When Joan was fifteen, her father was summoned to Vaucouleurs, some twelve miles north of Domrémy, to meet with the town’s captain, Robert de Baudricourt, about the “escalating tensions between the warring factions.” Aside from Mont Saint-Michel, and Tournai, both hundreds of miles to the west, Vaucouleurs was the single town north of the Loire to remain in France’s possession, testimony to Baudricourt’s grit and the tenacity of the men stationed in the garrison he oversaw. It was 1427, and Joan’s voices were speaking no longer of virginity but of battle. She knew she was the chosen one and that there was, as she said, “no one on earth, be he king, or duke, or the King of Scotland’s daughter, or anyone else, who can restore the kingdom of France.” The “King of Scotland” wasn’t a random allusion. Reflexively hostile toward England, Scotland was France’s ally, and the king of the Scots’ daughter had recently been betrothed to the dauphin’s son Louis, who was not yet four years old. Only a girl who followed dynastic politics would have known of such a development, and only Joan, her voices made clear, could lead the dauphin’s army to victory and him to his coronation at Reims, where all French kings were made.
“She was not so much warned by the oracle of the gods above,” Alain Chartier recorded in his Epistola de Puella of 1429, “as threatened with a very harsh punishment unless she went swiftly to the King.” Alain Chartier, of no relation to Jean Chartier, Charles VII’s secretary, was one of France’s two great poets of the era—the other was Christine de Pizan—and is unusual in identifying Joan’s vocation as the product of divine coercion, perhaps intending to feminize his subject by ignoring a fervor satisfied only by making war. Similarly, Schiller’s Joan bemoans her fate. “A terrible contract binds me to the spirit-world, powerful, invulnerable, and enjoins me to put to the sword and slaughter every living thing sent fatally against me by the god of battles.”
But more than a few little girls must have imagined themselves as warriors striding into tales of fantastic chivalry, girls who dreamed of heroism—and martyrdom—for the Church, dreamed of destinies no man would grant them the authority to fulfill. The limited media of medieval Europe meant that very few trouvères, or writers of chansons de geste, achieved the popularity, and thus the cultural sway, of the twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes, who enriched and enlarged the Arthurian cycle, bringing in ancient Celtic heroes, the theme of the Holy Grail, and Camelot as Arthur’s capital. The extraordinary number of surviving copies of works translated and adapted throughout Europe, volumes replicated and illustrated by hand, proves the extent to which Chrétien de Troyes’s vision saturated late medieval society. Érec et Énide, Cligès, Lancelot, Yvain, and Perceval: in each the knight-errant is the central character. He is courteous, generous, and of noble birth, a man who values his honor over his life and whose exploits are not confined to tournaments and warfare, but include fairy-tale elements like dragons, giants, and enchanted castles. The medieval imagination was crowded with the conventions of a literature not only written in the vernacular but also read and performed aloud, as were Easter passion plays and other liturgical productions. Every child knew heroism came in the form of a knight whose perfect virtue found its reflection in that of his lady, increasingly conflated with the Virgin Mary. As the medievalist Frances Gies observed, “The terms in which earthly women were flattered in troubadour poems were often borrowed—daringly—from those used to praise the Virgin Mary: the troubadour ‘worshipped’ his lady, there was ‘no woman like her.’ ” Even in satire, Don Quixote’s romantic delusions are centered on his peerless Dulcinea, so heavenly as to be forever out of reach.
Chansons de geste stimulated the cult surrounding the Virgin, whose popularity ascended steeply during the Middle Ages, perpetuated not so much by the Gospels’ handful of references as by an extensive pseudepigrapha,*1 noncanonical texts that gathered miracles and myths from a growing oral culture about the life of Mary, whom the theologian Jaroslav Pelikan stresses was “completely human in her origin, like all other human beings. Yet because she had been chosen by God to be the Theotokos [Greek, for Mother of God], her completely human nature had been transfigured.” Virginity was the key to Mary’s transfiguration, as it was for that of Joan, who described her vocation in terms familiar from The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary (today attributed to a ninth-century Carolingian scholar, Paschasius Radbertus). “Daily was she visited by angels,” the gospel read, “daily did she enjoy a divine vision, which preserved her from all evil, and made her to abound in all good. And so she reached her fourteenth year.”
Every Saturday, Joan went to Notre-Dame de Bermont, a hilltop shrine two miles north of Domrémy that was consecrated to the Virgin Mary, her devotion inspiring Schiller to replace bellicose Saint Michael as the bearer of Joan’s vocation with an apparition of the Virgin, who, Joan says, “appeared in front of me, carrying a sword and a flag, but dressed in every other way like a shepherdess.” When Joan protests she has no abilities as a warrior, the Holy Mother tells her, “a virgin without stain can accomplish all the good deeds in the world, if she withstands the love that’s of the world. Only look at me. I was like you, a chaste maid, yet I gave birth to the Lord, the Lord Divine; I am myself divine!”
“And then,” Schiller’s Joan says, “she touched my eyelids, and when I looked up, the heavens were full of angels … And as she spoke, the shepherdess’s dress fell away from her, and she stood there, clad in the brightness of a thousand suns, the golden clouds lifted her up, slowly taking her from my sight, to Paradise.”
Sword and flag notwithstanding, Mary’s shepherdess costume is warning enough that Schiller’s vision is romantic, reaching to feminize Joan, whose chastity did not mean she identified with passive divinity any more than she fantasized about giving birth to a messiah. She saw that role as her own. Probably, it was the remoteness of the shrine that attracted Joan more than its being consecrated to the Virgin, whom she mentions seldom and never with the fervor reserved for Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. In the future, she wouldn’t hesitate to seize a military advantage on the Festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, attacking Paris while its citizens were occupied by Masses and processions in the Virgin’s honor. “Pass on,” she said to the examiner who pressed her to admit the transgression, responding with the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Joan didn’t speak of whom the shrine paid tribute to, only of the little pilgrimage required to reach it. The climb from Joan’s house to the chapel is much the same today as it was when she made it, lovely in every season and especially so in spring, through high pastures divided by streams of bloodred poppies and along paths lined with a froth of Queen Anne’s lace, and finally into the forest, carpeted in places with tiny strawberries. She carried a few sous*2for a candle to light, as well as the flowers she’d picked on her way, and her angels kept her company. They assured her, she testified, that “God would clear a road for me to go to the lord Dauphin.”
That road, however, was not immediately apparent. Joan’s youth and gender held her captive to the supervision of any and every adult in Domrémy, and it was the spring of 1428, when Joan was sixteen, before she found a means of making her way to Robert de Baudricourt herself—for it was Sir Robert whom her voices told her to ask for assistance. Sir Robert, as Joan knew, had access to the dauphin, and according to her voices he “would give me men-at-arms” to accompany her west from the little pocket of resistance represented by the Duchy of Bar, which included Domrémy and Vaucouleurs, and through enemy territory to Chinon, where she would find the dauphin Charles.
Joan could have walked the twelve miles to Vaucouleurs, she could have started in the morning and arrived before noon, but there was little point in running away when she couldn’t successfully navigate the world of men by herself. Both a girl and a stranger in a realm that allowed women no autonomy, she needed a man to provide her an introduction to the captain. But who? Willing as Joan was, she hadn’t any idea how to accomplish what God asked of her. She should ask her uncle Durand for help, her voices said. At forty, Joan’s mother’s cousin’s husband, Durand Laxart, was old enough to be Joan’s uncle, and so she called him by that term of endearment and respect. But as intimate as the two families were, they lived ten miles apart, and Joan had to wait for an opportunity to visit her uncle without alerting her father to a plan that could only further harden his heart against her.
By now Joan had determined that to align herself with God’s will required the occasional earthly deceit and had reconciled herself to either hiding the truth or, when necessary, lying outright. “My voices would have been glad for me to tell them,” she said of her parents, “had it not been for the difficulties they would have raised had I done so. For my part, I would not have told them for anything.” Faith didn’t allow Joan the luxury of mortal attachment. God claimed her devotion as absolutely as her voices directed her actions. “If I had had a hundred parents,” she said to the examiner who had called attention to her failure of filial responsibility, “I would have gone nevertheless.” She, like her judges, remembered Jesus’s admonition to his would-be followers: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple … Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
“He’d been a good son to his father and mother, until the day he began his real task,” Péguy’s Joan says of Jesus. “Everybody was very fond of him … until the day he began his real task.”
Laxart, a farmer who lived in the hamlet of Burey, just outside Vaucouleurs, was as rough in dress and manner as any peasant and equally reluctant to approach a member of the aristocracy. Joan might well have been, as he believed her to be, a “well-behaved, pious, and patient” hard worker who “confessed gladly” and went to church often, but what man of his station would agree to escort even such a paragon of virtue to one of the dauphin’s captains, especially a paragon with so impudent a request?
A week of Joan’s company taught Laxart how obdurate was her will. “Was it not said that France would be ruined through a woman, and afterward restored by a virgin?” Joan asked him. She was that prophesied virgin, she told her uncle, she was La Pucelle, and she told the examiner she had no choice but to go. Saints Catherine and Margaret spoke of it continuously. “The voices told me I must leave and go to France.” She could no longer stay where she was. “They said I was to go to the Dauphin, to have him crowned.” As astounding as Joan’s announcement was, Laxart received it as would a man typical of his time and place, who understood the world as subject to visits from God’s emissaries, as well as of course from those of Satan. Joan was possessed, that was clear, but Laxart knew Joan, and he knew her goodness too well to imagine she might be possessed by a demon.
On May 13, 1428, Laxart brought Joan to Robert de Baudricourt, who, once he understood he was being asked to deliver a delusional peasant girl to the dauphin, suggested Laxart “give her a good slapping and take her back to her father.” Joan’s father was, of course, someone Baudricourt saw routinely, a man who had been made a village dean for his clear reason and good sense. Upon first hearing of Joan’s mission, the captain must have taken pause at the idea of Jacques d’Arc having so mad a daughter—just as he would stop and wonder at every other thing he’d learn about her. For, by the following summer, all of Europe would know about the virgin warrior who had emerged from a remote village in Lorraine. One day she was a shepherdess, the next a knight on a charger. God’s finger had brushed the earth, and no one, no matter his faith or lack thereof, could turn away from the spectacle. Some would say she was a witch, of course, and the finger Satan’s. But as far as Baudricourt was concerned, for now Joan was no more than Jacques d’Arc’s willful hoyden of a daughter, far afield from hearth and home, where she belonged, and a ready candidate for marriage and children—whatever it took to keep her tied down and too busy to think up such drivel.
Aside from Laxart, the only eyewitness on record to describe Joan’s first confrontation with Sir Robert was Bertrand de Poulengy, a squire, or apprentice knight, stationed in Vaucouleurs. Immediately convinced of Joan’s sanctity, Poulengy became a friend of her parents and often visited their home in the years after Joan’s death. “I saw her there, talking to Robert de Baudricourt,” to whom she said she had come “on behalf of her Lord, to ask him to send word to the Dauphin that … the Lord would send him help before mid-Lent.”
Who, Sir Robert wanted to know, was this Lord?
“The King of Heaven,” Joan said, and she explained that France belonged not to any mortal ruler but to God, who wished to entrust it to Charles and who “promised that the Dauphin would be made king … and that she herself would lead him to be anointed.”
Sir Robert laughed. He had another idea. Why not, he said, “hand her over to the pleasure of his soldiers” instead? That was one way to disarm a presumptive virgin.
The Lark introduces Baudricourt as predator rather than procurer. After offering to “kick [her] in the place where it will do the most good,” the captain negotiated terms for himself rather than his men, explaining his “rate of exchange” to the girl he called an “infernal nuisance” and “horrible mosquito.” She could have her horse, man’s clothes, and an escort, as long as he got what he wanted in recompense for his “benevolence.” “The village girls have told you all about it, haven’t they?” he asks Joan.
Of the confrontation, Jean Chartier, the royal historiographer from 1437 to 1450, said “they only laughed and mocked her for all this.”
“Don’t get involved in earthly strife. It will engulf you. Your purity won’t last,” Bertolt Brecht’s 1900 chorus warns Joan, offering medieval advice. “Your bit of warmth will perish in the all-pervading cold. Goodness departs from those who leave the comforting hearth.” Saint Joan of the Stockyards is one of three plays Brecht wrote about Joan of Arc, and it unfolds in a mythical Dreiserian Chicago, where Joan, “at the head of a shock troop of Black Straw Hats”—as Brecht christened his Salvation Army—must make her way through the minions of Pierpont Mauler to approach the Meat King herself. She promises his already hungry workers she will convince him not to close his canning factory for his own financial gain. “In a dark time of cruel confusion, of ordained disorder, of systematic lawlessness, of dehumanized humanity,” she cries to an agitated crowd, “we propose to bring God back.”
Christian socialism underscored the antiestablishment, egalitarian message of Jesus, prefiguring Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. Whether set in the fifteenth or the twentieth century, the war Joan brings is revolutionary. “This campaign of ours is undoubtedly the last of its kind,” Joan of the Stockyards tells the crowd of workers. “The last attempt to set Him up again in a crumbling world.” The situation is apocalyptic, accelerating toward the Jesus who came bearing a sword of justice rather than a bleeding heart. “We are soldiers of God,” Joan cries. “Wherever conditions are unsettled and violence threatens we come marching with our drums and banners, to remind people of God, whom they’ve all forgotten, and lead their souls back to Him.”
Discouraged if not defeated, Joan went home to find roving bands of looters circling Domrémy. By July, when Burgundian forces advanced on Vaucouleurs, Joan’s family had been forced once again to take refuge in Neufchâteau, driving their herds into the fields as they left. For two weeks they stayed at an inn kept by a woman known as La Rousse—the Redhead. Joan “did not like living in those parts,” she told a neighbor, “but preferred to live at Domrémy.” Still there was much to be gleaned from wayfarers’ conversation around a tavern’s communal dinner table, information that fueled Joan’s impatience to set off on her God-given errand. She didn’t object to working in La Rousse’s kitchen in exchange for room and board. She would rather pass the time doing chores than wait in idleness for her life to begin. But, as inquisitorial spies would later report, there were soldiers staying at the inn, a sliver of information her judges used to fabricate the allegation that Joan, “of her own will and without the leave of her said father and mother, went to the town of Neufchâteau in Lorraine and there for some time served in the house of a woman, an innkeeper named La Rousse, where many young unguarded women stayed, and the lodgers were for the most part soldiers.”
Having insinuated that La Rousse was a madam and Joan a prostitute, the judges found an additional use for the slander. As stated in the ninth of the seventy “articles of accusation” brought against her, Joan, “when in this service, summoned a certain youth for breach of promise before the magistrate of Toul, and in the pursuit of this case, she went frequently to Toul, and spent almost everything she had. This young man, knowing she had lived with the said women, refused to wed her, and died, pendente lite [pending litigation]. For this reason, out of spite, Jeanne left the said service.”
The motif surfaces in every narrative genre of the time, including the minutes of a kangaroo court: a duplicitous, unchaste woman lures a trusting young man to his death as he struggles to free himself from her sexual stain.
No, Joan objected, she’d made no promise to any young man. She had consecrated all of her being to God, her chastity both symbol and proof of her faith. She would never wed, unless at God’s command. “It was he who summoned me,” Joan corrected the examiner. “Saints Catherine and Margaret assured me I would win my case.” As they promised, the magistrate dismissed the suit and acquitted Joan, guilty of nothing but refusing to wed whomever her father had chosen to inherit the problem she’d become—a local boy, it’s assumed. While parents commonly resorted to bribery, threats, and even violence to coerce a child to accept an unwanted spouse, by the fifteenth century Church law protected such children, and fathers no longer had the right to marry off daughters without their leave. Joan might have considered herself overprotected, but she wasn’t chattel, not officially, and the ninth article was eventually dropped from the charges held against her. As for the maligned La Rousse, the innkeeper was a decent, proper woman, as several witnesses to Joan’s childhood testified.
Had she not already, Joan would discover that to advertise her chastity was to ask for that claim to be challenged or, worse, rendered false, and for as long as she was in Neufchâteau, she remained always in the company of her parents, the whole family living among neighbors from Domrémy, insulated from strangers. There was no one more committed to guarding Joan’s reputation than Joan herself, who had begun to perceive the lineaments of her future as a public figure and understood that rumor had power where truth did not. As soon as it was safe to do so, Joan’s family returned to Domrémy to find, once again, most of their homes burned, the church left in ruins.
“Do you know,” Péguy’s Joan demands of those who counsel her to control her temper … “that the soldiers are attacking towns and breaking their way into churches everywhere?… And they shout all sorts of vile things at the Blessed Virgin, to our mother the Blessed Virgin, and they call names and blaspheme Jesus on his cross …[T]hey foul the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Jesus … Jesus’s sacred body.”
On October 12, 1428, the English laid siege to Orléans. As it was the single remaining bastion that prevented them from crossing the Loire and occupying what remained of France, there was talk of little else. The kingdom that had reigned supreme in Europe just a hundred years earlier now faced extinction. Should Orléans fall, all of France would follow it, and all who called themselves French would find themselves under the rule of the king of England. It grew ever harder to manufacture hope in the face of what appeared inevitable defeat. Soldiers too honorable to defect sank into the apathy of the condemned, and the French clergy found themselves marching circles around the army’s frozen infantry, processing through the streets on a regular basis to demonstrate the constancy of their devotion in hopes of summoning a miracle. The dauphin, whose fear of illegitimacy inspired fatalism, was making plans to abandon his sinking kingdom for the castle of one of France’s allies—Scotland or Spain.
By December, Joan was back in Vaucouleurs. Her voices promised her success; she had only to persevere, in this case by using Laxart’s wife’s advanced pregnancy as an excuse to travel north. Joan persuaded her parents to let her go with her uncle Durand to stay for a few weeks in his home and help her mother’s cousin during her confinement, a ruse to which Jacques might not have agreed had he not been exasperated by the botched marriage plot that left Joan on his hands. He might reasonably have assumed his daughter would have given up her wild scheme after being dressed down by Sir Robert de Baudricourt in public and subsequently ridiculed. Not that Joan had disclosed what happened the last time she’d visited her uncle in Burey. In her parents’ home, Joan had been as circumspect as always, continuing to cloak her preoccupation with her voices’ demands. She’d practiced doing that for years. But the world in which Joan lived was small, and a grandnephew of Isabelle’s had told Joan’s brothers about her first meeting with Baudricourt. The report of so incongruous a transaction between their sister and the city’s captain aroused Jean and Pierre’s suspicions, as would any scenario involving Joan and men-at-arms, and they in turn told their parents about a spectacle that had already provided irresistible fodder for gossips.
For whatever reason—and perhaps it was nothing more than her own impatience—Joan left Domrémy in haste, a leave-taking remembered primarily for her cryptic good-byes. She left quickly but not in secret, bidding farewell to those she encountered as she was heading out of town. If she looked, she never found an opportunity to tell Hauviette that she was leaving, and Hauviette, who said she “loved her very dearly,” had “cried very bitterly about her going.” Mengette, with whom Joan spun and “did other household chores,” did get a last embrace, perhaps due to proximity, as her “father’s house was almost next door to Joan’s father’s.”
“When she went away, she said good-bye to me,” Mengette testified. “Then she departed and prayed God to bless me, and set out for Vaucouleurs.”
“All I know,” the farmer Gérardin of Épinal testified, “is that when she was about to go away, she said to me: ‘Friend, if you were not a Burgundian, there is something I would tell you.’ ” It would appear Gérardin was the single enemy sympathizer in town, whose head Joan would have been happy to “take off,” should God ask her to. As for Gérardin, he assumed Joan’s secret was no different from that of any other girl of her age, “something about a lad she wanted to marry,” he guessed.
“No eggs! No eggs!!” Sir Robert says to his steward in Saint Joan, by George Bernard Shaw. The play opens like a fairy tale, in a castle, and amplifies the apocryphal bird imagery that lifts Joan’s story above those of other mortals and loans her the vantage of angels. “Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by no eggs?” How can it be that all Sir Robert’s hens—“the best layers in Champagne”—have stopped producing eggs?
“There is no milk,” his steward tells him. “There are no eggs: tomorrow there will be nothing …[T]here is a spell on us: we are bewitched … as long as the Maid is at the door.”
Joan, however, wasn’t waiting at the castle door. Nor was she staying outside town with her uncle in Burey, but lodging with friends of his, Henri and Catherine Le Royer, who owned a house within the walls of Vaucouleurs. She had no intention of returning to Sir Robert before strengthening the legitimacy of her request by attracting more and more powerful adherents to her cause. Word had spread in the eight months since Joan’s earlier visit. Before the siege of Orléans, it had been easy to laugh off the odd girl in the homespun red dress, but news of the pivotal city’s imminent fall delivered the French to a desperation that transformed Joan from the butt of a joke into a young woman who merited serious attention. Perhaps she really was who she claimed to be, the prophesied virgin from the marshes of Lorraine. “I heard it said many times that she was to restore France and the blood royal,” her childhood friend Jean Waterin testified.
Joan had no sooner arrived in Vaucouleurs than the whole city knew of her return. Impatient for a first look at her, a throng gathered around the Le Royers’ door.
“What are you doing here, my dear?” asked Jean de Metz, a squire stationed in the city garrison. “Is it not fated that the King shall be driven from his kingdom, and that we shall all turn English?” Jean asked her, his tone arch. A knight in training, like Bertrand de Poulengy, he was playing to an audience at Joan’s expense, unprepared for sincerity so absolute it didn’t acknowledge sarcasm.
“Before mid-Lent I must be with the King,” Joan told him. “Even if I have to wear my legs down to the knees.” The salvation of France had been ordained, and “for that she was born,” she said to Henri Le Royer, identifying her messianic role as clearly as Jesus had to those who “sought him and would have kept him from leaving them” to minister to “other cities also, for,” as Jesus said, “I was sent for this purpose.” As it had been for Bertrand de Poulengy, the fervor of Joan’s answer made Jean de Metz her friend for life, a man of good standing who became another of her instant adherents. “I had great trust in what the Maid said,” Jean testified, “and I was on fire with what she said, and with a love for her which was, as I believe, a divine love.”
“I believed in what she said,” Catherine Le Royer testified, “and so did many others”—enough that Joan could gather together a party of companions and set out for Chinon without Baudricourt’s blessing. But according to Catherine the mission was quickly aborted. “Joan said that this was not the way in which she ought to depart,” and the party came back to learn that Joan’s fortunes had shifted once again, just as they had the last time she’d returned to Vaucouleurs. But that was after an absence of many months, not the few days it took to get to Saint-Nicolas, a quarter of the way to Chinon, and back. As Saints Catherine and Margaret had promised, God had indeed cleared her way to the lord dauphin.
Of the two royal houses that supported Charles’s hegemony, the Armagnac name dominates the pages of history books, but the house of Anjou was larger and more powerful. The “Queen of Four Kingdoms”—Aragon, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Sicily—Yolande of Aragon was titular queen consort of Naples, Countess of Provence, and Duchess of Anjou (Fig. 7). The death of her elder sister, Joanna, in 1407, left the twenty-three-year-old Yolande the sole remaining heir to her father’s crown, or would have, were she a man. Instead, she married Louis II, the Duke of Anjou, and after he died, in 1417, acted as regent for the eldest of their six children, Louis III. Her second son, René, was married off to Isabella, Duchess of Bar and daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, thus securing Yolande’s influence in the north of France. As a noblewoman, Yolande had been tutored in those subjects considered appropriate to her gender—“reading and writing in French and Latin … music, astronomy, and some medicine and first aid.” What she studied was political intrigue and maneuvering—the international relations of her day—and concluded she didn’t necessarily need a crown to rule a kingdom, just a malleable king. In 1419, immediately in the wake of Agincourt, and five years before the Burgundians formalized their alliance with the English, Yolande cemented the houses of Anjou and Valois by means of that most popular and generally trustworthy form of political alliance, matrimony. Her daughter Marie was just ten when betrothed to the twelve-year-old dauphin Charles, whose father she’d persuaded to sign a decree claiming the dauphin as his son and heir. As Charles VI was known to have been Isabeau’s sole sexual partner during the period of time when the dauphin was conceived, common sense supported his claim to the throne, but it couldn’t rescue him from the effect of his mother’s casting doubt on his birthright. When Isabeau demanded she return Charles to the French court, Yolande is said to have declared her unfit to raise the dauphin. “We have not nurtured and cherished this one for you to make him die like his brothers or to go mad like his father, or to become English like you. I keep him for my own. Come and take him away if you dare.”
Sometimes depicted as a lazy dilettante without any interest in rule, or as a simpleminded playboy, the dauphin was neither stupid nor apathetic. Prior to his mother’s betrayal he had been known for his theatrical military exploits, leading an army against the English when still a teenager. But Isabeau’s betrayal left him prey to a psychic paralysis that made him vulnerable to scheming courtiers jockeying for power, some with allegiance to the Burgundian party. His marriage, in the spring of 1422, when the dauphin was nineteen and Marie seventeen, and the subsequent death of his father that fall resolved nothing. Seven years later, as Joan struggled to make her way to Chinon, the dauphin had yet to claim what was his, the throne of France remained empty, and Yolande had financed an army Charles didn’t have the confidence to dispatch. She wasn’t about to sacrifice the kingdom she’d secured for her daughter to his inertia, and her immediate concern was to keep the remaining houses of France united while fending off an advancing enemy. For months now she had been searching for a means to guide, or force, if need be, Charles into a war she wanted and he didn’t. That a girl claiming to be the Virgin from Lorraine had arrived in Vaucouleurs to announce she’d been sent by God to lead France’s army and escort the reluctant dauphin to be anointed king at Reims was news Yolande seized with excitement. Immediately upon coming into possession of so welcome a rumor, she dispatched her messenger, Colet de Vienne, from the court at Chinon to that of her son René, the future Duke of Bar and Lorraine and Baudricourt’s immediate overlord.
Sir Robert, Yolande wrote to René, was on no account to squash or banish this peasant girl, not when his country needed the energy and confidence inspired by a prophecy fulfilled. René must contact Sir Robert immediately and tell him to have the girl evaluated and her words taken as those meriting serious attention.
Son obeyed mother; captain obeyed duke; Catherine Le Royer found herself with unexpected visitors. Baudricourt had done what Joan never thought to do: he summoned a Church authority to validate her mission, obliging Joan to participate in what she knew was a charade and considered a waste of time. “I saw Robert de Baudricourt, then captain of the town of Vaucouleurs, and Messire Jean Fournier enter my house,” Catherine testified. “I heard Joan say that this man, who was a priest, had brought a stole, and that he had exorcised her in front of the captain, saying that if there was any evil thing in her, let it begone away, and if there was any good thing, let it come to them all.” Since he had heard her confession, and thus already knew the state of her soul, “Joan said that this priest had done wrong.” Promised success by her voices, Joan hadn’t troubled to puzzle out how it might be realized, nor did she defer to earthbound clerics who ruled what they called the Church Militant, “all good Christians engaged in the struggle against the enemies of Christ,” to distinguish it from the Church Triumphant, whose members inhabited heaven. Still, all the rest of the world, who lacked direct access to God, believed that to offend Church doctrine was a grave mistake, and it was only after Joan had Fournier’s sanction that she received a summons from René’s father-in-law, the old Duke Charles of Lorraine.
An invitation to the home of a nobleman was as good as an announcement that through the inaudible direction of her voices and the invisible hand of Yolande Joan had bounded out of the peasantry and into the highest echelon of society, an accomplishment rare enough to qualify as something of a miracle. Now her appearance needed to reflect her new station. “I asked her if she wanted to travel in those clothes,” Jean de Metz said of Joan’s dress of “the reddish-brown homespun material known as russet.” If it was the typical farm girl’s dress, it was long sleeved and ankle length, with a laced bodice. “She replied that she would rather have a man’s clothes,” Jean said. “Then I gave her a suit and breeches belonging to my servants, so that she could put them on.”
But, Joan’s uncle Durand said, “some people of Vaucouleurs” determined that Joan should go off to see the duke in the clothes of a gentleman, not a servant, and had “everything that was necessary” made for her. As the clothing was offered as a gift, the citizens who outfitted their virgin warrior can hardly have found the idea of a woman wearing male clothing “abominable to God and man, contrary to laws both divine and natural and to ecclesiastical discipline … and prohibited under penalty of anathema.” The trial record dilates this judgment with a description of Joan’s dress so lingering in its specificity that it can only have been inspired by the delight taken in counting up the sins of others. Joan “wore shirt, breeches, doublet, with hose joined together and fastened to the said doublet by twenty points, long leggings laced on the outside, a short mantle reaching to the knees, or thereabouts, a close-cut cap, tight-fitting boots and buskins.”
Joan, as it turned out, was—or she quickly became—something of a fop. The tailor-made clothes the citizens of Vaucouleurs gave her awoke a taste for the luxurious fabrics and flamboyant styles that sumptuary laws held out of a peasant’s reach: velvet surcoats embroidered with gold thread; fur-lined mantles; colorful tunics bearing coats of arms; tight-fitting damask doublets with jeweled buttons and slashed sleeves that revealed contrasting silk linings; brightly colored hose; voluminous gowns—houppelandes—with sleeves that hung to the ground; pigases with their extravagantly long and pointed toes; chamois gloves; belts hung with bells and trinkets; an “infinity of hats … tam-o’shanters and furred caps, hoods and brims, chaplets of flowers, coiled turbans, coverings of every shape, puffed, pleated, scalloped, or curled into a long tailed pocket called a liripipe.”
Joan could not have chosen a more dramatic moment to defy a dress code. Costume historians identify the high Middle Ages as the arrival of fashion in western Europe. Cotton from Egypt; silks from the Ottoman Empire; improved dyes and dyeing techniques; complex patterns and new fabrics, like brocade and velvet, made possible by Chinese innovations in weaving: crusaders went east bearing murder and returned home with the ingredients for haute couture. And the increased social mobility that accompanied the aristocracy’s loss of power and conjured the ambitions of a man like Jacques d’Arc strengthened the yet ruling nobility’s resolve to assign and maintain standards of dress that identified a peasant as a peasant, no matter how much money he had to spend on disguising himself as a lord. Etymology identifies villein as the progenitor of “villainous,” as is churl of “churlish,” suggesting the regard in which the aristocracy held a peasant, whose lowly stature was received as proof of his base character. The Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain “attributes sublime virtues only to the nobility,” Huizinga observed of his Chronique des choses de mon temps, a history of the years 1417–74 that was written when “God, the theory went, had established an intangible order of which costume was merely the expression.” The Third Reich didn’t invent the yellow badge that announced its wearer as a Jew; it revived the idea from a decree made by Pope Innocent III in 1215 that Jews be “marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples.”*3By the time Joan was born, two centuries of increasing social unrest had drawn the strictures of sumptuary laws that much tighter; never before or since has Europe insisted on so rigid and visible a classification of its citizens. Even were a prostitute successful enough to afford the fine clothes of an aristocrat, she could never be confused with a lady, required, as she was by law, to wear a striped hood or cloak. Within this context, Joan, whose dress revealed, in the opinion of her judges, “her obstinacy, her stubbornness in evil, her want of charity, her disobedience to the Church, and the scorn she has of the holy sacraments,” refused to acknowledge the most basic and essential distinction, that drawn between male and female. “It was characteristic of the time, of the doctors’ narrowmindedness, of their blind attachment to the letter without any consideration for the spirit,” Michelet wrote, “that no point seemed more grievous to them than the sin of having assumed the garments of a man.”
“Mark what I say,” Shaw’s inquisitor lectures, “the woman who quarrels with her clothes and puts on the dress of a man is like the man who throws off his fur gown and dresses like John the Baptist: they are followed, as surely as the night follows the day, by bands of wild women and men who refuse to wear any clothes at all.” Shaw’s representation of the clerics’ response isn’t drawn from historical record, but it represents the Church’s viewpoint well enough. As pronounced by an anonymous member of the University of Paris, “If a woman could put on male clothing as she liked with impunity, women would have unrestrained opportunities to fornicate and to practice manly acts which are legally forbidden to them according to doctrine … for example, to preach, to teach, to bear arms, to absolve, to excommunicate.”
Jesus drafted his own death warrant in the temple when he upturned the tables of the moneylenders and berated those who sold doves for holy sacrifice, publicly challenging a corrupt social order that allowed the rich to purchase sacred power—an order swiftly reinvented by the Church that deified him. So now had Joan drafted hers by drawing the attention of both those who made and guarded rules she refused to obey and the multitudes governed by their misogyny.
With the example of Saint Margaret and other virgin martyrs before her, Joan sheared off her hair; by doing so, she announced she had removed herself from the company of other unwed girls, who were expected to leave their heads uncovered in public, their hair undressed and falling down their backs as an advertisement for prospective suitors. At a time when women didn’t get their hair cut, ever, Joan’s barely covered her ears. Hers was the original bob, the haircut assumed by flappers as a symbol of female liberation and still known in France as la coupe à la Jeanne d’Arc. It would have been possible for Joan to preserve her hair’s length and still wage war, especially as women and girls often wore plaits coiled over their heads. Arguably, it would have been a comfort, or even a precaution, to have an extra layer of padding under a metal helmet designed not only to deflect arrows but also to preserve a knight’s skull from the impact of a rock dropped on his head from a parapet.
But Joan didn’t want a woman’s hair any more than she wanted a woman’s fate. By the time she accomplished her mission, Joan would have attended the highest state function mounted on a white horse, dressed in armor, and cloaked in red velvet as she processed before courtiers and nobles, escorting her gentil dauphin to the altar of Reims’s cathedral, where he would be anointed Charles VII, his title secure, as no mortal could undo what God ordained. Unarmored, Joan wore clothes that befit a national heroine: conspicuously stylish and costly, as noted both by her worshipful, approving followers and by her enemies, who would call attention to her dress as evidence of decadence and, worse, pride. As they understood it, Joan had seized a set of symbols she didn’t merit, and what delight they would take in the role a golden cloak would play in her capture and defeat, how outraged at the vanity and self-indulgence they saw in its rich weight on her shoulders.
What Joan wore—and what she didn’t—announced what was more powerful for not being spoken aloud. Under interrogation, she said she dressed as a man as a practical concession to a life spent making war among men, but Joan wore male clothing under all circumstances, among soldiers or not. Schiller’s Joan seizes a helmet before leaving home to embark on her crusade; from it “warlike thoughts” pour into her head and make her eyes flash, her cheeks red. The costly male costume in which Joan cloaked her virgin female body transcended the pragmatic. It was the physical manifestation—the announcement—of her refusal to abide by patriarchal strictures, a defiance that was absolute and uncompromising, and both Joan and her judges knew that. The extravagant attention the inquisitorial trial paid her clothing and the role her cross-dressing would play in the decision to execute her reveal how subversive and genuinely dangerous the clerics who ruled society considered Joan’s assuming the right to wear male attire. No one, especially not Joan, thought her dressing as a man was “a small, nay, the least thing,” as she dismissed the topic when under interrogation.
Womanly duties, as Joan thought of them, were fine for girls who imagined themselves as Cinderellas or Sleeping Beauties, good girls rewarded for menial housework and, in the case of Sleeping Beauty, a passivity so profound it was deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose. There were, as Joan observed, enough of those women already. Only shackles and a prison cell would halt the trajectory of a young woman who understood herself as the leader of a holy quest, summoned by the patron saint of the crusaders, Saint Michael—whose slaying of the dragon was considered “the primordial feat of arms” from which knighthood sprang—to join Perceval, Lancelot, and Galahad, especially Galahad, the Christ figure of medieval romance. When Galahad came to King Arthur’s court, he saw that a single seat at the Round Table stood vacant.
“It belongs to one who hasn’t yet come,” the knights assembled told him. “It belongs to the Virgin Knight who will find the Holy Grail.” Others had come before him, the knights told Galahad, they’d wanted to take the one seat left at the table, and all had died upon touching it.
Galahad sat down at the table and lived.
A sacred vessel borrowed from a Celtic myth about a magic cauldron, the Grail first appears in an unfinished romance, Perceval le Gallois, by Chrétien de Troyes, who used the vessel to represent and contain God’s grace. Galahad wore flaming red armor when introduced to King Arthur’s court on Pentecost, the feast that celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. Galahad does indeed fulfill Merlin’s prophecy that it would be he, and no other, to find the Holy Grail, but before he can return to King Arthur’s court bearing the Grail that is his alone to find, he is visited by Saint Joseph of Arimathea, who claimed Jesus’s crucified body from Pilate and gave his own tomb for Jesus’s burial. The rapture to which Galahad succumbs in the presence of the saint is so intense that he begs to die in its embrace and is taken up to heaven by angels.
Talk still turned to the crusades, as it did to any means of propitiating the divine, and the ideals described in The Book of Chivalry remained as influential as they were when first listed by Geoffroi de Charny in the middle of the fourteenth century: largesse, prowess, courtesy, and loyalty. Chivalry was a system of ethics that applied to both war and love, a system that governed all of noble life. That this code was, like the strictures of the Church, “about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that.” The trial record shows the reward Joan anticipated for her faith and service in the armies of God was the same as what Pope Urban II promised the sixty thousand crusaders he dispatched from Europe in 1095 to save Jerusalem from the infidels: absolution from sin and eternal salvation. She, too, believed that “the worst conceivable crime for a member of a Military Order was apostasy, denying the Cross, even to save his life.” An army sixty thousand strong was extraordinary in its size; the sight of it was enough to inspire terror in a people for whom an army of five thousand was large.
Writing during the twelfth century, the prelate William of Tyre described the conditions that inspired the crusades, the first of which emerged during a period of violence and unrest analogous to that of the Hundred Years War. Eleventh-century Europe had yet to emerge from the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire: raids were the rule; murder went unpunished; the Church presented the sole means of social cohesion. The only story that could be relied upon not to change was the one at the center of the Church, the Gospels that gave meaning to the sufferings of the Church Militant and pointed the way to paradise. In the name of Christ, crusaders took up their swords and rode east to reclaim Jerusalem, where the Son of God rose from the dead and where they practiced siege warfare little different from that of fifteenth-century Europe, waged for heavenly gain and characterized by “massacre and torture,” “the mounting of heads on posts or even use of them as missiles.” Raymond d’Aguilers, contemporaneous chronicler of the First Crusade, wrote, “Dismembered bodies lay in the houses and streets, trampled by knights and men-at-arms … Crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.” By the time the war was won, they had murdered thirty thousand Muslims, who still hear the word “crusade” as twenty-first-century Westerners do “jihad,”*4 an act of terrorism perpetrated by benighted barbarians living in a dark age of superstition and fear.
The Church Militant had officially endorsed mass murder, whitewashing it as an act of piety.
Dressed in her new finery, Joan was ready for her visit to the Duke of Lorraine, who, having heard of the divine company she entertained, summoned and provided her safe conduct because he was ill and wanted her to intercede with God on his behalf. For her part, Joan accepted the duke’s invitation as an opportunity to campaign for his support and, as Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan’s hostess for three weeks following Charles’s coronation, testified, “told him she wished to go to France. And the duke questioned her about the recovery of his health; but she said she knew nothing about that … She told the duke nevertheless to send his son and some men to escort her to France, and she would pray to God for his health.” The widow of Charles VII’s financial adviser, Marguerite said Joan told the duke “he was sinning and that unless he reformed his ways he would not be cured. She urged him to take back his good wife,” the notoriously pious Margaret of Bavaria, whom he’d abandoned for a mistress, Alison Dumay, in the town of Nancy, a quick coach trip to the south. If the duke knew anything at all about his outspoken guest, the caution to govern his lust could hardly have come as a surprise. He withheld the gift of his son-in-law’s conscription, but Joan returned to Vaucouleurs the richer by four francs, “a horse with a black coat,” and another ally among the aristocracy.
From the time she arrived in Vaucouleurs in early January 1429 until her departure for Chinon on February 13, subtracting two weeks for her visits to the courts of Bar and Lorraine, Joan was left with a month to fill, and it’s assumed she received instruction in riding and carrying a lance from the knights stationed in the garrison there. “She was very bold in riding horses … and also in performing other feats and exercises which young girls are not accustomed to do,” said Jean de Wavrin, a Burgundian who fought against Joan at Patay.
To master a knight’s necessary skills, ordinarily acquired over years, Joan had the four weeks at Vaucouleurs and would be granted an additional three at Poitiers, when not being interrogated by the clerics assembled there to assess her claim of a divine vocation. Even a strong rider with native talent would be remarkable in achieving so high a level of expertise in six weeks. The girl who had protested that she “knew not how to ride nor lead in war” was praised universally—by comrades and enemies alike—for her adroit handling of a destrier. The expression Joan used for “ride” referred to a horse not as a garden-variety cheval but as a knight’s courser: strong, swift, and bred for battle. A destrier was a specialized horse, as different from a harness animal as a Thoroughbred from a Clydesdale. It was a knight’s deadliest weapon, plunging into the fray to rear up and come down kicking with forelegs powerful enough to kill an enemy with a single blow from an iron-shod hoof. Despite their relative prosperity, Joan’s family was unlikely to have kept any but work animals. Oxen plowed; horses pulled wagons to market. Even an athletic girl who loved being outdoors and going off alone into the woods, a girl in the throes of chivalric fantasies, wouldn’t have had the means to learn to ride a warhorse.
Joan’s zeal for battle was apparent, but she knew better than to present herself to powerful men without a veneer of humility and a few words to suggest a reluctance to undertake so immodest a quest. Long before she was on trial for her life, she was careful to underscore her lack of personal ambition.
“It’s no good breaking your heart to make men understand anything,” Joan’s mother tells her in The Lark. “All you can do is say ‘yes’ to whatever they think, and wait till they’ve gone out to the fields. Then you can be mistress in your house again.”
But Joan didn’t stoop to gather unacknowledged power. “If God didn’t mean me to be proud, why did He send an Archangel to see me, and saints with the light of heaven on them to speak to me?” Anouilh has her ask her inquisitor. “He only had to leave me looking after the sheep, and I don’t think pride would ever have entered my head.”
“I would much prefer to stay with my poor mother and spin,” Joan said to Jean de Metz, “for this is not my station. But I must go, and I must do it, for my Lord wishes me to perform this deed.” Once her vocation had been fulfilled, however, Joan didn’t return to the hearth but refused to relinquish her identity as a military chieftain. That she had been a child exemplary in her obedience speaks to her commitment to her voices’ direction to be good, not to her embrace of domestic routine, to which she never intended to return.
“I am a soldier,” Shaw’s Joan declares. “I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge and of placing the big guns.”
DeMille’s vision of his heroine’s potency is even less subtle. “If thou comest from God,” Sir Robert says to Joan, “show me what answer he would make to this!” Baudricourt rises from his throne-like chair to unsheathe and brandish his sword. Standing in profile, he points to its blade with his left hand, while with his right he holds its hilt just at the height of his pelvis; the length of it projects from his groin at an angle and rigidity suggesting tumescence. Provoked, Joan borrows a dagger-size knife from a page standing beside her and holds it up as if it were a chalice, her face tipped heavenward to receive the divine grace that infuses her little blade with miraculous power. With it she halves the much longer shaft of Sir Robert’s weapon. Immediately, Sir Robert agrees to give Joan whatever she asks, but he cannot meet her eye as he speaks; his gaze is fixed on his severed sword. “I am convinced and will send thee to thy King,” his unnecessary title card reads. If the scene provides unintended comedy for today’s audience, it remains useful for the aggressive transparency of its symbolism, its release having preceded psychology’s imposition of self-consciousness on popular culture. What could more obviously convey the nature of the fear Joan of Arc has always inspired than her unmanning her opposition with a supernaturally enhanced phallic weapon?
When she at last set out for Chinon, it was with six men, of whom at least one would admit to starting the trip contemplating her rape as a means of robbing her of the power she claimed.
*1 Unlike the apocryphal texts included in the Vulgate, pseudepigrapha, from the Greek pseud, “false,” and epigraphein, “to inscribe,” are not included in any scriptural canon.
*2 There were twenty sous to the livre.
*3 Canon 68, Fourth Council of the Lateran, convoked by Pope Innocent III.
*4 jihad: An Islamic term meaning “to struggle in the way of Allah” rather than a necessarily violent “holy war.”