INTRODUCTION. France is Joan’s favourite country, and this chapter borrows from 1993 and 1997 notes on travels through Western France, from 2006 notes on Southern France, and 2008 notes on Eastern France. I will conclude with reflections on French history and culture. Some chapters, such as this one, include some watercolours. Being absorbed in sketching helped me to understand different cultures on my journeys and now, embedding these pictures in the text, helps me to remember and explain these journeys.
WESTERN FRANCE – BRITTANY AND THE DORDOGNE – 1997
We had driven down Western France on our honeymoon, taking in the caves at Lascaux. The prehistoric cave paintings of deer, horses and reindeer are carbon dated at 17,000 years old, but it was in 1940 that four teenagers followed their lost dog down into its caves and galleries. We marvelled at them in 1961 and they were closed off in 1963 for preservation. Further down south, rounding a corner, we were astonished at the fairytale medieval fortress of Carcassonne. Since Aunty Ann was marooned there for a week during the 2010 Icelandic volcanic eruption, I looked it up in the Lonely Planet. One of the crusades was against the Cathars, a French religious sect that had come in from the Balkans. They were called “the perfects” because they were vegetarian and abstained from sex and, in 1208, Pope Innocent III preached a crusade against them. This excuse for a massive land grab was taken up spiritually by the Dominicans and militarily by Simon de Montfort. Driven finally into fortresses like Carcassonne, thousands of Cathars were burnt alive. But it was in 1997 that we were able more fully explored Normandy, Brittany and the river gorges of the Dordogne, setting off from Cockleshurds Cottage.
HOT AIR EVERYWHERE. Last week two balloons let go too much of it and landed either side of Cold Ashton blacking out the village for six hours. Also last week hundreds of irate Visa-seekers were letting off hot air in a queue stretching along three sides of a South Kensington block containing a bureaucratic blunderland called the French Embassy. A few days later when the little church clock up the hill told me it was 5 a.m. I woke Joan and, armed with these new visas, we set off for the ferry to Cherbourg. Mrs. Old’s B&B, where we had stayed overnight, was a mansion that Henry the Eighth once gave to Catherine Howard. Set in a steep wooded Dorset valley, it is still pretty impressive. The tourist is exact, the traveller vague, and we are not tourists. Accordingly, halfway across the channel we changed our plans, phoned Le Mans and cancelled the hotel reservation. Driving South from Cherbourg we got lost, and then found our alternative hotel was closed for two weeks. But, round a bend, there was a large B&B sign in English erected by a couple from Hampshire. Mike’s old stone cottage was one of only two left standing in the village after the allied advance in 1944. Since then no one has ploughed the field next door on account of the ammunition still buried there and, in the field next to that, a memorial commemorates twelve executed resistance fighters. “Much too hot in Spain. I advise you stay in France a few weeks” said the doctor examining Joan’s eye problem. But we are travellers and flexible so, instead of south, we turned right into Brittany. It looks a bit like Cornwall and, like Cornwall, it has a Lands End, but they call it Finisterre. Also like Cornwall, all rural hotel and B&B owners go to the beach for the summer, so we followed them there. “No” said the girl in the Concarneau tourist office “all accommodation is booked, mais p’tetre Madame Veillard? Une petite chambre seulement.”
MADAME VEILLARD was in her front garden, waving to us as we trudged up the road, mugs of strong coffee waiting in the kitchen. Aged 83 and slightly deaf, every morning she played the Verdi Requiem very loudly before going down to the beach for her swim. She absolutely enchanted Joan, who could follow most of her stories of life during and after the German occupation, and who one day might write her memoirs of that time. There was a launderette in Concarneau in which Joan left me on my own without any instructions. My first mistake was to try and shut machine number 10 with the door of machine number 11. I waited to hear words like cretin, imbecile and idiot, but the French are very polite and they pointed me to an obscure corner with instructions printed in multiple languages. Now, Je suis expert. But since the instructions were incomplete in French and altogether missing in Italian, I explained to a French tourist how to dispense soap powder and, to an Italian sailing instructor, how to reduce the cost of the tumble drier. After a few days in Mme Veillard’s attic room, and since we had no immediate plans, we moved along the coast to her son’s hotel at Ile Tudy.
The Hotel des Dunes was reminiscent of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. When there are only old people in the dining room all that is heard is the slurp of soup, and occasional attempts at Anglo-French communication, usually ending in confusion and stalemate. Sometimes when there are younger people, by that I mean about our age, the conversation livens up. La Rue de la Poste leads, unsurprisingly, to the post office. Nor did it surprise me that it seemed to be closed during normal hours. But while we ate fruit and cheese in our room, the other guests seemed to go downtown for lengthy lunches. Perhaps the postmaster also had leisurely lunch hours downtown. On Mondays a street market assembled itself below our window at 6 a.m. Sometimes a car, with a loud and distorted PA system invited us to the Kinema or to the Grand Circus. Never found the Kinema but I nearly bumped into a llama tethered to a shrub behind the beach. On the beach beyond the llama were about ten million people. When Joan visited my one-metre patch one afternoon I had to ask her if she had a reservation. Sometimes a fat lady wearing a one-piece swimsuit the size of a handkerchief erects a large umbrella, but this is for her poodle.
Hughes Conan is a superb chef and a lover of music. So Joan has gained access to the kitchen by lending him her cassette of Cecilia Bartoli. The other guests come there every year on account of the five course dinners, and dinner each evening resembles a religious ritual. After nine days here, exploring the quaint towns of Pont l’Abbe and Quimper, sudden rain and cold Atlantic winds drove us back east. Crossing the Loire at Nantes we passed south through the rolling vineyards of Muscadet and crossed the “vasty fields of France” to Limoges. Here, the hotel de la Paix has a collection of 250 antique phonograms which we discussed with some Americans at breakfast. They are travelling with friends from Texas who “have no French and not much English either.”
BEAULIEU. “While jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintop” the river valley is so steep that the sun does not peep into our window until gone eight o’clock. I have to admit that, when Romeo and Juliet oversleep, Shakespeare says it better. For the last eight days we have rented the top two floors of 27 rue de la Chappelle, an old house in the medieval village of Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, in South-West France. At one end of our lane is the Chapel of the Penitents, who wore blue capes. At the other end is the “Flot Bleu” restaurant, a 400-year old youth hostel, and the river bank where we sit in the sunshine and watch the evening slowly invade the valley. There Joan does her broderie, conversing with other “broderers” while I read The Moonstone which Kate has sent me from Hong Kong. Wilkie Collins is worth reading: “Study your wife closely for the next four and twenty hours. If your good lady doesn’t exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you! – you have married a monster.” I am pleased to report that Joan is not a monster.
On our last day the tiny congregation of the abbey is greatly swollen on account of the feast in honour of its two saints. As things start to go wrong Joan whispers to me that quote from the Australian Bulletin “Hell is a place where the French are the administrators”. The cantor is at cross-purposes with the organist. There are two priests in command, one sending the procession down the aisle, the other calling it back. Worse still, there is a secular procession warming up in the abbey square outside, and the little abbey orchestra is no match for the tubas and side drums of five brass bands. This region of France is reputed to have 500 chateaux and, by my reckoning, it must have at least that number of saints. One of the few villages not named after a saint is Collonge-la-Rouge, its ancient houses being built of red sandstone. So Joan and I escape from Beaulieu’s entangled processions to have lunch at Collonge, among its black-topped and wisteria-clad turrets, and to remind us of French cuisine as we head south for lesser cuisines, the sardines of Spain and the salted cod of Portugal.
SOUTHERN FRANCE – GATTIGUE AND UZES – 1993 and 2006
It was in 1993 that the mistral hit us as we crossed form Italy into France. We were hit again, this time by the gypsy children of Nimes, waving newspapers in our faces while they tried to pick our pockets. I shouted “polizei”, corrected it to “gendarmes” with no effect, then shouted “bugger off” and they fled. If the Italian “Agriturismo” is a rip-off, the French “Gites” system is excellent. The tourist bureau at Nimes discussed our needs, shortlisted 3 farms, phoned them and highlighted the routes on a map. M. Accabat installed us over a few glasses of wine and later outside our front door found itself a bottle from his own vineyard. From there we visited the exquisite, medieval, arcaded Place aux Herbes, the market square in Uzes, the temperature hovering at zero, and Joan said “wouldn’t this market place be lovely in summer”. And, in 2006, it was.
ROUND ONE. M. Accabat rents his family’s cottages from April to September. No one, except us, comes in November on account of the Mistral, a winter wind that races down the Rhone valley from the snow fields. M. Accabat explained the huge fireplace and the pile of logs, but by 9 p.m. the Mistral had defeated our log fire and we retired early to bed. We had lost round one. The village of Gattigue contains no more that six old cottages clustered round an 11th century church. Our cottage, even in winter, is a farmhouse one dreams of, with a candlestick on an old rough table, a hearth about three metres across opposite French windows opening onto a vine covered terrace. Anticipating winter, Joan used the well equipped kitchen to make about a gallon of leek and potato soup. And, anticipating a string of overnight stops to the English Channel, we load a week’s accumulation of dirty clothes into the machine and study the instructions. The “arresting of strange bodies” refers to the filter, not the gendarmerie.
ROUND TWO. On Tuesday the wind had dropped and we had soup and baguettes under the grape vines, M. Accabat waving from his tractor. Later, the Mistral forecast proved correct, 50-60 kph, but this time we were ready. The supermarkets of France, huge and exciting delicatessens, are as John Earls remembers them, and we stocked up. Outside the front door found itself another bottle of claret from the vineyard of M Accabat. Joan’s cuisine has switched to winter, my fire-lighting skills are much improved and, by 9 p.m., we relaxed in great comfort in front of the blazing fire while the Mistral did its worst overhead.
SUR LE PONT D’AVIGNON. The bridge of the famous song flung 22 arches across the Rhone in 1190 AD., now only four remain. But the Pont du Gard, the aqueduct built in 18 BC, is still complete with three levels of arches rising 40 metres above the river it spans, though it no longer carries water to the Roman town of Nimes, 50 kms away. Napoleon the Third restored it, Joan and David Smiley inspected it on their honeymoon and again yesterday. At Avignon the huge Papal Palace housed a series of six real Popes and later on several alternative Popes during a rather confused period in the history of the Church’s bureaucracy. And bureaucracy still lingers in the streets of Avignon – it took four travel agents to change our cross-channel ferry ticket.
THE DUCHESS OF UZES AND HER SPEEDING FINE. Times are hard in rural Languedoc, 20 percent unemployed, and we are the only patrons on Friday night, bouillabaisse night, at L’auberge d’Aigaliers up the road. However, the Duke of Uzes appears quite comfortable, as his family has stayed for 350 years in the Ducal Chateau we visited today. His great-grandmother was notorious, riding horses until she died at 96 in 1933. The first French woman to drive a car, she was fined one franc for speeding down the Bois de Boulogne. She is reputed to have killed 2000 stags, but I’m not sure she used the car for that, and she even tried to raise an army to overthrow the Republic. Vive la liberation des femmes.
BEEHIVES AND LES MONTAGNES DE MADELEINE. The design of these stone igloos evolved around 5000 BC and there are several in the fields here, big enough for shepherds or sentries, according to need. The average November temperature here is 16, yet thick ice has been forming overnight and frost hangs around all day. “Le temp est exceptional” explains M. Accabat as I pay the bill and explain where all his logs have gone. As the traffic up the Rhone valley got heavier and scarier we switched to the much quieter motorway through the Auvergne. We ate our thermos of soup in the car looking at a frozen lake in Les Montagnes de Madaleine as we turned up the heater and listened to Bellini’s oboe concerto. Thanks, John. Minus eight forecast for Monday night and on Tuesday every stretch of water was frozen over, even the swimming pool at Saulges where, with Rebecca, we cooled off in that hot summer. The friendly hotel we had stayed in was now an expensive conference resort, but we did enjoy a bottle of Vouvray.
NEARLY 48 YEARS AGO Gran, Tim and I crossed the Atlantic, 1800 tons, 12 passengers, and we slept fully clothed on account of the U-boats . Last night we crossed the channel, 32,000 tons, 2140 passengers, and I slept in my overcoat on account of the cold. I woke in the night with back ache. In my pocket was one of those hotel keys that are attached to a huge rubber ball so you will remember to hand it in! At 6 a.m. they shot us out into the cold wet darkness of Portsmouth and, so as not to surprise Gran at 7 a.m., we surprised the car park attendant by visiting Salisbury cathedral before sunrise.
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EASTERN FRANCE
We had flown to Dunkirk on our honeymoon landing, as was possible in those days, in a large field of buttercups. Dunkirk became famous in World War II with the evacuation in 1940 of a British army in hundreds of civilian fishing boats that crossed the channel from Kent to save them. My father’s cousin Archie, who survived four wounds in World War One, was killed during this evacuation. There is a dramatic portrayal of the evacuation in Atonement, a very fine film made of Ian McEwan’s book. The word Dunkirk means dune church. Must be Celtic. In 1993 we stayed, with Madeleine and Chris, near the Swiss border and the Jura Mountains. Then, in 2008, we spent a few weeks in Burgundy.
BURGUNDY
“The great skill of the Burgundians was not war but marriage”. (Michael Frayn, in Headlong). And so we find in Dijon that Philippe le Hardi, by marrying Marguerite of Flanders, quadrupled his territories, hence quadrupling his income and assets, tax free in those days. But his grandson, Philippe the Good, made even more money by capturing Joan of Arc and selling her to the English. A characteristic of these landed dynasties, which I will return to later, is that “the chasm between rich and poor was always vast” (Lonely Planet). A characteristic of Burgundy was the beautiful tiled roof pattern, in the photo. The Burgundians were also good at recycling, the cathedral of St. Benigne being supported on Roman columns. The pediments are much younger, dated 1026.
DIJON. The Romans, who called it Divio, would have slugged it all the way up from Italy on foot, Today, there are coin operated racks of bikes (velodi) for the young, cheeky little shuttle buses (navettes) for the young at heart, and the country buses and trains that go to places the more mature travellers want to go to. We started off in a hotel on the street of the glassmakers in the medieval quarter, with garlic snails at le Rouuseau, a restaurant on the rue Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now, we are in a self-contained cupboard called a studio apartment. We are practicing French with Aurelian who runs the cupboards, but all of our direct and indirect object pronouns flew out the window when we arrived in Paris. And now Aurelien will put acid down our sink since the “chase of water does not march”! But soon we will be coping with Mandarin! Our first night in the studio complex coincided with the arrival of 50 confused and disoriented Chinese, most of whom phoned us between 6 and 7 next morning, Apparently they then all wanted breakfast at the same time. “Mon Dieu” Aurelian nous a dit. Each day, to get “happiness and wisdom”, we stroke “La Chouette”, a small stone owl set in to the side of Eglise Notre Dame. Here Joan is in the crypt and, later in the dortoir (dormitory) of the Abbaye S. Bernadine.
Round the corner from the street of the glassmakers we found the Duke’s Palace, Maison Milliere, and this gargoyle
The red crypt below S. Benigne blew my mind and I had to try to sketch it. The blue arch shadows of the Monastere des Bernadines on the right were a challenge, while the bowels of the Abbaye Benedictine seem to writhe under its massive superstructure.
SEMUR. The country bus wanders across “the vasty fields of France” (Henry the Fifth?) as Joan dials her ipod to what she knows is my favourite aria, a recently discovered fragment, the rest is lost, of a Vivaldi opera. Semur is a turreted town that Madeleine once sketched, and here is a photo of one of its towers. In the cathedral St Sebastian’s usual arrows are missing perhaps pulled out by the revolutionaries, short of ammunition. But they were politically correct, those revolutionaries, defacing a bishop, but leaving stained glass windows of artisans and peasants intact.
In all French churches there are lists of “the glorious dead”, long ones for WWI, very short for WW2 and none, of course, for the enemy. We once found a list of New Zealanders right in the middle of France, but it was only at Gallipoli that we found the casualties of both sides listed. The cafe proprietor apologises for closing at lunchtime – they have had to sack the chef. He asks about le kangaroo, but I say I prefer le boef bourgignon, he laughs apologetically, and we find some pasta down the road.
Back in Dijon, M. Bourel, the dentist can’t speak English. Joan explains we are soon headed for Russia and “Nous preferons les dentists francais que les dentists Russe.” This pleases him greatly and there is no charge. Heading downtown to the station we are nearly run over by a tricycle carrying a box marked TNT. But catching a train to Beaune is a navigational challenge even before you get your ticket. After following a labyrinth of screen menus we are told our credit card is invalid. Fortunately, the bus depot has friendly humans only too willing to sell you a train ticket for cash.
LES FETES DU VINGTES. From Jaipur to Portugal, from Scotland to Venezuela, had come a dozen marching bands, And from the communes of Burgundy a similar number of folklorique dancers and players of trompettes, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies, zithers, fiddles and accordians in the most fabulous street parade (see appendix). But how, in the name of Saint Benigne, are these performers to be integrated into the Catholic mass on Sunday? Well, for starters there is a dazzling performance by the glittering Guarde Imperiale, Gilbert and Sullivan on a huge scale, reminding me of a lecture on Catholic triumphalism given me by Ted Mack when I sat next to him by chance shortly after World Youth Day. But then the inner tranquillity of Gregorian chant interspersed with folklorique contributions, blended into a joyous multicultural, one might almost say catholic, celebration of humanity. In the end the Church re establishes its thunderous authority, a voluntary from the massive organ vibrates up the pillars, threatening to shake loose the fan vaulting and lift its roof clear into the sky, The only group apparently not invited to the mass was the Jaipur Maharaja Brass Band, But I do concede that the hierarchy might not have considered four discordant trumpeters, one street juggler and a belly dancer entirely in keeping with the Roman Catholic tradition of the mass. Clearly welcoming this diverse congregation had been a tall, smiling, young coloured bishop with a beautiful voice,
TOURNUS. Built into the ancient city gates is the shop of the china guinea fowls and, overlooking the river Saone, is St. Philibert, an abbey of great beauty.
Its smooth clean cylindrical pillars go soaring to heaven. All that clutter of insipid religious paintings and sculpture that ruins the baroque and rococo churches of Austria is discreetly confined to a few side chapels. Here the statues are wooden and realistic and the painting of the virgin shows a vibrant, happy, country girl, not the usual milksop with dumpling. Once, we had attended an illustrated lecture by a priest (he claimed to have been excommunicated twice) on European church paintings who said “If I ever had a bambino looking like that I’d keep it locked in a cupboard.” We had taken the 11:30 from Dijon and found a room with a little courtyard at hotel la Paix. Just inside the city walls we found these china guinea fowls, and next day we walked early along the Saone’s misty river bank, stopping at a workman’s cafe for pain artisan and coffee, and buying fruit and cheese for lunch. (The Roquefort in Dijon was delicious but, since maggots were peeping out the next day, I am now careful). Then after exploring, iced tea, and we are ready for Jarret de Porc, beer and cassis at le Bourgogne.
We returned each day to St. Philibert. Here on the floor are some Roman mosaics, below is the crypt, and, round the corner going down to the river, the ancient doorway of Saint Valerian.
VEZELEY. We set the ping timer for 6, wake at 5 and by 7 are rattling along in a country bus to Vezeley, No buses from there as summer is over so we share a taxi with a wizened Russian Orthodox pilgrim with a very long white beard, resembling Elvis in Joan:s choir, We pay his share, write our names in his psalterie and he will pray for David and Jeanne (comme d:Arc) every day, The exquisitely beautiful abbey is perched on a steep ridge with, as is often the case with abbeys, superb rural views in prime real estate, sub prime being down beyond the station,
Europe is contradictions and here in the abbey at Vezeley there are two fine polished wooden statues of St Bernard, the one a pious monk, the other the “L’homme armee”, a crusader in the full armour of the church militant. It was here that he preached the second crusade so powerfully that he actually got a French king and an English king to join him for the crusade. The abbey is stunningly beautiful, but from this pinnacle of sacred art we descend the medieval cobbles to the unexpected, and unexpectedly large, profanity of a superb Picasso exhibition _ all bosoms, bottoms and worse. Towards evening we ascend the cobbles again for mass supposedly in the cloisters, But monks and nuns are assembling sporadically in the sanctuary, eventually joined by a confused congregation straggling in from the cloisters, The nuns kneel motionless for half an hour, the monks fidget and wander for half an hour. One monk confuses me with a series of hand gestures until I realise he is cleaning his spectacles, A man in the congregation wearing a bright red flak jacket leaps to his feet and rushes out, Then, contradicting all this confusion, the most beautiful singing floats up into the Romanesque arches, one nun playing a flute, another a dulcimer, As the warden in Trollope:s novel says: “Without music there is no mystery”
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
So what exactly is France? The Romans called it Gaul, and it has been invaded since by the Huns, Franks, Vikings, the English and the Germans. The Vikings became the Normans (Norsemen) of Normandy and then they invaded England. At one time another half of France was a separate state called Burgundy. Since many of these struggles to define France involved the wider dynasties, institutions and empires of Europe, l will leave these for the chapter on “Europe’s Legacy”. So I will end here with short comments on French memorials and labels, and reflections on two events, though both uniquely French, having world-wide repercussions.
On memorials. It has been said of England’s rural aristocracy that the eldest son became lord of the manor, the second bought a commission in the army, and the third went into the church. And in England’s sleepy little village churches can be found the tombs of the first, the regimental flags of the second, and the names of the third in those lists of vicars sometimes stretching back a thousand years. This seems not to be the case in France, perhaps because the aristocracy went through an unfortunate association with the guillotine, as John and Kate will remember from the rock opera they sang in at school. In the churches of both countries there are always lists in honour of the fallen in war, the “glorious dead”. We once found, in a little French church, a list of New Zealand dead far longer than that of the French. Only at Gallipoli did I see memorials to the dead of both sides. At the little church of St Tudy, though there were 50 names for WWI, only 2 for WW2. In Ile Tudy. But we found the rest of the story in other memorials, of the kind we don’t find in England or Australia: those who died in the resistance and, down the road in La Place des Deportees, the 20 who did not return from camps with names such as Belsen. On Sunday the mass, sung in French and Latin, increased in volume and confidence as the congregation, perhaps woken by church bells, increased five-fold in time for the sacrament.
On labels.The French railway system is called the National Society for Iron Horses, or SNCF. At the bar overlooking the Quai at Vannes, beer comes in three sizes: normale (quarter litre) serieux (half litre) or formidable (one litre). We can buy foreign papers here. In the Guardian we find that Salman Rushdie has defined Indian democracy as “One man, one bribe” the Indian theory of relativity as “Everything is for relatives” and, Aussie slang for thirsty as “dry as a pommie’s towel”. The New York Times is exploring headline absurdities: “Drunk gets nine months in violin case”, “Lung cancer in women mushrooms” and “Survivor of Siamese twins joins parents”. And somewhere we found this comment on the media: “A lie will go round the world twice while truth is still pulling its boots on.”
REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Robert Cole (A Traveller’s History of France) saw it coming from way back: “The Church, in alliance with the landed aristocracy, flourished…Church property being largely untaxed.” Vassals or serfs provided services or rent to the aristocracy and tithes to the Church. Counts owned counties and could pass this ownership on to their heirs. Starting in 1348 the Black Death wiped out a third of the population, but for a while there was relief for the surviving peasants, wages went up and rent went down, as explained later in David Ricardo’s supply and demand models. But, as population slowly replaced itself, wages went down and rents went up. These transfer payments became so huge that King Louis 14 had enough of it in 1670 to plan the palace of Versailles, with 10,000 rooms built by 36,000 serfs. The underlying ferment arose from this contrast between a rent-racked peasantry and the conspicuous consumption of this rent in palaces such as Versailles. Next, a population boom forced up food prices (consult the arithmetic of Thomas Malthus). Finally, the loss of colonies in India and North America led to a balance of payments deficit. The king attempted to raise taxes on a peasantry with nothing left with which to pay them. He tried to reduce spending (government spending, not his own). When all this failed he asked for money from those who did not pay tax, the nobles, the church, and office bearers. They refused and so the tax-payers (the Third Estate) rose in revolt and abolished noble and clerical privileges.
The new regime, intellectually confused over human rights, rejected Thomas Paine who had just designed the new American constitution. And they forgot the French Physiocrat’s land tax schemes that could have delivered both human rights and economic growth. Though many reforms persisted, confusion always attracts opportunists. They came from outside in the form of Europe’s crowned heads seeking territorial advantage, and from inside in the form of Napoleon, also seeking the territorial advantage of invasions, even as far as Moscow.
REFLECTIONS ON SAINT JOAN OF ARC. The play written by Bernard Shaw is preceded by 40 pages of essays, in the first of which Shaw claims that Joan was the first Protestant martyr, the first French nationalist, a pioneer of modern warfare and of rational dressing for women. Since she applied these reforms with such enthusiasm it is not surprising that she was burnt at the stake for heresy and unwomanly behaviour.
Now, in 1430, Joan has already established her reputation as a warrior, she has been called an angel dressed as a soldier, one who can perform miracles, and the French court is impressed. The Archbishop is asked by the Lord Chamberlin to define miracles. “A miracle is an event which creates faith.” “Even when they are frauds?” someone asks and the Archbishop replies “Frauds deceive. An event that creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud but a miracle” But under close questioning the Archbishop admits that sometimes he prefers to seek answers from Aristotle and Pythagoras rather than from saints and miracles, leading to this conversation “And who the deuce was Pythagoras?” “A sage who held that the earth is round, and that it moves round the sun” “What an utter fool. Couldn’t he use his eyes?”
Later, in the English camp and the Chaplain is lamenting that the English are being defeated. So a nobleman explains to him “That happens, you know. It is only in history books and ballads that the enemy is always defeated” But the Chaplain cannot understand these defeats “They are only Frenchmen”. The nobleman replies in a short speech that foretells the events of the next few centuries: “Frenchmen!! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you please! Men cannot serve two masters. If this cant of serving their country once takes hold of them, goodbye to the authority of their feudal lords, and goodbye to the authority of the Church. That is, goodbye to you and me”
The nobleman then predicts what will happen to Joan. “Some of Charles’s (The Dauphin) people will sell her to the Burgundians; the Burgundians will sell her to us; and there will probably be three or four middlemen who will expect their little commissions.” The Chaplain then blames the Jews, to which the nobleman replies “The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians”
In a similar exchange between the Earl of Warwick and the Bishop of Beauvais, Warwick warns of Joan’s influence: “It goes deep my lord. It is the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest between the private man and his God. I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it”. The bishop replies “As a priest I have gained a knowledge of the minds of the common people; and there you will find yet another most dangerous idea…France for the French, England for the English…Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will: I can find no better name for it.” So the English aristocracy and the French Catholicism are in agreement; their ways of life are threatened and Joan must burn. Warwick says “Well, if you will burn the Protestant I will burn the Nationalist.”
Joan at her trial, and facing burning if she doesn’t confess, says all we need to know about torture: “I cannot bear to be hurt; and if you hurt me I will say anything you like to stop the pain. But I will take it back afterwards; so what is the use of it?” and “only a fool will walk into a fire; God, who gave me my common-sense, cannot will me to do that” and she then finally signs the solemn recantation of her heresy. But the Inquisitor now tells her she will be imprisoned to the end of her earthly days. So she seizes the document, tears it into little bits, and says “Light your fire. Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole?” So they light the fire, Joan asks for a cross, and an English soldier gives her two sticks tied together. Later, the Executioner says “It is all over. You have heard the last of her” But Brother Martin says “This is not the end of her but the beginning”
And 25 years later Joan’s sentence is annulled and, in Shaw’s Epilogue, all the characters involved enter King Charles’s bedroom one by one to tell their story. The soldier, now in hell, is released on one day of the year for his one good deed: “I tied two sticks together and gave them to a poor lass that was going to be burned.” “Would you know her if you saw her again?” asks Joan. “Not I” he says “There are so many girls! And they all expect you to remember them as if there was only one in the world.” Joan asks him about hell. “No great torment, lady. You see I was used to worse, Fifteen years service in the French wars.” The next visitor is from Rome, nearly 500 years later, to call Joan to the Church Triumphant as Saint Joan. “Half an hour to burn you” says Dunois “and four centuries to find out the truth about you.” The English Chaplain asks for a statue to Joan in Winchester Cathedral. But the visitor from the Vatican explains “As the building is temporarily in the hands of the Anglican heresy, I cannot answer for that.” The play ends in uproar when Saint Joan asks “Shall I rise from the dead and come back to you a living woman?” They all look at her in horror and rush out of the room. She has already caused enough trouble down the years.
DIJON FETES DU VINGTES dances and street marches