The traveling party of seven included the two knights who financed the trip: Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy; Bertrand’s servant, Julien; Yolande’s messenger, Colet de Vienne; Richard the Archer; and the servant he shared with Vienne, Jean de Honecourt. “They were all knights and servants of Sir Robert de Baudricourt,” Joan testified. “Sir Robert had sworn them to conduct me well and safely.”
“Go,” Robert said to Joan as she departed. “Go, and come what may.” It was hardly a benediction, but Baudricourt was obeying orders, not acting out of faith. No matter his opinion, the price of getting rid of the obstinate girl had been to provide her an escort and a formal letter of introduction to the dauphin—a bargain, as it turned out. Even had Yolande not been scheming from afar, by now the citizens of Lorraine were traveling miles to get a glimpse of their Maid, thronging around her. Were Baudricourt to refuse to promote what they believed was her God-given mission, he’d risk an uprising.
With the formal introduction she needed, Joan and her six companions set out for Chinon on the night of February 12, 1429, “to go,” as she said, “to the lord Dauphin, and for that I was born.” Her phrasing often mimicked that of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, an echo here of Christ’s admonition to those who tried to detain him from his vocation. “I was sent for this purpose.”
Joan of Arc Leaving Vaucouleurs, Jean-Jacques Scherrer’s monumental history painting, first exhibited in 1887 (Fig. 8), has insinuated itself into the origin myth of France much as Emanuel Leutze’s equally narrative Washington Crossing the Delaware has shaped the vision of countless American schoolchildren. Life-size, regal, and handsomely attired in brown tunic, cape, and leggings, her yet-to-be-shorn hair falling over her shoulders and down her back—her transformation incomplete—Joan pauses on the threshold of her magnificent and terrible fate. The Maid’s horse lifts her to a heroic height. Like George Washington towering over his seated rowers, she is more than head and shoulders above the crowd around her, a sweep of caste from beggar to courtier; “the mother of her country,” history has judged her, “the George Washington of France.” She raises her left hand in farewell, her right reaches for the symbol of her vocation: a sword, its hilt and blade divided by the hand guard, emphasizing its cruciform outline and reminding us that her war is a holy one.
“No sword!” Sir Robert exclaims in Victor Fleming’s 1948 film, Joan of Arc. “Here,” he says. “Take mine!”
Scherrer’s painting has a focal point. The silver gleam of the weapon being passed from the captain to the Maid captures the eye and holds it on the critical moment, as a man of wealth and status relinquishes the symbol of his potency to a much younger woman. Just below that transaction is another reminder: painted in profile, the pommel of Joan’s armored saddle projects forward from her groin like an abbreviated phallus. Sir Robert reaches over his head and past the pommel to extend the tied scroll of a letter along with the weapon. Behind him, a peasant woman weeps in the arms of a man whose eyes beseech Joan. But Joan’s gaze, like Washington’s, is visionary, fixed on what she alone can see.
The mourners are Joan’s parents, of course, often inaccurately included at the scene of her departure from Vaucouleurs, the painter’s sleight of hand reaching forward to the time when Joan’s accomplishments and the awe they inspired would render her father’s distrust meaningless. During the nineteenth century the painting was exhibited internationally; Joan’s canonization made it into an image recognized all over the world; it remains popular in reproduction. Maxwell Anderson, who adapted his 1946 play within a play,Joan of Lorraine, for Fleming’s film, placed Joan’s mother in the crowd around Joan, mounted and wearing a man’s traveling cloak.
“A mother bears children and she gives them to the world and she thinks she knows them, but she doesn’t know them at all,” Isabelle says. Before Joan can pass through the city’s gates, before she exits one world to enter another from which she cannot return, her mother presses forward to give her the memento upon which her judges would fix, the subject first raised during the preliminary trial that determined the charges brought against Joan. By then she’d been in captivity for a year, shackled for the last six months in the endless dusk of an unlit cell, ill-fed, brutalized daily, and still obstinately immune to the efforts of seventy judges to dismantle her resolve.
“Did you not have some rings?” the examiner asked Joan.
“You have one,” she said. “Give it back to me. The Burgundians have the other.”
“Who gave you the ring now in the possession of the Burgundians?”
“Show me my ring if you have it.”
“Who gave you the ring taken by the Burgundians?”
“My father or my mother, at Domrémy.”
“What distinguished it from any other ring?”
“The names Jesus Maria were written on it.”
“Who wrote them?” the examiner asked, and he repeated the question, inspired by “a contemporary debate between the Franciscans, who encouraged reverence for the names of Jesus and Mary, and the Dominicans, who urged the papacy to forbid it as a satanic cult.”
The words did suggest a flight from orthodoxy. One effect of the Papal Schism had been a proliferation of covert proto-Protestant sects that wanted nothing to do with any pope. Joan’s examiners lingered over every conceivable means of implicating her in heresy or witchcraft and pressed her in hopes of forcing her to admit the names were an incantation of some sort. As they were throughout the trial, trumped-up religious charges cloaked the political agendas of the avaricious Sorbonne-trained clergy, just as they had hidden those of the Sanhedrin who pronounced judgment on Jesus. Both tribunals kowtowed to occupying forces while preserving what influence they could. “Jesus Maria” was a device used by mendicant friars of all orders: a means of identifying one another as separate from the clergy they considered corrupt. Collette of Corbie, for example, the visionary hermit and saint who founded the Poor Clares, is known to have “traveled in Joan’s region, using the emblem ‘Jesus Maria’ in her letters.” The judges who assembled in Rouen to try Joan, the majority of them creatures of the university, considered the use of sacred names for any purpose outside the ordained celebration of the Mass a crime of insurrection, of failing to submit to the ruling patriarchy’s prescribed forms and traditions.
“Who wrote the names?”
“I have told you I don’t know.”
“Was there any stone set in it?”
“There were three crosses on it, and no other mark that I know of, except Jesus Maria. My brother gave me the one you have. Give it to the Church if you will not return it to me.”
“Why did you look at this ring before going into battle?”
“Out of pleasure, and in honor of my father and mother.”
“For no other reason?” the examiner asked.
“Saint Catherine appeared before me, and the ring was on my finger when I touched her.”
“What part of Saint Catherine did you touch with the ring?”
“About that,” Joan said, “you will get nothing more from me.”
On the day of Joan’s departure for Chinon, the French initiated hostilities with the English on a flat, barren plain some 150 miles southwest of Vaucouleurs to block the progress of a three-hundred-wagon convoy of munitions and barrels of salt-cured herring the English had requisitioned in anticipation of Lent’s restriction on meat. According to the Journal du siège d’Orléans and Cousinot’s Chronique de la Pucelle, Joan persuaded Sir Robert “to arm her because she knew, with clairvoyance, about the defeat of the French in the battle of Rouvray, near Orleans, the so-called Battle of the Herrings, in February and told him about it before the news reached Vaucouleurs.”
“In God’s name, Robert de Baudricourt, you are too slow about sending me,” Joan says in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, “and have caused damage thereby, for this day the Dauphin’s cause has lost a battle near Orleans, and will suffer yet greater injury if you do not send me to him soon.”
The governor was perplexed by this speech, and said—“To-day, child, to-day? How can you know what has happened in that region to-day? It would take eight or ten days for the word to come.”
“My Voices have brought word to me, and it is true. A battle was lost to-day, and you are in fault to delay me so.”
That the French had initiated hostilities made the loss that much more ignominious. As the armies of France and their ally, Scotland, crossed the treeless plain on which the armies met, the English had been able to see the approach of the enemy and, under the command of Sir John Fastolf, stopped advancing and circled their wagons. Around the primitive fortification, they set spikes to discourage the charge of the French cavalry, a strategy that had served them well in earlier battles when they had been outnumbered. Time had proved the incompetence of “French knights [who] continued to see war as an arena in which to display their chivalrous qualities, not as an instrument of state policy.” Perhaps even more costly, as military histories attest, was the inability of French commanders to work cooperatively with the commoners they disdained. “No member of the noble class trusted the local rural peasants enough to permit them to have weapons of such effectiveness as the longbow,” whereas “the noble-born English knights and the common-born English longbowmen respected each other’s skill and courage, and had long experience working together as a team.” Over and over, the French—“individualistic glory-seekers … dilettantes” who “scorned … fellow soldiers in their own army, as social inferiors”—charged quixotically into a storm of arrows that assailed them before they were close enough to discharge their weapons effectively. Mounted on horses whose heads alone were armored, the cavalry corps trampled one another, as their destriers were more often maddened than incapacitated by enemy arrows. This time the leaders of the French and Scot forces failed to coordinate attacks and thus appeared to vacillate in their resolve to seize the convoy. Perceiving hesitance as cowardice, the English took advantage of the enemy’s confusion and counterattacked from behind, putting the combined French and Scot forces, as many as four thousand men-at-arms, to flight.
Joan and her escorts waited for dusk to fall before venturing beyond the gates of Vaucouleurs. While both contemporaneous narratives and later revisions explained Baudricourt’s apparent change of heart as accomplished by supernatural means, their authors were either innocent of Yolande’s offstage direction or intent on eclipsing it. Neither Joan nor any witness suggested Joan had foreseen the battle’s carnage, but she cannot have traveled far before she learned, through mortal means, what four hundred fatalities made official: the French had been decimated. Baudricourt died before the nullification trial; we have witness only to his actions and words, but whether or not the story of Joan’s second sight is apocryphal, it was Yolande’s orders that determined Sir Robert’s response. She would become one of several figures critical to the advancement of Joan’s career whose influence has generally been ignored or downplayed because it undermines the conventions of the messianic narrative. Too, the story of Joan of Arc tends to exonerate Charles’s mother-in-law as it doesn’t his mother, Isabeau, because Yolande served Joan’s mission. In truth, the women were alike in ambition, each manipulating weak men to gain political advantage.
Chinon, about 350 miles to the west, was at the end of an eleven-day journey through English-occupied territory, the rivers in flood as they were every February, “no roads and no bridges left.” Even though they took the precaution of proceeding only under cover of night, that seven men-at-arms—or six, and one armed girl—traveled on horseback undetected and undisturbed by soldiers guarding roads and circling the towns along the way is often cited as the first miracle to demonstrate Joan’s uncanny powers. A story was told by “some soldiers who had gone to intercept her when she was on her way to find the King,” Seguin Seguin testified for the nullification proceedings. A Dominican friar who provided the sole eyewitness account of Joan’s first formal ecclesiastical examination, at Poitiers, Seguin is considered by historians to have provided the most reliable of testimony. They “had laid an ambush to capture her and rob her and her company,” he said. “But at the moment when they were about to do so, they had found themselves unable to stir from their positions; and so Joan had escaped without difficulty together with her company.” There would be other miracles, both less ambiguous and more dramatic. Still, whether it was accomplished with or without the grace of God, that so large a party eluded both enemy soldiers and the bandits spawned by anarchy was at least lucky and by no means expected. After all, Baudricourt had provided Joan a military guard for a reason.
What conflict emerged was internecine and came in the form of power struggles between Joan and those members of her escort who, like Baudricourt, were just following orders—except Sir Robert was safe within the walls of a fortified city and they were being asked to risk their lives for a girl who not only claimed she heard voices from God but dressed as a man. Husson Lemaître, a tinker from Viville, not ten miles from Domrémy, testified for the nullification that he’d “heard it said that while Joan was being taken from Vaucouleurs to the King, some of the soldiers of her escort pretended to be the enemy troops, and that those who were with her made a show of being about to take to their heels. But she said to them, ‘In the name of God, do not run away. They will do us no harm.’ ” And, though Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy were firm defenders of Joan’s holiness from the outset, her other companions plotted to undo the audacity of this inconvenient virgin, only to discover why it was that one of the king’s squires, Gobert Thibault, heard “Joan’s intimates say that they never had any desire for her. That is to say, that sometimes they had a carnal urge, but never dared to give way to it; and they believed that it was impossible to desire her … Suddenly their sexual feelings were checked.” Whether the gift betrayed heavenly or, as her enemies would attest, demonic influences, and though her apologists would hardly have characterized it in such terms, Joan was believed to have safeguarded her virginity by using supernatural powers to emasculate would-be assailants.
“I afterward heard the men who led her to the King talking,” Marguerite La Touroulde said,
and heard them say that at the outset they thought her presumptuous and that they meant to put her to the test. But once they were on the road, escorting her, they were ready to do anything that she wanted and were as anxious to bring her before the King as she was herself to get there. They could never have denied her anything that she asked. They said that … they wanted to make sexual advances to her, but at the moment when they were about to speak they were so ashamed that they dared not tell her their intentions or utter so much as a word.
“We escorted her to the King … as secretly as we could,” Jean de Metz remembered. The need for cover prevented Joan from attending Mass as regularly as she liked; given the opportunity, she went more than once a day. “If only we could hear a Mass it would be a grand thing,” Jean remembered her saying. “But, to my knowledge, we only heard the Mass twice on the way,” once on the first night, when the party of travelers reached the town of Saint-Urbain and were invited to sleep in the abbey, and again a few days later, when they passed through Auxerre and Joan attended Mass in the principal church there. On February 21 the seven travelers paused at the village of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, a day’s ride from Chinon, that much farther to the west. From Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, Joan told the examiner, she’d requested permission to approach the dauphin at the castle. “I sent letters to my king telling him I had traveled a good hundred and fifty leagues to come to his aid, and I told him also that I knew many things to his advantage.”
Once again, Joan’s reputation had preceded her, and the dauphin’s advisers were divided as to whether Charles should receive her. Members of the house of Anjou had little choice but to fall in line behind Yolande, although few if any other than René would have known it was she who arranged for the delivery of this living prophecy fulfilled. In Fierbois, Joan waited two days for an invitation to court. The idea of such a meeting between nobility and commoner wasn’t as fantastic then as it would be now. Yolande was working within what was becoming the French kings’ tradition of privatizing their relationship to the divine. Long before Joan was captured, the archbishop of Reims had started grooming Joan’s replacement, Le Berger*1—the Shepherd—a genuine rustic chosen from among the ongoing pageant of mediums and prognosticators who had slipped into the widening breach between competing papacies. Ever since the election of Pope Urban VI in 1378, and the subsequent emergence of Clement VII, who left Rome and established a rival papacy in Avignon, the schism had aroused such intense animosity between opposing factions that families and tradesmen relocated to cities based on their allegiances to one or the other pope. Avignon might have been more accessible than Rome, but history has judged it “a virtual temporal state of sumptuous pomp, of great cultural attraction, and of unlimited simony.” In other words, France’s papacy was so palpably corrupt that the court had withdrawn its faith in popes and retrained it on visionaries like Marie Robine, whose access to political power had become more rule than exception. But Georges de La Trémoille, Charles’s grand chamberlain and if not royal favorite then the most formidable among the dauphin’s advisers, didn’t want the help of a visionary complete with a train of hysterical followers, especially not a sword-rattling female one tricked out like a man. An opportunist devoted to protecting his own interests over any other, La Trémoille had a brother who served the Duke of Burgundy, and he wanted surrender, even at the cost of France’s independence. He wasn’t going to lose his hard-won control over Charles, whom he’d flattered, bribed, and browbeaten into submission, not without a fight.
Joan assuaged her impatience at another delay the only way she knew how: she went to Mass as often as the monks celebrated it and spent as many hours as she could within the sanctuary of the shrine at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, where Charles Martel was said to have left his sword as a trophy of his victory over the Muslims in 732. Martel was the grandfather of Charlemagne, who is recognized as the father of chivalry—from the French cheval, for horse—as his armies’ increased dependence on cavalry gave birth to knighthood. Tales of miracles associated with Sainte-Catherine multiplied, and the shrine, on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, became the destination of countless knights who, having escaped their English captors, came bearing offerings of weapons and armor as well as “fetters, shackles, balls and chains, and other tools of imprisonment from which the saint had miraculously relieved her votaries.” There would be many altars before which Joan kneeled in her short life, from the most humble to those in cathedrals of a size and splendor unimaginable to a rural peasant. By force of circumstance she paused longer at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois than she would at others, on her knees among the ex-votos.
In its size and splendor, Chinon would have struck most small-town girls, few of whom traveled far from where they were born, as a vision from a fairy tale, an imposing stone structure complete with conical turrets whose bright, restless pennants advertised its occupants’ coat of arms. The foundations of the castle were built at an altitude higher than any land in sight; its battlements rose from a ledge of rock that overlooked the river Vienne, a slab of shadow looming over any army so foolish as to try to scale its height. The Vienne is a major tributary of the Loire, its banks peopled ever since rivers were used as trade routes, in prehistory, and the strategic advantage granted by the château’s height was joined by its unusual physical grace. Joan reached Chinon in the middle of the day on March 4, 1429, and lodged at a house belonging to a woman she characterized, in anticipation of her examiner’s maligning her hostess, as having a good reputation. There she was forced again to do what she hated: wait.
“I was continually praying that God would send a sign for the king,” Joan said, and at last he did. “I was in my lodging when the angel came, and afterwards we went together to the king.” Joan and her angel had company as they climbed the steep switchback trail that led up to the castle’s gates. Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy walked alongside them.
The confessor who traveled with Joan, Jean Pasquerel, testified that as Joan “was going into the royal lodgings that day, a man sitting on his horse near the entrance said, ‘Is not that the Maid there?’ swearing to God that if he had her for a night she would be no maid next morning. Then Joan said to the man, ‘Oh, in God’s name, do you take His name in vain when you are so near your death?’ And an hour later that man fell into the river and was drowned.” Pasquerel didn’t join Joan’s army until after their meeting at Tours, where she would be outfitted for battle, so he had not seen the event himself, but several eyewitnesses whom he considered trustworthy had confirmed it. Graham Greene’s adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan for Otto Preminger’s 1957 film of the same title compressed the transaction into a single scene in which a loutish mercenary quits the company of a gaggle of whores to try to pull Joan down from the back of her horse. “You little slut,” he says to her. “You think you’re for the officers only, do you?”
“Let the poor man be,” she scolds the squires who come to rescue her, “he’s very near his end.” The mercenary lunges toward Joan and falls to the ground dead as his fingers graze her cloak.
That a levelheaded pragmatist like Robert de Baudricourt had provided a guard for a girl who claimed to be the Virgin of Lorraine; that the captain had parted with knights and horses he could ill afford to sacrifice; that he risked his reputation by publicly supporting La Pucelle, as she called herself: La Trémoille knew the letter would have precisely the effect on Charles that his mother-in-law had intended. Simon Charles, the president of the Chamber of Accounts—considered among the dauphin’s advisers as the courtier who, according to Régine Pernoud, “most faithfully records the reactions of the King, with whom he was intimate”—testified that it was “because of that letter the King was impelled to hear her, and Joan was accorded an audience.”
But when Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy were admitted to the dauphin’s chambers upstairs, they discovered that Charles wasn’t expecting the arrival of the Maid from Lorraine. La Trémoille had intercepted the letters Joan sent from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, destroying hers and confiscating Baudricourt’s, which, upon the dauphin’s learning of its existence, he produced, demonstrating his duplicity.
“There is nothing in that court but evil,” Alain Chartier warns in Joan of Lorraine. “A weak ruler draws evil to him as a dead dog draws buzzards.”
Held downstairs in the guardhouse, Joan insisted she had a message for the dauphin and none other, but, “pressed in the King’s name to explain the reason for her mission,” and otherwise barred from his presence, she had no choice but to cooperate. There are “two reasons for which I have been sent by the King of Heaven,” Joan said. “One is to raise the siege of Orléans, the other to lead the King to Reims for his anointing and coronation.”
“When they heard this,” Simon Charles testified, “certain of the King’s counselors”—La Trémoille foremost among them—“said that he must put no trust whatever in Joan, and others said that since she claimed to have been sent by God and had something to say to the King, the King ought at least to hear her.”
Schiller introduces a fictional knight from Lorraine to convince Charles of the validity of Joan’s claim; he brings tidings of a battle never fought, with an army she had yet to command, prefiguring her victory at Orléans. “And while the generals discussed among themselves what or what not to do, and still unable to decide—before our eyes, a miracle! Suddenly a girl stepped out of the depths of the woods, a helmet on her head like some goddess of war, and beautiful yet at the same time terrifying. Her hair fell in dark curls around her neck; a sort of heavenly aura seemed to play about her figure.” The knight describes how, struck dumb with wonder, and almost against their wills, her soldiers made such an onslaught against the terrorized enemy that “it was no battle—it was butchery! Two thousand dead lie on the field, not counting those the river swallowed up: on our side not a single man was lost … She calls herself a prophetess sent by heaven and promises to save Orléans before the moon has changed.”
The precaution of a preliminary theological inquiry was undertaken immediately, before Joan was allowed an audience with the dauphin. The clerics assembled included, as one of Joan’s comrades-in-arms would testify, the king’s confessor, Gérard Machet, a University of Paris scholar, Pierre de Versailles, and a handful of bishops, including Jourdain Morin of Poitiers and Hugues de Combarel, all judged by history as “moral, serious, and ethical men,” whose responsibility was only to “provide basic confirmation of her Catholic practices, morals, and purity.” On the insistence of his advisers, Charles took the further precaution of soliciting “a respected but entirely independent opinion” from Jacques Gelu, who cautioned the yet-to-be-anointed king against any credulous embrace of Joan’s claims. Charles must not, he wrote, “make himself ridiculous in the eyes of foreign nations, the French having quite a reputation for the ease with which their nature leads them to be duped.” Joan came from Lorraine, Gelu reminded the dauphin, a region notoriously tolerant of witchcraft and one that shared a border with Burgundian sympathizers. Even were her motives pure, she was a gullible shepherdess. The wisest course was a slow one. Patience, Gelu advised, patience. Evil couldn’t be hidden indefinitely; it would have to emerge from behind mortal attempts to hide it.
If Joan was daunted by her arrival in a world so unlike her own, where wealth had the power to banish the squalor of peasant life, she betrayed no discomfort. If she felt any awe at entering the castle of a king, she showed none to her companions. Chinon, to which Charles fled when the Duke of Burgundy’s army seized Paris in 1418, was the pearl of the Loire valley, a favorite residence of kings and queens for centuries. Like the great majority of the castles in the region, it belonged to the house of Anjou—to Yolande—and had since the collapse of Roman rule, in the fifth century. Most of the structure was completed under the auspices of Henry II, who, having acquired France by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine, died within its walls in 1189. Chinon was plumbed and heated. Its halls were hung with tapestries, and the coverlets over its down-filled beds were lined with ermine. The floors were marble; there were sconces and candelabra enough to banish the dark.
But Joan’s attention was elsewhere, already beyond the château, galloping ahead of her. Long before she arrived at court, Joan had embarked on a prolonged visionary experience that would end only at her death; the ascension through social strata that delivered her to the highest level of aristocracy wasn’t so ear popping for her as it would be for the average peasant girl. Still, having known only the beauty of nature, she discovered a new form, a shining man-made splendor she couldn’t have imagined for herself: jeweled fingers and throats and hair that took more than one pair of hands to dress, clothes that required a lord have a valet and a lady a maid, and everywhere she looked silk gauze veils floating from the steeple-sharp points of the ladies’ conical hennins, for the latest fad when Joan arrived at court was the headdress history has chosen as an emblem of the era’s fashions. Crowns whose beauty couldn’t match but necessarily informed her attempts to describe the ones her angels wore. The era’s visual art betrays the conflation of earthly and heavenly riches, an equivalence introduced by the Bible. The book of Revelation’s heaven is a city of pure gold, with foundations of precious stones, each of its twelve gates made of a single pearl.
Already, the citizens of Chinon were out milling in the streets, gossiping and waiting for a chance to see the Maid. Outside its walls were growing ranks of aspiring foot soldiers, as “French people of all ages and professions leave their homes to join the army and march towards Jeanne, like the Magi following their star.” Multitudes of mostly simple folk walking with clogs on their feet, carrying axes, pitchforks, and pikes—farm implements that provided prototypes for weapons used in hand combat—“crowds of people along every road that leads from Lorraine to Chinon” came to volunteer their lives to serve in the army of the virgin warrior who had passed unmolested “through the territory of the King’s enemies, and … almost miraculously, forded many rivers in order to come to the King.”
“There is something strange about this girl,” Yolande tells Charles in The Lark, “something remarkable. Or so everybody thinks, and that’s what matters.”
With Yolande overtly propping up his resolve, Charles defied La Trémoille and his cadre of Burgundian spies and sympathizers and demanded that Joan be brought upstairs. The scene in which Joan at last meets the dauphin claims a prominent role in every telling of her story, identifying her immediate discovery of the dauphin, who had hidden himself among a crowd of courtiers, as her first significant miracle, the one that ignited the fuse of her messianic trajectory. After all, she’d never seen him or his likeness before—what other than her voices could have tipped her off? Predictably, the scene grew more fantastic with every telling, although in the case of Joan the religious truth embraced by hagiography can’t eclipse historical fact. The first meeting between Joan and Charles included only a handful of people. The second was a reenactment of the first and took place months later, after Joan had been thoroughly vetted by a Church tribunal.
“He came from on high,” Joan said of the angel who accompanied her on her initial visit, and he “went with me by the stairs to the king’s chamber.”
“Who entered first?” the examiner asked.
“The angel went in first. He came by Our Lord’s command.”
“How?”
“He came in through the door,” Joan said, and “from the door the angel stepped upon the ground and he walked towards my king.”
“How far was the distance between this angel and your king?”
“The space of a good lance-length,” she said, that distance being anywhere between nine and fourteen feet.
“And did anyone else see or hear this angel? Anyone other than you?”
“My king and several others heard and saw the voices which came to my aid,” Joan said, a characterization that evinces how oblique and cryptic she became when interviewed about angels and saints and their properties. No witness for the nullification claimed to have seen, or heard, her voices, though they trusted they were real. Not one of Joan’s contemporaries suggested she had ever lied about her experience of what she believed was a heavenly manifestation.
“Who were the others present?”
“Charles de Bourbon and perhaps three others”—Yolande, La Trémoille, and a handful of the dauphin’s closest advisers.
“When the King learned that she was approaching,” Simon Charles testified, “he withdrew behind the others; Joan, however, recognized him perfectly.”
Among the courtiers, the grand master of the king’s household and erstwhile crusader, Raoul de Gaucourt, remembered that Joan—he too called her a “poor shepherd girl”—“appeared before His Royal Majesty in great humility and utter simplicity. I heard her speak the following words to the King: ‘Most noble Lord Dauphin, I have come and am sent by God to bring help to you and your kingdom.’ ”
Joan fell to her knees before the dauphin as she did before her angels and saints, Charles being one of the few mortals before whom she lowered herself in obeisance. She was wearing what she had on the journey from Vaucouleurs—“a black doublet with hose attached, a short tunic of coarse black material, black hair, cut round, and a black cap on her head.” If she was surprised by the physical appearance of the man she had imagined countless times, she didn’t betray it. Isabeau is reputed to have been beautiful in her youth, but her children, three of whom died in infancy, were an unprepossessing lot. Charles lived to be fifty-eight, longer than any of his siblings. If his official court portrait by Jean Fouquet (Fig. 10) is not of the warts-and-all school, then the dauphin must have been repellent. The lower half of his face, with its full-lipped, petulant mouth and fleshy chin, suggested sated appetites; the eyes above his bulbous nose were, as observed by his contemporaries, small and calculating. “If he can make three sous profit on any virtue you bring him he’ll sell you out, and throw you in the corner like an empty sausage skin,” Chartier observes in Joan of Lorraine. The dauphin’s arms and legs were so spindly as to shock those who saw him when he was not upholstered in ceremonial velvet and fur but wearing his everyday green tunic. An inexpensive garment that wasn’t discarded but repaired when the elbows gave out, it demonstrated well enough the poverty into which France’s court had descended. Though Joan would find herself increasingly impatient with Charles’s vacillation and what seemed like timidity, and he would sacrifice her life to his ambition, she never judged him. She saw no wrong in righteously criticizing most of the rest of the world, either collectively or one man at a time, but Charles was God’s anointed. If she believed she could budge his resistance to undertaking military maneuvers he perceived as risks and she understood as opportunities, Joan would remonstrate with him for an hour, but she regarded Charles as she did the pope, both representatives of divine will who stood outside the reach of mortal censure—as did she.
Despite the protests of La Trémoille and Archbishop Regnault de Chartres, the dauphin agreed under pressure from Yolande to retire with Joan to a separate room. “The Maid talked with our lord the King in private,” Joan’s squire, Jean d’Aulon, wrote of the initial meeting, “and told him certain secrets that I do not know.”
“After hearing her,” Simon Charles added, “the King appeared to be joyous.” By all accounts, the chronically indecisive and ineffectual dauphin emerged from the private audience radiating optimism and confidence, suddenly appearing as a man capable of rule.
Whatever transpired between the dauphin and the Maid has fueled six centuries of curiosity. Joan refused to discuss it at all, not even to save her life.
“What sign did you bring to Charles showing him you came from God?” the examiner asked repeatedly.
“Go and ask him,” Joan said. “I have already told you that you will not drag this from my lips.”
While Joan’s testimony about her private audience with the dauphin fails to address the obvious point of her judges’ questions—just how exactly had the divine manifested itself?—there’s little sense in parsing each of her inconsistent responses to exhume a truth from their vivisection, not any more than in constructing rationales to explain the inconsistency of her comments, when Joan refused to make any other than a qualified oath to her examiner.
“You may well ask me such things, that to some I shall answer truly, and to others I shall not.” She swore to tell the truth only about what she—not her judges—considered the subject matter of her trial for heresy and witchcraft and refused to divulge her private experience of God. Why would she when, as she said, she was “more afraid of failing the voices by saying what is displeasing to them, than of not answering you”? They were welcome to call other witnesses, she told them; those of her party knew well that the voice was sent to Joan from God, and they knew this voice.
If Charles gave any account of the sign Joan gave him, it was many years after the fact, and history is left with little more than secondhand hearsay from the man Joan called her gentil dauphin.*2 Pierre Sala, a courtier and chronicler during the reign of Charles’s son and successor, Louis XI, wrote that toward the end of his life the king had confided in his chamberlain Guillaume Gouffier, whose duties required him to sleep in Charles’s bedroom. Gouffier told Sala that Charles had made a “humble silent request in prayer to Our Lord … in which he begged him devoutly that if it were true that he was His heir … might it please God to protect and defend him.” Otherwise, he asked that God allow him to escape to the court of one of his allies, in Spain or Scotland. Joan, Charles said, had known the prayer he made, known it in enough detail to convince the dauphin of her legitimacy. As all of France understood Charles’s predicament, and suffered his indecision, any of his subjects might guess the nature of his prayers. Whether it was what Joan said, a repetition of his words so precise as to be miraculous, or the fervor with which she said it that convinced the dauphin is impossible to know. The atmosphere at court had been so long imbued with pessimism and anxiety that Joan’s passionate certainty separated her from everyone else the dauphin knew.
Among the nobles summoned to court so that they might see and judge the Maid for themselves was Charles’s cousin Jean II, the Duke of Alençon, a witness for the nullification trial. “When Joan came to find the King,” Alençon testified, “he was at the town of Chinon, and I at Saint Florent,” no more than a day’s journey away.
I was riding out on a quail hunt when a message came that a Maid had come to the King who maintained that she was sent by God to drive away the English and to raise the siege which these English had laid to Orléans. That is why I went to the King the next day, at Chinon, where he was, and I found Joan talking with the King. Just as I drew near, Joan asked who I was, and the King replied that I was the Duke of Alençon. Then Joan said, “You have come at a good time. The more of the blood royal there are together, the better it will be.”
Alençon had assumed his title as a minor, in 1415, when he was six years old and his father died at Agincourt. Now twenty, the man Joan called her “Pretty Duke,” presumably because he was handsome in the full flower of his manhood, was among Charles’s intimates. “After dinner the King went to walk in the fields,” Alençon remembered of the day he arrived, “and there Joan ran at a tilt, and when I saw her do this—saw her wield a lance and run at a tilt—I gave her a horse.”
Having navigated eleven nights on horseback under circumstances that demanded absolute control of her mount, Joan had proved herself better than an accomplished rider with remarkable stamina. She had a way with animals that people noted and that she would have been quick to identify as an expression of God’s will. “I saw her completely covered by plate armor except for her head,” a knight wrote to his mother from court. “A small axe in her hand,” she was waiting for her page to subdue her “great black charger, which reared up fiercely at the entrance of her lodging and would not allow her to mount. Then she said, ‘Take him to the cross,’ which was in front of the church down the street. There she mounted without him moving, as if he had been tied.”
Alençon’s gift of a destrier was no small compliment but a costly tribute to the girl astride a galloping stallion, wielding a weapon twice as long as she was tall. A destrier could cost as much as fifty livres; now Joan had two.
“When the King had seen and heard her,” Raoul de Gaucourt testified, “he wanted more information about her. So he put her in the care of Guillaume Bellier, who was the master of his house, the captain of Troyes, and my lieutenant at Chinon. His wife was a most devout woman with a very high reputation.” A veteran crusader appointed by Charles as the grand master of his household and sent by him to the pope to initiate the nullification proceedings, Raoul de Gaucourt was careful to allude to the high reputation of Joan’s hostess because it was she who, in her de facto role as chaperone, guaranteed the preservation of Joan’s chastity, which had been confirmed by Yolande herself, attended by Lady de Gaucourt and Lady de Trèves.
“When Joan came to the King she was twice examined by women to discover what she was, man or woman, wanton or virgin,” Pasquerel said, his recollection corroborated by Jean d’Aulon, who was chosen by Charles to serve as Joan’s squire and “keep personal watch over Joan because he was the wisest knight and the man of the most approved honesty at his court.”
“The Queen said and told the King that she and her ladies had found her beyond any doubt to be a true and intact virgin,” Pasquerel testified, “with no signs of corruption or violation.”
Joan had been lucky, some would say blessed, as well as chaste, at a time when the exploration of a girl’s genitalia was an almost meaningless exercise, as it wasn’t medically possible in the fifteenth century to determine with any certitude that a girl was a virgin, especially not if she was athletic and, like Joan, had been on horseback for a week and a half. She’d had more than enough physical activity to tear so delicate a membrane of flesh without her even knowing it had happened; a girl’s hymen can easily be broken without pain or bleeding. In the course of three years, the young woman whose identity was inseparable from her virginity would endure one invasive inspection of her vaginal canal after another; if she ever voiced an objection, it was not recorded. Probably she was as stoic about the need to prove her virtue to those who would otherwise doubt her claim as she was about any other of the sacrifices her vocation demanded of her. And the blessing did hold, as even the exertions of warfare would leave the physical proof of virginity intact for her inquisitors to first double-check and then plot to destroy.
For the few days before Joan was sent to Poitiers for what would be a far lengthier and more thorough examination by clerics than she could have anticipated, the dauphin ordered that she be lodged in the Tour de Coudray, the keep embraced by the westernmost fortifications. “I lived in that tower with Joan,” Louis de Coutes testified, he “and a certain Raymond” the two apprentice knights assigned to be Joan’s pages. “All the time that she was there I was with her continuously, all day long,” Louis said. “At night, she had women with her, and I well remember that during the time that she was in that tower of Coudray many of high rank came on several occasions to talk with Joan. What they said or did, I do not know, as I always ran off when I saw them coming; and I do not know who they were.” Fourteen or fifteen at the time, Louis had been learning the art of war from Raoul de Gaucourt and was far more impressed by the status of courtiers than his lower-born mistress, whose piety struck him as exceptional. “I often saw her on her knees and praying, as I supposed. However, I was never able to hear what she said, although sometimes she wept.”
A hundred and fifteen years earlier, Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, had slept in Joan’s tower bedroom—as a prisoner, not a guest. By 1312, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, known informally as the Knights Templar, had been disbanded, its members accused of heresy, apostasy, and idolatry. For two centuries, the order had held Europe in the kind of thrall Joan would inspire, its history indivisible from that of the crusades, its heraldry still familiar: a bloodred cross on a white ground. Knights Templar were held to embody the valor of the knight and the chastity of the cleric; their embrace by the public adumbrated Joan’s, as did their fate. In debt to the order and unable to wring enough taxes out of his people to finance an army, on Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV sacrificed the Templars to the replenishment of his coffers. By then, the organization’s high-minded vows of poverty had long yielded to the greed awakened by the sight of plunder, easy to perceive as recompense for the dangers and hardships of murdering infidels. Their tax-exempt status—granted by the pope—accelerated the Templars’ arrival at wealth so fantastic that some became moneylenders and went into banking. But it was their autonomy that made it imperative to obliterate the order rather than seize its assets. To furnish the grounds for the arrest of some two thousand Knights, “the King’s prosecutors dragged into the light every dark superstition and fearful imagining of sorcery and Devil-worship that lay along the roots of the medieval mind,” suborned witnesses to provide false testimony, and extracted confessions under torture.
As Joan’s trial would demonstrate, the injustice inherent in medieval ecclesiastical courts inspired the system’s slavishly scrupulous maintenance of the appearance of justice. Sentencing required proof of guilt, even if that so-called proof was accessed by illegal and immoral means. Jacques de Molay, who had been Philip IV’s friend and his daughter’s godfather, was burned at the stake in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, after proclaiming his and the order’s innocence. In the end, sixty-seven Knights Templar abjured their forced confessions and were condemned as lapsed heretics and burned alive before a crowd, satisfying the same need as would Joan’s execution, for propitiation in the form of a human sacrifice that recast a violent crucifixion the Church had yet to convincingly package or contain within the mystery of the Eucharist. The symbolic reenactment of the Mass couldn’t quench the Church Militant’s thirst for real blood—not in the fifteenth century—and for as long as the Inquisition co-opted God’s singular right to judge, and smite, it denied the power of Jesus’s sacrifice to redeem mortal sin.
Jesus wouldn’t have had to look as far back as 115 years to read his fate—only three, as it was immediately after the Romans executed John the Baptist for publicly denouncing Herod’s incestuous marriage that Jesus assumed the Baptist’s flock and his apocalyptic message. Warnings abounded, but they weren’t warnings he needed to predict his martyrdom, as he was reported to have done in all four of the Gospels. The Sanhedrin set spies among Jesus’s followers, spies whose livelihoods, if not their lives, depended on finding something useful, or just usable. “For many bore false witness against him,” the Evangelist Mark wrote, adding that “their witness [testimony] did not agree.” It took so little, really, to set a man on the road to Golgotha, an abandoned quarry immediately outside Jerusalem’s city walls. Chosen for its elevation and visibility, Golgotha was a mound of barren rock the Romans forested with crucifixions, leaving the dead to hang for vultures to pick at until their bones fell to the ground for carrion beetles to polish. They served as a reminder of the cost of refusing to submit to an orthodox priesthood that asserted its exclusive right to mediate the most private among human experiences, that of the divine.
The record of Joan’s examination at Poitiers has been lost. Once crowned, Charles might have had it destroyed because of its potential to embarrass and alienate those nobles who were identified as enemies in 1429 but had subsequently returned their allegiance to the French throne. More likely, its findings and opinions were inconvenient enough to the Inquisition that all copies were searched out and destroyed. But there were a few witnesses and chroniclers who described the proceedings. Alain Chartier, a political commentator as well as a poet, stressed Joan’s unusual intellectual capacities—“she appeared to have studied at University rather than cared for sheep in the fields”—and though the Poitiers record itself is lost, a document accepted as the formal conclusions of the theologians who examined Joan was copied and distributed in the spring of 1429. While the Poitiers inquiry is generally understood to have been a far less formal hearing than the Inquisition’s meticulously conducted trial at Rouen, it was undertaken by a formidable gathering of male clerics, many more than the hastily assembled Chinon tribunal, and was the third investigation into Joan’s character—or the third invasive delay Joan would endure—before she was allowed to take up her quest. The dauphin and his retinue accompanied Joan to Poitiers, the provisional capital of what was left of France and the home of its royal parliament from 1418 to 1436. Joan was by now the subject of broadcasts given by town if not royal criers. Her entourage wasn’t that of a king, handpicked from among the highest echelon of society, but it was hundreds strong, the royal party dogged by crowds of peasants following Joan to what she knew was to be a test, but not the nature of that test. Sola cum multis, infima de summis, indocta cum doctis, foemina cum viris, Chartier called it: one against many, lowly against exalted, illiterate against scholars, a woman against men.
In reconstructing the examination from disparate documents, historians estimate eighteen clerics assembled to question Joan, representing members of the Dominican, Carmelite, Franciscan, and Benedictine orders. “Besides myself,” Seguin Seguin testified, “there had been summoned Master Jean Lombard, professor of theology in the University of Paris, Guillaume Le Maire, canon of Poitiers and bachelor in theology, Guillaume Aymeri, professor of theology and a Dominican, Friar Pierre Turelure, Master Jacques Madelon, and several others … We were told that we had the King’s orders to interrogate Joan and to report our opinion of her to the royal Council; and we were sent to the house of Master Jean Rabateau at Poitiers, where Joan was lodged, to examine her.” Gobert Thibault, one of the dauphin’s squires, remembered two more professors of theology who had been called to Poitiers: “Master Pierre de Versailles, and Master Jean Érault.” In sum, they represented “a gathering of the finest clergy in non-occupied France.” None was allowed to reserve judgment; each was obliged to either approve or disapprove of Joan’s mission.
For some time, it was assumed that De quadam puella (Concerning a certain young girl), an undated treatise by Jean Gerson, the éminence grise among fifteenth-century French theologians, had been composed as a resource for the Poitiers commission. Included in the first edition of Gerson’s collected writings, De quadam puella was probably not written by the University of Paris theologian himself; a later edition calls it the work of one of his followers. More problematically, it alludes to battles that took place under Joan’s leadership, months after she had been given her army as a result of the Poitiers findings. No matter the document’s date or author, it was Jean Gerson who established the criteria for discretio spirituum—the “discernment of spirits”—articulating what became the clergy’s standard method of inquiry, employed at Poitiers as it would have been anywhere else in the realm. Despite his renown, Gerson wasn’t so lofty in his erudition that he didn’t abridge his treatise De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis (On distinguishing true from false visions) to a handy ditty:
Ask Who, What, Why.
To Whom, What kind, From where.
“By following Holy Writ [Scripture],” Joan would have to prove herself through her judges’ “human prudence, inquiring about her life, her morals, and her intention … and through devout prayer, asking for a sign.” Joan’s “soul must be probed as to whether it be supernatural, as sacred writ expects it to be done,” recorded the anonymous poet whose summary of the proceedings was included among the nullification trial’s records. The “probing” of her soul, according to Jean, Duke of Alençon, was harsh—enough that she sought him out, distraught to the point of tears, but certainly not cowed. “Afterward, when she was taking her meal with me,” he testified, “Joan told me that she had been very closely examined, but that she knew more and could do more than she had told her questioners.” The poet, who is assumed to have been among the clergy present at Poitiers, bore witness to its being just as much a witch trial as the one that ended Joan’s life in Rouen. Each time her fate lay in the hands of worldly men, with worldly ambitions. The difference would lie in their agendas, and thus their verdicts.
Scriptural guidance cited in De quadam puella amounted to twelve “propositions,” of which six were offered in support of La Pucelle and six against. Old Testament prophets were summoned, and Old Testament female warriors as well, furnishing precedents against which to measure Joan. Christine de Pizan would include the same exemplary members of the female sex—Deborah, Esther, and Judith—in her panegyric “The Song of Joan.” In fact, the fifth chapter of Judges, considered the “oldest remaining considerable fragment of Hebrew literature,” is commonly referred to as the Song of Deborah, a prophetess whose militarist agenda neatly prefigures Joan’s and whose exhortations to the general of Israel’s army sound very like those Joan would use to rouse her battle-weary soldiers. Their plight mirrored that of the Israelites, who, having dependably once again done evil in the sight of the Lord, had subsequently been sold into the hands of the Canaanites. The fourth of Israel’s pre-monarchic judges, Deborah went to the leader of the Israelite army, Barak, and said to him, “Up; for this [is] the day in which the Lord has given [the enemy general] Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you?” The book of Esther was most likely conceived as “propaganda for the observance in Palestine of a festival brought home by Jews from the Dispersion” in the form of an origin myth for Purim, the holiday celebrating the Jews’ escape from Persia. It’s widely considered a historical novella, and its titular heroine is a Jewish orphan who marries the king of Persia and risks death to expose “a subtly planned anti-Semitic pogrom.” An apocryphal text, Judith represents a nationalist, pragmatic religion that equated piety with patriotism, inspiring its protagonist to seek out Holofernes, the leader of the invading Assyrian army. After ingratiating herself into Holofernes’s trust as well as his tent, Judith waits until he falls into a drunken sleep, then cuts off his head and takes it home as proof of God’s enduring love for the Israelites.
“The Lord has struck him down by the hand of a woman,” Judith tells her people when she shows them the Syrian general’s head.
But scriptural precedents meant only so much in the face of Jesus’s warning that his followers beware false prophets. “Many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he,’ ” Jesus said, “and they will lead many astray.” If Joan were a true prophet, the author of De quadam puella asserted, “she should be a person of excellent saintliness” and not a girl who was “inclined toward a certain indecency of youths, riding on horseback while dressed in the clothes of a man,” having shorn off what, in the words of Paul—recalled as a witness for the prosecution—“had been given to her for a covering.” It wasn’t only sumptuary laws that forbade cross-dressing; in Scripture it amounted to taboo. Once Saul, a Pharisee who persecuted early Christians, Paul served laws as old as Moses: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”
Paul was spiritually a Jew, legally a Roman, and intellectually a Greek—an ideal passport for a proselytizer—and he not only spread the word but subjected it to his own revisions, including not only a pretext for misogyny but also its applications, even in a faith that promised, as he articulated it in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” On earth, women were subservient and ever reminded that they were the sources of pollution and death. Adam was not the one deceived, Paul wrote to his disciple Timothy. “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Paul wrote a third of the New Testament; theologians consider his thirteen of the New Testament’s twenty-seven books*3 to have had more influence on Christian doctrine than the contribution of any other of its authors. Church leaders continue to cite his exhortation “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection” to validate excluding women from positions of leadership. “I permit,” Paul wrote to Timothy, “no woman to touch or have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”
“I asked her again whether she believed in God,” Seguin Seguin reported of the girl who spoke to angels. “She answered, ‘Yes, more than you do.’ ” The dean of the faculty of Poitiers, Seguin recalled the Dominican professor of theology Master Guillaume Aymeri’s challenge to Joan: “You said the voice told you that God wishes to deliver the people of France from their present calamities. If He wishes to deliver them,” Aymeri said, “there is no need of soldiers.”
The response Seguin described twenty-seven years after the fact was exasperated, indignant, and hardly the words of a girl overawed by her interrogators. “In God’s name!” Joan said. “The soldiers will fight, and God will give them the victory.” It was an application of what Joan’s comrades-in-arms remembered as her favorite aphorism: “God helps those who help themselves.” Included by Benjamin Franklin in his Almanack, the motto is often mistaken as a quotation from Scripture—even though it ignores or appears to discount the doctrine of grace and predates Christianity by at least six hundred years. The moral to Aesop’s “Hercules and the Waggoner,” it was used in a number of Greek tragedies, including Philoctetes, Sophocles’s play set during the Trojan War, memorably resolved by Odysseus’s idea to build a big horse and fill it with shock troops. “Heaven never helps the men who will not act,” he says.
Trust in God and keep your powder dry. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. In one form or another, the motto has always appealed to soldiers—a natural call to arms from Joan’s angels, who were no less impatient than she and equally irritated by hairsplitting.
“What language do your voices speak?” Seguin asked.
“A better tongue than you do,” Joan answered. The dean testified that as he was from Languedoc, in the South of France, he spoke a vernacular heavily inflected by spoken Latin, and hence not as purely French.*4
The girl who bristled at being called a simple shepherdess certainly didn’t sound like one, and the letters she would dictate to the English betray the pugnacious relish with which they were composed, as well as the oratorical flair she’d exhibit under interrogation, the pleasure she took in being “subtle with an altogether feminine subtlety,” as one embittered Rouen judge characterized her ability to sway her listeners. In the end, the scriptural allusion that most effectively supported Joan’s cause wasn’t contributed by a Bible scholar but one she summoned herself.
“God cannot wish us to believe in you,” Seguin said to Joan, “unless he sends us a sign, to show that we should believe in you. We cannot advise the King to entrust you with soldiers, whom you would run into danger, merely on your bare assertion. Have you nothing more to say?”
She did. “I have not come to Poitiers to make signs,” she told all eighteen judges present. “But lead me to Orléans, and I will show you the signs I was sent to make.”
It didn’t take a cleric to recognize Joan’s rebuke as an echo of Jesus’s to the self-righteous Pharisees who asked him to prove his divinity with a sign sent from God. “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign,” Jesus told them, a generation that served the letter of the law before its spirit and one whose wickedness he presented in terms of unlawful sexual conduct. Implicitly, Joan said as much to the sanctimonious priests who demanded a sign from her. By the time the discernment trial was over, the subject who had disingenuously warned the Poitiers examiners of her ignorance, assuring them, “I do not know A from B,” had had occasion to remind them, “There is more in our Lord’s books than in yours.”
If Joan was guilty of anything, it was impertinence, and this the Poitiers commission forgave, concluding that “no evil is to be found in her, only goodness, humility, virginity, devotion, honesty, and simplicity.” Beyond that, Joan inspired the people to “much pious belief, to the praise of God.”
Or, as the Earl of Warwick, Joan’s jailer in Rouen, summarizes for Anouilh, “In the end they agreed to use Joan as a sort of a flagpole to nail their colors to: an attractive little mascot, well qualified to charm the general public into letting themselves be killed.”
Had Yolande determined the length—as well as the outcome—of the Poitiers deliberations? No gathering of French eminences could evade her influence, and, calculated or not, to withhold the Maid from the populace for a few weeks was an effective tease. Mobs are volatile. Most rulers fear them. And the violent uprising of the Jacquerie was well within the court’s memory. Two generations earlier, the imposition of punitively high taxes on the underclass (whom nobles derided as Jacquerie for the padded vests, orjacques, that distinguished them as peasants) ignited riots directed at the lords who maligned and ill-treated the peasants on whose labor they depended. Encouraged by Étienne Marcel, Paris’s provost of merchants—a title equivalent to mayor—a group of agitators gathered one spring evening in 1358 in the cemetery at Saint-Leu, some twenty-five miles north of the city, to plan an attack on those nobles they judged so autocratic as to have withdrawn their allegiance to the king. The revolt was extinguished within three weeks, but the atrocities committed in the name of social justice provided an indelible reminder to the upper classes of how deep was the commoners’ enmity and what savagery it could inspire—enough to capture and disembowel a knight before his family, winding his intestines on a spool while he was still alive, roast his gutted corpse on a spit, and force-feed him to his wife and children. It took a ruler like Yolande, whose confidence in her earthly power matched that of a messiah’s trust in divine assistance, to cultivate so volatile a means of furthering her political agenda as mass hysteria. Without any other marvel to occupy its attention, let alone dangle a promise of salvation, the populace made do with spreading rumors, as ever more people streamed into Chinon, drawn to a swiftly widening pinprick of hope.
On March 27, 1429, Joan was officially presented to the wider court. No princess in all Europe has ever made so memorable a debut. The Count of Vendôme, one of Yolande’s retinue, escorted Joan into the Grande Salle on the upper floor of the Château du Milieu, a “splendid apartment … some seventy feet long by twenty-five feet wide, with a vast hooded fireplace at one end, three large windows overlooking the gardens of the inner court, and one smaller window overlooking the town, the river, and the landscape beyond.” Once the staring, hushed crowd had parted to allow Joan and the count to make their way to the throne, the count presented her to the man sitting there. It was not Charles. Before Joan’s entrance, the dauphin had explained the ruse to all those assembled: as a means of testing the counsel of Joan’s voices, he would change clothes with one of his courtiers, who would take Charles’s place on the dais while the dauphin hid among the crowd. In Marco de Gastyne’s La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc,Joan herself suggests the challenge, conveyed to Charles by one of his courtiers, and in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan the dauphin exchanges clothes with Gilles de Rais, the notorious Breton knight who fought alongside Joan and whose career as a serial rapist and murderer of as many as two hundred children would inspire the creation of Bluebeard and end in his execution by hanging in 1440, at the age of thirty-six. There’s no reason to imagine it was Gilles de Rais who pretended to be the dauphin—no evidence that Gilles de Rais was present or that the dauphin switched places with anyone, only that “he withdrew behind the others,” as Simon Charles reported. But the conceit allowed Shaw, and others who followed his lead, to call attention to what had been a genuine and striking coincidence. Although he did not turn to the occult and the sacrifice of children until after Joan was executed—as if there were no lust so evilly ravenous that her proximity couldn’t dismantle it—Gilles de Rais had in fact been one of Joan’s comrades-in-arms, and as such invited their overt juxtaposition, as stark as black and white: the most vile and destructive manifestation of lust side by side with luminous, absolute purity. Joan’s unquestioning acceptance of any soldier for God, no matter how burdened by sin, recalls the embrace of Christ, who turned no sinner away, a narrative flourish that sanctifies Joan and redeems one of the great villains of history.
Joan wasn’t fooled by the impostor but went immediately to the dauphin. “Joan recognized him perfectly,” Simon Charles remembered.
“I recognized him among many others by the counsel of my voice,” Joan told the Rouen judges, “which revealed him to me.”
“How do you come to know me?” Brecht’s Meat King asks Joan of the Stockyards.
“Because you have the cruelest face,” she tells him.
“Was there an angel over the dauphin’s head when you saw him for the first time?” the examiner asked.
“If there was,” Joan testified, “I did not see it.”
“Was there a light?”
“There were three hundred knights and fifty torches, without counting the spiritual light, and I seldom have revelations but there is a light.”
As Yolande intended, the crowd was thrilled and astounded by the immediate demonstration of Joan’s supernatural power. Among them, only a handful knew Joan had already picked the dauphin out of a gathering so small it would be surprising if an intelligent and observant girl hadn’t identified the dauphin, if only by virtue of the deference the others present were required to show him. That they kept silent bears witness to the force of Yolande’s grip. Among that handful, only Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of the king’s household, testified for the nullification, characterizing Joan’s presentation as a single event, rather than an original meeting followed by a subsequent, amplified reenactment. Gaucourt was eighty-five when he testified; the conflation was likely an innocent one. Twenty-seven years had passed, a long time for an old man to resist the impulse to revise the beginning of Joan’s career to predict its subsequent glory, countless retellings and thus endless reimagining of his one claim to fame, which depended entirely on his proximity to “that poor shepherd girl.”
The focus of every eye in the packed room, Joan fell to her knees to embrace the dauphin’s legs, the same obeisance she made to her angels. Perhaps she had been coached to execute “the same bows and reverences customarily made before the King,” as Jean Chartier recorded in Chronique de Charles VII, “just as if she had been brought up at court.” She was wearing the rough black traveling clothes appropriate to Yolande’s production, rather than the new finery she preferred. It’s difficult to know if or how much Joan endorsed Yolande’s use of creative deception. There’s little reason to assume, and no evidence to suggest, she disapproved of what had been orchestrated to garner support for her mission or that she didn’t understand by now that such demonstrations were useful, even necessary. After all, she’d been working assiduously for many months to enlist the support of a fraction of the number of courtiers Yolande convinced in an hour by staging and amplifying what had, after all, already happened. Joan’s entrance was an announcement made to courtiers, an entirely mortal transaction; it was not a sign recklessly demanded of God. If Joan hadn’t already understood the power of simple gestures and images to sway a multitude, she did now. Under interrogation, she conflated the original and the restaged versions; the composite included details from each meeting.
“Was any one else with you when you showed the sign to your king?”
“I think there was not, although many people were fairly near.”
Asked again, two days later, after the interrogation had been moved from the public venue to Joan’s cell—her judges’ hostility that much more oppressive in close quarters—she changed her report, claiming that what had occurred privately during the original first meeting had been witnessed by the crowd assembled for her presentation to the court. “God willed that those of my party who were there should see the sign,” she said, and thus take confidence in the divine assistance she promised. She added that it was not only her supporters who were impressed but also those who had called her motives or her sanity into question.
“The clergy ceased opposing me when they had recognized the sign,” she told the examiner, a crown “so rich and precious that I do not know how to count or appreciate its riches. It signified that the dauphin would gain the kingdom of France.”
“Does this sign still exist?”
“Yes,” she said, “certainly, and it will last for a thousand years and more.”
“Where is this sign?”
“Preserved with the king’s treasure.”
“Did you yourself see it on his head?”
“I cannot tell you without perjury,” Joan said. “My voices have not given me leave to speak of it.”
“Was it of gold or silver? Were there precious stones? What was this sign? Was it a crown?”
“It was a crown, yes, but no man could describe so rich a thing as this sign.”
“Did the crown have a good odor? Did it glitter?”
“Yes, it was of good odor and it will always be so, as long as it is well and duly guarded.”
To the medieval mind, Joan’s characterization of a heavenly sign as having material substance, rather than confined to a mystical realm only she could see, wasn’t nonsensical or even incredible. If devils and saints took on a convincing corporeal reality, so could a sign. Too, just as it was natural to express love, whether human or divine, in concrete material terms, so was it unavoidable to use mortal measures to communicate things of the spirit, splendid raiment “fully adequate to express spiritual purity.” The crown, Joan said, had been carried to the king by “an angel from God, and from none other but Him. After I left the gathering I learned that more than three hundred people saw the sign,” including Charles and his courtiers. If the examiner didn’t believe her, he could send to the king to ask him.
“What reverence did you show the sign when it came to your king?” the examiner pressed.
“I uncovered my head, and I knelt down many times. I thanked Our Lord for my deliverance from the trouble arising from the opposition of the clergy.”
“Of what appearance and size was this angel from God?”
“I have not leave to tell you that.”
“Was he alone, or did other angels accompany him?”
“There were others as well.”
“And these angels, were they all of the same appearance?”
“Some of them were fairly like one another, and some were not, as far as I could see. Some had wings or were crowned, others were not … And in their company were St. Catherine and St. Margaret who were with the … angels up to the very chamber of the king. Send to the king and he will tell you,” she said.
The examiner didn’t send to the king, not any more than he called any other witness to confirm or deny what was an unusual report from a mystic, that others present, and not just a few, had shared her visions. But what witness was needed to demonstrate that Joan believed a heavenly host appeared to bestow a mystical crown on Charles and thereby establish his birthright? That she asked for her testimony to be corroborated by the king of France, no less, was proof enough.
*1 Le Berger would suffer the predictable reversal and find himself reviled and condemned to death, although “Le Berger was spared the misery of long imprisonment and the farce of a protracted trial, but was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river by the English without more ado.”
*2 In this context, gentil is understood as an antecedent to the title of dauphin, an indication of caste, as in “gentleman,” rather than its modern translation as “kindly.”
*3 While Paul wrote nearly half of the New Testament’s books, they represent just under a third of the text.
*4 Langue d’oïl and langue d’oc were the two predominant medieval French dialects, each translated as the “language of yes.” Oïl—now oui—was used as the affirmative in northern and central France, oc in the south.