Almost all little girls have a love affair with horses. They also seem to go through a Joan of Arc phase, too. I was indifferent to the equestrian sports – but I read all the books in my library on the illiterate virgin from Domrémy who gave birth to a nation.
So I was pleased to learn in my online peregrinations that today is her 600th birthday. How the experts have determined her birthday when we’re not even sure of the year she was born, I can’t remember, if I ever knew. The picture at right was made about half a century after her death; the only contemporary portrait made of her has not survived.
She may be a powerful reminder that events can be successful without turning out quite as we imagined. Charles VII, the king whose coronation she engineered, appears to have been a truly nasty piece of work. Having recently attended the exhibition of The Mourners at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, I enriched my appreciation for what a first-class creep he was: “the mourners” adorn the tomb of John the Fearless, done in by the king-to-be in a particularly treacherous way. Old habits die hard: he did nothing more than a decade later to save his warrior and savior when she was captured by the Burgundians. She burned at the stake in 1431.
We know her, not only as a warrior, patriot, and saint, but also as the heroine of two great plays: Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, and Jean Anouilh‘s The Lark.
The most famous passage from Shaw’s play follows her agreement to sign a confession renouncing her “voices,” to live under permanent confinement.
“You think that life is nothing but not being dead? It is not the bread and water I fear. I can live on bread. It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again climb the hills. To make me breathe foul damp darkness, without these things I cannot live. And by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your council is of the devil.”
Below is a 1957 Hallmark video of the play, starring that remarkable and generally underrated actress Julie Harris as Joan and the better known, for different reasons, Boris Karloff as Pierre Cauchon. Lillian Hellman made the English adaptation and Leonard Bernstein composed the incidental music. (Otherwise you could watch Carl Dreyer‘s reverential and acclaimed The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I have always found a little like watching paint dry. Guess I’m a lowbrow.
I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole Anouilh play, but it looks pretty good in the bits I’ve seen. You’ll have to skip through Hallmark’s 2-minute cheesy commercial at the beginning, and a very blurry video version – but Harris is worth it, I think.
Tags: Boris Karloff, Carl Dreyer, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Anouilh, Joan of Arc, Julie Harris, Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman
January 6th, 2012 at 10:00 pm
Twain, who disliked most manifestations of modern medievalism, adored Joan, too, calling her ““easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” I daresay he was a little bit in love with her.
January 7th, 2012 at 12:04 am
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. He considered his book about her his best book – though few critics agree.
January 7th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
[…] According to the Book Haven, yesterday was the 600th birthday of Joan of Arc. Fortuitously, I learned this morning via D.C. neighbor and blogger George that the Joan of Arc statue in Meridian Hill Park, dedicated by President Harding on the saint’s birthday in 1922… […]
January 15th, 2012 at 9:57 am
I found it really interesting that both of the leading, anti-immigrant, French presidential candidates have appropriated Joan of Arc into their campaigns — the most extreme of the two, Marine Le Pen, holding a press conference at her statue in Paris on her 600th birthday. According to my French friend, the idea that Joan expelled the foreign English out of France is a very attractive metaphor for those who see immigrants as the problem to the French economy today.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/278356/20120108/joan-arc-anniversary-sarkozy-marine-le-pen.htm
(thanks for a wonderful blog),
Summer
February 5th, 2012 at 7:13 am
[…] Bottom row, from left to right: St. Mathew, St. Joan of Arc and St. Theresa of Avila. Credit: 1, 2, 3, 4.Seven Cardinal VirtuesIn the Catholic Faith, there are seven different cardinal virtues. These […]