They weren't French - the blasphemous St. Joan

The central chant of The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc culminates with a vision of the defense and subsequent betrayal of Christ by his disciples.

The defense:

MADAME GERVAISE: The master saviour did not want Peter to draw his sword against the soldier in arms: we mustn’t go to war…

JEANNETTE: So they had swords.

MADAME GERVAISE: They therefore had swords. (170)

The betrayal:

JEANNETTE: I believe, had I been there, I would not have forsaken him.

MADAME GERVAISE: Daughter, child, let us keep ourselves from the sin of pride.  We are made as others.  We are Christians like others.  We would have been like them.  We would have been among them.  We would have acted like them.  The Scriptures had to be fulfilled.  All forsook him.  Not one remained.  It had to be.  All forsook him.  We too would have forsaken him…  We are no better than the others.

JEANNETTE: They weren’t French.  They weren’t French knights. (171-2)

“They weren’t French” – this was, to me, the single most shocking line in Charles Péguy’s audacious play.  The nun, Madame Gervaise, a representative of orthodoxy, is similarly shocked – “You don’t talk like a good Christian, like an ordinary Christian.”  After all, Peter, the founder of the Church, is among the deniers of Christ.  But he was not French.

Joan and the nun debate the sin of pride, and the meaning of the cock that crowed with each of Peter’s denials, the meaning of religious courage.  Joan is, of course, unswayed.  We know how the story ends, with Joan on the bonfire and France liberated from the English.  The nun, Madame Gervaise, is in fact converted to Joan’s position – but the nun is French, and amply courageous.

I have never read, and have little idea, what George Bernard Shaw or Bertolt Brecht try to accomplish in their plays about Saint Joan.  They can’t be much like Charles Péguy, can they?  I can believe, though, that Péguy’s Jeannette becomes this Joan:

I had trouble, sometimes, mentally excluding the image of Renée Falconetti’s extraordinary performance in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).  Dreyer’s script is taken directly from the transcripts of her trial in 1431, so the film is structured a bit like this play – another debate with a saint, a frustrating exercise, since mystic saints seem to have their own rules of engagement.

Falconetti – this is really the key – captures the central strangeness of Joan, the sense that Joan is not quite of this world, that this wisp of a girl has an unearthly power, and that what is heresy or sin in other people is something else in her.

Péguy’s book is, like Dreyer’s film, a masterpiece, high level artistry.  I was tempted to write “a masterpiece, but a disquieting one,” which is wrong. A masterpiece, and therefore disquieting.

Still borrowed from imagesjournal.

its last thoughts tetter the furrows - the mystery of The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc

The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc.  The title, that got my attention.  Hard to parse.  Written by Charles Péguy, published, self-published, in 1910.

It’s a play, or maybe a poem.  It has been a play, much shortened, rearranged.  The translation, the only translation of the whole thing, is 200 pages long.  The centerpiece of the play is a French nun’s seventy page meditation on Mary’s perspective on her son Jesus, a Passion of Mary.

For the last three days she wept.
For the last three days, she wandered, she followed.
She followed the procession.
She followed the events.
She followed as you follow a funeral.
But it was a living man’s funeral.
A man who was still alive. (117)

Joan, Jeannette, is “thirteen and a half.”  She spends the entire play, a few moments aside, spinning wool, always working.  The story, so to speak, is Jeannette’s discovery of her sainthood, of her role as the deliverer of Catholic France from the godless English – “Do you know they feed their horses oats on the venerable altar?” (70).

The nun and Jeannette argue about sacrifice, about charity.  The nun tries to persuade Jeannette to accept suffering, to be loyal to the church.  Aspiring sainthood resembles heresy.

Jeannette is not dissuaded.  Rather, if I understand the poem correctly, the nun’s arguments backfire, actually convincing Joan to become a martyr for France.  “Can it be that so much suffering is lost?” asks Jeannette.  She will, like Christ, redeem France’s suffering.

I suspect I can pinpoint the exact moment when Jeannette enters her vocation.  But who knows.  The women do not debate so much as exchange monologues.  Entire pages could be best performed as chants, like a church liturgy.  Péguy’s poetics are irregular and repetitive, looping, strange. Strange, strange.

Oh, if in order to save from the eternal flame
The bodies of the dead who are damned and maddened by pain,
I must abandon my body to the eternal flame,
Lord, give my body to the eternal flame;
My body, my poor body, to that flame which will never be quenched.
My body, take my body for that flame.
My wretched body.
My body worth so little, counting for so little.
Of little weight.
My poor body of so little a price.
                      (A pause)          (83-4)

The most common stage directions are (A pause) and (A long pause).

Péguy was a socialist, an atheist, a Dreyfusard, who had somehow returned, by the time he wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, to Catholicism, although not, paradoxically, to the Church.  In 1914, forty-one years old, he enlisted in the French army as an officer and was killed almost immediately.

Geoffrey Hill’s poem “The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy” (1983) is, I would guess, read more – read more by readers of English – than Péguy himself.

The blaze of death goes out, the mind leaps
for its salvation, is at once extinct;
its last thoughts tetter the furrows, distinct
in dawn twilight, caught in the barbed loops. (stanza 8)

Hard to write about, this poem.  Hard to think about.

This little essais is indirectly related to my trip to Quebec City.

Excerpts and page numbers, from the Julian Green translation, Pantheon, 1950.