The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
Gilman, Richard
THE MAID OF ORLEANS THE MYSTERY OF THE CHARITY OF JOAN OF ARC Charles Peguy Adapted by Jean-Paul Lucet, Translated by Jeffrey Wainwright Carcanet, $9.50, 92 pp. Richard Oilman Charles Peguy...
...Joan says in the play: "If it will save from the fires of Hell/the flesh of the damned mad with their hurt,/I give up my flesh to the fires of Hell...
...The great difference between the two plays, as Julian Green wrote, is that the second is "not an account of Joan's life but rather an attempt to describe the awakening of her supernatural vocation...
...Indeed it's Gervaise's realism that gives Joan the beginning of an awareness of what she's going to be called upon to do...
...I hope someone has the imagination and wherewithal to put it on stage here...
...But it is Madame Gervaise, reputed to be a saintly woman but with a keen sense of the world's difficulties, who finally gets through to Joan, without in the least diminishing the girl's ardor or blunting her purpose...
...As printed (I've no idea how it's been done in performance) the play is in one long act with no formal scene divisions...
...And so it surprised and delighted me to learn that Pe'guy's great dramatic poem, or poetic drama, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, has recently been freshly adapted for the stage in France and newly translated for theatrical performance in England...
...Peguy was born in 1873 at Orleans, which is, of course, in a profound manner Joan's city...
...In 1900 he founded the tiny but enormously influential journal Cahiers de la Quinzaine, and around that time "rediscovered" his faith, though he was never physically to practice it...
...Of humble origins, he was a brilliant student and won a scholarship to the Ecole Normale Supe'rieure...
...whose comment on the Dreyfus case stands out in my memory above all others: "We would have died for Dreyfus but Dreyfus wouldn't die for Dreyfus...
...Thirteen years later he published the second, radically changed work...
...And his drama about Joan, of all saints perhaps the one who best incarnated those two realms of time and being, is disturbing, deeply affecting, bold and lovely...
...as she was...
...Must it be that you sent your son in vain...
...Hauviette, a model of simple goodhearted devotion, chides Joan for her fierce perfectionism and thirst to take on the sufferings of others...
...The play begins with Joan reciting the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary and then saying: "Our Father, our Father...
...Where the miserable are miserable once," the younger girl says, "you make yourself miserable a hundred times over...
...She is aflame with poetry and yet — the vice of her virtue — is also filled with bitterness over God's silence, his seeming indifference to the evils that beset France...
...how long before your kingdom does come...
...88: Commonweal "Why do you want, sister, to save the dead . . . why do you want to be a better saviour than the Saviour...
...But there are losses too, chiefly the dropping of some wonderful lines of Joan's...
...who marvelously defined the "bourgeois mind" as that which "always and inevitably prefers the visible to the invisible'' — was killed at forty-one in the first days of World War I while leading his troops in a charge at Villeroy...
...A sprawling epic (which I've not read...
...Pe'guy — about whom Francois Mauriac, on hearing of the play's first translation into English (by Julian Green in 1951), said that now he wished someone would translate him into French...
...The new adaptation-translation is considerably shorter than Green's version, no doubt for practical reasons of staging...
...In this he resembles a later writer, Simone Weil...
...This has the virtue of a clean line and some relief from Pe'guy's incessant repetitions and reiterations, his penchant for lengthy litanies and extremely minute variations on themes, the sort of thing Mauriac, who fundamentally admired Pe'guy, was complaining about...
...The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc is the second of two plays Peguy wrote about the saint...
...I don't know anybody who has), it covered the major events of Joan's life, beginning with her childhood and ending with her trial and death...
...It employs two other characters, Joan's younger friend, Hauviette, and an invented figure, a nun named Madame Gervaise...
...you would have to have new saints who would invent new kinds of consolation," and "Your business, Lord, is to bless...
...While still in his teens he repudiated his ancestral Catholic faith, became an ardent if greatly unconventional socialist, and discovered his literary-philosophical vocation...
...13 February 1987: 89...
...Pe'guy was sui generis, a man ardently, even fanatically concerned with eternity but one who at the same time was remarkably attuned to the struggles of the temporal...
...But perhaps most effective of all is Gervaise's long description of what Mary's suffering must have been, a speech designed to instruct Joan in the humility she will one day achieve and carry in the midst of her prowess...
...Richard Oilman Charles Peguy is nearly unknown today, in America at least, among the several overlapping kinds of readership he once enjoyed: Catholics of a literary or metaphysical bent, lovers of arduous yet strangely exalted poetry, students of French politics and their arcane relationship to what we think of as "culture...
...There is almost no physical action apart from entrances and exits, so that the "drama" of the piece subsists entirely in the dialogue or, at least as often, in alternating monologues, some of which, Madame Gervaise's imaginative reconstruction of the life of the Virgin, for example, are extremely long...
...she asks later, "and will it be said that Jesus died in vain...
...This is one note among many that establish Pe'guy's Joan as a highly unorthodox figure, someone very far in certain respects from the contours of her legend...
...When we ask for your blessings, we are making you doyour job...
...But this is a minor delinquency in an enterprise for which we should be grateful...
...And when Joan, one of whose obsessions is that Jesus' friends, most pointedly the Apostles, cravenly abandoned him, says that "the people round here, in Lorraine, French people, they wouldn't have run off and left him . . . never would we have been such cowards," the nun tells her: "We are such cowards every day, poor child, we are such cowards every day...
...Will it be said that you did nothing at all to put an end to the great sorrow in the realm of France...
...What kept him out of the church were, among a complicated set of reasons, chiefly its right-wing politics and defense of privilege, his own wide sense of the betrayal by institutional Christianity of Jesus' injunction to help the poor and suffering, and his inability to accept the ideas of eternal damnation and Hell...
...The first, published in 1897, just before the reawakening of his faith, seems to have been wholly conventional in structure and theme, if not in language and music...
...Gervaise asks her...
...His eventual output would include poetry, plays, essays, political tracts, and unclassifiable writings that may best be described as mystical reflections grounded in acute social observation...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 3
