I'M NOT SURE why I never read this before, as I have a long-held interest in literary works about Joan of Arc, but somehow I had not. I've known about it since grad school, but it took Bruno Dumont's film Jeannette to motivate me to read it. I'm happy to report that it is every bit as strange as Dumont's film.
It presents itself as a play--that is, the text is arranged as speeches for characters, with details about the setting and stage directions in italics--but it is hard to imagine the play being performed uncut. For one thing, it is long (over 150 pages in the Pléiade text). There are only three characters, but no action to speak of--the whole play is speeches about God, faith, and grace, some of which run for pages.
One of the characters is Joan (here, Jeannette) at age thirteen, right before she has begun hearing her voices. As the play opens, Joan delivers and then at some length dismantles the Lord's Prayer, asking God for an explanation why, 1400 years on, the kingdom still has not come. Jeannette's friend Hauviette enters, trying to persuade Jeannette to take it down a notch, just be a good parishioner and not make waves. Jeannette's not having any of that, thanks. Hauviette exits to make way for Madame Gervaise, who seems to be a former teacher (maybe? not sure about this point) who has become a nun... or perhaps she was always a nun but has withdrawn into seclusion.
Mme. Gervaise's counsel to Jeannette makes up most of the rest of the play. She too, like Hauviette, is trying to gather Jeannette back into orthodoxy, but Mme. Gervaise shows considerably more insight into Jeannette's misgivings as well as greater theological depth.
This sounds as dry as a bone--but Péguy lends Mme. Gervaise's disquisition the intensity of a fever dream. Rhythmic, repetitive, obsessed, it seems more like an incantation than a sermon, especially in its hallucinatory depiction of Jesus's Passion, which pays special attention to Mary as witness. Among the passages that struck me is this one, a memorable depiction of Jesus as disruptive healer:
Jusqu'au jour où il avait commencé le désordre.
Introduit le désordre.
Le plus grand désordre qu'il y ait eu dans le monde.
Qu'il y ait jamais eu dans le monde.
Le plus grande ordre qu'il y ait eu dans le monde.
Le seul ordre.
Qu'il y ait jamais eu dans le monde.
Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc appeared in 1910 during a particularly turbulent era in French letters. The Dreyfus Affair had polarized writers (and the society as a whole), the poles roughly definable as secularist-socialist-universalist on the one hand and Catholic-monarchical-nationalist on the other hand. Plenty of cordial hatred on both sides (not unlike USA in Trump times, though I don't think Trump has many littérateurs on his side). Péguy had been a socialist dreyfusard for most of his career--did Le Mystère mean he had changed sides, given Joan's connection to Catholicism and militant French patriotism? It did not, but in the context of the time, the question of whether Péguy had switched sides dominated response to the work. I'd like to learn more about this.
Of particular interest to me is the Yeats connection. Iseult Gonne (Maud's daughter) read Le Mystère to him in Normandy in 1916, translating it as she read I suppose. It made enough of an impression on him that he noted it a key essay of his from 1919, "If I Were Four-and-Twenty." The final part of the play, where Jeannette angers Mme. Gervaise by insisting that the men of France would not have abandoned Jesus during his trial and execution as the apostles did, particularly impressed him.
That Yeats would have connected to Jeannette's/Joan's passionate advocacy for her countrymen always made some sense to me, but now that I have read the whole play, it's hard to imagine his sitting through a reading of it, even by the young and lovely Iseult Gonne. His appetite for Catholic theology was small, I think, and he was not really all that interested in Jesus. Perhaps he appreciated Iseult's appreciation of it.
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