DARKNESS AND LIGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 13

DARKNESS AND LIGHT

THE SAINT AND THE DEVIL, a biographical study of Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, by Francis Winwar; Hamish Hamilton. English price, 15/-. HE title explains the author’s conception of this double biography; the book sustains it admirably. Within a decade, 15th Century France saw two young people burned for sorcery, the one in lingering torture, protesting her innocence, the other given swift death after publicly confessing to the murder of several hundred children to satisfy his. sadistic lust. The man _ became quickly identified with Bluebeard, the maid eventually became a canonised saint. The extraordinary story of Joan of Are here loses none of its fascination (continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (Cont'd,)

(continued from previous page) by being paralleled with that of Gilles de Rais, brilliant Marshal of France, who fought with her, protected her and then forsook her to seek the Devil. The lives of both are amply documented, Joan’s particularly so. Francis Winwar’s researches have given a book that must have been as absorbing to write as it is to read. The subject, of course, will always provoke argument. Her interpretation of Joan is the generally accepted one of the illiterate peasant girl inspired, guided, warned and, in the brief hour of her abjuration, forsakén by her Voices. The portrait lives, from the quiet days of Domrémy, through the military miracles, to her humiliation, trial and death. Until their crowning of the ingrate Charles, Gilles rides in glory with her, but he cannot decide whether Joan is indeed La Pucelle or a Limb of the Fiend. It is a corollary of the age, no less than an indictment of the man, that this deeply religious aesthete of murder, living for the joys of luxurious excesses and the exquisite tertures of penance, should have believed there is no sin so vile it cannot be expiated. Gilles’s portrait is not as superbly convincing as that of the maid whose exalted vision shook the entire feudal age.

The author suggests the probable. explanation when she describes the depositions at his trial: "records of such bestial callousness that the mind, incredulous, refuses to accept them." The hand she says, is numb; it is also, very occasionally, turgid, The two protagonists, one of God and the Devil, one of God, move against an authentically drawn background, France war-ravaged and famine-racked. The bibliography and the illustrations

are good,

C.M.

B.