Saint Mark

( Originally Published 1922 )

REENTER the Sieur de Conte! .. . Our gallant old friend makes as knightly a show as of yore when first he rode into the lists and pledged his fealty to the stainless Maid. But alas! his hair that rivalled the rutilant mane of Mars, is now white as carded wool. Yet has that eye lost nothing of its old fire, and the years have but fetched new strength and cunning to his hand. And methinks the Sieur fights with a tempered skill and a wary shrewdness that were not always his in the old days—by my halidom, I would not care to be the Holy Council at Rome with such a champion pitted against me! For indeed the Holy Council may pow-wow as long or as short as may please their holinesses--the world at the challenge of the Sieur de Conte, has awarded the crown of saintship to Joan of Arc. The living voice, the magic pen of the Sieur de Conte are worth all their musty raking from the past; are more than worth their assumed authority to decide the question. If the Holy Fathers have dropped the matter for the nonce, as rumor now declares, they have but done the thing that might have been expected of them. The Church is ever too wise to invite defeat, too polite to issue a dead-letter, too strong in its divine right to surrender on heretic compulsion. Besides, it is here to stay forever; and shall it be moved for a chit of a girl who has been dead less than five hundred years?—Tut, tut,—there is always plenty of time!

The Sieur de Conte (otherwise Mark Twain) in all that he has written on the subject, has failed to point out one extraordinary fact with regard to Joan of Arc. I am glad that he has left it to me. It is this: Since that fearful day in Rouen when she was led to her martyrdom by fire, she has been the glory of the faith and the shame of the Church. That is why she has waited so long for the formal warrant of saintship. That is why the Devil's Advocate has so far prevailed to deny her on earth the crown she wears in Heaven.

Do not think this a musty old question which interests only a few droning priests sitting in a back room of the Vatican, and here and there a poetic idealist like the Sieur de Conte. By no means!—it is a question as vital as the fame of the Maid herself, calling forth champions and antagonists in every age. It is a plague-sore in the side of the Church—put your finger there ! It never has been settled because it never could and never can be settled to the credit of the Church. Also I believe it is bound up with the eternal question of liberty, in whose holy cause the Maid fought and suffered.

Joan of Arc was done to death by the priests and theologians of the day, urged on by the civil power in the hands of her French and English enemies. I am aware that her death is not chargeable, in a direct sense, to the Church, and it is deemed likely by Lamartine that she would have been saved, had she known enough to appeal directly to Rome. I am aware that, short of canonization, the Church has done what it could to make amends to the memory of Joan of Arc. To give her the crown of saintship now, would not restore the credit of the Church, but would rather irreparably dam-age it in the eyes of the world. For the two or three hundred priests and theologians who judged the Maid, as well as the godly men of the Inquisition of Paris who damned her as a child of the Devil, were in loyal communion with the Church, and were, in fact, part of its machinery. Still, it is certain that the Church, in its true representative and executive character,* did not incur the guilt and odium of Joan's death. But the whole system arrogating divine powers and claiming the right to draw supernatural warrants, was involved in the trial and murder of the Maid; was judged by the measure with which it meted to her; and is now of a truth dead forever to the more enlightened part of mankind. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of liberty!

A certain set of apologists on behalf of the Church try to cast all the blame of Joan's persecution and death upon the English. To be sure, the English had the best right to hate her and to seek her destruction, for had she not beaten them in many battles and all but driven them out of the fair land of France, which they had come to regard as their own? But let us be fair; her own countrymen shared to the full in the guilt and the shame of her death —nothing can clear them of that! Besides, we are not to forget that both French and English were in that day of the same religious faith. Not a single heretic took part in the proceedings against Joan, from the holy clerics of the Inquisition of Paris who pronounced anathema upon her, to Bishop Cauchon, that zealous prototype of Fouquier Tinville, who sought her blood openly and thirsted for it with an eager relish that shocked even his fellow judges; or the rude soldiers who kept guard within her cell day and night, and probably caused her as much anguish, at times, as the threat of the fire. They were all believers in the One True Faith, and the stain of her innocent blood is upon every one of them, French and English. Make no mistake about that!

Indeed, we can not go astray as to the facts, and these themselves can not be twisted to the purpose of special pleading; for the whole plan of the murder of Joan of Arc, the carefully marked steps by which it was unrelentingly carried out, the heroic but ineffectual struggles of the victim, the unspeakable devices resorted to, in order to circumvent and destroy her, the pitiless, unhalting purpose of her prosecutors, marked as with a pencil of red,—are laid bare to us, by the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses, with a fulness of detail and a veracity of statement which leave hardly a question to be asked or a doubt to be solved. It is all there—the conspiracy of power, learning and holiness (God save the mark!) against one brave, help-less, ignorant, innocent girl. We see the suavely ferocious Cauchon pressing her with both his holy hands toward the scaffold—he was excommunicated some years afterward, but it didn't save the Church's credit. We see that formidable array of priests setting the utmost skill of their wits, the deepest resources of their cunning, against a simple country girl who could neither read nor write a name which is now one of the best known on the earth; trying by every art of casuistry to wrest or surprise from her an admission that should send her to the flames.

Let us be just: they were not all equally guilty, not all equally intent on the slaughter of the innocent lamb before them. Not one was so bad as the monster Cauchon, and to be strictly fair even to that consecrated beast, not one had Cauchon's motive—but the fact does not save the Church's credit. Some of those priests had kind hearts and would gladly have sent the child home to her mother; but they lacked the power. Besides, they were captives themselves, bound hand and foot with the fetters of superstition and devil-born lunacy, misnamed religious fervor; daunted by monstrous ignorance, and mythic fears of Hell and darkness, chrisomed and holy-watered into a pretence of light and knowledge—aye, they were cowering slaves, branded and obedient to the lash, and she standing free and enfranchised in her chains !

Though I am perhaps the first to call attention to the matter, there are many points of likeness between the trial of Jesus Christ and the trial of Joan of Arc. They were both sold for a price of silver. Both were martyrs of liberty. Both perished through a combination of forces political and priestly. Christ had Caiaphas; Joan had Cauchon, something the worst of it. The chief accusers, the head prosecutors of each were priests, and as the Jews cried out at the trial of Jesus, "His blood be upon us and upon our children!"—so might the priests have cried out at the condemnation of Joan, "Her blood be upon us and upon the Church !" It is there yet—the excommunication of Cauchon and the reversal of the Judgment have not removed it. Something more will have to be done ere that Great Wrong can be righted.

But having shown the great similarity marking the trials of Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, I now wish to call attention to a most striking point of unlikeness, which is even more suggestive than the resemblance shown. It is this: among the judges of Joan of Arc—priests as they were or deemed themselves to be, of the Christ of love and mercy—there was none so merciful as Pontius Pilate, whose memory is not held in much honor by the Christian world; not one had the courage or the humanity to wash his hands of the intended murder. Some desired it out of their blind ignorance and cruel fanaticism; many no doubt regretted it, as a severe but salutary act of faith; all consented to it! The responsibility is thus landed squarely where it belongs, on the official religion which was then in league with the secular arm. If there had been the least available doubt as to that—if the damning record were not in black and white, attested by the solemn oaths of so many witnesses of or participants in the trial—the Church would long ago, for her own credit, have granted the saintship of Joan of Arc, and to-day the altars of the Maid of Orleans would flame in a hundred lands. But perhaps, since the Eternal Church does not count years as men count them, it is yet some ages too soon to raise an altar to the Second Great Martyr of Liberty. And maybe this is a fortunate thing for Liberty and the Maid, for on the day that the Church makes Joan of Arc wholly her own, on that day she will step down from the unexampled place she has so long held in the love and pity and worship of mankind.* Such a consummation would not, I am sure, be agreeable to her leal knight and devoted champion, the Sieur de Conte Mark Twain.

IN the wide court of Heaven, on any of these fine days, you may see—if God has given you sight above your eyes—a Maid who has been a maiden now during full five hundred years. Her hair is the color of the corn-silk at harvest-time, and her eyes of the early for-get-me-not. She is slender as of old when, clad in shining armor and mounted on her milk-white steed, she led the long dispirited warriors of France to victory, or upheld her wondrous standard at the coronation of her King. Often she may be seen leaning over the crystal battlements, chin on hand and looking down with pensive gaze on France, and Orleans, and Domremy, and Rouen whence her soul, like a white dove, ascended in the flame of her country's cruel ingratitude.

But sometimes she turns her glance from scenes like these, charged with sweet and terrible memories, and looks down with loving intentness toward a certain spot on earth where an old white-haired man raises eyes of love and almost worship to hers. They see and salute each other—oh, be sure of that! The old man was many years younger when they first be-came acquainted, but the Maid is always the same age, for they grow no older in Heaven. Who shall explain the spell (since the Sieur de Conte will not confess his dreams) that has joined in a perfect love and understanding these two children of Nature, separated by the dif ference of race and the shoreless gulf of five hundred years? Who can but wonder at the enchanting touch of a white hand from out the past which has turned the bold scoffer and jeerer, the wild man of the river and the mining camps, into such a knight as was rarely seen in the most gracious days of chivalry? And to see him now, when he should be taking the rest he has so gloriously earned, still eager to battle in her cause, daring the world to the onset, fighting for her with the passionate heart of youth, pleading for her with a burning zeal, as if in the five centuries that have rolled away since her death no other cause worthy to be named with hers has appealed to the award of sword or pen—to see this rightly and with eyes cleared for the perception of that Truth which is the only thing really precious in the world, is to rejoice at the finest spectacle that has been given to the wondering eyes of men in our day.

Whether the brave old knight will yet win the whole world over to her side, I can not say, though I think he will, if he be given time enough; but, at any rate, he has already made sure of all kind and feeling hearts. I believe his devotion to Joan of Arc is the finest and most ideal poem of our age—an age, to be sure, which has known too little poetry, and which has never thought of looking to the Sieur de Conte to supply it. And I believe, further, that the Book of the Ideal contains the story of no love more pure and beautiful than this which unites the Old Man and the Maid.