The Life of Joan of Arc Part 128

"Since you know so much about it, why don't you perform your errand yourself? Why do you appeal to a poor man like me who knows not how to express himself?"

Then the unknown replied to Martin:

"It is not I who will go, but you; do as I command you."

As soon as he had uttered these words, his feet rose from the ground, his body bent, and with this double movement he vanished.

From this time onwards, Martin was haunted by the mysterious being.

One day, having gone down into his cellar, he found him there. On another occasion, during vespers, he saw him in church, near the holy water stoup, in a devout att.i.tude. When the service was over, the unknown accompanied Martin on his way home and again commanded him to go and see the King. The farmer told his relatives who were with him, but neither of them had seen or heard anything.

Tormented by these apparitions, Martin communicated them to his priest, M. La Perruque. He, being certain of the good faith of his paris.h.i.+oner and deeming that the case ought to be submitted to the diocesan authority, sent the visionary to the Bishop of Versailles.

The Bishop was then M. Louis Charrier de la Roche, a priest who in the days of the Revolution had taken the oath to the Republic. He resolved to subject Martin to a thorough examination; and from the first he told him to ask the unknown what was his name, and who it was who sent him.

But when the messenger in the light-coloured frock-coat appeared again, he declared that his name must remain unknown.

"I come," he added, "from him who has sent me, and he who has sent me is above me."

He may have wished to conceal his name; but at least he did not conceal his views; the vexation he displayed on the escape of La Valette[2766] proved that in politics he was an ultra Royalist of the most violent type.

[Footnote 2766: Antoine Marie Chamans, Comte de La Valette (1769-1830), was a French general during the first empire. Having been arrested in 1815 and condemned to death, he was saved by his wife.--W.S.]

Meanwhile the Comte de Breteuil, Prefect of Eure-et-Loir, had been told of the visionary at the same time as the Bishop. He also questioned Martin. He expected to find him a nervous, agitated person; but when he found him tranquil, speaking simply, but with logical sequence and precision, he was very astonished.

Like M. l'Abbe La Perruque he deemed the matter sufficiently important to bring before the higher authorities. Accordingly he sent Martin, under the escort of a lieutenant of _gendarmerie_, to the Ministre de la Police Generale.

Having reached Paris on March 8, Martin lodged with the _gendarme_ at the Hotel de Calais, in the Rue Montmartre. They occupied a double-bedded room. One morning, when Martin was in bed, he beheld an apparition and told Lieutenant Andre, who could see nothing, although it was broad daylight. Indeed, Martin's visitations became so frequent that they ceased to cause him either surprise or concern. It was only to the abrupt disappearance of the unknown that he could never grow accustomed. The voice continued to give the same command.

One day it told him that if it were not obeyed France would not know peace until 1840.

In 1816 the Ministre de la Police Generale was the Comte Decazes who was afterwards created a duke. He was in the King's confidence. But he knew that the extreme Royalists were hatching plots against his royal master. Decazes wished to see the good man from Gallardon, suspecting doubtless, that he was but a tool in the hands of the Extremists.

Martin was brought to the Minister, who questioned him and at once perceived that the poor creature was in no way dangerous. He spoke to him as he would to a madman, endeavouring to regard the subject of his mania as if it were real, and so he said:

"Don't be agitated; the man who has been troubling you is arrested; you will have nothing more to fear from him."

But these words did not produce the desired effect. Three or four hours after this interview, Martin again beheld the unknown, who, after speaking to him in his usual manner, said: "When you were told that I had been arrested, you were told a lie; he who said so has no power over me."

On Sunday, March 10, the unknown returned; and on that day he disclosed the matter concerning which the Bishop of Versailles had inquired, and which he had said at first he would never reveal.

"I am," he declared, "the Archangel Raphael, an angel of great renown in the presence of G.o.d, and I have received power to afflict France with all manner of suffering."

Three days later, Martin was shut up in Charenton on the certificate of Doctor Pinel, who stated him to be suffering from intermittent mania with alienation of mind.

He was treated in the kindest manner and was even permitted to enjoy some appearance of liberty. Pinel himself originated the humane treatment of the insane. Martin in the asylum was not forsaken by the blessed Raphael. On Friday, the 15th, as the peasant was tying his shoe laces, the Archangel in his frock-coat of a light colour, spoke to him these words:

"Have faith in G.o.d. If France persists in her incredulity, the misfortunes I have predicted will happen. Moreover, if they doubt the truth of your visions, they have but to cause you to be examined by doctors in theology."

These words Martin repeated to M. Legros; Director of the Royal Inst.i.tution of Charenton, and asked him what a doctor in theology was.

He did not know the meaning of the term. In the same manner, when he was at Gallardon he had asked the priest, M. La Perruque, the meaning of certain expressions the voice had used. For example, he did not understand the wild frenzy of France [_le delvie de la France_] nor the evils to which she would fall a victim [_elle serait en proie_].

But there is nothing that need puzzle us in such ignorance, if it really existed. Martin may well have remembered the words he did not understand and which he afterwards attributed to his Archangel still without understanding them.

The visions recurred at brief intervals. On Sunday, March 31, the Archangel appeared to him in the garden, took his hand, which he pressed affectionately, opened his coat and displayed a bosom of so dazzling a whiteness that Martin could not bear to gaze on it. Then he took off his hat.

"Behold my forehead," he said, "and give heed that it beareth not the mark of the beast whereby the fallen angels were sealed."

Louis XVIII expressed a desire to see Martin and to question him. The King, like his favourite Minister, believed the visionary to be a tool in the hands of the extreme party.

On Tuesday, April 2, Martin was taken to the Tuileries and brought into the King's closet, where was also M. Decazes. As soon as the King saw the farmer, he said to him: "Martin, I salute you."

Then he signed to his Minister to withdraw. Thereupon Martin, according to his own telling, repeated to the King all that the Archangel had revealed to him, and disclosed to Louis XVIII sundry secret matters concerning the years he had spent in exile; finally he made known to him certain plots which had been formed against his person. Then the King, profoundly agitated and in tears, raised his hands and his eyes to heaven and said to Martin:

"Martin, these are things which must never be known save to you and to me."

The visionary promised him absolute secrecy.

Such was the interview of April 2, according to the account given of it by Martin, who then, under the influence of M. La Perruque's sermons, was an infatuated Royalist. It would be interesting to know more of this priest whose inspiration is obvious throughout the whole story. Louis XVIII agreed with M. Decazes that the man was quite harmless; and he was sent back to his plough.

Later, the agents of one of those false dauphins so numerous under the Restoration, got hold of Martin and made use of him in their own interest. After Louis XVIII's death, under the influence of these adventurers, the poor man, reconst.i.tuting the story of his interview with the late King, introduced into it other revelations he claimed to have received and completely changed the whole character of the incident. In this second version the pa.s.sionate Royalist of 1816 was transformed into an accusing prophet, who came to the King's own palace to denounce him as a usurper and a regicide, forbidding him in G.o.d's name to be crowned at Reims.

Such ramblings I cannot relate at length. They are to be found fully detailed in the book of M. Paul Marin. The author of this work would have done well to indicate that these follies were suggested to the unhappy man by the partisans of Naundorf, who was pa.s.sing himself off as the Duke of Normandy, who had escaped from the Temple.

Thomas Ignace Martin died at Chartres in 1834. It is alleged, but it has never been proved, that he was poisoned.[2767]

[Footnote 2767: _Rapport adresse a S. Ex. le Ministre de la Police Generale sur l'etat du nomme Martin, envoye par son ordre a la maison royale de Charenton, le 13 Mars, 1816, par MM. Pinel, medecin en chef de l'hopital de la Salpetriere, et Royer-Collard, medecin en chef de la maison royale de Charenton, et l'un et l'autre professeurs a la faculte de medecine de Paris._ Inscribed at the end with the date--Paris, 6 May, 1816--39 pages in 4'o MS. in the library of the author. Le Capitaine Paul Marin, _Thomas Martin de Gallardon Les Medecins et les thaumaturges du XIX'e siecle_, Paris, s.d. in 18'o. _Memoires de la Comtesse de Boignes_, edited by Charles Nicoullaud, Paris, 1907, vol. iii. pp. 355 and _pa.s.sim_.]

APPENDIX IV

ICONOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is no authentic picture of Jeanne. From her we know that at Arras she saw in the hands of a Scotsman a picture in which she was represented on her knees presenting a letter to her King. From her we know also that she never caused to be made either image or painting of herself, and that she was not aware of the existence of any such image or painting. The portrait painted by the Scotsman, which was doubtless very small, is unfortunately lost and no copy of it is known.[2768]

The slight pen-and-ink figure, drawn on a register of May 10, 1429, by a clerk of the Parlement of Paris, who had never seen the Maid, must be regarded as the mere scribbling of a scribe who was incapable of even designing a good initial letter.[2769] I shall not attempt to reconstruct the iconography of the Maid.[2770] The bronze equestrian statue in the Cluny Museum produces a grotesque effect that one is tempted to believe deliberate, if one may ascribe such an intention to an old sculptor. It dates from the reign of Charles VIII. It is a Saint George or a Saint Maurice, which, at a time doubtless quite recent, was taken to represent the Maid. Between the legs of the miserable jade, on which the figure is mounted, was engraved the inscription: _La pucelle dorlians_, a description which would not have been employed in the fifteenth century.[2771] About 1875, the Cluny Museum exhibited another statuette, slightly larger, in painted wood, which was also believed to be fifteenth century, and to represent Jeanne d'Arc. It was relegated to the store-room, when it turned out to be a bad seventeenth-century Saint Maurice from a church at Montargis.[2772] Any saint in armour is frequently described as a Jeanne d'Arc. This is what happened to a small fifteenth-century head wearing a helmet, found buried in the ground at Orleans, broken off from a statue and still bearing traces of painting: a work in good style and with a charming expression.[2773] I have not patience to relate how many initial letters of antiphonaries and sixteenth-, seventeenth- and even eighteenth-century miniatures have been touched up or repainted and pa.s.sed off as true and ancient representations of Jeanne. Many of them I have had the opportunity of seeing.[2774] On the other hand, if they were not so well known, it would give me pleasure to recall certain ma.n.u.scripts of the fifteenth century, which, like _Le Champion des Dames_ and _Les Vigiles de Charles VII_, contain miniatures in which the Maid is portrayed according to the fancy of the illuminator. Such pictures are interesting because they reveal her as she was imagined by those who lived during her lifetime or shortly afterwards. It is not their merit that appeals to us; they possess none; and in no way do they suggest Jean Foucquet.[2775]

[Footnote 2768: _Trial_, vol. i, pp. 100, 292.]

[Footnote 2769: There is a wood engraving of this figure in Wallon, _Jeanne d'Arc_, p. 95.]

[Footnote 2770: E. de Bouteiller and G. de Braux, _Notes iconographiques sur Jeanne d'Arc_, Paris and Orleans, 1879, in 18'o royal paper.]

[Footnote 2771: Reproduced in many works, notably opposite p. 17 in the book of E. de Bouteiller and G. de Braux, referred to above.]

[Footnote 2772: _Ibid._, see woodcut opposite p. 8.]

[Footnote 2773: In the Orleans Museum. A copper-plate engraving by M.

Georges Lavalley, in the _Jeanne d'Arc_, of M. Raoul Bergot, Tours, s.d. large 8'o.]

[Footnote 2774: Of this cla.s.s of so-called portrait, I will merely mention the miniature which serves as frontispiece to vol. iv. of _La Vrai Jeanne d'Arc_, of P. Ayroles, Paris, 1898, in large 8'o, and the miniature of the Spetz Collection, reproduced in the _Jeanne d'Arc_ of Canon Henri Debout, vol. ii. p. 103 (also in _The Maid of France_ by Andrew Lang, 1908. W.S.).]