The Passion of) Joan of Arc

Jeffrey Winter (The Passion of) Joan of Arc

Some man asked me recently if I had any regrets about her. Did I feel I might have treated her too harshly?

No, I told him; there was no other way. You try it, I said. You take a woman down from the stage and set her before the eyes of the world, then take God and put him behind the eyes of the woman. You try it.

Anyway, I knew it would not kill her. Contrary to what you’d think, we grow more malleable as we grow older. (Can you imagine, for example, if I had picked some brittle nineteen-year-old ingénue for the part? She would have fractured the moment we clipped the first tress.) Indeed, at times I felt that I feared her more than she did me.

In the final analysis, I told him, none of this is of any consequence: She is dead now, and her tears are still wet. Whatever I put her through, I’m sure she would see the value in that.

For God’s sake, I told him, look at it again, from start to finish: The trial, the temptation, and the immolation. Watch her through the flames, I said, at the end of her climb to the stars, and tell me you do not hear the fire building, that you do not feel it rising in your own skin. It is that fire that acquits me.