Next appears upon the scene 'honnete personne Laurent Guesdon,' clerk
and advocate to the lay court of Rouen. He also had been present at
the death of Joan of Arc, and, from his office as lieutenant of the
Bailiff of Rouen, he held an important position at the execution; and
this is some of his evidence relating to it: 'I assisted at the last
sermon preached at the old market-place. I had accompanied the
Bailiff, being then his deputy. The sentence was read by which Joan
was abandoned to the secular arm; after that sentence had been
pronounced the executioners seized her, before either the Bailiff or
myself had time to read the sentence; and she was led up to the
stake--which was not as it should have been ordered.'
Next arrive as witnesses two burghers of Rouen, Peter Cusquel and John
Moreaux. Both of them had been spectators of the martyrdom, but they
have nothing of interest to say about it. And finally--(and doubtless
the reader will be glad to come to the end of this interminable
procession, as is the writer)--comes the deposition of John
Marcel--'bourgeois' of Paris. Marcel had been in Rouen during the time
of the Maid's trial, and was also present at the end of her life. M.
Fabre, in concluding in his book the translation of the testimonies of
the long list of witnesses given by him for the first time in full,
makes a great point of the universal concurrence of those who knew
Joan of Arc as to her undoubted purity of person as well as of mind:
that fact is of the greatest importance as regarded the rehabilitation
of the Maid of Orleans. That is a subject which it is not now
necessary to do more than to allude to; but to the French judges in
the time of the trial of the rehabilitation, the fact of Joan of Arc
being proved to have been incontestably a virgin was of the highest
interest. It was reserved for a countryman of Joan of Arc's (Du
Bellay) to invent a legend to disprove the fact; and to the
everlasting shame of French literature, Voltaire adopted the lying
calumny in his licentious burlesque-heroic poem, _La Pucelle
d'Orleans_.
The sentence of rehabilitation which fills in the translation a dozen
of M. Fabre's pages, was solemnly delivered in the great hall of the
archiepiscopal palace at Rouen. On that occasion one of Joan of Arc's
brothers, John, was present. The sentence which was framed to wipe
away the iniquity of the judgment by which the heroine had been
condemned, was delivered by the Archbishop of Rheims in the presence
of a vast concourse of people, among whom were the Bishops of Paris
and of Coutances. Among other things ordered to honour the memory of
the Martyr, it was ordained that after a sermon preached on the spot
where the act of abjuration had taken place in the cemetery of the
Church of Saint Ouen, and also on the site of the spot where had stood
the stake and pyre, two crosses should be erected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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