Joan’s birthplace, Domrémy, lies on the west bank of the upper Meuse River, in northeastern France’s region of Lorraine,*1 about 150 miles east of Paris. A census taken in the fourteenth century—it counted hearths rather than individuals—estimated the village’s population at a little fewer than 200 inhabitants. Today the head count hovers around 150. With the exception of the Joan of Arc Center and the basilica erected in her honor, Domrémy remains much as it was in her lifetime, the small seat of an agricultural community in a high valley of the Meuse. The climate is more temperate than severe, summer’s heat peaking in July at about eighty degrees, winter’s grip tightest in January, when the river, shallow and trending into marsh where it winds past town, slows and finally freezes. The soil, dense, clayey, and rich in limestone, is ideal for pasturing livestock and for the cultivation of oats, wheat, rye, and hemp—as well as grapes. Lorraine’s vineyards, known today for Beaujolais Nouveau, were first planted during the Roman occupation of Gaul.
Then, as now, a perfectly pastoral landscape spread around Domrémy’s tight little clutch of mostly one-story homes: a patchwork of greens, a white spatter of sheep, a river’s serpentine course coiling through hills that gradually rose into the Bois Chenu, the looming dark Oak Wood in whose dusky shadows wolves lurked, hoping for a wayward lamb. And there were more fearful predators, for, as everyone knew, it was behind the dark curtain of trees that the devil changed costume, lying in wait for two-legged prey.
Like Vaucouleurs to the north and Neufchâteau to the south, Domrémy was a less provincial village than it might have been were it not located on the Via Agrippa, the network of old Roman roads crisscrossing France and connecting, in the case of Domrémy, Verdun and Dijon by way of Langres. As it was, the town received timely news of the outcome of every skirmish, as well as the dauphin’s subsequent response, disseminated by his pages. A less fortunate aspect of Domrémy’s position was its vulnerability to passing raids, as a road was as good as an invitation to enjoy the spoils of one town after another. While urbanites in nearby Reims or Metz had the protection of fortified walls, the farmers and vintners who lived in the countryside and whose labor provided cities with all they consumed found themselves running every which way from marauding bands of soldiers, as well as deserters, mercenaries, and looters drawn to insufficiently protected property. Écorcheurs, they were called, or flayers, and if they didn’t skin the land while engaged in what was almost exclusively siege warfare, when unemployed they plundered whatever they chose. Captain John Fastolf, a respected military tactician whom Joan would face in battle, summarized the modus operandi that accompanied siege warfare, whose ultimate objective was to capture dynastic rule by kidnapping and ransoming royalty. Occupying armies were directed to systematically ravage the land, burning whatever they didn’t steal—homes, grain, fruit trees, crops—and killing livestock they didn’t take for their own. The strategy was intended to demoralize as well as enervate the citizenry. Once the seemingly interminable war had drained the coffers of France and England both, some soldiers were forced to steal that they might feed and clothe themselves; others succumbed to the temptation of vandalism, rape, and murder that would go unpunished. It was an age of unchecked violence, the plague’s devastation inuring the populace to grotesque physical torment, which became an object of fascination and even entertainment. The upper class lived for the sanctioned slaughter of warfare punctuated by tournament melees, mock battles that produced unfortunately real effects, different from Roman gladiatorial contests only in their assuming a veneer of high-minded chivalry. Peasants gaped at heads on pikes and bodies left hanging from gibbets until the flesh dropped off their bones.
By the fifteenth century, famine, plague, and warfare had so drained the land of able bodies that the economic and social fabric no longer supported serfdom, and the system of government that had characterized western Europe for nearly a thousand years had all but collapsed. Those whom the Black Death didn’t kill, it freed from bondage. Peasants, serfs, laborers—tens of thousands of commoners—seized the chance to turn on the aristocracy they’d served for as long as anyone could remember, taking over the châteaus of those who had died intestate to feel the warmth of a feather bed and taste the spell a silver goblet imparted to a mouthful of wine. Of course, not everyone turned to murder and thievery. Once out from under vassalage, a skilled worker could demand payment for his labor and make his way up in the world. Born in 1375, when civil unrest was at its most widespread, Joan’s father, Jacques d’Arc, lived in a time of unprecedented mobility, when an enterprising man might take advantage of depressed land values to increase his real estate and when the loosening of the social order inspired a similar instability in the fixed systems of thought that had accompanied it. By attacking his creation so indiscriminately and catastrophically, God had lost a little of his power of persuasion, and inasmuch as a man freed himself from the proscribed thoughts of the Church fathers, he had the capacity to think independently. It would be centuries before Western society valued the freethinking individual over the conformist, but a shift had occurred.
A villein, or free peasant, from Ceffonds, in Champagne, fifty miles west of Domrémy, Joan’s father owned forty acres over which he rotated his crops and pastured his sheep and another ten acres in the Bois Chenu, into which townsfolk ventured only as far as they needed to drive their pigs to forage acorns and grow fat. Jacques d’Arc had his own home, and he owned the furnishings within it. Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, was born in 1377 and raised in Vouthon, just five miles northwest of Domrémy. It’s likely that Isabelle’s brother (sometimes identified as her uncle) Henri de Vouthon, the prior of a Benedictine monastery in Sermaize, arranged her betrothal to Jacques d’Arc. Just as the child Joan has been cast in the role of humble shepherdess, her family has often been represented as diminished in circumstances, socially isolated, naive, and untouched by the corruption inherent to worldliness. But few among the peasantry could claim a Church superior in his or her immediate family; few were landed. Isabelle owned property in Vouthon as well as what she would inherit when Jacques died in 1431, of grief, some said, as Joan was executed that year. Romée was not a conventional surname—nor did a fifteenth-century peasant necessarily have a surname—but a distinction conferred on Isabelle (or possibly her mother) for having made a pilgrimage to Rome, a significant expense that bore witness to an unusual commitment to one’s faith. To undertake such a journey required not only money but also the willingness to expose oneself to brigands who lay in wait along all pilgrim roads, as well as to plague and leprosy. A medieval pilgrim often sold all he owned to finance a journey from which he didn’t necessarily expect to return. As friends and neighbors universally attested, both Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée were “true and good Catholics, upright and brave.”
“Honest farmers,” they grew rye and oats, but the local diet, and their livelihood, was based on livestock—milk, cheese, eggs, fowl, and pork. The wool Jacques sheared from his sheep each spring bought what the family didn’t grow or make for itself. Prosperous among the peasantry, they had a few hundred francs*2 in savings, as well as food and room enough to offer the occasional traveler dinner and a night’s rest, either on the floor before the hearth downstairs or in one of the two lofts that formed the second story of “the only house in the village that was built of stone, not wood and thatch,” in an age when almost all dwellings, urban as well as rural, were made of wood.
The fourth of her parents’ five children, Joan was born in 1412, after her brothers Jacquemin and Jean and her only sister, Catherine, and before Pierre. Sources are inconsistent as well as incomplete, however, with respect to the birth order of Joan’s siblings and their respective ages. According to some, Jacquemin, the eldest, was born in 1406, when Isabelle was thirty, which would have made him a very young groom in 1419, the year he is said to have married and settled on his mother’s land in Vouthon, where he remained until the spring of 1429. By then, Joan’s fame had drawn all her siblings into its glare and on into history books, a rare destination for a peasant. After Jean and Pierre followed their little sister into battle, Jacquemin returned to Domrémy to help his parents, who were then in their mid-fifties, run the family’s farm. By then, Catherine had married, moved to the neighboring town of Greux, and died, most likely in childbirth.
The accuracy of the day traditionally celebrated as that of Joan’s birth, January 6, or Twelfth Night, is called into question by the date’s sole extant source, an excitedly florid letter from a courtier within the dauphin’s inner circle—a man who was almost certainly not present at a remote village’s celebration of a Church feast day. “It was during the night of the Epiphany that she first saw the light in this mortal life,” Perceval de Boulainvilliers wrote to the Duke of Milan in June 1429. “Wonderful to relate, the poor inhabitants [of Domrémy] were seized with an inconceivable joy …[and] ran one to the other, enquiring what new thing had happened. The cocks, as heralds of this happy news, crowed in a way that had never been heard before, beating their bodies with their wings; continuing for two hours to prophesy this new event.” The only of Lord Perceval’s letters known to have survived, it was written on June 21, 1429, a month after Joan had raised the siege of Orléans, eclipsing the festering shame of Agincourt and demonstrating God’s long-awaited mercy. As king’s councillor and a recruiting officer for the French army, Boulainvilliers had reason to celebrate a triumph that made his job not only possible but also effortless. Men who had previously fled from the front made an about-face to chase after Joan for a chance to fight under her command. The court was jubilant, even giddy, but the dauphin Charles of Valois wasn’t the center of its attention. That was occupied by Joan, the international sensation to whom France owed its victory. Letters like Boulainvilliers’s flew from Chinon to castles and manors across Europe. That every literate European spoke and read French accelerated the trajectory of Joan’s fame, the impulse to embroider what was already fantastic as irresistible to a lord as to a gossiping housewife at market. Human prophets had predicted Joan’s advent; now nature, one species anyway, had confirmed her arrival. As it was not the habit of medieval people to take note of birth dates, it was that much easier for the unreliable apparatus of human memory to nudge Joan’s winter arrival to align with a date befitting her glory. It mattered little whether an Epiphany birthday resulted from heavenly manipulation, happy coincidence, Lord Perceval’s imagination, or was the gift of a fabulist somewhere in the chain of rumor that delivered news to the French aristocracy; more important was that Joan’s birth be met with fanfare and its date carry meaning. Epiphany marks the Magi’s paying homage to Jesus, the infant Messiah who represents the “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation, a book dear to the medieval mind for its wealth of symbol and allegory. For a girl who understood herself as God’s agent—“the reason I was born” to save the people of France and deliver its crown to God’s chosen king—there was no more fitting birthday. Jesus borrowed December 25 from Sol, who, like most solar deities, had timed his arrival to follow on the heels of the winter solstice, and Jesus took Sol’s halo as well—as did the Roman emperors.
Where no tangible historical records or artifacts provide a counterweight to the pull of a narrative tradition shaped by faith, the historical truth of a life like Joan’s or Jesus’s gives way to religious truth. Deities in mortal form must have parents, places of birth, and childhoods, and Boulainvilliers unwittingly aligned Joan’s birthday with an event that might never have taken place. No evidence supports any wise men’s pilgrimage to the newborn Son of God; no astronomer recorded any celestial phenomenon that might have been interpreted as a guiding star. The idea of Jesus’s being laid in a manger derives from a mistranslation of the Aramaic to the Greek; he was probably born in an underground room used for pressing olives, far from a manger, with no space for receiving shepherds and magi. The Nativity might not have occurred in Bethlehem. Among the five cities archaeologists have identified as possible birthplaces for Jesus, Nazareth is the most likely, as his name suggests. The Evangelist Matthew chose Bethlehem to fulfill a messianic prophecy made eight hundred years earlier by Micah: “You, oh Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel.” John’s Gospel chose a different validation: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” summoning in the case of Moses a tradition dating as far back as the Bronze Age. As it had been for Jesus, so it would be for Joan; an origin myth was added as a prefix to what was known of her extraordinary life, an auspicious beginning that predicted the subsequent miracles—prophecy applied retroactively to provide context for phenomena witnessed by hundreds of people and, as nothing else explained them, experienced as divine.
Witnesses to Joan’s early childhood include friends, neighbors, local clergy, a man who identified himself as Joan’s uncle but who was in fact her cousin’s husband, and four of her dozen or more godparents. When parishes had yet to keep written records and the majority of the populace was illiterate, twelve wasn’t an unusual number of godparents, especially not for the daughter of a prominent villager. The more people who could bear witness to a person’s identity, age, and, most important, baptism, the better. Named Jehanne, or Jehannette, after one of her godmothers, Joan never used the name “Arc.” As she explained to the notary who each day read her recorded testimony back to her to confirm its accuracy—lest “the said Jehanne should deny having made certain of the replies collected”—in Joan’s part of the world, children bore their mother’s surname (suggesting to some biographers that her father’s mother might have come from Arc, ten miles north of Ceffonds). She supposed she might be Jehanne Romée, but she had always chosen to identify herself as Jehanne la Pucelle, Joan the Virgin, child of her heavenly rather than earthly father.
We have no verifiable likeness of Joan and little physical description. Portraits made during her lifetime, including her profile pressed into, as stated in the trial record, “medals of lead or other metal in her likeness, like those made for the anniversaries of saints canonized by the Church,” would have been destroyed in the wake of her execution, no longer devotional objects but devil’s play. The single surviving contemporaneous image of Joan is the work of a man who never saw her, more doodle than drawing. Clément de Fauquembergue, the greffier, or “clerk,” who recorded the raising of the siege of Orléans in Paris’s parliamentary record, sketched a long-haired girl in the register’s margin. Her body is covered by a dress; her face, drawn in profile, wears a severe expression; and she carries a sword in one hand, her standard in the other (Fig. 1). If the clerk got one thing right, it was by accident. Her hair, a strand of which was found caught in the wax seal of one of her dictated letters, discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, was the color of his ink, black, as corroborated by an eyewitness at court. It was at court that Boulainvilliers first met the girl whose exploits would fill his correspondence, and he found her an “elegant” figure. She “bears herself vigorously,” he wrote, “speaks little, shows an admirable prudence in her words. She has a light feminine voice, eats little, drinks little wine,” and “wears a cheerful countenance.” The Duke of Alençon, who, like others of Joan’s comrades-in-arms, “slept on the straw” with her and had occasion to see her disrobe, praised her young body as beautiful, quickly adding that he “never had any carnal desire for her” and attributing the failure to Joan’s ability to banish the lust of any who might admire her, a power to which other men in her company bore witness. “Although she was a young girl, beautiful and shapely,” her squire, Jean d’Aulon, said, and he “strong, young, and vigorous,” and though in the course of dressing her and caring for her wounds he had “often seen her breasts, and … her legs quite bare,” never was his “body moved to any carnal desire for her.”
That so many of Joan’s comrades described their inability to summon lust for her as a genuine miracle suggests that she was certainly not unattractive. Probably she was slender, given how universally those who had eaten with her commented on her abstemious habits. As she easily found men’s clothing to fit her while waiting for her own to be made, she might have been taller than most women of her time, perhaps as tall as five feet eight, the average height of a European man of the fifteenth century, although the more romantic accounts of her life tend to present her as petite. A physician who had occasion to examine Joan when she was a prisoner “found that she was stricta, that is, narrow in the hips.” If she and her sister shared that boyish silhouette, it might have ended Catherine’s life, lost as it probably was in childbirth. Without doubt, Joan was an athletic girl, and a strong one. The plate armor she wore immediately upon receiving it, for whole days at a time, weighed between forty and fifty pounds, enough that knights in training typically took weeks to accustom themselves to carrying the added weight.
As not even a written description of Joan’s face survives, imagination has had centuries of unobstructed influence. Shakespeare’s portrait of Joan in Henry VI, first produced in 1597, adroitly skirts the question of her physical appearance. “That beauty am I bless’d with which you see,” Joan tells the dauphin, is the gift of the Virgin, who “with those clear rays which she infused on me” transformed Joan’s appearance, gathering her into the radiance of her purity. “Black and swart before” as the result of “sun’s parching heat” to which she “display’d [her] cheeks,” now she is fair-skinned, possessing the pallor then held to be beautiful, as only an aristocrat could afford to spend her life in the shade.
Given a blank canvas, many of the painters who have taken Joan as a subject summoned a comely blonde, more Valkyrie than French paysanne, just as they fabricated features for the equally unknown face of Jesus, every portrait not only homage but also projection. The hero must always be handsome and the heroine beautiful, attended by light, not dark, to reveal the perfection virtue demands. The black robe in which a witch could expect to be burned is almost without exception whitewashed for Joan,*3 more often depicted in her glory, a majestic figure clad in shining armor and mounted on a white horse. To avoid revealing the immodest outline of a woman’s legs, the painted Joan’s armor tends, like a bodice, to terminate at her waist; from it flows a skirt usually originating under an incongruous peplum fashioned of plate mail (Fig. 2). Held to a lower standard of modesty, Saint Michael, the leader of God’s armies, typically wears an abbreviated skirt to absent the problematic groin, a locus of pollution angels don’t carry.
To the years preceding the arrival of her voices, Joan’s testimony gives glancing attention. It was a period to which she attached little interest or sentiment, eclipsed as it was by the luster and excitement of what followed. Almost as featureless as her face, Joan’s childhood invites invention, and the fabled Joan tells us less about the real woman than she does the standard tropes of Christian narrative. In 1429, the anonymous cleric known as the Bourgeois of Paris recorded in his journal that when Joan “was very small and looked after the sheep, birds would come from the woods and fields when she called them and eat bread in her lap as if they were tame.” Birds provide an enduring motif in apocryphal stories of Joan. From the chickens that crowed at her birth to the white dove seen flying from her heart as she died, their presence indicates that of the Holy Spirit, represented in all four Gospels as a dove descending from on high, a dove as old as Noah’s olive branch. Friedrich Schiller imagined Joan prophesying her own advent: “A white dove will fly up, brave as an eagle, to attack these vultures that tear our land apart.” Anouilh, whose 1955 play about Joan is called The Lark, describes her as a bird “in the skies of France, high over the heads of her soldiers, singing a joyous crazy song of courage. There she was, outlined against the sun … Every once in a while a lark does appear in [the] sky and then everything stupid and evil is wiped out.”
As a child, Jesus, too, had his apocryphal birds, stories of an early life spun between heaven and earth. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas describes Jesus “making sparrows, then slapping his hands so that they may fly away.” John the Baptist recognized Jesus as the Messiah when he “saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him” and heard “a voice from heaven saying ‘this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’ ”
Like virtually all mothers of the time, Isabelle taught her daughters the domestic skills expected of a woman, an apprenticeship that began as soon as a girl was able to fetch and carry. When asked if she had learned any craft in her youth, Joan said that she had indeed, boasting that “in sewing and spinning I fear no woman.” As to the importance of those and all other “womanly duties,” there were, she added, “enough other women to do them.”
Enough wives and daughters to milk the cows, skim the cream, churn the butter, make the cheese, to carry grain to the mill, come home with flour, and bake bread. To feed the fowl, collect their eggs, and to slaughter, pluck, and butcher those destined for the pot. To sow, tend, and reap a kitchen garden, and fetch the water for it as well. To make and mend the family’s clothes, render soap from sheep tallow and with it do the washing, then sweep the floor, scrub the pots, collect wood, and lay a fire over which to cook. Enough to suckle and dandle babies, chase toddlers, and nurse whoever fell ill. To follow men into the fields when needed to plow, glean, or thresh. To swing a scythe through the hay, and toss and dry it too. To pick the hops, bring them home to dry, and with them make the beer. And next harvest the flax, winnow out its seeds, soak the stalks, dry and pound them with a mallet, and, at last, spin its fibers into thread. To shear sheep, wash and card their wool, and spin it into yarn.
There was no end to the duties that kept a woman cloistered in her home and under the dominion of her nearest male relation, whether father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or cousin. When something so little as an unwed girl’s poking her head out of a window might be interpreted as evidence of promiscuity, it was a man’s duty to protect a woman from her own nature, inherited from disobedient Eve, lest she fall prey to idleness, gossip, immodesty, or, worst of all, lust. But long before Joan could be married off or secured in a convent, she was shown a different life, whose singular course would not only free her from domestic servitude but also remove her from the company of her own sex and deliver her into an army of randy, blasphemous men whose age and rank—if not physical strength—far surpassed her own and who followed her with the same unquestioning faith she herself placed in God.
Asked why she rather than another had been chosen to accomplish divine will, Joan said, “It pleased God so to do by a simple maid, to drive back the king’s enemies.” It’s a misleading if not exactly disingenuous statement. True, she was not literate, but Joan was no simple maid. Though she was uneducated, her mental acuity gave her the advantage over Sorbonne-trained theologians three times her age. When she was eleven, her father was appointed the local “dean,” testifying to both his character and his affluence, as villagers tended to select the most prosperous among them to represent their interests. As a dean, Jacques d’Arc received a stipend to perform administrative chores for Domrémy. He checked weights and measures to ensure equitable transactions on market day; he collected taxes, organized the watch, and served as a delegate in local disputes. That same year, 1423, he “accompanied the mayors of Domrémy, Greux, and seven other ‘notable’ inhabitants of the two villages to pay protection money to the Lord of Commercy,” twenty-five miles to the north. Jacques’s responsibilities often delivered him into the company of other local functionaries, all of them gathered together as they wouldn’t be under any other circumstances, eagerly trading news from different parts of the realm. Travel, and travel alone, carried tidings from town to town along rutted roads that were muddy when they weren’t choked by dust stirred up by countless feet and hooves. Merchants with wagons and barrows, itinerant weavers carrying looms, clerics peddling indulgences, pack trains headed to market or castle, tinkers, tax collectors, self-scourging penitent pilgrims covered in ashes and lament: their voices all flowed together in an endless torrent of rumor and fact. At home, eating at table, sitting before the fire, talking with friends, Joan’s father would have mentioned the names of the men to whom her voices would direct her and from whom she would seek help in making her way to the French court.
Joan was far from the popular conception of her as “the daughter of a shepherd, who herself followed a flock of sheep,” as the prominent theologian Heinrich von Gorkum described her, echoing his equally respected colleague Jean Dupuy’s description of Joan as a “young girl who had only watched over animals.” Heinrich and Jean were contemporaries of Joan’s and wrote about her exploits as they unfolded. Like the Bourgeois of Paris, they were educated, worldly, and no more immune to the urge to shape Joan according to the conventions of hagiography than was the chatty courtier Boulainvilliers. As was true in most small towns, herding was a communal responsibility in Domrémy, and Joan’s legendary career as shepherdess was limited to taking her turn, along with all the other children, keeping an eye on the villagers’ sheep while doing other chores. Usually, Joan brought her spindle with her. The townsfolk had an established routine to secure their livestock when under threat of looters whose imminence made driving their herds to another town impossible. Jacques d’Arc and another townsman, Jean Biget, had led a delegation to lease a small island (long since washed away) in the nearby Meuse from its absentee owner, the Lord of Bourlémont. In so shallow a river, it wasn’t the island itself that the citizens of Domrémy wanted but the abandoned fortress on land not even a quarter mile away from the village. The stronghold provided a ready corral, and when the alarm was raised, all the animals were driven across the shallows and onto the island, their owners running behind them. By the time it was safe for them to return to their homes, the villagers would find them plundered, if not burned entirely, a catastrophe that Joan’s family was spared, living as they did in a stone house.
Like most villages throughout Europe, Domrémy retained folk customs to which the Church had applied an inadequate gloss of Christian piety. Each spring, along the short road from Domrémy to Greux, an ancient beech known as the Fairies’ Tree gathered the village young people under its wide canopy and provided a good example of the kind of “evidence” spies dispatched to Joan’s hometown brought back to her inquisitors, who shaped it into what the Joan of Arc specialist Régine Pernoud calls “mendacious propositions that misrepresented Joan’s thoughts,” in this case implicating her in pagan rites that suggested sorcery. “Ladies who cast spells—fairies they used to call them—used to come in the old days and dance under that tree,” Joan’s godfather Jean Moreau remembered, and one of her godmothers, Jeanne, the wife of Mayor Aubery, claimed she had seen the fairies. Whether or not this was true, Joan didn’t know. She herself “never saw the fairies at the tree” and knew nothing about such creatures. In her lifetime, all that remained of such revels had been recast as a celebration of Laetare (from the Latin for “joyful”) Sunday, on which it was permitted to break the Lenten fast and heap the altar with flowers. Girls played with boys under “leaves and branches come down to the ground,” as a local farmer, Gérardin of Épinal, described it. “Their mothers bake them loaves, and the young people … sing and dance there, and then they go to the Fontaine aux Raines”—a reputedly medicinal aquifer that welled up but a stone’s throw away—“and eat their bread and drink its waters.”
Everyone who spoke of the tree remembered its beauty. Far enough from the village that only its outline could be discerned, the tree’s green envelope held one of youth’s enchanted realms, sunlight blowing through the leaves.
“Were you not also inclined to go to the Fairies’ Tree?” the examiner asked Joan.
“Sometimes I would make garlands for Our Lady of Domrémy.”
“What did you do with the garlands?”
“We put them on the branches of the tree. I sometimes hung them there with the other girls. Sometimes we took them away, and sometimes we left them there.”
Though Joan had “heard that people sick of the fever drink of this fountain and seek its water to restore their health,” she did “not know whether they are cured or not.” Nor did she “know whether she had danced near the tree since she had grown to understanding.” The Fairies’ Tree represented but one of the carefree pleasures Joan gave up once she perceived the gravity of her mission.
The same year that Jacques d’Arc was made dean, the Burgundian governor-general of Barrois attacked and laid siege to Sermaize, where Joan’s mother’s uncle, the prior, lived. A skirmish of little political consequence, it is remembered for the death of a single soldier, Collot Turlot, whose young widow, Mengette, was Joan’s first cousin. Of dire consequence was the Battle of Verneuil, fought on August 17, 1424, a second Agincourt, it was called. Again, French losses were insupportable. Normandy had fallen, as had five French troops to every one enemy soldier, 7,262 in all, more than half of them from Scotland, with which the French were allied. The outcome of Verneuil has been cited as the moment when the dauphin lost hope in God’s favor and resigned himself to unrelieved punishment.
Closer to home, in 1425, a local outlaw, notorious in his alliance with the Burgundians, was scapegoated for the theft of livestock from Domrémy and Greux, its sister town immediately to the north. Residents of both villages—if not Joan’s father or brothers, then her neighbors—took their vengeance outside the law and murdered the Burgundian sympathizer, who was posthumously acquitted of the crime. The lynching demonstrated how entrenched and reflexive was the enmity of civil war, penetrating the whole of the country even as it reached backward and forward in time, the lives of generations entirely circumscribed by betrayal, destruction, and injustice—“a whole century,” history has judged, saturated with “a sombre tone of hatred.” Even for those who didn’t do battle, war brought hardship and injury, and division colored every aspect of life. The games of children imitated battle, segregating them into factions and providing the younger inhabitants of Domrémy with an excuse to engage in skirmishes with those of Maxey, less than a mile northeast and under Burgundian control. Asked under oath if she had joined in what sounds like the medieval antecedent of cowboys and Indians—with sticks and stones in lieu of cap guns and blunt arrows—Joan said she never did, “as far as I remember.” The reply might sound evasive, especially coming from a girl as preoccupied with warmongering as Joan, who did recall other children returning home to Domrémy “much wounded and bleeding,” had Joan not consistently distinguished herself from other children.
Soon after the lynching, Joan’s village came under attack yet again, by Burgundians, and was raided and burned, this time forcing its inhabitants to flee south to Neufchâteau. Towns like Domrémy that lay on the border between Burgundian- and Armagnac-held territories “belonged to no one, were supported by no one, were spared by no one,” as the nineteenth-century French medievalist Jules Michelet characterized them. “Their only liege, their only protector, was God.” When she came home, Joan discovered her parish church, Saint-Rémy, had been badly damaged, an affront she would have had to face every time she looked out her window or walked out her own front door, as the church was the family’s immediate neighbor. When would she come, the prophesied virgin? When would God forgive France and send a savior?
In the summer of her thirteenth year, Joan received what she described as “a voice from God to help and guide me.” The voice came at midday, when Joan was in her father’s garden, adjacent to the parish cemetery. If it was a kitchen garden typical of its time and place, it included a row or two of cabbage, as well as onions, garlic, leeks, pole beans, parsnips, beetroots, and medicinal herbs. Every medieval housewife with a patch of dirt to hoe cultivated lovage and rue for everything from catarrh and pinworms to plague. Perhaps Joan was on her knees, the sun on her back, the earth warm to her touch. She might have been weeding or digging up an onion her mother sent her to fetch. At noon the church bell began to ring overhead, and Joan stopped what she was doing and, if she were not already on the ground, fell to her knees. Apart from the sun’s transit across the sky, church bells, whether calling farmers home from the fields or summoning Joan to prayer, provided residents of villages like Domrémy their only means of marking time. The sound soared above the clamor of daily life, directing the ear, as a steeple did the eye, toward a realm of beauty and order. When they rang unexpectedly, it was in alarm, warning of fire, wolves, or the approach of human enemies. As it was Joan’s father who oversaw the town watch, she lived at the focal point of what little defensive apparatus Domrémy maintained. Literally, there was no one for whom church bells rang more loudly, and the “near continuous incursions and pillaging by outsiders of all sorts” made Joan into a child unusually fixed on the sound of bells, which spoke of God and time and danger.
The local sacristan, Perrin Drappier, remembered that Joan scolded him when he failed to ring the bell for Mass or evening prayers, and when that didn’t work, she bribed him, promising him the reward of “galettes,” or cakes—the kind Little Red Cap carried in her basket—if he would only fulfill his duties dependably. Jean Waterin, a childhood friend with whom Joan drove her father’s plow, remarked that she “used to go down on her knees every time she heard the bell tolled” and often slipped away to “speak with God.” A different Jean, the Count of Dunois, who would become one of Joan’s closest comrades-in-arms, remarked that even at the frantic height of her military career “it was her habit every day, at Vesper time or at dusk, to retire into a church and have the bells rung for almost half an hour.” Watching her pray, Dunois saw a woman “seized with a marvelous rapture,” a description far more revealing than any Joan would give.
On this first visitation, noon on a summer day, she had barely crossed herself at the bell’s call before the garden vanished, and the sky and the earth as well. No church, no river, no patchwork of green. There was nothing but light, “a great deal of light on all sides, as was most fitting,” Joan told the examiner, reminding him tartly, “Not all the light comes to you alone!”
The voice’s arrival was of consuming interest to Joan’s examiners. How could it not have been? Over and over they questioned her in the attempt to access, or construct, evidence that might be used to prove its source demonic. But all the voice had given Joan on that first afternoon was the kind of mild and perfunctory direction a clergyman might extend to any child. “Be good,” it had said, and “go to church often.” After it had fallen silent and the garden emerged from the flood of light, Joan found herself “much afraid.” Even so, the departure of the voice left her bereft. “I wept,” she said. “I fain would have had them take me with them too.”
“There was more than a single voice?” the examiner asked.
“It was St. Michael,” Joan said, “and he was not alone, but accompanied by many angels from heaven, a great host of angels. St. Gabriel was among them.”
Michael: archangel and patron saint of the crusaders, whose slaying the dragon, as Satan is called in the book of Revelation, was considered “the primordial feat of arms” from which knighthood sprang.
Gabriel: the bearer of annunciation to the Virgin Mary.
The judges to whom we commend Joan today are doctors of medicine rather than of the Church. Her voices have inspired retroactive diagnoses of hysteria, schizophrenia, epilepsy, even tuberculosis. Academics don’t judge; they interpret. Feminist scholars posit a Joan calculating enough to costume herself as a visionary, like Catherine of Siena or Bridget of Sweden; this was an era when mystical revelation was one of the few routes a woman might take to political power. Cultural anthropology reminds us that it is at times of overwhelming social crises—like those of fifteenth-century France, staggering in the wake of war and plague and famine, and first-century Israel, caught under Rome’s heavy heel, its people starving—that visionaries arise. When Jesus delivered the apocalyptic word of God to the Israelites, he spoke to a nation whose land was occupied, its people decimated by famine and disease, its surviving citizens subject to punitive taxation and violent injustice. It was the only mortal world he knew. The Lord’s Prayer—“Give us this day our daily bread”—was conceived by a messiah whose parables focused on germination and failed crops and whose impossible multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed hungry masses is held among his greatest miracles.
Joan said of herself, “I am sent to comfort the poor and needy.”
Ethnographers identify shamanic figures as a feature of successful societies. Granted passage to states of consciousness that elude the vast majority of us, they are the repository of our fears and hopes as well as our means of petitioning the divine. Neurotheology has discovered “God spots” in the human brain. Four out of five people experience feelings they identify as rapture when specific areas of their temporal lobes are stimulated by a magnetic field. If the brain is wired for faith in a higher being, it must be that faith conveys an evolutionary advantage.
“The first maker of the gods,” William James wrote, “was fear.”
Among Catholic mystics, Joan is unusual for having left no written account of what Saint Teresa of Avila called the “orison of union” with the divine, a “sublime summit” from whose vantage she perceived truths otherwise withheld and from which she descended convinced that she had “been in God and God in her.” If, like Saint Teresa, Joan saw in her angel’s hand “a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point … a little fire, and if he thrust it into her heart and her very entrails,” leaving her “all on fire with a great love of God,” she never said. If she saw anything like Saint Bridget of Sweden’s vision of the Christ child radiating such an “ineffable light and splendor, that the sun was not comparable to it,” she said nothing about that either.
Drawing no distinction between angels and saints, Joan characterized what her intimate companions described as religious ecstasy as “comfort,” a strikingly laconic report when compared with the overheated, lushly detailed, and erotically charged revelations of established mystics, validated through clerical channels Joan failed to consult. The sight of the rack only hardened her resolve. “Tear me limb from limb,” she told her captors. “I would rather have you cut my throat than tell you all I know.” Joan’s refusal to part with the details of her most intimate experience, and her insistence that these were hers to withhold, expresses how absolute was her identification with virginity, a state of being unpenetrated and unplundered, the integrity of her body reflecting that of her soul.
Though mystical experience is ineffable, by definition outside mortal language’s power to communicate, it was the custom of the period to narrate visions as if they were fever dreams come true. For Margery Kempe the “air opened as bright as any lightning” and left her “powerless to keep herself steady because of the unquenchable fire of love which burned very strongly in her soul.” When Julian of Norwich was gravely ill, her body “dead from the middle downwards,” she found herself plunged in darkness. Then the image of the crucifix began to burn before her blind eyes, her pain vanished, and her body was healed. Her holy “lover” appeared before her, and her vision lingered on the thorns pressed into his head, from which “the red blood trickl[ed] down … hot and freshly and right plenteously.” Joined to Christ in mystical marriage, Catherine of Siena wrote of drinking the blood that spilled from his wounds. Said to have lived on the Eucharist alone for the last two years of her life, she died at the same age as had her bridegroom, thirty-three.
The preoccupation with blood that characterizes these saints is little different from a vampire’s, an erotic thirst for life’s essence, a thirst that, whether satisfied by God or Satan, dangled immortality. The early-twentieth-century playwright Charles Péguy cannothelp but retroactively infuse Joan with a little private longing. “The Roman soldier who stuck his spear into your side had what so many of your saints, so many of your martyrs, have not had,” she says to Jesus. “He touched you. He saw you … Blessed are they who drank in the look of your eyes,” she says, where her contemporaries speak of the blood of his wounds.
The promise of revelation, dependably rendered in such fulsome, trenchant detail, made the genre a popular one, sensuous when not outright seductive. Julian of Norwich described the “malicious semblance” of the devil’s face, as “red like the tilestone when it is new-burnt, with black spots therein like black freckles—fouler than the tilestone. His hair was red as rust, clipped in front, with full locks hanging on the temples.” Devils and imps steal through the visions of the era’s mystics, just as they leer from its artists’ canvases, gleefully tempting the righteous and dragging off the damned. “Satan, in an abominable shape, appeared on my left hand,” Teresa of Avila wrote. “I looked at his mouth in particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright, without any shadow.” But Joan never spoke of the devil. He seems to have had no place in her visions, occupied only by angels.
Still, as Anouilh’s examiner reminds her, when the devil “comes to snare a soul … he comes with coaxing hands, with eyes that receive you into them like water that drowns you, with naked women’s flesh, transparent, white … beautiful.” Asked if she had the discernment to judge an apparition as either holy or demonic, Joan said she was sure she could distinguish between a real angel of God and a counterfeit. “I believed [in its goodness] very soon and I had the desire to believe it,” she told the examiner; the word “desire” is sometimes translated as “will.”
Frightened or not, Joan was waiting for what had happened to happen again. Not only had the experience continued to unfold in her mind; the visitation was hardly over before it had slipped between her and the life she used to have, and its influence didn’t diminish but increased. She’d beheld a splendor that left mortal life little more than the taste of ashes in her mouth. She didn’t tell her best friend, Hauviette, or her sister, Catherine, what had happened in the garden, not any more than she did the village curé or her kind, pious mother, who had introduced her to God and taught her to say the Paternoster and the Ave Maria and to recite what is known as the Nicene Creed, as first articulated in 325, when the Roman emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea. At this first of the twenty-one ecumenical gatherings recognized by the Catholic Church,*4 bishops representing all of Christendom stated the basic tenets of the Christian faith:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father, before all worlds, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance as the Father, by whom all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Instinctively, Joan protected herself from the critical regard that would follow her sharing such a confidence as her entertaining visits from angels bearing messages from the King of Heaven, and when the voice returned and spoke once more, again she kept it to herself. For all the years that remained to her, “a good seven” of her nineteen, she estimated, Joan’s everyday companions, whose company she chose before that of mortals and whom she obeyed as she did not any mortal, were invisible and inaudible to everyone but her.
“They often come among the Christian folk and are not seen by any except by me,” she told the examiner.
“Did you see St. Michael and these angels corporeally and in reality?”
“I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you.”
How could she have imagined them, she reasoned, when their voices came to her from outside her own consciousness, when they woke her from sleep to deliver a message? Standing trial, Joan complained that the clamor in the courtroom drowned the angels’ voices out; she couldn’t hear what counsel they offered. Sometimes the prison itself was so loud she couldn’t hear them properly when they spoke to her in her cell.
“Who persuaded you to have angels with their arms, feet, legs, and robes painted on your standard?”
“I had them painted in the manner in which they were painted in churches.”
“Did you yourself ever see them in the manner in which they were painted?” the examiner asked. It was among the questions Joan refused to answer.
Joan’s evasiveness and the inconsistency of her testimony about the angels she heard and saw have drawn centuries of scrutiny and criticism. Vita Sackville-West observed that “her reluctance to discuss their personal attributes is manifest and consistent.” On February 22, in the course of her second public interrogation, Joan said it was only after three visits that she recognized the angel as Saint Michael. On March 15, by which point the questioning had been moved to her cell, she said she saw him “many times” before she believed it was he. The discrepancy seems insignificant when Joan had established from the outset of the trial that she, and not those who presumed to judge her, would determine which questions she was bound to answer honestly, if at all. Her confidence in her vocation allowed her righteousness enough to warn her persecutors. “If you were well informed about me,” she told them, “you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing except by revelation.”
As the trial record shows, the longer and harder Joan was pressed to describe what couldn’t be described, the more details she summoned to characterize a visitation she understood as angelic, in that it conveyed messages from God. The Old Testament term for angel, mal’āk ’ĕlōhîm, means “messenger of God.” Perhaps a single voice accompanied by a great light evolved into several voices Joan could distinguish from one another, and those in turn conjured beings who had lips with which to speak, crowned heads, and bodies she could see and touch and even smell. It’s typical for visitations like Joan’s to accrue definition and detail with each added encounter. She’d had an experience—thousands of them by the time she traded her mortal life for the eternal company of her angels—that required explanation. Perhaps she didn’t so much invent details as relinquish them slowly. Perhaps she didn’t invent but borrowed unconsciously. Familiar figures, holy and God-sent, angels and saints provided ready vessels in which Joan could safeguard what she didn’t want to forget or deny, rapture so overwhelming and potentially disorienting that it required containment.
“A light came over the sun and was stronger than the sun,” Joan tries to explain in The Lark, a light that entered and overcame what she calls “the shadow of me.”
“How did you know it was an angel who spoke?” the examiner asked, the notary noted, and the judges allowed to remain in the trial record.
“By his angels’ speech and tongue,” Joan said.
“Born in the shadow of the church, lulled by the canticle of the bells, fed on legends,” as the historian Jules Michelet described her. “Unawares, the young girl created, so to speak, her own ideas, turned them into realities, made them entities, powers, imparted to them, from the treasure of her virginal life, an existence so splendid, so compelling, that the paltry realities of this world grew faint in comparison.”
Had Saint Michael not been clear as to the meaning of “good,” he told Joan he was sending two female saints to be her daily, sometimes hourly, guides to furnish clear and dramatic role models.
“How do you know one from the other?” the examiner asked Joan.
“By the greeting they give me,” she said. “I also know the saints because they tell me their names.”
Saint Catherine was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers,*5 powerful intercessors around whom cults developed during the plague years, their images displayed in churches and chapels Joan visited as a child. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 282, Catherine was the beautiful daughter of her people’s pagan king, Costus. As a scholar, she penetrated a world largely claimed by men. By fourteen, Catherine had converted to Christianity, consecrated her virginity to her heavenly bridegroom, and become a convincing proselytizer. She left Alexandria for Europe, where she converted Valeria, the wife of the Roman emperor Maxentius, who had Valeria executed for the crime of practicing Christianity. Having removed the impediment that stood between him and the true object of his desire, Maxentius proposed that he and Catherine marry. Catherine, however, refused to accept an earthly bridegroom in Christ’s stead. Maxentius ordered she be tortured, but the wheel meant to break her body fell into a pile of splinters at her touch. Undeterred, Maxentius had her beheaded, successfully.
A statue of another of the Holy Helpers, Saint Margaret of Antioch, stood just next door to Joan’s family home, in the little church of Saint-Rémy. The second of Joan’s heavenly guides, she was a daughter of royalty as well, if in a different sphere. Her father was a pagan priest who disowned her when she converted to Christianity and vowed to remain a virgin; she escaped his house disguised as a man. A Roman governor tried to make Margaret his wife at the cost of her faith, but she renounced him instead, defying a series of tortures by means of miracles, the most remarkable of which was her escaping from inside the dragon that swallowed her by using her cross to rake the inside of the beast’s stomach until it vomited her back up. Eventually, Margaret’s petitions went unanswered, or perhaps she saw more clearly what lay on the other side of mortal life and gave it up. Said to have been martyred in 304, she was declared apocryphal in 494, a finding that had no impact on her popularity or the reality accorded her by the faithful.
For Joan, as much as it had for the virgin martyrs of the early Church, being good meant being chaste, in mind and spirit as well as in body. Among the three acceptable modes of existence for a woman—virgin, wife, and widow—only a virgin escaped the pollution inherent to her sex. Three “orders of merit” clarified their relative worth: “Virgins would be rewarded a hundred times their deserts; widows sixty times; and wives thirty times.” Within each of the three modes, “an explosion of female categories” betrayed a Linnaean determination to impose order on the gender held to be more primitive, lacking the moral restraint and cerebral capacity of men. Sexually immature girls, adolescents ready for marriage, married women, spinsters, late marriers, women past procreating: rankings observed from the perspective of something like animal husbandry were each subdivided according to a social hierarchy that reached from royalty all the way down through minor aristocrats, nuns, servants, and chicken dealers—prostitutes not worthy of inclusion, even in a group so universally disdained.
“Art thou not formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness? Shalt thou not be food for worms?” a medieval cleric ranted. Scholars of the period mined the classics for validation of the early Church’s hostility toward women, which found an ideal target in menstrual blood, both tangible evidence and ready symbol of women’s uncleanness. The “foul substance was blamed for preventing seeds from germinating, for turning grape mash bitter, for killing herbs, for causing trees to shed their fruit, for rusting iron and blackening brass, for giving dogs rabies.” Aristotle taught that the gaze of a menstruating woman was so impure it would darken a mirror, stealing light from the other side of the glass, a conclusion rationalized by Galenic theories of harmful vapors, such as those that issued from menopausal women “because various excess humors no longer eliminated by menstruation now exited through the eyes.” Tertullian memorably described a woman as “a temple built over a sewer,” summoning Christ’s image of “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”
But Joan, her squire reported, didn’t menstruate. During all the months that he dressed and served her, Jean d’Aulon saw no evidence she was afflicted by the “female malady.” “In her, the life of the spirit dominated, absorbed the lower life, and held in check its vulgar infirmities,” Michelet wrote. “Body and soul she was granted the heavenly grace of remaining a child.” Perhaps the fervor of her vow of chastity was enough to forestall menarche indefinitely. Perhaps the strain of warfare and imprisonment suppressed what would have been her natural reproductive cycle. The reason is irrelevant to the story. In memory, and then in biography and history, Joan would remain forever on the cusp of womanhood, not only chaste, but yet to fall under Eve’s shadow or bear her stain.
Friends noted Joan’s withdrawal from their company and must have wondered at her new solitary life. Perhaps they felt sorry for her, a girl too pious to have fun, but they’d never been visited by angels or shown the glories of paradise. They didn’t know Joan had traded their company for a rapture that consumed her several times each day, and never more dependably than when she was in the woods and far from their company.
“I was only born the day you first spoke to me,” Anouilh’s Joan says to her voices, dismissing not only the childhood that hagiographers were so eager to fill with birdsong but the very notion of her ever having existed outside her vocation. “My life only began on the day you told me what I must do, my sword in hand.”
Had Joan’s conduct not been that of an exemplary Christian before the visitation, now her virtue was so intense it demanded her separation from earthly pastimes. As she herself put it, “Since I learned that I must come to France, I had taken as little part as possible in games or dancing.” (Here and elsewhere in the trial transcript, Joan’s use of “France” derives from the confusion inspired by Domrémy’s ambiguous position on the border.)
“She gave alms gladly and had the poor of the village gathered together, and she wanted to sleep beside the hearth and to let them lie in her bed,” testified Isabellette, an older girl who remained in Domrémy and married a farmer there. “One never saw her hanging about the streets, but she stayed in church to pray. She did not dance, and often we other young people used to notice that and talk about it. She was always working and spinning and digging the ground with her father,” Isabellette testified for the nullification.
So devout she inspired gossip, Joan was derided as well. “She was deeply devoted to God and the Blessed Virgin,” Colin, a childhood friend, remembered, “so much so that some other lads and I—for I was young then—used to tease her.” One of those lads, Jean Waterin, said the same. “I and the others made fun of her,” he admitted.
“I say my prayers, yes, Joan,” Hauviette chides her friend in Péguy’s The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, “but you, you never leave off saying them, you say them all the time, you say them at everyone of those crosses by the roadside, the church isn’t enough for you. The crosses by the road have never had so much wear … You are our friend, but you’ll never be like we are.”
If Joan hadn’t been a solitary soul before, she soon became one, her vision so firmly fixed on the glories and terrors of her vocation that she was immune to any pressure to conform to her peers’ expectations, unaffected by censure from any mortal source. “She liked going to church and went often,” her friend Mengette said. Joan confessed so frequently that the vicar commented on it, and others remembered seeing her on her knees at every opportunity. “She gave alms out of her father’s goods, and she was so good and simple and pious that the other girls and I used to tell her that she was too pious.” And, Mengette added, she was industrious. “She liked working and undertook all sorts of jobs.”
She was holier, by far, than they, her only sin to evade chores so she could pray in the woods or visit a chapel “when her parents thought she was at the plough, in the fields, or somewhere else,” her godfather Jean Moreau testified.
“When I was in the woods I easily heard the voices come to me,” she told the examiner.
In fact, the dialogue between Joan and her voices was growing ever more urgent. Giving alms and devotedly caring for the sick were not enough for God, nor was a vow to remain a virgin for as long as he wanted. “Joan, Child of God,” her voices called her, and they told her it would soon be time to leave her home and set out on a holy quest. And not only Joan was given presentiments of her leaving. “My mother told me several times that while I was still at home my father said he had dreamed of my going away with soldiers,” Joan testified, “and my parents took great care to keep me safely.”
Like most men of his era, Jacques d’Arc held dreams to be oracular and prophetic, and when he dreamed more than once that his younger daughter went off with men-at-arms at a time when the only women to do so were prostitutes, he received it as not only a dire warning but also a call to action.
“If I thought this thing would happen which I have dreamed about my daughter,” Jacques said to his sons, “I should want you to drown her; and if you would not, I would drown her myself.”
“They held me in great subjection,” Joan testified.
“You were crying out to someone,” Joan’s father says in The Lark, when he catches her praying aloud. “The bastard fled before I could catch him. Who was it? Who was it? Answer me. Answer me or I’ll beat you to salt marsh.”
“I was talking to the Blessed Saint Michael.”
Jacques strikes Joan. “That will teach you to lie to your father,” he says. “You want to start whoring like the others. Well, you can tell your Blessed Saint Michael that if I catch you together I’ll plunge my pitchfork into his belly and strangle you with my bare hands for the filthy rutting cat you are.”
If Jacques d’Arc’s recurring nightmare didn’t prove him clairvoyant, it was disturbing enough that her family remembered and recounted something that delineated a significant conflict between Joan and her father. Years after the fact, when spies were plundering the memories of Joan’s childhood friends and neighbors, they stumbled across what storytellers preserved not only for its drama but because it provides an element the virgin martyr’s plot requires: a controlling father who intends to stymie her vocation, a forced betrayal typically the first obstacle to her glory. Chaste as she was, some aspect of Joan’s behavior must have communicated insubordination, enough to eventually inspire Jacques’s efforts to let another man take a turn at containing her. But, as Joan’s father would discover, it’s not easy to marry off a daughter who has given herself to God.
History is rarely kind to a heroine’s antagonist, and Jacques d’Arc’s misreading of his daughter’s character amounted to perversion. She wouldn’t follow an army but lead one, and the power she claimed would rest on her virginity, the most profound and closely guarded aspect of her identity, the one that provided the name with which she christened her reborn self: La Pucelle, the Maid, derived from the Latin puella, a girl yet to enter womanhood.
*1 Derived from Lotharingia, Lorraine was one of the three territorial divisions of the Carolingian Empire, formed in AD 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III.
*2 The name given a one-livre coin, minted between 1360 and 1641. Livre, from Latin libra, was a measure of weight, like the English pound.
*3 That exception is a fifteenth-century mural within the chapel of Notre-Dame de Bermont, a mile north of Domrémy. In it, a black-robed—and blond-haired—Joan awaits execution.
*4 The most recent was Vatican II, 1962–65.
*5 The fourteen are Agathius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Denis, Erasmus, Eustace, George, Giles (the only of the fourteen who was not martyred), Margaret of Antioch, Pantaleon, and Vitus.