cauchon: When first did you hear them?
Where first did they speak?
Joan: In my father’s village
In my father’s field.
There I first heard them.
There did they speak.
Sometimes by the church,
Sometimes by the brook
In the bells,
In the water
Silver and clear and cool.
Inquisitor 1: And in what Latin
Or in what French
Did these voices speak to you?
In what tongue
And with what accent?
Joan: In one surely better than yours
Good English sir.
Inquisitor 1: Impudence!
Cauchon: And when they appeared to you, these saints,
Did you touch them
Joan: Yes, I did touch them.
Cauchon: And what part of them did you touch?
Joan: Is this of interest to my lord?
Cauchon: Did ever you embrace these saints you saw?
Joan: I did embrace them both.
Cauchon: And who were these saints that you did embrace?
Joan: They are my saints ,
Saint Catherine
And Saint Margaret.
Cauchon; And was there a fragrance in their embrace?
Joan: Yes, the fragrance of heaven
And it was good.
Cauchon: And when you embraced them
Was it above or below?
Joan: It was in reverence my lord,
That I embraced their feet
And fell before them
As it should be.
And kissed their holy feet..
Cauchon: And when you kissed them
Was it warm
Or was it cold?
Joan: On this my lord
You trouble much
And you shall not have my answer.
Inquisitor 1: And these visions you have
Do they come to you naked
Or are they arrayed?
Joan: Do you not think
That God in his wonder
Has not the wherewithal
To cloth his own saints?
From Stage Right, in the same place as the Temptress, there appears Saint Catherine. She is arrayed in full medieval elegance, a crown of virginal flowers in her hair. A gobo with branch patterns lights her to suggest that she appears from out of the trees.
St. Catherine: See yourself Joan.
See yourself through the summer misty wood,
There beneath the sun’s cutting blades
There upon a morning damp
Moist beneath your shoeless feet.
Warm, the fragrance of wild raspberry,
And must from early fallen leaves,
Warm droplets
Upon your arms and legs and brow,
Roll soft upon your lips.
Vapors rise and fill your mouth
Lush and sweet with grape and rose.
Turn, Joan.
Turn to my voice.
Joan: Why do you call me?
Why do you want me?
It is hot.
Airless
Only the straw stacks
The meadow grass
The trellis rose
And arbor grape
Breath out upon the light.
I cannot breath.
Why do you call me?
I’m guarding the sheep.
Do you not see me?
What have I done
Why do you punish
Why do you curse?
Curse me with your voices
With you bidding
With your will.
Where is my will
A will of my own
It is hot
I cannot breath
Your voice is upon me
Your voice is inside me
Your voice is within me
Release me my will !
Release me
Forgive me
What fault is my own?
A 2nd peasant woman appears again. She speaks directly to the audience.
Peasant Woman 2: She was a strange girl.
A good girl but strange.
All the time standin’.
Standin’ and staring.
Talkin’ to trees
Talkin by streams
To her face in the water.
(Pointing stage left)
From by there you could watch her
By there you could see.
But I never quite heard her
Or what she would say.
Peasant Woman 3 Who’d want to listen?
A strange child
Talked to the trees
Babbled to the water,
Did her chores
But always in a dream.
Wasn’t a bad girl.
But never seemed to care
What the other children did,
Or what other folks was doin.
Woman Surely, she had a side of good
A side like other girls?
A joy in life
A sweetness like the other girls?
Woman 3 A joy in life
A touch of sweetness?
If sweetness be madness
And folly to boot
Then she had a sweetness
To cloy the tongue
And set the stomach
In want of salt.
The shapes, the ghosts
That led your soul away.
away.
Joan: There beneath the branches leafless,
My wooden shoes, farm girl shoes,
Rustling the sand along the walk,
The sheep, the dung, the scent,
` Lips iced, tasting the cold,
Breathing the damp, dead winter
Cold in my nostrils
My ears burned and open to the wind
Whistling through the branches
Bending boughs and twigs.
Joan: They are too far.
They are too deep.
I despair of them.
They have abandoned me.
Cauchon: Look deeply Joan.
Inward into memory’s womb
Where the demon sowed
His foul bred seed
Whose hideous deformity
Burst forth unaborted
To wreak upon the fields of France
It’s unleashed taste for death.
Joan: It is cold.
My eyes tear.
My nose runs.
My toes are curled
I shiver.
Cauchon: Speak Joan.
Do you hear them?
They wait Joan,
The monsters wait.
They wait to speak.
They call.
Joan: I hear them.
I hear them from the right side.
I hear the silver bells
The great bells
The church bells
Silver notes that break the winter’s freeze.
2nd Inquisitor: Do they call?
Do they speak?
Do you hear them?
Hear them darting
Through the mind’s deep sea
And foaming waves,
Leviathan monsters’
Blackened blood
Spurting from tentacles writhing
Cloud in inky darkness
Light’s bright clarity
That seeks to penetrate
The waves above.
From Stage Right a dark, draped figure appears. It is a woman, but “faceless”, in the shadows.
Temptress: Do you feel the darkness, Joan?
Do you feel the blackness about you?
Hold Joan! Hold and still!
The stilled air
Unmoving air
Motionless air
Black and dark.
The final despair
The despair of the tomb.
It fills your nose
And ebbing pours itself downward
Down through the throat,
From there to the lungs;
Filling, loading, exploding
Hot and bleak and black
In despair’s growing darkness.
Joan: Quiet in your darkness there!
Quiet! Do you not hear?
(Silence)
Do you not hear?
(Silence)
A peasant woman suddenly appears. She is from Joan’s past.
Peasant: Whad are ya starin’ at girl?
Look at ya dumb!
Legs planted sticks in the dirt.
Will ya be growin’ there?
Like a pile the sheep ha’ left in na road!
Wake up girl! Go off to yer work.
Peasant Girl: And she won’t play
Won’t sing with us,
She walks alone,
Twigs and leaves,
Straw and hay,
She weaves and winds
Beneath the trees,
Or by the brook.
And sometimes
Bends and stares
At her reflection.
Then smacks the face
That she finds there
In the water’s flow
And screams and cries
What we can’t understand.
She’s not much fun.
Who’d want to play
With the likes of her.
(Lights return on the court.)
Inquisitor 2 Wake up girl!
Do you hear us?
Do you hear these questions?
Questions of faith,
Questions of holy church?
Cauchon: You claim to hear voices.
The voices of saints.
Holy voices
Voices that guide you.
Joan: Voices that brought me to France.
To my king.
Inquisitor 3 Whose voices?
Inquisitor 4 Saints’ voices?
Cauchon Demons’ voices?
Joan: Holy voices!
That brought me to France,
That raised up my king,
That drove out the English,
That restored the crown.
Inquisitor 1: Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 2: Heresy!
Cauchon: When first did you hear them?
Where first did they speak?
Joan: In my father’s village
In my father’s field.
There I first heard them.
There did they speak.
Sometimes by the church,
Sometimes by the brook
In the bells,
In the water
Silver and clear and cool.
Inquisitor 1: And in what Latin
Or in what French
Did these voices speak to you?
In what tongue
And with what accent?
Joan: In one surely better than yours
Good English sir.
Inquisitor 1: Impudence!
Cauchon: And when they appeared to you, these saints,
Did you touch them
Joan: Yes, I did touch them.
Cauchon: And what part of them did you touch?
Joan: Is this of interest to my lord?
Cauchon: Did ever you embrace these saints you saw?
Joan: I did embrace them both.
Cauchon: And who were these saints that you did embrace?
Joan: They are my saints ,
Saint Catherine
And Saint Margaret.
Cauchon; And was there a fragrance in their embrace?
Joan: Yes, the fragrance of heaven
And it was good.
Cauchon: And when you embraced them
Was it above or below?
Joan: It was in reverence my lord,
That I embraced their feet
And fell before them
As it should be.
And kissed their holy feet..
Cauchon: And when you kissed them
Was it warm
Or was it cold?
Joan: On this my lord
You trouble much
And you shall not have my answer.
Inquisitor 1: And these visions you have
Do they come to you naked
Or are they arrayed?
Joan: Do you not think
That God in his wonder
Has not the wherewithal
To cloth his own saints?
From Stage Right, in the same place as the Temptress, there appears Saint Catherine. She is arrayed in full medieval elegance, a crown of virginal flowers in her hair. A gobo with branch patterns lights her to suggest that she appears from out of the trees.
St. Catherine: See yourself Joan.
See yourself through the summer misty wood,
There beneath the sun’s cutting blades
There upon a morning damp
Moist beneath your shoeless feet.
Warm, the fragrance of wild raspberry,
And must from early fallen leaves,
Warm droplets
Upon your arms and legs and brow,
Roll soft upon your lips.
Vapors rise and fill your mouth
Lush and sweet with grape and rose.
Turn, Joan.
Turn to my voice.
Joan: Why do you call me?
Why do you want me?
It is hot.
Airless
Only the straw stacks
The meadow grass
The trellis rose
And arbor grape
Breath out upon the light.
I cannot breath.
Why do you call me?
I’m guarding the sheep.
Do you not see me?
What have I done
Why do you punish
Why do you curse?
Curse me with your voices
With you bidding
With your will.
Where is my will
A will of my own
It is hot
I cannot breath
Your voice is upon me
Your voice is inside me
Your voice is within me
Release me my will !
Release me
Forgive me
What fault is my own?
A 2nd peasant woman appears again. She speaks directly to the audience.
Peasant Woman 2: She was a strange girl.
A good girl but strange.
All the time standin’.
Standin’ and staring.
Talkin’ to trees
Talkin by streams
To her face in the water.
(Pointing stage left)
From by there you could watch her
By there you could see.
But I never quite heard her
Or what she would say.
Peasant Woman 3 Who’d want to listen?
A strange child
Talked to the trees
Babbled to the water,
Did her chores
But always in a dream.
Wasn’t a bad girl.
But never seemed to care
What the other children did,
Or what other folks was doin.
Woman Surely, she had a side of good
A side like other girls?
A joy in life
A sweetness like the other girls?
Woman 3 A joy in life
A touch of sweetness?
If sweetness be madness
And folly to boot
Then she had a sweetness
To cloy the tongue
And set the stomach
In want of salt.
Woman 4
Its your tongue’s got salt
And vinegar too
That sours your breath
And the air you belch
Woman 3: Me belch air
Its you make wind
With all your cackle
And gossip and talk.
Woman 1: Bother you both
You own onions boil
And tighten your bowel
With sweeter medicament.
In all of France
Across the land
They talk her name
And what she done.
Woman 2: What she done is ride with men
And what she’s ridin
I’d like t’ know
What’s a girl that age
Got to do with men in mail
And iron and cask,
Astride their horses
At gallop gone
To run up their lance
` In an Englishman’s rump,
And slash up their ears
And their pig pokin noses
\ And them manly parts.
That go pokin and proddin
The loose girls of France.
What she doin I say
That girl from a village
Who should be beddin
A man of her own
And bringin about
A gaggle of babies
To work in her father’s fields.
Joan, back in time, in a trance.
Joan: I hear you.
Where are you?
(Silence)
There, there to my right?
(Silence)
There, by the church?
(Silence)
By the willow?
By the stream?
(Silence)
Is it the water speaking?
Yes. Yes, I will listen.
(Silence)
Yes. Yes, I will go.
Peasant woman 3 Look at ‘er standin
Droopin’ like a willow
Branches all hangin’
Tippin in the water
Peasant Woman 4 Maybe the lass
Ought to bend to the mud
And smear up her face
To save us that jaw.
Peasant Woman 5 Where could a child
Get such a face?
Peasant Woman 2 Not how got the face
But who got her?
Peasant Woman 1 Or who got her mother!
Peasant Woman 3 Was her father who fathered
Or was the nest feathered
By some other fowl?
Peasant Woman 5 Some other fowl
Who set her up foul
With the jaw of an ox
And the grin of an ass.
Joan: (to herself) Make them go away
Make them go away!
I don’t want to hear them.
I don’t want to listen.
(She goes to her knees. She looks into the stream)
Take it away!
(She pushes against her own face, first in the reflection then begins to rip violently at her own face)
Take it away!
Why must I look at it?
Why must you be there?
Break the water (she splashes her hand into the stream)
Break the image, the shape, the form, the shadow.
(Violently against her own face)
Break it away.
Break it away!
Rip it from my bones
Skin it from my skull
Cast its soft and sallow flesh
This woman’s flesh
Soft and sallow
Boneless and without rise
Slash it and rip it
Into the water to wash it away!
From Stage Right, Saint Margaret appears. Like Catherine, she is clothed in full regalia, flowers and filtered light.
St. Margaret: Soft, Joan, soft.
Do not gaze upon the water’s broken surface
There where ripples, rocks and running
Turn and twist the mouth and nose and eyes.
Gaze instead upon the inner stream
Where the blood within your heart
Fills your veins and stirs your soul
Therein a different self
Fold within your bones and skin and hair and blood.
And nestle within the glowing shadows
That span the soul’s bright unending halls
Of cavernous wonder.
St. Michael: There, Joan. There inside
Awaits the palace halls of your desire.
There the castle towers of your fire.
Go then Joan.
Go to your king.
Go into France
Passed the wood
Beyond the field
The thatch and wattle
The daub and mud.
There will be your glory
And the glory of your people.
Joan: I hear.
I hear.
Clerk 1: Joan
Joan
This council calls you, Joan.
Inquisitor 1: Do you believe yourself capable of sin?
Of mortal sin?
Of sin that damns the soul
And leaves it sullied
To grieve eternal
In the flame unending
Of longing for that face divine
That is our yearning all?
That is that complement
Of man’s own natural bent?
Joan: I do not know your words.
Your words are so unlike
The council of my visions.
I do not know your words
But commend myself
To him whose voice
Has bid my doings.
Inquisitor 3: Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 5: Do you know the weight of your reply?
Do you know the measure of your words?
You speak to saints,
As so you say
To visions thin and born upon the air,
To bells and ringings and winter’s chill.
But our words,
The words of mother church
Whose vast halls of stone and glass
Echo out both loud and clear
To pierce the ear of wayward men
To bring their minds to truth,
To bring their hearts to truth
To bring their souls to truth!
This you do not hear?
.
Inquisitor 2: Her soul is lost in mortal sin
And darkened, so infects the ear
Each sin bound orifice
She sports before us.
The fleshed out image
Of her whore plague crimes.
Mortal sin
And unrepented.
Joan: Mortal sin?
Yes, I know of mortal sin.
But why if I were in this sin
Would voices sweet and kind
Bid me do such things so good as I have done?
Restored my king
And to him his crown.
If I were in this state of sin
Would not my saints
My Catherine dear
And Margaret loved
My Michael warrior at God’s side,
Would not my saints
From me and from my sin
Flee in horror stricken?
Inquisitor 3: Such presumption on your part!
Inquisitor 1: Do you defy our sacred office?
Inquisitor 2: Do you affront our holy laws?
Inquisitor 5: Further counts against your name!
Joan: If I guard and keep me maiden
And likewise keep
The pureness of my soul,
Then as virgin in body and heart
Will God protect me and defend me.
Inquisitor 1: (enraged)
You presume too much.
Inquisitor 2: Confess!
Voces: Confess, Confess!
Joan: And I would confess.
For never can one cleanse
The conscience all too much.
And when I do confess,
And should I be by mortal sin possessed,
Then surely my Lords here present rightly know
That this great sorrow
Is for my God and my confessor
Alone in silence dark to hear,
And not to be adjudged by this assembly.
(Lights down on Joan)
(Lights up on Peasant Women)
Woman 1 She’s not a normal that one.
Not a girl like mine
Or yours
Or any of the neighbors here.
Woman 2 Some thinks she puts on airs
And struts about to show herself
But I’m not one to say such things
Or meddle ‘bout her ways.
Woman 3: But at her age
You’d think by now
They’d a got her up as wife
Or at least as promised bride.
Woman 4: Wha dya talk
It’s nonsense then
Who’d take her on?
Robert the fool
Or club foot Pierre.
No whole built man
In back or brain
Would want the like a her.
Woman 3: Well what’s more than that
Is the gob she’s got
Sallow as goat piss
And sagged as its udder.
Woman 2: And it ain’t her face alone,
You’ll always find a man
Whose eyes is blind
To such as her,
And only want
What they get in the dark.
Woman 3: Muffle it up in the horse’s feed bag
To shut up all but them grey eyes.
Them big strange eyes
Always starin
Lookin at ya like ya got
Your old aunt’s ghost
Sittin behind your shoulder
Woman 4: Or like she sees some spider
Crawlin down from your hair
That’s ready to bite your neck
And she ain’t gonna tell
But let ya get bit
Like she wanted it ta be
To teach ya a lesson.
Woman 2 Ya talk the fool
Like she was some witch
Get on yer way!
Can’t ya see
She’s got air in the head
Like Matthew the beggar
Only he don’t run off
To visit the king
But sits in his corner
With his fleas and his lice.
Woman 1: But it ain’t just her face
Or her eyes
Or her look.
It’s what she has done
To her womanly self.
Look what she done!
What she done to her hair
She cut it up short
Bobbed up like a boy
Like a page or a squire
Or knight of the crown.
Woman4: What man would want a woman well
Who wears her hair
Cropped short like his?
Woman 3: Whose got the eye to see her hair,
Look what she done to the clothes she wears.
Cast off her skirt and blouse and shawl
No apron, pin afore or bib
Not cowell or kerchief on her head.
Like some soldier’s boy she wears a shirt
And britches tight against her legs.
Woman 4: Ya make me blush.
To hear such talk.
What ails this girl,
To make her so?
(Lights down on women. Up on the trial)
Inquisitor 2: How with repugnance we must look upon your dress.
Rejecting woman’s clothing
You have taken shirt and breeches
Hose joined to doublet with twenty points
Leggings laced on the outer side
And surcoat to the knees.
Inquisitor 1: Your hair you have cut in demi-round
Like a young coxcomb
And dagger and lance
You took to side.
Inquisitor 1: Now, think you not more fiiting.
That you cast off this tunic
That you put aside these britches,
These clothes which suit a man?
Inquisitor 2 It does not become a woman
To wear the clothing of a man.
Jeanne: It is not the clothing of a man I wear,
But the clothing of my king’s good soldier.
Inquisitor 2: But is not then a soldier a man!
Jeanne: Is not a soldier any who fights for his land?
Inquisitor 3: But does not a soldier wear a man’s costume.
Jeanne: Does not a soldier wear a soldier’s costume?
Inquisitor 1 (impatient and fierce)
Will you put on a woman’s dress?
Inquisitor 2: In prison they gave you a woman’s dress.
Jeanne: You have taken my woman’s dress.
Inquisitor 1: Your jailers gave you a woman’s dress.
Jeanne: And brought me here in soldier’s dress.
For you have denied me a woman’s ward
And shut me in the keep of men
You have shackled my feet
And bound my hands
In the lustful eye
Of your English guards
Who mock and deride
And threaten .....
Inquisitor 2: (interrupting) You talk in circles!
Inquisitor 1: (interjecting furiously)
Non induetur mulier veste virili-
Abominabilis enim apud Deum!
Let no woman wear the clothing of a man!
It is an abomination before the Lord!
Jeanne: I talk in French and in no Latin.
I wear the soldier’s dress,
Who fights for God and for his king,
And for the saints who bid me wear it.
(Lights come up on the soldiers and down on the court.)
Soldier 1: Rough did she speak against the English king
Soldier 2: And well against Bedford and all his men.
Soldier 1: The young boy in the squad
Soldier 2: The young boy with learnin
Soldier 1: From the monks he took his letters
He wrote it out for her
Soldier 1: Words she could say
Soldier 2: Say well with a full tone voice
Soldier 1: Like the voice of a fighter.
Soldier 2: Stronger than yours.
Joan: King of England
And you Duke of Bedford
Who call yourself regent of France
Do you right now before the King of Heaven!
Hand over to the Maiden
The Maiden now sent
Now sent by Heaven’s great king
The keys to those good towns
Which your villainy and greed
Has violated in this sweet France.
And if you will not so to do,
You shall see fall upon yourself
Your very great misfortune
If you believe not these tidings sent to you
Sent to you by this the maiden
She shall strike within your midst
And you shall cause your own great ruin.
For none shall hold the kingdom of France
But by God, the true heir, who is Charles my prince.
(Lights on the court - down on the soldiers.)
Inquisitor 1: We are fair and upright men
And it is our will
That in your favor
You should have
A counselor, an advisor,
One who will speak in your behalf
And in consideration
Of your unletterdness
Aid you in the comprehension
Of this most serious state.
Loiseleur:(with a parchment and quill in hand)
Hear me Joan.
Hear the words of comfort.
Abjure your testimony,
Forswear this uniform.
Believe me Joan,
For if you are willing,
You will be saved.
Put on your clothes,
The clothes of a maid.
Put down your arms,
Your sword and your shield.
Tend to your hair,
And shear it no more.
Grant what they wish,
Bend and abjure.
If you do not heed them,
Your life will be forfeit,
Your soul in great peril.
Do as I say,
And the church will embrace you,
Call you again daughter,
And ransom your soul.
Sign, Joan.
Sign and abjure.
Jeanne: Promise me that I may hear mass
If I wear a woman’s dress.
Promise me this,
And I will answer you.
Loiseleur: I promise that you may hear mass
If you wear a woman’s dress.
Jeanne: And what would you answer,
If I have sworn to God
And to my king
Never to put off
This tunic of war?
Loiseleur: Swear what you will!
Will you put off this manly garb
And wear a woman’s dress?
Joan: Then have it made,
This woman’s dress,
But modest in cut
With no train or trim.
Give me a cover for my head,
That I may hear mass.
And when I return
Its your tongue’s got salt
And vinegar too
That sours your breath
And the air you belch
Woman 3: Me belch air
Its you make wind
With all your cackle
And gossip and talk.
Woman 1: Bother you both
You own onions boil
And tighten your bowel
With sweeter medicament.
In all of France
Across the land
They talk her name
And what she done.
Woman 2: What she done is ride with men
And what she’s ridin
I’d like t’ know
What’s a girl that age
Got to do with men in mail
And iron and cask,
Astride their horses
At gallop gone
To run up their lance
` In an Englishman’s rump,
And slash up their ears
And their pig pokin noses
\ And them manly parts.
That go pokin and proddin
The loose girls of France.
What she doin I say
That girl from a village
Who should be beddin
A man of her own
And bringin about
A gaggle of babies
To work in her father’s fields.
Joan, back in time, in a trance.
Joan: I hear you.
Where are you?
(Silence)
There, there to my right?
(Silence)
There, by the church?
(Silence)
By the willow?
By the stream?
(Silence)
Is it the water speaking?
Yes. Yes, I will listen.
(Silence)
Yes. Yes, I will go.
Peasant woman 3 Look at ‘er standin
Droopin’ like a willow
Branches all hangin’
Tippin in the water
Peasant Woman 4 Maybe the lass
Ought to bend to the mud
And smear up her face
To save us that jaw.
Peasant Woman 5 Where could a child
Get such a face?
Peasant Woman 2 Not how got the face
But who got her?
Peasant Woman 1 Or who got her mother!
Peasant Woman 3 Was her father who fathered
Or was the nest feathered
By some other fowl?
Peasant Woman 5 Some other fowl
Who set her up foul
With the jaw of an ox
And the grin of an ass.
Joan: (to herself) Make them go away
Make them go away!
I don’t want to hear them.
I don’t want to listen.
(She goes to her knees. She looks into the stream)
Take it away!
(She pushes against her own face, first in the reflection then begins to rip violently at her own face)
Take it away!
Why must I look at it?
Why must you be there?
Break the water (she splashes her hand into the stream)
Break the image, the shape, the form, the shadow.
(Violently against her own face)
Break it away.
Break it away!
Rip it from my bones
Skin it from my skull
Cast its soft and sallow flesh
This woman’s flesh
Soft and sallow
Boneless and without rise
Slash it and rip it
Into the water to wash it away!
From Stage Right, Saint Margaret appears. Like Catherine, she is clothed in full regalia, flowers and filtered light.
St. Margaret: Soft, Joan, soft.
Do not gaze upon the water’s broken surface
There where ripples, rocks and running
Turn and twist the mouth and nose and eyes.
Gaze instead upon the inner stream
Where the blood within your heart
Fills your veins and stirs your soul
Therein a different self
Fold within your bones and skin and hair and blood.
And nestle within the glowing shadows
That span the soul’s bright unending halls
Of cavernous wonder.
St. Michael: There, Joan. There inside
Awaits the palace halls of your desire.
There the castle towers of your fire.
Go then Joan.
Go to your king.
Go into France
Passed the wood
Beyond the field
The thatch and wattle
The daub and mud.
There will be your glory
And the glory of your people.
Joan: I hear.
I hear.
Clerk 1: Joan
Joan
This council calls you, Joan.
Inquisitor 1: Do you believe yourself capable of sin?
Of mortal sin?
Of sin that damns the soul
And leaves it sullied
To grieve eternal
In the flame unending
Of longing for that face divine
That is our yearning all?
That is that complement
Of man’s own natural bent?
Joan: I do not know your words.
Your words are so unlike
The council of my visions.
I do not know your words
But commend myself
To him whose voice
Has bid my doings.
Inquisitor 3: Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 5: Do you know the weight of your reply?
Do you know the measure of your words?
You speak to saints,
As so you say
To visions thin and born upon the air,
To bells and ringings and winter’s chill.
But our words,
The words of mother church
Whose vast halls of stone and glass
Echo out both loud and clear
To pierce the ear of wayward men
To bring their minds to truth,
To bring their hearts to truth
To bring their souls to truth!
This you do not hear?
.
Inquisitor 2: Her soul is lost in mortal sin
And darkened, so infects the ear
Each sin bound orifice
She sports before us.
The fleshed out image
Of her whore plague crimes.
Mortal sin
And unrepented.
Joan: Mortal sin?
Yes, I know of mortal sin.
But why if I were in this sin
Would voices sweet and kind
Bid me do such things so good as I have done?
Restored my king
And to him his crown.
If I were in this state of sin
Would not my saints
My Catherine dear
And Margaret loved
My Michael warrior at God’s side,
Would not my saints
From me and from my sin
Flee in horror stricken?
Inquisitor 3: Such presumption on your part!
Inquisitor 1: Do you defy our sacred office?
Inquisitor 2: Do you affront our holy laws?
Inquisitor 5: Further counts against your name!
Joan: If I guard and keep me maiden
And likewise keep
The pureness of my soul,
Then as virgin in body and heart
Will God protect me and defend me.
Inquisitor 1: (enraged)
You presume too much.
Inquisitor 2: Confess!
Voces: Confess, Confess!
Joan: And I would confess.
For never can one cleanse
The conscience all too much.
And when I do confess,
And should I be by mortal sin possessed,
Then surely my Lords here present rightly know
That this great sorrow
Is for my God and my confessor
Alone in silence dark to hear,
And not to be adjudged by this assembly.
(Lights down on Joan)
(Lights up on Peasant Women)
Woman 1 She’s not a normal that one.
Not a girl like mine
Or yours
Or any of the neighbors here.
Woman 2 Some thinks she puts on airs
And struts about to show herself
But I’m not one to say such things
Or meddle ‘bout her ways.
Woman 3: But at her age
You’d think by now
They’d a got her up as wife
Or at least as promised bride.
Woman 4: Wha dya talk
It’s nonsense then
Who’d take her on?
Robert the fool
Or club foot Pierre.
No whole built man
In back or brain
Would want the like a her.
Woman 3: Well what’s more than that
Is the gob she’s got
Sallow as goat piss
And sagged as its udder.
Woman 2: And it ain’t her face alone,
You’ll always find a man
Whose eyes is blind
To such as her,
And only want
What they get in the dark.
Woman 3: Muffle it up in the horse’s feed bag
To shut up all but them grey eyes.
Them big strange eyes
Always starin
Lookin at ya like ya got
Your old aunt’s ghost
Sittin behind your shoulder
Woman 4: Or like she sees some spider
Crawlin down from your hair
That’s ready to bite your neck
And she ain’t gonna tell
But let ya get bit
Like she wanted it ta be
To teach ya a lesson.
Woman 2 Ya talk the fool
Like she was some witch
Get on yer way!
Can’t ya see
She’s got air in the head
Like Matthew the beggar
Only he don’t run off
To visit the king
But sits in his corner
With his fleas and his lice.
Woman 1: But it ain’t just her face
Or her eyes
Or her look.
It’s what she has done
To her womanly self.
Look what she done!
What she done to her hair
She cut it up short
Bobbed up like a boy
Like a page or a squire
Or knight of the crown.
Woman4: What man would want a woman well
Who wears her hair
Cropped short like his?
Woman 3: Whose got the eye to see her hair,
Look what she done to the clothes she wears.
Cast off her skirt and blouse and shawl
No apron, pin afore or bib
Not cowell or kerchief on her head.
Like some soldier’s boy she wears a shirt
And britches tight against her legs.
Woman 4: Ya make me blush.
To hear such talk.
What ails this girl,
To make her so?
(Lights down on women. Up on the trial)
Inquisitor 2: How with repugnance we must look upon your dress.
Rejecting woman’s clothing
You have taken shirt and breeches
Hose joined to doublet with twenty points
Leggings laced on the outer side
And surcoat to the knees.
Inquisitor 1: Your hair you have cut in demi-round
Like a young coxcomb
And dagger and lance
You took to side.
Inquisitor 1: Now, think you not more fiiting.
That you cast off this tunic
That you put aside these britches,
These clothes which suit a man?
Inquisitor 2 It does not become a woman
To wear the clothing of a man.
Jeanne: It is not the clothing of a man I wear,
But the clothing of my king’s good soldier.
Inquisitor 2: But is not then a soldier a man!
Jeanne: Is not a soldier any who fights for his land?
Inquisitor 3: But does not a soldier wear a man’s costume.
Jeanne: Does not a soldier wear a soldier’s costume?
Inquisitor 1 (impatient and fierce)
Will you put on a woman’s dress?
Inquisitor 2: In prison they gave you a woman’s dress.
Jeanne: You have taken my woman’s dress.
Inquisitor 1: Your jailers gave you a woman’s dress.
Jeanne: And brought me here in soldier’s dress.
For you have denied me a woman’s ward
And shut me in the keep of men
You have shackled my feet
And bound my hands
In the lustful eye
Of your English guards
Who mock and deride
And threaten .....
Inquisitor 2: (interrupting) You talk in circles!
Inquisitor 1: (interjecting furiously)
Non induetur mulier veste virili-
Abominabilis enim apud Deum!
Let no woman wear the clothing of a man!
It is an abomination before the Lord!
Jeanne: I talk in French and in no Latin.
I wear the soldier’s dress,
Who fights for God and for his king,
And for the saints who bid me wear it.
(Lights come up on the soldiers and down on the court.)
Soldier 1: Rough did she speak against the English king
Soldier 2: And well against Bedford and all his men.
Soldier 1: The young boy in the squad
Soldier 2: The young boy with learnin
Soldier 1: From the monks he took his letters
He wrote it out for her
Soldier 1: Words she could say
Soldier 2: Say well with a full tone voice
Soldier 1: Like the voice of a fighter.
Soldier 2: Stronger than yours.
Joan: King of England
And you Duke of Bedford
Who call yourself regent of France
Do you right now before the King of Heaven!
Hand over to the Maiden
The Maiden now sent
Now sent by Heaven’s great king
The keys to those good towns
Which your villainy and greed
Has violated in this sweet France.
And if you will not so to do,
You shall see fall upon yourself
Your very great misfortune
If you believe not these tidings sent to you
Sent to you by this the maiden
She shall strike within your midst
And you shall cause your own great ruin.
For none shall hold the kingdom of France
But by God, the true heir, who is Charles my prince.
(Lights on the court - down on the soldiers.)
Inquisitor 1: We are fair and upright men
And it is our will
That in your favor
You should have
A counselor, an advisor,
One who will speak in your behalf
And in consideration
Of your unletterdness
Aid you in the comprehension
Of this most serious state.
Loiseleur:(with a parchment and quill in hand)
Hear me Joan.
Hear the words of comfort.
Abjure your testimony,
Forswear this uniform.
Believe me Joan,
For if you are willing,
You will be saved.
Put on your clothes,
The clothes of a maid.
Put down your arms,
Your sword and your shield.
Tend to your hair,
And shear it no more.
Grant what they wish,
Bend and abjure.
If you do not heed them,
Your life will be forfeit,
Your soul in great peril.
Do as I say,
And the church will embrace you,
Call you again daughter,
And ransom your soul.
Sign, Joan.
Sign and abjure.
Jeanne: Promise me that I may hear mass
If I wear a woman’s dress.
Promise me this,
And I will answer you.
Loiseleur: I promise that you may hear mass
If you wear a woman’s dress.
Jeanne: And what would you answer,
If I have sworn to God
And to my king
Never to put off
This tunic of war?
Loiseleur: Swear what you will!
Will you put off this manly garb
And wear a woman’s dress?
Joan: Then have it made,
This woman’s dress,
But modest in cut
With no train or trim.
Give me a cover for my head,
That I may hear mass.
And when I return
I
shall put on these clothes that I now wear.
Loiseleur: Do you not hear?
Have you no sense?
Once and for all,
Will you abjure?
Put off these clothes
And cover yourself
In womanly dress
As a young maid should!
Joan: Everything I have said or done
Is in the hand of God
And so in all
I commit myself to him.
` I swear to you this,
That nothing would I do
That is against the Christian faith.
And should I learn
That I have done anything
Contrariwise to that faith
I would rip it from me
And cast it out.
(Lights down on the trial. St. Catherine appears.)
Catherine: There by the water,
Beneath the trees young yellow green,
In sweet spring’s purple misted April,
Pink blossomed coronets
In the young girl’s hair
Golden brown and black,
There Joan, you danced your dance,
Small toes, naked and white
Stirred the sand beneath your feet,
Bending the verdant locks of grass.
And from your fingers,
Pink and slender,
You raised the gentle garland high,
And in soft lilting called my name.
Joan: Saint Catherine, good Catherine,
Why do you forsake me?
Catherine: Forsake you, Joan?
Joan: I loved you.
Catherine: You loved me?
Joan: All my prayers,
Devotions
All upon my knees...
Catherine: Whose devotion?
Joan: Upon my knees,
Upon the earth,
Red with sun and black with mud,
Didn’t I kneel upon the rocks moss green?
Didn’t I bend to blue mantled heaven,
To white ermined clouds,
The princely array of God’s holy saints?
Catherine: Was it Catherine you loved?
Was it Catherine you heard?
Joan: And there in faith in holy church,
Knees upon the stone,
Gray and cold, humble
Beneath her arching vaults,
As though to suckle grace
From God’s bending belly.
Catherine: Joan, Joan,
Were you not weaned of mother’s milk?
Have you no teeth for crusty bread?
Joan: Oh! How you mock me!
You have called me, you have touched me,
With the voice within your heart.
In my innocence you have filled me,
Entered me, driven me,
With passion fired me
And with your love transformed my reason.
And now you, like a whore,
Forget the one who loved you so
(Lights down on Joan.)
(Up on Christine de Pisan and Baudricourt
Like all other characters not present at the trial, Christine and Baudricourt play in the orchestra area.)
Baudricourt: Good friend, good lady
You warm my heart to see you well
Christine: Baudricourt
Old fellow
Too long have you been away
Come sit by me
By my webs and weaving’s
Long white spinnings
And restore to them a bit of color
That since long ago
Has bled from their threads.
Baudricourt: My lady Christine,
Your youth and your vigor
still rush their spicy sap
Into those sharp gray eyes.
Don’t try to coyly pry from me
The compliments you know that you deserve
But that I am to short of wit to offer.
Christine: You are the wit, old Baudricourt
But not just to jest with me
In my listless wanderings,
You are the wit
of that witless king of yours
I’ve heard your doings in this new affair
This girl, this wonder they call the maid.
Baudricourt: A wonder she is
If truth be told
A peasant, a stripling
An unlettered girl
Who came to me one morning
And with words so convincing , so sure
And a face so set, more strong in sweetness than in will
She determined to me that I
Of all the men in France, that I,
Should lead her to Charles, the Dauphin.
For Charles, so she said, by God’s hand and hers
Would be king.
Christine: Tell me Baudricourt
Is she as they say she is?
Has my woman come to France?
The idyl of my imaginings
The rantings of my soul?
Baudricourt: Yes, my friend,\
It is as you have written
A city of women
In the walls of France.
Christine: Do not play with me Baudricourt
A fine soldier you are,
None better,
But a scholar.
There’s another thing!
You’ve not read my book
But play on the word
Of those that have
And scoffed along with them no doubt.
Baudricourt: Too well, my lady
You know me too well.
I have not read your books
My eyes dart across a worded page
In aimless coursing
Awkward at the phrase’s turn
But no eye is swifter to the arrow’s flight
Or the sword’s deft pass
In a battle’s mud and steel and smokey skies.
(Lights fade on Baudricourt. Christine is lit with a pin spot for her monologue.)
Christine: Long have I waited Baudricourt
So long that I thought it only a dream.
Even Anna on the temple steps
Waited no longer than I.
More than I can count
The wrinkles about my sallowed eyes
The fawn brown spots upon my skin
Have I seen snow’s white crystals
Melt to spring’s white blossoms
Upon the branches at my window
But now, now I rejoice,
Like summer’s upturned boughs
In prayer to the noon bright sun,
For these eyes, gray and heavy lidded
See a new light that shines from France’s crown.
To the new city comes a woman,
No, not a woman but a young maid,
Frail in flesh but steel in mind, and soul and heart.
In victory she has led her prince upon the throne.
For Were not you Charles,
on the 17th day of July
in splendor and glory
in the city of Reims
crowned seventh of that name
king of France
And this from a girl
from a maid
Oh! What honor for the female sex!
God’s love for it appears
for what 5ooo men could not have done
a girl of sixteen
who weighs not the armor she wears
but too her seem her very meat.
No not Hector, Nor brave Achilles
possessed such strength
For it is God’s love
that moves her on.
Pass then beyond all brave men
For it is the woman who shall bear the crown.
Arise, sweet France
Your daughter’s valiant cry
Has driven the enemy from your hearth;\
No more to rape and plunder
Your children in their beds.
Your daughter, sweet France,
Has done what no son could do,
For in this year, fourteen hundred and twenty nine
A virgin called forth a new dawn
And brought the sun to shine anew
Upon your gentle fields.
END ACT I
____________________________________________________________________________
Loiseleur: Do you not hear?
Have you no sense?
Once and for all,
Will you abjure?
Put off these clothes
And cover yourself
In womanly dress
As a young maid should!
Joan: Everything I have said or done
Is in the hand of God
And so in all
I commit myself to him.
` I swear to you this,
That nothing would I do
That is against the Christian faith.
And should I learn
That I have done anything
Contrariwise to that faith
I would rip it from me
And cast it out.
(Lights down on the trial. St. Catherine appears.)
Catherine: There by the water,
Beneath the trees young yellow green,
In sweet spring’s purple misted April,
Pink blossomed coronets
In the young girl’s hair
Golden brown and black,
There Joan, you danced your dance,
Small toes, naked and white
Stirred the sand beneath your feet,
Bending the verdant locks of grass.
And from your fingers,
Pink and slender,
You raised the gentle garland high,
And in soft lilting called my name.
Joan: Saint Catherine, good Catherine,
Why do you forsake me?
Catherine: Forsake you, Joan?
Joan: I loved you.
Catherine: You loved me?
Joan: All my prayers,
Devotions
All upon my knees...
Catherine: Whose devotion?
Joan: Upon my knees,
Upon the earth,
Red with sun and black with mud,
Didn’t I kneel upon the rocks moss green?
Didn’t I bend to blue mantled heaven,
To white ermined clouds,
The princely array of God’s holy saints?
Catherine: Was it Catherine you loved?
Was it Catherine you heard?
Joan: And there in faith in holy church,
Knees upon the stone,
Gray and cold, humble
Beneath her arching vaults,
As though to suckle grace
From God’s bending belly.
Catherine: Joan, Joan,
Were you not weaned of mother’s milk?
Have you no teeth for crusty bread?
Joan: Oh! How you mock me!
You have called me, you have touched me,
With the voice within your heart.
In my innocence you have filled me,
Entered me, driven me,
With passion fired me
And with your love transformed my reason.
And now you, like a whore,
Forget the one who loved you so
(Lights down on Joan.)
(Up on Christine de Pisan and Baudricourt
Like all other characters not present at the trial, Christine and Baudricourt play in the orchestra area.)
Baudricourt: Good friend, good lady
You warm my heart to see you well
Christine: Baudricourt
Old fellow
Too long have you been away
Come sit by me
By my webs and weaving’s
Long white spinnings
And restore to them a bit of color
That since long ago
Has bled from their threads.
Baudricourt: My lady Christine,
Your youth and your vigor
still rush their spicy sap
Into those sharp gray eyes.
Don’t try to coyly pry from me
The compliments you know that you deserve
But that I am to short of wit to offer.
Christine: You are the wit, old Baudricourt
But not just to jest with me
In my listless wanderings,
You are the wit
of that witless king of yours
I’ve heard your doings in this new affair
This girl, this wonder they call the maid.
Baudricourt: A wonder she is
If truth be told
A peasant, a stripling
An unlettered girl
Who came to me one morning
And with words so convincing , so sure
And a face so set, more strong in sweetness than in will
She determined to me that I
Of all the men in France, that I,
Should lead her to Charles, the Dauphin.
For Charles, so she said, by God’s hand and hers
Would be king.
Christine: Tell me Baudricourt
Is she as they say she is?
Has my woman come to France?
The idyl of my imaginings
The rantings of my soul?
Baudricourt: Yes, my friend,\
It is as you have written
A city of women
In the walls of France.
Christine: Do not play with me Baudricourt
A fine soldier you are,
None better,
But a scholar.
There’s another thing!
You’ve not read my book
But play on the word
Of those that have
And scoffed along with them no doubt.
Baudricourt: Too well, my lady
You know me too well.
I have not read your books
My eyes dart across a worded page
In aimless coursing
Awkward at the phrase’s turn
But no eye is swifter to the arrow’s flight
Or the sword’s deft pass
In a battle’s mud and steel and smokey skies.
(Lights fade on Baudricourt. Christine is lit with a pin spot for her monologue.)
Christine: Long have I waited Baudricourt
So long that I thought it only a dream.
Even Anna on the temple steps
Waited no longer than I.
More than I can count
The wrinkles about my sallowed eyes
The fawn brown spots upon my skin
Have I seen snow’s white crystals
Melt to spring’s white blossoms
Upon the branches at my window
But now, now I rejoice,
Like summer’s upturned boughs
In prayer to the noon bright sun,
For these eyes, gray and heavy lidded
See a new light that shines from France’s crown.
To the new city comes a woman,
No, not a woman but a young maid,
Frail in flesh but steel in mind, and soul and heart.
In victory she has led her prince upon the throne.
For Were not you Charles,
on the 17th day of July
in splendor and glory
in the city of Reims
crowned seventh of that name
king of France
And this from a girl
from a maid
Oh! What honor for the female sex!
God’s love for it appears
for what 5ooo men could not have done
a girl of sixteen
who weighs not the armor she wears
but too her seem her very meat.
No not Hector, Nor brave Achilles
possessed such strength
For it is God’s love
that moves her on.
Pass then beyond all brave men
For it is the woman who shall bear the crown.
Arise, sweet France
Your daughter’s valiant cry
Has driven the enemy from your hearth;\
No more to rape and plunder
Your children in their beds.
Your daughter, sweet France,
Has done what no son could do,
For in this year, fourteen hundred and twenty nine
A virgin called forth a new dawn
And brought the sun to shine anew
Upon your gentle fields.
END ACT I
____________________________________________________________________________
LA PUCELLE, THE TRIAL OF JOAN
ACT II
SCENE CHANGE- We return to the courtroom on stage. Joan is not present.
(SILENCE)
Inquisitor1: State your name woman.
Jacquinette: What did you say ?
Inquisitor1: Your name. Please give us your name.
Jacquinette: Name?
Inquisitor 2 The witness will give her name.
Jacquinette: Witless? My father called me witless.
My mother too.
Witless.
Inquisitor 1 Your name woman
Do you have a name?
Jacquinette: Name?
Inquisitor 2 Your name?
Jacquinette: Are you going to put me in prison?
Inquisitor: Woman, give us your name.
Jacquinette: I done nothin wrong
Don’t put me in prison.
They gots rats there.
I don like rats.
They hide in the cellar.
It’s dark there
I don like the dark neither.
Inquisitor 2: No one will harm you
Give the court your name.
Jacquinette: I didn’t drown the cat.
It wasn’t my fault
It fell in the barrel.
It fell in the barrel with the rain.
Ol’ woman Marie
She drowned the cat.
Inquisitor 3: Your name.
Loiseleur (approaching the woman)
Tell them how they call you
Tell them Jacquinette.
No one will harm you.
Tell them your name.
Jacquinette: (Loudly)
Jacquinette
They call me Jacquinette.
Inquisitor 1: Where were you born Jacquinette?
Jacquinette: Born?
In my father's house.
Inquisitor 2: What village or town?
Jacquinette: In my village.
Inquisitor: And what is the name of that village?
Jacquinette: It is the village where I was born.
The village with the sycamore
The big tall sycamore
Standing by the church door.
The fountain in the square
The dogs along the fences
They piss along the fences
And the chickens in the yards
Loiseleur: Tell them the village name.
Tell them Domremy
Inquisitor2: Are you from the village of Domremy?
Jacquinette: Domremy. Domremy
That’s what she said to me.
Listen to the bells
Listen to the church bells
The bells of Domremy.
Listen to the bells and you will know
The hour of the angel's prayer
Inquisitor 2: The angel's prayer?
Jacquinette: When you hear the bells
You fall upon your knees
You fall upon your knees
And say out loud these words
Special words, angel's words.
Inquisitor 2: And who told you these words?
Jacquinette: Ah, that was Joan.
Good Joan,
Sweat Joan.
Inquisitor: What words did Joan tell you
What angel's words ?
Jacquinette: Special angel's words.
And you will see,
You will see.
If you are sick,
Angels make you well;
If a sheep is lost,
Angels bring it home.
But you must know the words,
All the angel words.
And Joan told me so.
Inquisitor 3: Joan taught you special words
Words the angels use?
Words to bring you health
Good fortune and good times?
Jacquinette: Yes, good fortune,
By the ringing of the bells
The angel's bells.
Inquisitor 1 And what are these words
These angel's words?
Jacquinette: If I tell you them
Will you let me go?
Loiseleur: If you tell them they will let you go.
Jacquinnette: No rats
No dark.
Loiseleur: No rats
No dark
But if you do not say
You will truly be a sorry girl.
Inquisitor 1: We will let you go.
Jacquinette: And bring old Marie in here.
She drowned the cat.
Inquisitor 2: Tell us the words.
Jacquinette: First I hear the bells.
Ding-dong
Dong-ding
I hear the bells
Ding-dong
Dong-ding
And then I fall
I fall on my knees
To say the words.
(As in a trance. She completely transforms and seems rational)
Angelus Domini
Nuntiavit Mariae
Et concepit de spirito sancto
Inquisitor 1: Angelus Domini?
(Going up to Loiseleur. )
What testimony is this you bring us.
Do you wish to make us fools.
A mad girl who prays the Angelus,
A pious prayer of every peasant,
Of every nun and dutiful monk.
Is this what you brought us to hear.
Loiseleur: (to Jacquinette)
Do you know what these words mean?
Jacquinette: No, my Lord, I do not know.
Inquisitor 3: Then why do you say them?
Jacquinette: Because they bring good things.
Inquisitor 3: They bring good things?
Jacquinette: Oh yes, my lord.
Inquisitor 3: Good things from whom?
Jacquinette: From the angels, my lord.
Inquisitor 1: (to Losieleur)
From the angels.
Loiseleur: Only the angels Jacquinette?
Jacquinette: Oh, no sir.
Loiseleur: Then from whom?
Jacquinette: From the fairies my lord.
(Loiseleur shows his smug satisfaction at this answer.)
Inquisitor 1: From the fairies?
Who told you of fairies?
Jacquinette: Oh, Joan my lord.
` Good Joan,
Sweet Joan.
She always talked to me
And to the fairies.
Inquisitor 2: She talked to the fairies?
How did she talk to the fairies?
Jacquinette: There in the fields,
She made the trees to sing,
The birds to dance among the branches.
Rabbits and hares,
Gray, brown and soft
Ate from her hands
And bowed at her knees.
She taught me songs
And made me laugh.
And down by the river
In the pebbles and sand
With a stick in her hand
She made the shape
Of birds and flowers and tiny things.
And with a stone or a chip
She gave them an eye
And said they could see
As well as we.
Inquisitor 1: Is it not clear
From what we have heard
That the church here present
Most mourn for this child
So bewitched and beguiled.
Is it not clear
That here before us
IS the first of those twisted
And led astray
By the wiles of a woman
In the devil’s charge.
Cauchon: Lead her away.
Record her words.
Bring in the witness.
Jacquinette: No rats, no rats.
No dark, no cold
Cauchon:(almost caring)
No rats, no cold,
No dark, no fear.
(Two soldiers lead in Joan.)
Inquisitor 3: As a child did you not play near the woods?
.....
Joan: (interrupting)
As a child did not you play near the woods?
Inquisitor 3: As a child did you not play near the woods
Where there is said to be a certain tree
A tree called the fairy tree
Joan: yes, by Domremy there grows a tree,
A great tall tree
A red leaf beach
Branched about, high and low
And in the estate of Pierre Baudricourt
Knight of my lord , the king.
Inquisitor 2: And is it said that the fairies visit this tree?
Joan: So they say.
Inquisitor 2: And that the sick and ill go to this tree.
Joan: So they say.
Inquisitor 2: And that they go to this tree
Thinking they will be cured
Of ills and sorrows.
Joan: That they go there
I have heard.
But that they have ever been cured
or saved I do not know,
Nor do I know anyone who
Says they have been cured or saved.
Inquisitor 2: Did you frequent that tree
Or that fairy dwelling wood.
Joan: Do you call it a fairy wood
Because you believe they dwell there.?
I do not know that this can be true
For I have never seen them there
Nor, as best I know, anywhere.
Inquisitor 2: Do you go there
With the other girls
And with them
Hang upon the branches
Flowers and garlands
For the fairies pleasure?
Joan: Of what they may do for the fairies
I know nothing.
but in may, the young girls go to the tree
And there they dance
And weave garlands of flowers
To hang upon the branches
And so they bring the spring
Which in French we call
Le Beau Mai.
But since I have learned
That I must come to France
I have left behind
The songs and flowers
The games and rounds
The young girls play.
Peasant Girl: She never likes play.
There she sits,
Sits all day.
By the wheel spinning
Spinning.
The wheel goes turning
While she hums, hums, hums.
What is she doing?
She won’t come to play.
And when she’s not spinning
She stands ‘round alone singing
In the trees, by the water
Where she stares at her hands
Looks at the water
And talks to the stones.
Threw an acorn once
An hit her head
And what did she do
She fell on her knees
And crossed herself, (gesturing rapidly) crossed herself, crossed herself.
I suppose if a pigeon
Shit on her head
She’d think it was angels
Come for a kiss.
Woman 1: Do you remember the girl?
A strange one round here.
Not many friends
a quiet self- kept.
Woman A bit too good
If your askin me
Too good for us
If ya know what I mean.
Can;t never trust
The ones that do
All what she done.
Woman All the time prayin
And out in the church
Confessin, confessin
What was it she done
A girl a that age?
Woman Start ya ta wonder
Why she would be
Round by the priest
And round by the church
At any odd time of the day.
Woman I heard it said
She’s take in the vagrants
The drunks and the bums
And set them to sleep
In her house on her bed
And she would take the floor.
Woman Is the floor the only thing
That she would take
Or was she takin small
What now she gets large
And her floor the startin ground
For what she plays now in the field
Woman: But what’s the likes a her
doin with the likes a men
Woman Or is the likes of those men
That likes their men
That she’s done herself up for?
Woman Done indeed
from head to toe
in garters and hose
and britches and bows
that string up a man
where he needs to be strung
Woman While what a woman binds up
She binds flat away down
To liken her bosom
To a boy’s flat boney chest
Before he’s a man.
Woman What woman is this
Who makes herself so
And struts about proud
Like a feather fluffed pheasant
With pennants and banners
And soldiers array.
Woman A girl or a soldier
A woman or man
By the looks a’ her doin’s
She’s a hard one ta’ tell.
(Lights down on women, up on the Trial)
Cauchon (frustrated and angry)
Did you want to be a man
When first you came to France?.
Joan: I wanted to be only what God wanted me to be.
Inquisitor 3: Did God want you to be a man?
Joan: God wanted me to be good,
To hear mass and say my prayers
And to go to my king,
Who is king of France.
Inquisitor 1: (in frustration)
Will you take a woman's dress?
Joan: Give me one.
I will take it and go.
Otherwise I will not have it,
For I am content with this,
Since it pleases God that I wear it.
class=WordSection4> Inquisitor 2: Will you not leave behind the wearing of these clothes!
Inquisitor 3: Harlot!
Inquisitor 4: Camp follower!
Inquisitor 2: Frenchman’s boy-faced whore!
(Inquisitor 1 turns to silence 2 - he intends to take a different direction in the questioning.)
Inquisitor 2: You have believed in saints
You have believed in angels
But you believe in them
As you yourself say
As you do believe in Christ the Lord
To equal God’s saints
With the creator Himself
Is heretical imbalance
And an error in faith.
Inquisitor 3: You have said that you see the future
Beyond the veil of human eyes,
You claim your heretic and degenerate prince
To be the king of France
Inquisitor 1: Your clothes are a man’s
Your hair worn short.
You leave nothing to show
Of a woman’s form.
Inquisitor 3: You deceive in your words
In your faith and your actions,
You deceive in your claims
In your dress and your bearing.
Inquisitor 1: You are heretic
Demon
Witch
Abomination before the Lord.
Loiseleur Save your soul Joan,
Call your body back from death.
The flames that burn the flesh
Are but like summer’s sun
To sweet young skin;
But the flames that burn in hell
Sear and crackle in eternal torment.
Hold back the flames of fiery hell,
Abjure, recant
And let God preserve you.
(The lights dim on the court and come up on Joan and the Temptor)
Temptor: Do you feel the darkness Joan?
The darkness ever growing?
Where are your visions,
Your hopes for tomorrow?
Only the rats, the wet and the mold,
Only the rotting, the putrid, the foul.
Give in to them Joan.
You cannot go on.
Hope, Joan, Hope?
Hope is a conceit
A failed past’s swollen reflection
Cast into a future void;
The soul’s limp spine
Seeking to glorify
The weakness of the present
Through the worn glaze mirror
Of its own vanity.
Already your future,
Decays in the past.
Nightmares and screams
Speak clearer than voices
Of saints in your visions.
And the pain of the fire,
The pain of the flame.
Joan: I am condemned
I see the fire lit.
I see the wood piled ready,
The post upon the pyre
Where they will put me to the flame.
I see, yet I will not abjure.
I fear, yet I will not deny
The God, the saints,
The voices that guide me.
And even after,
When I am in the fire,
When the scraping flame
Burns and blisters black my skin,
And though my screams
Fill the square
And cause the bells to echo
Even then will not a sound
Announce a change of word.
I will not change a thought.
I will not change my soul.
I will not change that I have loved
My country, my king, my God.
But shall maintain what I have said
Until death.
Peasant 1: She’s off to her dreams
What a sight to behold.
Peasant 2: Baudricourt, the kings first council
Gave her arms,
Gave her his faith
And brought her to Chinon
Peasant 3: They say the king
When he was to receive her
Thought to trick her
And play her as a fool
And sport.
He hid himself among his courtiers
And sat upon his throne instead
A serving boy,
Dressed in the king’s own cap and cloak.
Peasant 2: But she was not fooled
There was no game.
She entered the hall
And went to the throne
Then turned away
And walked straight to the king
Who hid behind a women’s clutch
In the corner of the hall.
Peasant 1: They say she knows things
No man would know
Not priest, not bishop, not scholar, not king.
She plans out battles
And leads attacks,
A girl who could not even lead her father’s sheep.
She outdoes the English, and Burgundy’s men
And leads the men of France
Beneath her pennant, blue and white.
Peasant 2: She dons armor and sword,
Shield and tunic all painted in blue
And white and silver garnish.
She has a charger,
Ten and eight hands high,
A girl who could not guide her mother’s mule.
Peasant 1: Of God or the devil
I surely don’t know.
But what she can conjure
What she can make
Is beyond a village girl’s ken.
(Lights down. Up on Joan)
Soldier 1: A girl, Baudricourt sends us a girl?
What did we all say?
Who can believe it?
The English call her witch
Burgundy calls her harlot
But she is France,
She is Charles and the throne.
Soldier 2: She is God’s saint
Her miracles prove it.
She knew the king
When he hid from her
She told him of the sword,
The sacred sword buried deep,
Deep below Saint Catherine’ altar
In the Church at Fierbois.
Soldier 3: Covered in rust they found it
Just as she said.
Covered in rust, aged and decayed
Forgotten and lost
Like the crown of France.
Yet, in her visions,
She saw its blade
Silver and sharp
And ready for battle.
And when they dug it from its grave,
The rust and tarnish and dirt of ages
Fell fast away.
And so they made her a velvet scabbard
To sheath that sword.
And with it she led us on to Orleans.
Soldier 3: Sure this girl can’t be no witch
What witch could work her magic spells
` Under good Jesus and Mary’s name.
She had ‘em put the names
In silver and gold
In writin’ on her banner.
Now, I’m not sayin as I can read.
And can’t say for my life
That that’s what it says,
But there are fellows in the camp
Who have learned at least their letters.
And that’s what they say
She’s wrote up there.
Soldier 2: They say that pennant brings her luck,
As well as some special ring
The king has sent.
I don’t know ‘bout witches
And I’m not sure ‘bout luck,
But that girl flung herself up on the wall
Like no man I know,
And took an arrow in the chest
Without a wince or call.
Soldier 1: I hear some say she’s a boy in them clothes
Maybe the captain’s boy?
Soldier 2: She ain’t no boy
I heard it sure
From the captain’s man
Who saw her once
When he came into her tent.
He came to fetch her to Baudricourt
And there she was,
Naked to the waist,
And sure enough
(He gestures “round breasts”)
She ain’t no boy.
Soldier 3: Have you
forgot
That that’s no proof.
These (he gestures) are not the things that make a woman.
Soldier 1: Now, you sure one that needs a woman,
Soldier 3: For sure you’re right,
But I’ve heard for sure that she’s no boy
And that the queen herself made sure she wasn’t
And more than that was never been touched
If you know what I mean.
Soldier 1: But now the English got her.
And the Duke of Burgundy
Locked her up.
And all them priests and monks
Are sure to twist her up
And set her up for fire wood.
Soldier 2: But the king won’t let ‘em.
He owes her the crown.
Soldier 1: But they asked a ransom,
And the king’s purse
Holds less that a fork full of water.
(Lights down on soldiers as they come up on Charles, the queen and Baudricourt)
Charles: (Yelling)
Afraid, I’m afraid.
Queen: An idiot,
My son is an idiot.
Charles: If she is a demon.
Queen: A fool for a king.
Baudricourt: But if there is truth in what they claim...
Queen: You are as much a fool as he.
Charles: My conscience troubles me.
I walk alone at night,
Without sleep, without dreams,
Troubled by the thought, by the fear
That indeed she is demon sent
And demon sent she rode to me
To fit my crown with hell-fire coals
To lift me up
To cast me down
Into the darkest devil’s pit.
Queen: When will I hear enough from this fool?
He babbles like school boys
In fancies and dreams
That the priests and the nuns
Paint in his brain.
Idle ramblings
Adventuresome terrors
Fit for a child.
Charles: If I am king by a witch
I am the king of demons,
Maggots and worms will burst from my bowels
Blood and puss will spurt from my brow
I will forever me consigned to hell fire
And know no peace in death
As I have known no peace in life.
Queen:(To Baudricourt)
We speak plainly Baudricourt
We speak as soldiers
We speak as kings,
I the throne and you the lance.
Truth to tell,
We have no need,
No need of her now.
Her role is complete
The battle is done.
Whether demon or saint
She has delivered us Rheims
She has given us Orleans
Restored to us France.
Baudricourt: A girl, madame,
Of no more than nineteen,
A girl came to me madame
And with her a dream.
Can we allow her to our enemies
To their prisons, their guards
Their English guards
Who beset her day and night
With taunts and chidings
They have denied her the woman’s right
Of churchly confinement in a nunnery’s ward
And subjected her as a soldier
To the keep of men.
Is this our repayment
For the crown she has won?
Queen: Did you see her at Rhiems
At my son’s side.
There were she stood
A warrior goddess
Resplendent in silver and blue
Her sword at her side
And in her outstretched arm
The pennant she bears
And on it emblazoned
Jesus, Maria?
Did you see the soldiers watch her,
See the people fixed
Staring in wonder.
And there upon the throne,
Upon the throne of France
This, their king.
This, frail in body and long in nose,
Whimpering, drooling,
Fidgeting with his crown
Like a child with a new hat.
Charles: Let the English have her,
She frightens me.
Harlot they call her,
Witch and whore.
Let the English burn her
To appease the sin
She has done.
Baudricourt: We cannot abandon her, madame.
Pay out a ransom
Return her to France.
If need be,
Send her away
To a convent or cloister
To live out her days.
Charles: I will not have her.
Don’t do it mother.
Keep her away.
Queen: No, Baudricourt, no.
Not for my son’s fears
But for his crown,
For the crown of France.
One more battle she must fight,
One more battle must she win.
The English will burn her,
We know it well.
But the fire they will light
Will scorch all of France
And cleanse it of England
For a thousand years.
And not only England
But all of our foes
And so will the crown
And the land
Be forever one, forever France.
(Return to the trial)
Inquisitor 1 Have you visited the Church of Saint Catherine
Saint Catherine at Fierbois
Joan: Yes
Inquisitor 1 And what did you find at the Church
Joan: A sword my lord
Inquisitor 1 And where did you find this sword
Joan: They found it beneath the altar my lord
Inquisitor 2: And how did they find it
Joan: They knew where to find it by my voices
For I told them where it lay
Not to deep I think
But covered in rust
With five crosses upon it
Inquisitor 2: And what blessings did you invoke
Or have invoked upon it
Joan: Neither did I bless it
Or have it blessed
Inquisitor 3: Did you place your sword upon the altar
And so placing it
Believe it more fortunate
Joan: No my lord
Inquisitor 3: Had you a banner
Joan: A banner white and fringed in silk
Upon it a field of lilies golden
And with the words as they tell me
Jesu Maria
Inquisitor 3: And fir which was your greater care
Your banner or your sword
Joan: Forty times more
I loved my banner
Than my sword
Cauchon: Your soldiers Joan.
What do you say of your soldiers.
Joan: Not my soldiers,
But God’s soldiers
And soldiers of the king.
Cauchon: Do you see them Joan?
How you deceived them Joan?
How you enticed them Joan?
Joan: My soldiers heed the call of France.
Cauchon: Do they kiss your hands?
Joan: Do they kiss my hands?
Cauchon: Do the soldiers kiss your hands?
Do they press their lips upon your palms”
Do their lips
Melt within
The folds or your skin?
Joan: Do they kiss my hands?
Cauchon: Do their lips warm
The soft and tender folds
That lie beneath your fingers?
Joan: These hands?
A soldier’s hands,
Raw hands.
Cauchon: Moist lips Joan,
To soften those hands.
Joan: Blistered hands.
Cauchon: Tell me Joan,
Do they kiss your hands?
Joan: Hands that wield the sword
Of almighty God’s desire.
Cauchon: And your desire Joan?
What voice is your desire?
Do you hear them now?
Listen.
Joan: Beating thousand chorus wings,
Red and blue, silver and gold,
Startled doves in autumns leaves
Thunder soundless to my ears
And flutter trumpeting within my soul.
Rumbling in the clouds
Soft upon the earth
The angels sing to me
Call to me
Listen!
Cauchon: Then you do not hear them
But only think you hear them.
Joan: Listen.
Cauchon: Conjured them,
Divined them from bewitched imaginings.
Joan: Listen.
Yes, I hear.
(Silence)
Michael, guardian, warrior.
Heaven’s champion knight,
I white flame armor
Sun rayed hair, celestial fire
From above his thrusting brow
Bursts forward toward his halo crown,
Eyes, icy crystals that scorch and singe
My burning cheeks to summer’s rose.
Upward to those crystal spheres
He raises high his blue silver steel.
“Go forward Joan,
Forward for God,
Forward for France”.
Inquisitor 4: You desire the flow of human blood
Across the fields of daughter France,
That God should speak to you in the Frenchman’s tongue
And shut his ears to England’s prayers.
That you ignore the call to love your foe
And claim that saints direct you....
Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 3: You have abandoned father and mother,
Home and duty.
You live in the company of men,
To march with whores
Who swarm the fields of battle.
Harlot! Adulteress!
Inquisitor 4: You refuse the judgement of Mother Church
And all her councils.
You do not heed the will of clergy,
Of bishops and clerics who speak as one.
You do not cease to err in the pernicious singularity
Of self destruction
Which you dare to call,
The voice of God.
Apostate! Idolater!
Inquisitor 1: Sign the confession.
Sign and abjure!
Inquisitor 5: Will you submit to the ordinance of the church?
Joan: I submit to God.
Inquisitor 2: Will you cast aside these men’s clothes.
Joan: Has my lord forgotten
Or can he not read his own books
On this you have my answer.
Inquisitor 3: Submit
Sign
Joan: I am condemned.
But send me a priest
And with God’s aid
I will answer to him
In the dark closure
Of my private confession.
Inquisitor4: You will have no priest
Until you submit,
Submit to the church
Who sits here before you,
Present in this body.
Submit to the church
Who with her bishops
And with her priests
With her sons
And with her daughters
Speaks as one
In God’s holy name.
Cauchon: If thy brother
Shall trespass against thee
Go you and tell him his fault.
But if he will not hear thee,
Then take with thee one or two more,
And if he shall refuse to hear even them,
Tell his wrong doing to the whole assembly.
And if he refuse to hear the whole assembly
Let him be to thee as the heathen apart!
Inquisitor 4: You will be an outcast Joan.
Like the villainous Saracen
The Blackamoor among us,
Marked like Cain,
And the children of Ham.
Your soul in solitary anguish
With torment
Shall abide with demons.
Joan: I am the church’s baptized daughter,
Raised upon the font.
Her waters washed my sins.
But now you wish to raise me up
Excommunicate
And cast me down and unmarked grave.
Yet, I am a good Christian
And so I shall die.
Inquisitor 2: No, Joan.
You raise yourself.
You raise yourself above the church
Above this assembly,
Above the law.
Joan: It is God who has raised me,
To serve my king,
To serve my country,
To serve His will.
Inquisitor 4: His will.
Your impudence cries louder than your foul deeds.
Joan: For my words and for my deeds,
I refer them all to God.
Inquisitor 3: Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 2: Heresy!
Inquisitor 1: By your own words,
By your own words Joan,
You break with holy church
And this assembly.
The church is one,
The church is holy.
Loiseleur: Make yourself one with us Joan,
Make yourself one.
Do not let your soul wander alone.
Renounce your voices,
Embrace the truth
And find peace in your heart.
Joan: To tell you different I cannot.
To say you different I cannot.
Even though I go to the fire,
I cannot renounce my saints,
My voices,
My king,
My God.
Cauchon: Girl!
Do you not realize
These words you utter
Tear at our very soul?
To bring you to reason
To make you again whole,
You drive us to consider means
That strike fear into us all.
Loiseleur: Why can you not do what they ask?
Are you willing to burn?
Do you not fear the flame?
The flame that sears the flesh,
That rises to dance upon your breast
To slice your nipples
And sing upon your nose and lips
And curl and leap between your fingers
And dart and cut beneath the nails.
Thrusting up between your limbs
To melt your maidenhood to ash.
Have you seen those dead from fire?
Have you smelled and heard their stench filled cries?
(Joan is silent. She crosses herself.)
Inquisitor 1: She remains.
Inquisitor 2: Silence.
Inquisitor 1: Unrepentent.
(The judges move toward the center. Cauchon prepares the final judgement. Two soldiers move Joan to a side platform to hear the sentence)
Cauchon: In ipsa causa concludimus
We, assembled here to hear this cause
Declare by law
The process is concluded..
For in all things you have remained obdurate
And do not consider
As the Gospel surely teaches
That no branch may bear
Its fruit of its own
Except that it abide
By the growing of the vine.
Hear then now
The words of this court
For, before us at dawn
On the morrow in this place
Shall you hear well
The sentence pronounced
To be carried out
In this city of Rouen
According to right
And to holy law.
Joan: Do not! I implore you. Do not!
Inquisitor 1: Then you submit?
Inquisitor 2: Then you abjure?
Joan: I am afraid!
Temptor: You are an abomination Joan.
Your are a distortion.
In flesh you are a woman’s mold
In heart are you driven as though a man.
Yet that woman’s flesh denies itself
and shields itself in manly dress
And that manly soul
that moves you on
Is towards comely saints compelled
Cast off the guise of your design
accept the mask of their charade.
Truth, Joan, truth?
What truth have you designed?
But truth that you deny.
Have you not seen on the water’s surface?
Have you seen in the depth’s of your soul?
Crippled in sight
Blinded in action
You cannot stand alone Joan,
You cannot stand alone.
Collapse the armor of your walls
And fall to nest within their arms.
Loiseleur: (Handing her the document)
Make your mark.
Joan: (She makes her mark)
Temptor: Joan, Joan
You have seen
You have seen
Now you are at one
At one with them
Cast off now this manly garb
Don again your womanly dress
Stand down from arms and fields of war
Turn again to a woman's web
Leave behind your strange desires
And turn your will to their designs
You are one with them Joan
One with all others
Is this not simple thing
That that’s no proof.
These (he gestures) are not the things that make a woman.
Soldier 1: Now, you sure one that needs a woman,
Soldier 3: For sure you’re right,
But I’ve heard for sure that she’s no boy
And that the queen herself made sure she wasn’t
And more than that was never been touched
If you know what I mean.
Soldier 1: But now the English got her.
And the Duke of Burgundy
Locked her up.
And all them priests and monks
Are sure to twist her up
And set her up for fire wood.
Soldier 2: But the king won’t let ‘em.
He owes her the crown.
Soldier 1: But they asked a ransom,
And the king’s purse
Holds less that a fork full of water.
(Lights down on soldiers as they come up on Charles, the queen and Baudricourt)
Charles: (Yelling)
Afraid, I’m afraid.
Queen: An idiot,
My son is an idiot.
Charles: If she is a demon.
Queen: A fool for a king.
Baudricourt: But if there is truth in what they claim...
Queen: You are as much a fool as he.
Charles: My conscience troubles me.
I walk alone at night,
Without sleep, without dreams,
Troubled by the thought, by the fear
That indeed she is demon sent
And demon sent she rode to me
To fit my crown with hell-fire coals
To lift me up
To cast me down
Into the darkest devil’s pit.
Queen: When will I hear enough from this fool?
He babbles like school boys
In fancies and dreams
That the priests and the nuns
Paint in his brain.
Idle ramblings
Adventuresome terrors
Fit for a child.
Charles: If I am king by a witch
I am the king of demons,
Maggots and worms will burst from my bowels
Blood and puss will spurt from my brow
I will forever me consigned to hell fire
And know no peace in death
As I have known no peace in life.
Queen:(To Baudricourt)
We speak plainly Baudricourt
We speak as soldiers
We speak as kings,
I the throne and you the lance.
Truth to tell,
We have no need,
No need of her now.
Her role is complete
The battle is done.
Whether demon or saint
She has delivered us Rheims
She has given us Orleans
Restored to us France.
Baudricourt: A girl, madame,
Of no more than nineteen,
A girl came to me madame
And with her a dream.
Can we allow her to our enemies
To their prisons, their guards
Their English guards
Who beset her day and night
With taunts and chidings
They have denied her the woman’s right
Of churchly confinement in a nunnery’s ward
And subjected her as a soldier
To the keep of men.
Is this our repayment
For the crown she has won?
Queen: Did you see her at Rhiems
At my son’s side.
There were she stood
A warrior goddess
Resplendent in silver and blue
Her sword at her side
And in her outstretched arm
The pennant she bears
And on it emblazoned
Jesus, Maria?
Did you see the soldiers watch her,
See the people fixed
Staring in wonder.
And there upon the throne,
Upon the throne of France
This, their king.
This, frail in body and long in nose,
Whimpering, drooling,
Fidgeting with his crown
Like a child with a new hat.
Charles: Let the English have her,
She frightens me.
Harlot they call her,
Witch and whore.
Let the English burn her
To appease the sin
She has done.
Baudricourt: We cannot abandon her, madame.
Pay out a ransom
Return her to France.
If need be,
Send her away
To a convent or cloister
To live out her days.
Charles: I will not have her.
Don’t do it mother.
Keep her away.
Queen: No, Baudricourt, no.
Not for my son’s fears
But for his crown,
For the crown of France.
One more battle she must fight,
One more battle must she win.
The English will burn her,
We know it well.
But the fire they will light
Will scorch all of France
And cleanse it of England
For a thousand years.
And not only England
But all of our foes
And so will the crown
And the land
Be forever one, forever France.
(Return to the trial)
Inquisitor 1 Have you visited the Church of Saint Catherine
Saint Catherine at Fierbois
Joan: Yes
Inquisitor 1 And what did you find at the Church
Joan: A sword my lord
Inquisitor 1 And where did you find this sword
Joan: They found it beneath the altar my lord
Inquisitor 2: And how did they find it
Joan: They knew where to find it by my voices
For I told them where it lay
Not to deep I think
But covered in rust
With five crosses upon it
Inquisitor 2: And what blessings did you invoke
Or have invoked upon it
Joan: Neither did I bless it
Or have it blessed
Inquisitor 3: Did you place your sword upon the altar
And so placing it
Believe it more fortunate
Joan: No my lord
Inquisitor 3: Had you a banner
Joan: A banner white and fringed in silk
Upon it a field of lilies golden
And with the words as they tell me
Jesu Maria
Inquisitor 3: And fir which was your greater care
Your banner or your sword
Joan: Forty times more
I loved my banner
Than my sword
Cauchon: Your soldiers Joan.
What do you say of your soldiers.
Joan: Not my soldiers,
But God’s soldiers
And soldiers of the king.
Cauchon: Do you see them Joan?
How you deceived them Joan?
How you enticed them Joan?
Joan: My soldiers heed the call of France.
Cauchon: Do they kiss your hands?
Joan: Do they kiss my hands?
Cauchon: Do the soldiers kiss your hands?
Do they press their lips upon your palms”
Do their lips
Melt within
The folds or your skin?
Joan: Do they kiss my hands?
Cauchon: Do their lips warm
The soft and tender folds
That lie beneath your fingers?
Joan: These hands?
A soldier’s hands,
Raw hands.
Cauchon: Moist lips Joan,
To soften those hands.
Joan: Blistered hands.
Cauchon: Tell me Joan,
Do they kiss your hands?
Joan: Hands that wield the sword
Of almighty God’s desire.
Cauchon: And your desire Joan?
What voice is your desire?
Do you hear them now?
Listen.
Joan: Beating thousand chorus wings,
Red and blue, silver and gold,
Startled doves in autumns leaves
Thunder soundless to my ears
And flutter trumpeting within my soul.
Rumbling in the clouds
Soft upon the earth
The angels sing to me
Call to me
Listen!
Cauchon: Then you do not hear them
But only think you hear them.
Joan: Listen.
Cauchon: Conjured them,
Divined them from bewitched imaginings.
Joan: Listen.
Yes, I hear.
(Silence)
Michael, guardian, warrior.
Heaven’s champion knight,
I white flame armor
Sun rayed hair, celestial fire
From above his thrusting brow
Bursts forward toward his halo crown,
Eyes, icy crystals that scorch and singe
My burning cheeks to summer’s rose.
Upward to those crystal spheres
He raises high his blue silver steel.
“Go forward Joan,
Forward for God,
Forward for France”.
Inquisitor 4: You desire the flow of human blood
Across the fields of daughter France,
That God should speak to you in the Frenchman’s tongue
And shut his ears to England’s prayers.
That you ignore the call to love your foe
And claim that saints direct you....
Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 3: You have abandoned father and mother,
Home and duty.
You live in the company of men,
To march with whores
Who swarm the fields of battle.
Harlot! Adulteress!
Inquisitor 4: You refuse the judgement of Mother Church
And all her councils.
You do not heed the will of clergy,
Of bishops and clerics who speak as one.
You do not cease to err in the pernicious singularity
Of self destruction
Which you dare to call,
The voice of God.
Apostate! Idolater!
Inquisitor 1: Sign the confession.
Sign and abjure!
Inquisitor 5: Will you submit to the ordinance of the church?
Joan: I submit to God.
Inquisitor 2: Will you cast aside these men’s clothes.
Joan: Has my lord forgotten
Or can he not read his own books
On this you have my answer.
Inquisitor 3: Submit
Sign
Joan: I am condemned.
But send me a priest
And with God’s aid
I will answer to him
In the dark closure
Of my private confession.
Inquisitor4: You will have no priest
Until you submit,
Submit to the church
Who sits here before you,
Present in this body.
Submit to the church
Who with her bishops
And with her priests
With her sons
And with her daughters
Speaks as one
In God’s holy name.
Cauchon: If thy brother
Shall trespass against thee
Go you and tell him his fault.
But if he will not hear thee,
Then take with thee one or two more,
And if he shall refuse to hear even them,
Tell his wrong doing to the whole assembly.
And if he refuse to hear the whole assembly
Let him be to thee as the heathen apart!
Inquisitor 4: You will be an outcast Joan.
Like the villainous Saracen
The Blackamoor among us,
Marked like Cain,
And the children of Ham.
Your soul in solitary anguish
With torment
Shall abide with demons.
Joan: I am the church’s baptized daughter,
Raised upon the font.
Her waters washed my sins.
But now you wish to raise me up
Excommunicate
And cast me down and unmarked grave.
Yet, I am a good Christian
And so I shall die.
Inquisitor 2: No, Joan.
You raise yourself.
You raise yourself above the church
Above this assembly,
Above the law.
Joan: It is God who has raised me,
To serve my king,
To serve my country,
To serve His will.
Inquisitor 4: His will.
Your impudence cries louder than your foul deeds.
Joan: For my words and for my deeds,
I refer them all to God.
Inquisitor 3: Blasphemy!
Inquisitor 2: Heresy!
Inquisitor 1: By your own words,
By your own words Joan,
You break with holy church
And this assembly.
The church is one,
The church is holy.
Loiseleur: Make yourself one with us Joan,
Make yourself one.
Do not let your soul wander alone.
Renounce your voices,
Embrace the truth
And find peace in your heart.
Joan: To tell you different I cannot.
To say you different I cannot.
Even though I go to the fire,
I cannot renounce my saints,
My voices,
My king,
My God.
Cauchon: Girl!
Do you not realize
These words you utter
Tear at our very soul?
To bring you to reason
To make you again whole,
You drive us to consider means
That strike fear into us all.
Loiseleur: Why can you not do what they ask?
Are you willing to burn?
Do you not fear the flame?
The flame that sears the flesh,
That rises to dance upon your breast
To slice your nipples
And sing upon your nose and lips
And curl and leap between your fingers
And dart and cut beneath the nails.
Thrusting up between your limbs
To melt your maidenhood to ash.
Have you seen those dead from fire?
Have you smelled and heard their stench filled cries?
(Joan is silent. She crosses herself.)
Inquisitor 1: She remains.
Inquisitor 2: Silence.
Inquisitor 1: Unrepentent.
(The judges move toward the center. Cauchon prepares the final judgement. Two soldiers move Joan to a side platform to hear the sentence)
Cauchon: In ipsa causa concludimus
We, assembled here to hear this cause
Declare by law
The process is concluded..
For in all things you have remained obdurate
And do not consider
As the Gospel surely teaches
That no branch may bear
Its fruit of its own
Except that it abide
By the growing of the vine.
Hear then now
The words of this court
For, before us at dawn
On the morrow in this place
Shall you hear well
The sentence pronounced
To be carried out
In this city of Rouen
According to right
And to holy law.
Joan: Do not! I implore you. Do not!
Inquisitor 1: Then you submit?
Inquisitor 2: Then you abjure?
Joan: I am afraid!
Temptor: You are an abomination Joan.
Your are a distortion.
In flesh you are a woman’s mold
In heart are you driven as though a man.
Yet that woman’s flesh denies itself
and shields itself in manly dress
And that manly soul
that moves you on
Is towards comely saints compelled
Cast off the guise of your design
accept the mask of their charade.
Truth, Joan, truth?
What truth have you designed?
But truth that you deny.
Have you not seen on the water’s surface?
Have you seen in the depth’s of your soul?
Crippled in sight
Blinded in action
You cannot stand alone Joan,
You cannot stand alone.
Collapse the armor of your walls
And fall to nest within their arms.
Loiseleur: (Handing her the document)
Make your mark.
Joan: (She makes her mark)
Temptor: Joan, Joan
You have seen
You have seen
Now you are at one
At one with them
Cast off now this manly garb
Don again your womanly dress
Stand down from arms and fields of war
Turn again to a woman's web
Leave behind your strange desires
And turn your will to their designs
You are one with them Joan
One with all others
Is this not simple thing
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Is this not a comfort sweet
At peace now Joan
be at peace
Cauchon: Now see we justice
The will of God and the people of France
Prevail against the ways of deceit
Of villany and cunning.
Now for your treason
The just dessert.
You have found, Joan,
You have found the will of God.
You have renounced your demons
And you have found the will of God.
You have restored your soul.
Joan: My soul? Oh my soul!
(She pauses in confusion)
Cauchon: Your soul redeemed.
Cauchon: Your soul redeemed.
Joan: My soul consumed!
Oh, my saints!
Oh, my holy voices!
What have I done?
What have I done?
Now do I behold my sin
Now do I perceive my error
For with my mark have I denied my loving God
A god who has made me as I am
Who has conceived me and sent me forth
Who has created the fullness of my self
A god who would not deny to daughter or son
The gift of love
The right of love
Which is the making of the soul
And in my weakness have I denied
To fit myself within your narrow mold
For fear to stand alone
For fear to speak that love
Which speaks to me
And that your blindness cannot see
And your hearing cannot hear
Loiseleur: Beware your words!
Joan: Beware my soul!
I have deceived them,
I have betrayed them!
Oh Sweet voices
Oh, holy martyrs!
Forgive me my treason!
Forgive me this lie!
Cauchon: The demons retake her!
Joan: Undo my mark
Loiseleur: Do you renounce your abjuration?
Joan: Pardon my treason
Loiseleur: Do you recant your admission?
Joan: I recall my saints, my voices, my loves.
Inquisitor 1: Do you return to your sin
Joan: Yes, I behold my sin
I behold my error
For in that stroke have I denied my loving God
A god who has made me as you see
For I am indeed God made
Not in hair and dress
But in soul and mind and heart
Unink that stroke
Scrape clean the leaf
That I may too
Remove the stain
that has blackened my faith
My heart, my soul.
For fear to stand alone
Against those fires which would burn away
All that my God, my voices, my saints
Have called upon me to be
Loiseleur: Then you bring upon yourself
The judgement that awaits you
The fires of purgation whose biting flame
But hints at the eternal fires of hell’s dark hole.
Joan: You speak of fires my lord;
You speak of darkness.
But is this not already greater darkness?.
Is this not a more burning flame?
How brief that moment
Of my submission
Yet in its instant was all the burning fire of eternity
Feeding on the flesh of my denial.
And when you bind me upon that pyre,
It will not be my screams that you will hear
But the sound of God’s justice offended
That will burn through your ears and mind and heart.
(Silence)
Joan: Listen.
St. Michael: Joan,
I have heard you Joan.
I have heard but cannot defend.
For though you have called me,
Was it I who called you?
Joan: Truly, did I hear you
And truly did believe.
Touch me now
Touch me with that golden lance
With which at heaven’s birth
You cast below the fiend’s false light
To hell’s dark fires
And everlasting night.
Michael: Joan, poor Joan.
Vain pride did not all that morning perish
Nor did it fall so far into hell’s black fire
That it’s gilded touch
Is not with us still.
Joan: Is it vain to love,
Is it pride to call upon the saints
To fall before their shrines
And speak their names with a faith
That consecrated them to me?
St. Margaret: Are we then yours Joan?
Are we, the elect, given to you?
Do we above, dally below
To meddle in the hearts of men
And play with children’s hearts,
And so entice the wiles
Of foolish young maids?
Joan: By my love you are mine,
By my faith you are elect
Within God’s realm.
It is my love that hears you;
My love that gives you voice.
My faith that brings you to me.
Catherine: Faith, Joan,
Faith in whom.
In us?
Margaret: Or in your self.
Joan: I only wanted to love you.
I only wanted to love.
Michael: There can only be silence now Joan
Only the silence of your own will
Deep within you it echoes
The voiceless cries
Of your lonely soul.
They cannot see Joan;
They cannot hear.
You are alone.
Joan: No, No!
Do not abandon me
Do not forsake me
I have loved you
I have loved you!
You are mine!
Do you not hear me?
Do you not hear?
Loiseleur: Do you not hear us Joan?
Do you not hear this assembly?
Submit to this council
Submit to the church.
Submit to the truth!
(Stage lights dim. Lights up on the orchestra for Christine.)
Christine: What then is truth?
I tell you her word is truth
For her word is ever one.
And is not truth by its very nature
Like nature, ever one?
For all your pacts
For all your congress
You arrive by multiplicity
By contrivance and false compromise,
By diminution, by distillation
At points which counterfeit and mock
The one-ness which is truth.
By your councils and your parries,
Which pleases all
And troubles none,
You become your own contentment
And find a resting place
Where you think to defend yourselves
In your own approbation
And mutual smug repose.
And though you by numbers
Rebuke her, confine her, destroy her,
you cannot arrest her
For she is also her own truth,
Her own unshakeable oneness
Bound within and without
By the steadfast armor
Of her belief.
And it is here that you fear her.
Here that you men of learning
Men of the church,
Men of arms
Here that you fear
A simple girl,
A country girl
Not yet ten and nine.
For in the oneness of the truth
All your force
All your threats
All your chains
And black wholed prisons,
Crumble in dust,
An impotent lie.
(The stage goes dark.
A lone monk, hood raised, appears in the shadows with a single lighted taper.
We hear a choir intoning the Dies Irae as at the start of the play.)
Clerk 1: In the name of the Lord
AMEN
We, Pierre Cauchon,
By divine mercy
Bishop of Beauvais
Jean le Maitre
` Deputy of the Inquisitor
Of the faith
Jean Craverant
Doctor of Theology
And matters of faith
Judges competent in this action,
Whereas, we deem you Joan
Who calls yourself the Maid
To be a wayward heretic
Fallen into a diversity of crimes
Of schism, idolatry
And invocation of demons.
In your singularity you raise your pride
In your pride you defy this communion
With unyielding fixation
Like a dog
You return,
return to your own vomit,
To devour and consume anew
Your headstrong presumption.
Therefore, in the single voice
And unity of holy church
And all those assembled here
The clerk takes the great taper, turns it upside down and extinguishes the flame on the floor)
WE DECLARE YOU HERETIC
WE CAST YOU FROM THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH
WE DISCARD YOU AS A ROTTEN AND PUTREFIED MEMBER
AND GIVE YOU UP TO SECULAR JUSTICE
Joan: (Screaming for the first time)
My God, I am afraid.
(The following moves rapidly ; the chant continues)
Loiseleur: Abjure Joan.
Joan: I am alone!
Inquisitor 5: Abjure!
Joan: I don’t want to die.
Loiseleur: Recant Joan
Joan: Don’t let me burn!
Loiseleur: Free yourself!
Joan: I am afraid.
Inquisitor 1: A king you saved,
You cannot save yourself!
Joan: My God, Into your hands!
Inquisitor 2: Recant
Joan: Do not burn my hands.
Inquisitor 3: Sign!
Joan: ... my face.
Inquisitor 4: Swear!
Joan: ... my hair
Inquisitor 5: Heretic!
Joan: .. My skin, my eyes
Inquisitor 4: (As a clerk kneels before her with paper and quill)
Sign and recant.
Joan: I cannot.
Inquisitor 3: Sign.
Joan: I cannot. I am bound.
Inquisitor 2: Unbind her hands.!
Joan: Not by your threads
But by chains
By the chains of my soul.
inquisitors alternately:Witch
Heretic
Blasphemer
Apostate
Joan: Oh my saints
Why have you abandoned me?
Oh, my king,
OH, Orleans
Oh, sweet France
Unbind me of myself
Deliver me to their will
To dissolve to their mind.
Inquisitors alternately: Witch
Heretic
Blasphemer
Apostate
Cauchon: Then you despair!
Despair of your voices.
Despair of your saints.
Joan: No!
I despair of the truth
That flees from your hearts!
(A large pole is either lowered from the fly space or rolled in from the wings.
They bind Joan to the stake:)
The stake must be raised above the floor so that her head is beyond arm’s reach.
As they bind her.
The following exchanges must be as frenetic as possible..
Joan: I confess to almighty God...
Cauchon: Confess your lies!
Joan: To blessed Mary ever Virgin...
Cauchon: Confess your harlotry!
Joan: To blessed John the Baptist...
Cauchon: To confess daughter of Satan!
Joan: To the holy saint Michael
To saints Margaret and Catherine..
Cauchon: Confess, confess
Joan: That I have sinned...
Cauchon: Instrument of evil
Daughter of sin.
class=WordSection2> (They light the fire.)
Joan: A cross
A cross
Bring me a cross.
(A man from the crowd runs in with a tall processional cross and holds it to her face.
Joan kisses the cross.)
Loiseleur: (to the executioner)
Do your job man
Now
Do your job
Joan: Jesu!
Executioner: Too high
They have set her too high
My arms cannot reach.
Joan: Jesu!
Loiseleur: Now, now , the rope
Bind the garrot!
Twist the cord!
Joan: Jesu, Jesu!
Executioner: The flames
Too high
They have set her too high!
The Crowd: A strange chromatic tonal groaning
BLACKOUT
Lights return dimly. Only Cauchon and the executioner remain.
Cauchon: (to the executioner)
It did not burn completely?
Executioner: No, my lord.
Cauchon: Did you see when the flames had burned away
The sackcloth she wore?
Executioner: Yes, lord.
Cauchon: A woman’s body.
Executioner: Yes, my Lord.
A woman’s body
Or, no. A girl’s
We all saw.
Cauchon: The people saw?
Executioner: Yes, my lord.
They talk of it now.
Cauchon: It did not burn completely?
Executioner: As I said my lord,
Not completely.
Cauchon: Not completely.
Executioner: No my Lord
When the flame went out
I added oil,
Saltpeter
Niter.
With wood on top
And wood below.
It burned the flesh.
Charred the bones
But still inside
There was a lump,
A clot of flesh.
Cauchon: A clot?
What clot?
Executioner: (opening a cloth)
This my lord.
Cauchon:(examining)
What is this lump
A coal?
A mass?
Executioner: A heart my lord.
A maiden’s heart.
Cauchon: (thrusting it back at him)
Burn it
Burn it with the rest
Use oil
Use pitch
Executioner: I tried my lord
I tried
It will not burn.
Cauchon: Then cast it away
Cast it to the water
Into the Seine
Into the river.
Executioner: (moves down stage - alone)
Into the river.
Into water’s blue silver veins.
The heart will flow
New blood
New soul
Into her daughter France.
And in time to come
Not England, not Spain
Nor the tribal Hun
Will move to strike her down.
Flow on, daughter of France
And mother to your country.
History awaits you.
Cauchon: (to himself)
What have we burned?
A fool, a simple fool.
She was heretic, apostate.
Yet they will glamorize, canonize...
Accept what you see...
The ashes of prideful villainy
What have I burned?
Can there be doubt?
Therein festers her true contagion,
Like the plague her ashes spread on the wind,
The foul air that carries her madness to the many.
Already they say what men will always say
And there, there is her heresy,
There is her lie.
More quickly will they believe the fool
Crazed with wonders and fables,
More quickly still will they cower before the devil’s horns,
Than they will wonder before the light of reason
And the goodness of God.
(To the crowd)
Go home!
Go home!
There are greater fools to come.
From her ashes other vermin will rise
All ready each to believe his own ghosts,
His own goblins,
The saints of their wild imaginings.
Go home!
Go home.
END OF PLAY
\\
At peace now Joan
be at peace
Cauchon: Now see we justice
The will of God and the people of France
Prevail against the ways of deceit
Of villany and cunning.
Now for your treason
The just dessert.
You have found, Joan,
You have found the will of God.
You have renounced your demons
And you have found the will of God.
You have restored your soul.
Joan: My soul? Oh my soul!
(She pauses in confusion)
Cauchon: Your soul redeemed.
Cauchon: Your soul redeemed.
Joan: My soul consumed!
Oh, my saints!
Oh, my holy voices!
What have I done?
What have I done?
Now do I behold my sin
Now do I perceive my error
For with my mark have I denied my loving God
A god who has made me as I am
Who has conceived me and sent me forth
Who has created the fullness of my self
A god who would not deny to daughter or son
The gift of love
The right of love
Which is the making of the soul
And in my weakness have I denied
To fit myself within your narrow mold
For fear to stand alone
For fear to speak that love
Which speaks to me
And that your blindness cannot see
And your hearing cannot hear
Loiseleur: Beware your words!
Joan: Beware my soul!
I have deceived them,
I have betrayed them!
Oh Sweet voices
Oh, holy martyrs!
Forgive me my treason!
Forgive me this lie!
Cauchon: The demons retake her!
Joan: Undo my mark
Loiseleur: Do you renounce your abjuration?
Joan: Pardon my treason
Loiseleur: Do you recant your admission?
Joan: I recall my saints, my voices, my loves.
Inquisitor 1: Do you return to your sin
Joan: Yes, I behold my sin
I behold my error
For in that stroke have I denied my loving God
A god who has made me as you see
For I am indeed God made
Not in hair and dress
But in soul and mind and heart
Unink that stroke
Scrape clean the leaf
That I may too
Remove the stain
that has blackened my faith
My heart, my soul.
For fear to stand alone
Against those fires which would burn away
All that my God, my voices, my saints
Have called upon me to be
Loiseleur: Then you bring upon yourself
The judgement that awaits you
The fires of purgation whose biting flame
But hints at the eternal fires of hell’s dark hole.
Joan: You speak of fires my lord;
You speak of darkness.
But is this not already greater darkness?.
Is this not a more burning flame?
How brief that moment
Of my submission
Yet in its instant was all the burning fire of eternity
Feeding on the flesh of my denial.
And when you bind me upon that pyre,
It will not be my screams that you will hear
But the sound of God’s justice offended
That will burn through your ears and mind and heart.
(Silence)
Joan: Listen.
St. Michael: Joan,
I have heard you Joan.
I have heard but cannot defend.
For though you have called me,
Was it I who called you?
Joan: Truly, did I hear you
And truly did believe.
Touch me now
Touch me with that golden lance
With which at heaven’s birth
You cast below the fiend’s false light
To hell’s dark fires
And everlasting night.
Michael: Joan, poor Joan.
Vain pride did not all that morning perish
Nor did it fall so far into hell’s black fire
That it’s gilded touch
Is not with us still.
Joan: Is it vain to love,
Is it pride to call upon the saints
To fall before their shrines
And speak their names with a faith
That consecrated them to me?
St. Margaret: Are we then yours Joan?
Are we, the elect, given to you?
Do we above, dally below
To meddle in the hearts of men
And play with children’s hearts,
And so entice the wiles
Of foolish young maids?
Joan: By my love you are mine,
By my faith you are elect
Within God’s realm.
It is my love that hears you;
My love that gives you voice.
My faith that brings you to me.
Catherine: Faith, Joan,
Faith in whom.
In us?
Margaret: Or in your self.
Joan: I only wanted to love you.
I only wanted to love.
Michael: There can only be silence now Joan
Only the silence of your own will
Deep within you it echoes
The voiceless cries
Of your lonely soul.
They cannot see Joan;
They cannot hear.
You are alone.
Joan: No, No!
Do not abandon me
Do not forsake me
I have loved you
I have loved you!
You are mine!
Do you not hear me?
Do you not hear?
Loiseleur: Do you not hear us Joan?
Do you not hear this assembly?
Submit to this council
Submit to the church.
Submit to the truth!
(Stage lights dim. Lights up on the orchestra for Christine.)
Christine: What then is truth?
I tell you her word is truth
For her word is ever one.
And is not truth by its very nature
Like nature, ever one?
For all your pacts
For all your congress
You arrive by multiplicity
By contrivance and false compromise,
By diminution, by distillation
At points which counterfeit and mock
The one-ness which is truth.
By your councils and your parries,
Which pleases all
And troubles none,
You become your own contentment
And find a resting place
Where you think to defend yourselves
In your own approbation
And mutual smug repose.
And though you by numbers
Rebuke her, confine her, destroy her,
you cannot arrest her
For she is also her own truth,
Her own unshakeable oneness
Bound within and without
By the steadfast armor
Of her belief.
And it is here that you fear her.
Here that you men of learning
Men of the church,
Men of arms
Here that you fear
A simple girl,
A country girl
Not yet ten and nine.
For in the oneness of the truth
All your force
All your threats
All your chains
And black wholed prisons,
Crumble in dust,
An impotent lie.
(The stage goes dark.
A lone monk, hood raised, appears in the shadows with a single lighted taper.
We hear a choir intoning the Dies Irae as at the start of the play.)
Clerk 1: In the name of the Lord
AMEN
We, Pierre Cauchon,
By divine mercy
Bishop of Beauvais
Jean le Maitre
` Deputy of the Inquisitor
Of the faith
Jean Craverant
Doctor of Theology
And matters of faith
Judges competent in this action,
Whereas, we deem you Joan
Who calls yourself the Maid
To be a wayward heretic
Fallen into a diversity of crimes
Of schism, idolatry
And invocation of demons.
In your singularity you raise your pride
In your pride you defy this communion
With unyielding fixation
Like a dog
You return,
return to your own vomit,
To devour and consume anew
Your headstrong presumption.
Therefore, in the single voice
And unity of holy church
And all those assembled here
The clerk takes the great taper, turns it upside down and extinguishes the flame on the floor)
WE DECLARE YOU HERETIC
WE CAST YOU FROM THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH
WE DISCARD YOU AS A ROTTEN AND PUTREFIED MEMBER
AND GIVE YOU UP TO SECULAR JUSTICE
Joan: (Screaming for the first time)
My God, I am afraid.
(The following moves rapidly ; the chant continues)
Loiseleur: Abjure Joan.
Joan: I am alone!
Inquisitor 5: Abjure!
Joan: I don’t want to die.
Loiseleur: Recant Joan
Joan: Don’t let me burn!
Loiseleur: Free yourself!
Joan: I am afraid.
Inquisitor 1: A king you saved,
You cannot save yourself!
Joan: My God, Into your hands!
Inquisitor 2: Recant
Joan: Do not burn my hands.
Inquisitor 3: Sign!
Joan: ... my face.
Inquisitor 4: Swear!
Joan: ... my hair
Inquisitor 5: Heretic!
Joan: .. My skin, my eyes
Inquisitor 4: (As a clerk kneels before her with paper and quill)
Sign and recant.
Joan: I cannot.
Inquisitor 3: Sign.
Joan: I cannot. I am bound.
Inquisitor 2: Unbind her hands.!
Joan: Not by your threads
But by chains
By the chains of my soul.
inquisitors alternately:Witch
Heretic
Blasphemer
Apostate
Joan: Oh my saints
Why have you abandoned me?
Oh, my king,
OH, Orleans
Oh, sweet France
Unbind me of myself
Deliver me to their will
To dissolve to their mind.
Inquisitors alternately: Witch
Heretic
Blasphemer
Apostate
Cauchon: Then you despair!
Despair of your voices.
Despair of your saints.
Joan: No!
I despair of the truth
That flees from your hearts!
(A large pole is either lowered from the fly space or rolled in from the wings.
They bind Joan to the stake:)
The stake must be raised above the floor so that her head is beyond arm’s reach.
As they bind her.
The following exchanges must be as frenetic as possible..
Joan: I confess to almighty God...
Cauchon: Confess your lies!
Joan: To blessed Mary ever Virgin...
Cauchon: Confess your harlotry!
Joan: To blessed John the Baptist...
Cauchon: To confess daughter of Satan!
Joan: To the holy saint Michael
To saints Margaret and Catherine..
Cauchon: Confess, confess
Joan: That I have sinned...
Cauchon: Instrument of evil
Daughter of sin.
class=WordSection2> (They light the fire.)
Joan: A cross
A cross
Bring me a cross.
(A man from the crowd runs in with a tall processional cross and holds it to her face.
Joan kisses the cross.)
Loiseleur: (to the executioner)
Do your job man
Now
Do your job
Joan: Jesu!
Executioner: Too high
They have set her too high
My arms cannot reach.
Joan: Jesu!
Loiseleur: Now, now , the rope
Bind the garrot!
Twist the cord!
Joan: Jesu, Jesu!
Executioner: The flames
Too high
They have set her too high!
The Crowd: A strange chromatic tonal groaning
BLACKOUT
Lights return dimly. Only Cauchon and the executioner remain.
Cauchon: (to the executioner)
It did not burn completely?
Executioner: No, my lord.
Cauchon: Did you see when the flames had burned away
The sackcloth she wore?
Executioner: Yes, lord.
Cauchon: A woman’s body.
Executioner: Yes, my Lord.
A woman’s body
Or, no. A girl’s
We all saw.
Cauchon: The people saw?
Executioner: Yes, my lord.
They talk of it now.
Cauchon: It did not burn completely?
Executioner: As I said my lord,
Not completely.
Cauchon: Not completely.
Executioner: No my Lord
When the flame went out
I added oil,
Saltpeter
Niter.
With wood on top
And wood below.
It burned the flesh.
Charred the bones
But still inside
There was a lump,
A clot of flesh.
Cauchon: A clot?
What clot?
Executioner: (opening a cloth)
This my lord.
Cauchon:(examining)
What is this lump
A coal?
A mass?
Executioner: A heart my lord.
A maiden’s heart.
Cauchon: (thrusting it back at him)
Burn it
Burn it with the rest
Use oil
Use pitch
Executioner: I tried my lord
I tried
It will not burn.
Cauchon: Then cast it away
Cast it to the water
Into the Seine
Into the river.
Executioner: (moves down stage - alone)
Into the river.
Into water’s blue silver veins.
The heart will flow
New blood
New soul
Into her daughter France.
And in time to come
Not England, not Spain
Nor the tribal Hun
Will move to strike her down.
Flow on, daughter of France
And mother to your country.
History awaits you.
Cauchon: (to himself)
What have we burned?
A fool, a simple fool.
She was heretic, apostate.
Yet they will glamorize, canonize...
Accept what you see...
The ashes of prideful villainy
What have I burned?
Can there be doubt?
Therein festers her true contagion,
Like the plague her ashes spread on the wind,
The foul air that carries her madness to the many.
Already they say what men will always say
And there, there is her heresy,
There is her lie.
More quickly will they believe the fool
Crazed with wonders and fables,
More quickly still will they cower before the devil’s horns,
Than they will wonder before the light of reason
And the goodness of God.
(To the crowd)
Go home!
Go home!
There are greater fools to come.
From her ashes other vermin will rise
All ready each to believe his own ghosts,
His own goblins,
The saints of their wild imaginings.
Go home!
Go home.
END OF PLAY
\\
