Ada: On May 23, 1430, at Compiègne, she was caught outside the walls when the drawbridge was raised. A Burgundian archer grabbed her gold-embroidered cloak and pulled her off her horse.7
Theo: And then she's sold, essentially.
Ada: The English paid ten thousand livres, a royal prince's ransom, and took her to Rouen. She was kept in a secular military prison, chained to a bed, guarded by five soldiers, though canon law said a woman facing church charges should be in a church prison with women.57
Theo: The trial was rigged from the start?
Ada: Bishop Pierre Cauchon, an English partisan, ran it with sixty clerics and no defense counsel for her. They tried to trap her. Asked if she was in God's grace, she said: if I am not, may God bring me to it; and if I am, may God keep me in it.57
Theo: That's dazzling. A theologian's trap, and she just walks through it.
Ada: The real charge came down to her male clothing and her refusal to submit her voices to the earthly Church. She signed a retraction under threat of the fire. Then four days later she was back in men's clothes. Witnesses in 1456 said the guards stole her dress while she slept and a lord tried to rape her.78
Theo: So the clothes weren't defiance. They were protection.
Ada: The English recorded it as relapse, which meant death. On May 30, 1431, at the Place du Vieux-Marché, nineteen years old, she was burned. She asked for a cross; a soldier tied two sticks together and she kissed it and put it in her bodice. As the flames rose she cried out Jesus, again and again. That was her last word.78
Theo: And there's the legend of the heart.
Ada: The friar Isambart said that after three burnings, with sulfur and pitch and charcoal, her heart lay in the ashes intact, full of blood. They pulled the fire back once so the crowd could see she was truly dead, then burned her again and threw the ashes in the Seine, so no one could keep a relic.
Theo: Was the heart really untouched?
Ada: Dense organs full of water do resist an open wood fire. To those watching, it was a miracle. The record calls it physics. Twenty-five years later Charles reopened the case. Her mother, Isabelle, petitioned the Pope. Over a hundred and fifteen witnesses testified, and in 1456 the verdict was declared null, corrupt, and unlawful. Her name was cleared.35
Theo: And the saint part comes much later.
Ada: Nineteen twenty. Nearly five centuries after the fire, Pope Benedict the Fifteenth canonized her. The peasant girl the English burned as a heretic became Saint Joan of France. And remember, Anaïs, you can stop any episode and ask us whatever you're wondering.7
Theo: This was Historai, where history answers back.