On April 6, 1429, a week after her presentation to the court at Chinon, Joan arrived in Tours, about five miles northwest of Chinon, to be equipped for battle. She was accompanied by her squire, Jean d’Aulon, her page, Louis de Coutes, and the army’s new bursar, Jean de Metz, to whom Charles’s treasurer, Hémon Raguier, had entrusted nearly six thousand livres to disperse among the two dozen or so commanders in Joan’s army to cover the expenses of waging war. While Joan is popularly imagined as the leader of a“peasant army,” the core of her troops was “composed of the usual groups of aristocrats, mercenaries, municipal levies, and other typical elements.” Joan did attract a great number of soldiers who had heretofore avoided joining a losing battle, but they were not different from the men-at-arms who typically volunteered. Knights were noblemen; they traveled with retinues that might include their wives, children, footmen, personal chefs, valets for the men, and maids for the ladies; a medieval army was followed by merchants eager to capitalize on the ready market it represented. Several entries in Raguier’s 1429 account book relate specifically to Joan, the first being, “To the Master Armorer, for a complete harness for the Maid, 100 livres tournois.” As the armor was intended to protect the body of a girl, not a man, it was necessarily made to order, and thus costly. “She was armed as quickly as possible,” Jean Chartier wrote, “with a complete harness such as would have suited a knight … born in the king’s court.”
To furnish context where no exchange rate exists, the armor worn at Agincourt by the Duke of Orléans had cost only eighty-five livres. Joan was outfitted in what was called “white armor”—not white in color but simple, lacking the decorative flourishes of ceremonial armor. Luster was determined by cost. Not all suits of armor were shining and silver, “the ‘steel’ used in the age of plate armor … quite different from the homogeneous refined material in use today. It was a very streaky steel that could vary from wrought iron to medium carbon steel in the same piece and often had a good deal of slag throughout.” The work of a master armorer was “handed down from grandfathers and fathers to sons and grandsons.”
From one fitting to the next, there was never a bride more excited by her gown than Joan was by her armor. Between her clothing and what was commonly called a “harness,” Joan wore a heavy, quilted doublet, stuffed, like a mattress, with horsehair. A gambeson, as it was called, the vest cushioned the body and prevented the suit’s metal plates from chafing and abrading the skin, offering just that much more resistance to arrows released with enough momentum to pierce plate. In fact, those who couldn’t afford plate armor often wore a gambeson alone. Chain mail*1 sewn to the gambeson covered whatever plates of steel could not—the backs of the knees, for example—thus providing full-body protection. Contrary to the irresistible popular misconception, epitomized by the farcical image of a knight hoisted by a crane onto the back of his charger, a suit of armor no more immobilized the wearer than protective gear does a present-day firefighter. A harness consisted of enough individual elements to allow a nearly full range of motion, and the weight of well-crafted armor was distributed evenly over the body. Experiments with genuine fifteenth-century plate armor have demonstrated that even an untrained man can mount and dismount a horse, lie flat on the ground and get easily to his feet, run, and move his arms freely, all without discomfort—so long as his armor was properly fitted, as Joan’s certainly was. The polished breastplate included a flange attached to its right side, an arrêt de cuirasse. This “arrest” stabilized the lance for better aim and allowed a mounted knight to hold the weapon firmly enough under his—her—arm to stop it from sliding backward on impact. With an arrêt, the entire breastplate and gambeson absorbed the shock of a successful strike and minimized injury to the right shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand. A mounted knight required no codpiece, as the front bow of a war saddle was armored to protect the groin. Three styles of helmet were available to Joan. The open-faced bascinet (Fig. 12) was no more than a steel skullcap with a pointed crown; the sallet, with a rounder crown, offered more protection and might include a visor; the capeline, with a brim, was best for scaling walls. According to her comrades, Joan “often went about with her head bare,” as did many military commanders of high rank.
There is no teller of Joan’s story, including—especially—Joan, who doesn’t pay careful attention to her swords. Most biographers recognize the subject as inviolate and honor Joan’s account of them. She’d arrived in Chinon carrying the weapon Robert de Baudricourt gave her when she left Vaucouleurs. It was a blade of no distinction, a concession to her need for protection while crossing enemy territory—a place keeper for the sword that would identify Joan, just as Excalibur had King Arthur. While in Tours, Joan “sent for a sword which was in the church of Ste. Catherine de Fierbois, behind the altar,” she testified. She’d known its location, she told the examiner, not because she’d discovered it herself during the hours she spent in the church but because she had learned of it “through her voices” months after she’d left Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. “Immediately it was found there, all rusted over,” she said. “It was in the ground, rusted over, and upon it were five crosses.”
“You had been to Ste. Catherine de Fierbois?”
“Yes. From there I sent letters to my king, and from there I went to Chinon. In Fierbois, I heard Mass three times on the same day.” Given her continual attendance, Joan must have come to know the monks to whom she wrote “asking if it was their pleasure that I should have the sword, and they sent it to me. It was not buried deep behind the altar. I believe I wrote saying it was behind.
“The local priests gave me a scabbard, as did those of Tours,” Joan told the examiner, “one of crimson velvet, and the other of cloth of gold.” As neither was practical for use in battle, she “had another made of very strong leather.”
“Who brought you this sword?”
“I never saw the man who fetched it. But I know he was a merchant, an armorer of Tours. As soon as the sword was found, the priests rubbed it, and the rust fell off at once without effort.”
Comparisons to King Arthur’s sword are unavoidable, each a phallic blade possessed by the female earth and withheld until its rightful owner emerges, Arthur’s embedded up to the hilt in stone,*2 Joan’s hidden entirely, under dirt and rust. In the Middle Ages metallurgy was regarded as a sister art to alchemy, and a sword, like a saint’s relic, was an object accorded reality in both natural and supernatural spheres. Metallurgy was magic that transformed matter, a power that in Scripture belonged only to God, who gave David the sword with which he slew Goliath. In the book of Revelation a “sharp, two-edged sword” of righteousness issues from the risen Christ’s mouth.
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth,” Jesus said. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc uses the shortcut of a mystical dream sequence to deliver a physical sword to the young Joan’s side. Released in 1999, the film is laced with psychosexual trip wires, trimming Joan’s vocation to fit a plot of mortal vengeance. The first to wield Joan’s sword is a looting enemy soldier, who seizes it and gores her beloved sister to death before he rapes her, violating both blade and victim. The image isn’t new or even repurposed. Martial d’Auvergnes’s illustrations from the fifteenth-century Vigiles du roi Charles VII depict enemy soldiers goring women wearing the floor-length red dresses of peasants. In one, a nobleman, richly robed, thrusts his sword directly into the region of her groin; below them the cobbles are splashed with blood, a decapitated head turns its eyes away. In the other, an infantryman’s blade enters a bit higher, into her lower abdomen; still, if the soldier’s aim isn’t as good as the nobleman’s, his weapon is more impressive, with its unnecessarily distinct phallic outline. TheVigiles’s Joan presides over an attack on Paris while wearing a long red skirt, the phallic hilt of an oversized sword projecting from her groin (Fig. 26). The latter is missing in the scene of her being tied to the stake, the vanquished Maid unarmored as well as unarmed, her long hair restored. The delicate, mannered gestures of the genre can’t mask the murderous fantasies Joan inspired, using elements of an alphabet of ancient symbols we all recognize: a man’s sword, a girl’s long hair, her dress, presenting us with equally familiar equations between, for example, the loss of virginity and death.
If, as legend holds, the sword retrieved from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois had once belonged to Charles Martel, he had buried it himself behind the altar, in secret, bequeathing it to whomever God chose as its next owner. Joan’s physical description of the five crosses etched into its blade is consistent with decorative motifs typical of the eighth, rather than the fifteenth, century. If it was Martel’s sword, it had been carried, used, and bathed in the blood of infidels by the first king of the Franks. To be given such a sword through mystical revelation was another sign that Joan was truly what she claimed to be: God’s anointed and, thus, France’s savior.
By the end of her military career, Joan would have owned five swords: Baudricourt’s gift; the one retrieved from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois; two she left on the altar of the church of Saint-Denis, outside Paris, as an offering of thanks for having been protected in battle; and one taken “as a prize of war from an Anglo-Burgundian leader.” That one, Joan said, had been particularly useful for giving “de bonnes buffes et de bons torchons”—hard buffets and clouts. And yet the only witness who testified to ever seeing Joan using a sword was Jean, Duke of Alençon, who watched her “chase a girl who was with the soldiers so hard, with her sword drawn, that she broke her sword” (Fig. 16) over the prostitute’s back, a significant blow as a battle sword typical of its time was a large weapon intended to be used with both hands and weighing as much as ten pounds. After that, in Joan of Lorraine, Dunois, the captain with whom Joan would relieve the siege of Orléans, tells La Trémoille that the whores left. “All of them. In a mess of tears and shrieks and bundles.”
Jesus, too, was described as having used physical force just once, when he made a whip of cords and with it drove the moneylenders from the temple, chasing them off before overturning their tables. Like Joan’s, his was a spontaneous, violent rejection of pollution, a righteous anger in hot pursuit of sin, protecting the sanctity of the temple—“temple” the word chosen by Paul as a metaphor for the body, especially a woman’s. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You do not belong to yourself.” In either case, architectural or physiological, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit must be preserved from corruption.
“You think you have a right to set foot in the house of God just because of your filthy Mammon, but we know where and how you got it,” Brecht’s Joan of the Stockyards accuses a broker. “We know you haven’t come by it honestly. This time, so help me, you’ve made a big mistake, and you’re going to be driven out, driven out with a club.”
“Where is that sword now?” the examiner asked Joan. “In what town?”
“I cannot say. I used it at Lagny. After, at Compiègne, I no longer had it with me,” because, Michelet conjectures, the sword from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois was the one Joan had broken over the prostitute’s back, and “the virgin sword could not bear such a contact; it broke, and no smith could make it whole again.”
“Was it lost?”
“That does not concern your case. Whatever I had when I was captured, my horses and swords and other things worth more than twelve thousand, is now in the possession of my brothers.”
No matter where her arms ended up, she had never used them in combat. “I carried my standard into battle,” she testified, “so as not to kill any one.”
Charles VII’s treasurer, Hémon Raguier, drained the coffers of another “25 livre tournois” to be given to “Hauves Poulnoir, painter living at Tours, to pay for fabric and paint a large and small standard for the Maid.” The standard was about twelve feet in length, three feet at its widest, and tapered to two points. As chef de guerre, it was Joan who carried the great banner. Aside from preventing her from bearing arms, it allowed her to keep herself the focus of every one of the thousands of soldiers in her wake.
“Who told you to have the figure of Our Lord and the angels painted on the standard you carried?” the examiner asked.
“My saints told me, ‘Take the standard in the name of the King of Heaven.’ For this reason I had it painted so.”
“Was there not something written on the standard as well?”
“The names Jhesus Maria,” Joan said. “It was fringed with silk,” she added.
“Where were these names? Were they written above or at the side or beneath?”
“At the side.”
“At whose direction did you have it painted in this fashion?”
“I have done nothing except at God’s command,” Joan said. “And I have told you this often enough.”
Its design conceived by angels and conveyed by Joan to the banner maker, Poulnoir, Joan’s standard held the attention of her examiners, whose questions were precise enough to allow the creation of a reasonable facsimile (Fig. 13).
“What color was this standard?”
“It was white,” Joan said, “of white linen or boucassin. The world was depicted on it, and two angels, one at each side. They were painted on a field of white sown with lilies”—by which she meant golden fleurs-de-lis, the heavily stylized flower that represented both king and country. Only a king could grant the use of a fleur-de-lis; the symbol harked back to Clovis, the first ruler of the Franks, who organized the informal and shifting alliances of the separate tribes of Gaul into a protonation, gathering chieftains loyal to his cause: rule by a single king whose successors would inherit the union. On Christmas day, 1496, seven years into his reign, Clovis converted to Christianity at the behest of his wife, Clotilde, who was visited by the Holy Spirit upon her husband’s baptism at Reims. A dove descended from on high, bearing three white feathers representing the estates of clergy, nobility, and commoners, elements that would come together as three gilded petals, likely inspired by the yellow iris common to the area of Languedoc rather than by a white lily. Charles’s official court painter, Fouquet, is the first known visual artist to record an emerging French nationalism. Many of Fouquet’s history paintings survive; most include the motif of a field of gold fleurs-de-lis against a royal blue ground. Dunois remembered the standard somewhat differently, with “the figure of our Lord holding a fleur-de-lis in His hand.” Still, his version preserves the deliberate symbology of Joan’s standard, which communicated a political message stressing Christ’s role as king, rather than as shepherd or sacrificial lamb, thus underscoring the divine right of kings.
“And which do you prefer,” the examiner asked Joan, “your standard or your sword?”
“I much prefer my standard to my sword,” Joan said. “I prefer it forty times as much,” she said, using forty as it is used in the Bible, as shorthand for a number too great to count, the number of days Noah floated on the face of the drowned earth, the number Jesus spent in the wilderness when tempted by the devil.
“Did you not throw or have others throw holy water on the pennons?”
“I do not know anything about that,” Joan said. “If it was done, it was not at my instruction.”
“Did not other men-at-arms have pennons made in the style of yours?”
“The Lords kept their own [coats of] arms”—as each knight would have to have done. Given the chaos of hand-to-hand combat, family crests were often the only means of telling friend from foe on the battlefield. “Some of my companions in arms had them made at their pleasure,” she said, “others did not.” If they did, she added, it was “merely to distinguish their men from others.”
Heraldry provided an outward, readable sign of noble ancestry and advertised the wearer’s right to bear arms. Once the king had granted a coat of arms to a family, it could be worn by no other, and given the medieval relish for symbol, collectively and individually they were fetishized to the point of cult worship. It was required of every knight to recognize the crest of every friend or foe he was likely to encounter in his career, a language that was highly specialized and visually dense, enough that it took years before most knights mastered what Joan picked up in a few weeks, acquiring what was her first alphabet as well as the ability to read combinations of its elements quickly. Myth insists on the simplicity of Jesus and Joan, but here simplicity might better be called single-mindedness. While their aims might appear uncomplicated—uncompromising—their intellects were without par. Many times the Evangelists cite the response of highly educated audiences to Jesus’s radical interpretation of Scripture, listeners “astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” The Duke of Alençon was not the only one to marvel at Joan’s exceptional gifts, her mastery of horsemanship and immediate understanding of weaponry. Like Jesus, regarded by some scholars as unlettered,*3 Joan had a memory good enough to obviate her illiteracy; she picked talents worth cultivating; she acquired mastery with unnatural speed and perception.
In Tours, Joan was approached by a young mendicant friar—an acquaintance of her mother, who had met him at Notre-Dame du Puy at Velay, some three hundred miles south of Domrémy. “Go to the shrine at Puy, Mother,” Victor Fleming’s Joan says to her mother as the two bid each other good-bye at Vaucouleurs, “and pray for us.”
A major shrine, as Lourdes would become a few centuries later, Puy drew multitudes of pilgrims. Isabelle’s prayers did of course focus on her daughter, as did much if not all the talk among a group of pilgrims from Lorraine, and Jean Pasquerel conveyed such saintliness that he appeared to Joan’s mother as God’s answer to those prayers. She and the other pilgrims pressed him to seek Joan out when he returned home to Tours, where he was a lector in the convent there.
An alternate theory holds that Yolande, in need of a reliable reporter from the front of the war she’d financed, arranged Pasquerel’s introduction to the Maid. Yolande, whose own beauty taught her its value, was always busy behind the scenes and had groomed and placed beautiful women in courts all over France, with instructions to find their way into beds and make use of pillow talk—a network of seductive spies to further her agendas by bringing home information and applying nudges where necessary. There’s no reason to imagine Pasquerel might have fallen prey to feminine wiles, or any other temptation, but one of the men who brought him might have been less immune to pretty ankles and perfumed bosoms.
“Joan was lodged in the house of Jean Dupuy, a citizen of the town,” Pasquerel testified. “I found Joan at his house, and the men who had brought me spoke to her like this: ‘Joan, we have brought you this good Father. If you knew him well, you would like him exceedingly.’ ”
Joan did like Pasquerel exceedingly, so much so that she entreated him to join her holy army, as he did. “I served her as chaplain and heard her confession and sang her the Mass,” he testified, remaining at Joan’s side until she was captured and providing invaluable eyewitness accounts of the lifting of the siege of Orléans and of subsequent maneuvers.
Once Joan had been outfitted for battle, she and her army of twenty-five hundred set out for Blois, about thirty miles northeast of Tours, escorted, according to Jean, Count of Dunois, by the archbishop of Reims and Raoul de Gaucourt, who served as bailiff at Orléans. Blois was about halfway to Orléans; there Joan was met, Dunois continued, by “the men who were taking in the convoy of food, to wit the lord de Rais, and de Boussac, with whom were the lord de Culant, the admiral of France, La Hire, and the lord Ambroise de Loré, who has since become provost of Paris.” Boussac was Jean de la Brosse, the marshal of France who would take part in all Joan’s campaigns. La Hire, meaning “hedgehog,” the nickname that recognized his prickly temperament, was the mercenary captain Étienne de Vignolles, infamous for the relish with which he undertook the pillaging of land and damsels. Invariably portrayed as loud, vulgar, and corpulent—larger than life—La Hire is a male incarnation of the prostitute with a heart of gold that can’t be obscured by a tawdry costume or uncultured tone. “With all your sins you are like a bright new coin in the hand of God!” Joan exclaims to La Hire in The Lark. At Blois, he was the only captain to welcome Joan immediately, he and the Duke of Alençon the only two among Joan’s comrades who would attempt her rescue after she was captured and sold. The rest of the guard wasn’t so much following orders as following along for what promised to be a grand adventure if not a victory. Living prophecy or not, in an age when warfare was sanctioned recreation and knights crammed a furlough with jousting, brawling, and bullying, the Maid of Lorraine was marching toward the clash of real battle. If she had yet to establish her divinity, she still offered the excitement of a crusade.
At Blois, Joan paused to introduce herself to the enemy from a remove and warn them of her imminence. Just as she had first approached Charles and his court by means of a couriered letter from the remove of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, so did she send word to the English, telling them who she was and what they could expect from her arrival at Orléans. Even from a distance of six centuries, the salutation alone is a masterpiece of impudence, the repetition of the accusatory “you” and the “calling yourself” startlingly cocky forms of address coming from a peasant to royalty.
King of England, and you Duke of Bedford, calling yourself regent of France, you, William Pole, Count of Suffolk, John Talbot, and you Thomas Lord Scales, calling yourselves lieutenants of the said Duke of Bedford, do right in the King of Heaven’s sight. [Surrender to The Maid] sent hither by God the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns you have taken and laid waste in France. She comes in God’s name to establish the Blood Royal, ready to make peace if you agree to abandon France and repay what you have taken. And you, archers, comrades in arms, gentles and others, who are before the town of Orleans, retire in God’s name to your own country. If you do not, expect to hear tidings from The Maid who will shortly come upon you to your very great hurt. And to you, King of England, if you do not thus, I am “chef de guerre”; and whenever I meet your followers in France, I will drive them out; if they will not obey, I will put them all to death. I am sent here in God’s name, the King of Heaven, to drive you body for body out of all France. If they obey, I will show them mercy. Do not think otherwise; you will not withhold the kingdom of France from God, the King of Kings, Blessed Mary’s Son. The King Charles, the true inheritor, will possess it, for God wills it, and has revealed it to him through The Maid, and he will enter Paris with a good company. If you do not believe these tidings from God and The Maid, wherever we find you we shall strike you and make a greater tumult [“hahay”] than France has heard for a thousand years. Know well that the King of Heaven will send a greater force to The Maid and her good men-at-arms than you in all your assaults can overcome: and by blows shall the favor of the God of Heaven be seen. You Duke of Bedford, The Maid prays and beseeches not to bring yourself to destruction. If you obey her, you may join her company, where the French shall do the fairest deed ever done for Christendom. Answer, if you desire peace in the city of Orleans; if not, bethink you of your great hurt soon. Written this Tuesday of Holy Week.
Joan had composed the ultimatum six weeks earlier, when still in Poitiers awaiting the result of a trial whose outcome she already knew. Because the French were defending their land against an occupying army, the rules of “just war”—determined by ecclesiastical tradition—released Joan from the responsibility to formally declare war on the English, as required of a leader who initiated hostilities. When war was perceived as a form of propitiation, only those who undertook to right a wrong could successfully appeal to God for aid. Joan didn’t have to warn the English, who knew of her advent in any case. As leader of the army to which God promised victory, she could reasonably hold herself accountable to give the enemy a chance to retreat in face of certain defeat, but her letter wasn’t conceived as a merciful gesture. It was a public platform from which to proclaim herself chef de guerre—a title the French generals currently running the war would certainly not have awarded her. For Joan, however, who traveled under the protection of God, the advantage would never lie in stealth, and she had no intention of collecting and maneuvering troops without making the declarations her position entitled her to make—to those at the very top of the English command hierarchy, two of whom were too august to be present at Orléans. The Duke of Bedford was John of Lancaster (Fig. 17), the third son of Henry IV, King of England and acting head of state in France for his nephew Henry VI (Fig. 18), the seven-year-old King of England. John Talbot was Earl of Shrewsbury and constable of France, the commander in chief of the Burgundian army. As the Count of Suffolk, William Pole ruled what was settled in the fifth century as the kingdom of Anglia, north of London on England’s east coast; Thomas, Lord Scales, a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of English chivalry, served as the Duke of Bedford’s lieutenant. These were the men to whom she threw down the gauntlet of what “can be read as a mere license for aggression and violence.”
“Surrender to the Maid … the keys of all the good towns you have taken and violated in France.” Joan’s enemies used sexual slurs to invalidate her claim to power; she called the English occupation an act of rape. “She comes in God’s name to establish the Blood Royal.” Here was the exalted blood necessary to counteract the polluted flow that had first issued from between Eve’s legs—blood that was sacred, as holy as menses were base. Blood at one with that of the immaculate Christ, both mortal and divine, the antidote to Isabeau’s wanton betrayal. Here was Joan, announcing herself as God’s anointed, his messiah: La Pucelle. In naming herself the Virgin, Joan made “a preemptive strike against being seen as a camp follower,” because it wasn’t only Jacques d’Arc who presumed prostitution was the sole purpose of a woman among soldiers.
“If you obey her, you may join her company”—words spoken down from a considerable altitude—“where the French shall do the fairest deed ever done for Christendom.” Joan’s prose galloped on ahead of her, as mannered and romantic as that of any chanson de geste, switching suddenly to passages whose language and cadence harked back to the God of the Old Testament, demanding his chosen people make genocidal war on those who would occupy their land. “I am sent here in God’s name, the King of Heaven, to drive you body for body out of all France. If they obey, I will show them mercy.” As with other of her letters, Joan refers to herself as both “she” and “I,” reserving the exalted, decorous third person for the Maid, and not adopting the familiar first person but quoting the most exalted of all voices. “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh,” God promised Moses. “For with a strong hand [I] will send them out, yea, with a strong hand [I] will drive them out of [your] land.” “I will drive them out,” Joan warned the occupying army, “if they will not obey, I will put them all to death.”
The letter was unsigned; it would be another six months before Joan took the time to learn to sign her name. That a maid, generally understood as booty to be seized by conquering soldiers, would so thoroughly subvert the accepted order of things as to declare herself chef de guerre to the king of England and promise to mete out God’s retribution was a presumption previously unimagined—unimaginable—to those who received the missive and in turn released only one of the two messengers who had been dispatched with it. The Armagnac whore had better go home before they caught and burned her, the English replied to Joan’s challenge. They’d already set tinder under the stake they’d prepared for the messenger they hadn’t released, debating whether or not burning him would break the charm she’d used to bewitch her army. Joan sent the herald who had been released back with her response.
“Go and tell Talbot that if he takes up arms I shall do likewise … Let him have me burnt, if he can catch me.”
Maxwell Anderson, whose Joan of Lorraine premiered in 1946, slides the responsibility for what remains, five hundred years later, an unladylike broadcast from a girl whose delusions included her equality to men over to her brothers Jean and Pierre, who take it upon themselves to teach their hand-wringing, timorous sister how to behave like a man, with authority. Joan’s first lesson in what is “not girl’s work,” as Pierre refers to what Joan’s angels call “speaking boldly,” inspires not confidence but lament.
“Oh, if I could speak large and round like a boy, and could stand that way and make my words sound out like a trumpet—if I could do that, I could do all the things God wants me to do. But I’m a girl, and my voice is a girl’s voice, and my ways are a girl’s ways.” And her lines were written in the aftermath of Rosie the Riveter’s 1942 eruption into the culture as the icon representing all the wives and daughters who selflessly took on jobs their husbands and sons had left to join the army. By the play’s premiere, World War II was over, and the men had come home to discover that once freed from domestic chores, not every woman could be enticed, or coerced, back to the hearth. Just as disturbing, the ones who refused to relinquish agency that had belonged to men held on to their identities as women. The girl in the “We Can Do It!” poster wears red lipstick with her blue coveralls and glares through movie star eyelashes while showing off her flexed bicep. It’s a war effort poster; Rosie’s pose is confrontational, but the Axis powers aren’t the enemy. The fist she holds up is as blatant a symbol as the sword in the hand of her World War I predecessor. “Joan of Arc Saved France. Women of America, Save Your Country, Buy War Savings Stamps” (Fig. 36). The 1917 Joan’s gaze is tender, rapturous, and, like her sword, directed up, toward heaven. Her red lips part, a blaze of white light pours over her head: here is the heroine of Joan of Lorraine, whose shining armor protects her “girl’s ways” and whose creator’s vision of Joan was retrospective and romantic. Born in 1888, Anderson was twenty when Joan was beatified, America innocent of world wars to come, and the only war effort a woman was expected to make was as a consumer, spending what was presumably her husband’s money. Not Rosie: she’s discovered what it’s like to have her own, lips closed in what might be a seductive pout if the jut of the bottom one didn’t make her point clear. Rosie’s men’s clothes hide a truer Joan than does the shining armor, a woman who rolls up the sleeve of her coveralls as a warning: a fight stands between her and anyone who might take away her place in the world.
It isn’t numbered among Joan’s miracles, but that a girl of seventeen successfully denied thousands of soldiers the solace of swearing, gambling, and fornicating—every anodyne to the strains of war—is by any measure extraordinary. As described by Louis de Coutes, whose “personal recollections” Twain used as a narrative device, the camp at Blois was filled with “brigands” like “wolves and … hyenas. They went roaring and drinking about, whooping, shouting, swearing, and entertaining themselves with all manner of rude and riotous horse-play; and the place was full of loud and lewd women, and they were no whit behind the men for romps and noise and fantastics.” Secular culture tends to judge profanity a failure of manners when it judges it at all, but Joan and everyone she knew understood that to take God’s name in vain was a serious transgression, the sort that invited capital punishment. According to Jean Gerson, “the whole of France, for all her Christianity, suffers more than any other country from the effects of this horrible sin, which causes pestilence, war, and famine.” The severity of these perceived punishments demonstrated how absolute was the medieval belief in God’s inclination to smite any who offended him. Joan “told La Hire, whose habit and custom it was to swear frequently, to swear no more,” Seguin testified, “and when he was tempted to swear by God to swear by his staff” instead—an amusing recommendation to an audience alert to the phallic references that saturate narratives of the Maid. Twain’s Joan suggests that “he might swear by his bâton,” calling it “the symbol of his generalship.” As for gambling, Marguerite La Touroulde remembered Joan “had a horror of the game of dice.” It was a horror that demonstrated Joan’s familiarity with the Gospels’ account of the Roman soldiers who, when they were done crucifying Jesus, divided his clothes among themselves by throwing dice. The sword broken over the camp follower’s back suffices to underscore Joan’s determination that her soldiers conduct themselves as chastely as their leader. Under her command, she announced, any soldier caught with a prostitute would be forced to marry her, a punishment that was never imposed, as, Dunois explained, “when we were in her company we had no wish or desire to approach or have intercourse with women,” adding, “That seems to me almost a miracle.” Promising victory only to an army that demonstrated its faith by living it, she required her chaplain to hold twice-daily services for worship. “Joan bade me assemble all the priests twice a day, in the morning and the evening,” Pasquerel testified, “and when they came together, they sang anthems and hymns to Saint Mary, and Joan joined them. And she would not let the soldiers mix with the priests unless they had confessed, and she exhorted all the soldiers to confess in order to come to this gathering; and at the gathering itself all the priests were prepared to hear anyone who wanted to confess.”
Though she didn’t conceive them as such, the rites of the Church gave Joan the means to summon her soldiers, thwarting male authority as she sidestepped the army’s chain of command by seizing the clergy’s. Even more subversive and dangerous, Joan was controlling men by censuring their sexual behavior, promising with authority greater than a pope’s that only soldiers no longer burdened by pollution would ascend to heaven. The rest, by implication dirty and un-absolved, were damned. Perhaps it would have been tolerable for a woman to clothe and armor herself as a man, had she not claimed the arena of a man’s power as well as his costume. A hundred years earlier, when Jean de Montfort, the Duke of Brittany, was captured by the English, his wife, Joanna of Flanders, took up his sword and rode from town to town gathering forces to lead “a heroic defense in full armor astride a war-horse in the streets, exhorting the soldiers under a hail of arrows and ordering women to cut short their skirts and carry stones and pots of boiling pitch to the walls to cast down upon the enemy. During a lull she led a party of knights out a secret gate, and galloped by a roundabout way to take the enemy camp in the rear, destroyed half their force, and defeated the siege.” Joan would have been familiar with the heroics of “Jeanne la Flamme,” as Joanna was known throughout France for incinerating the tents and supplies of the enemy. “Le feu! Le feu! Amis, fuyons! C’est Jeanne-la-Flamme qui l’a mis! Jeanne-la-Flamme est la plus intrépide qu’il y ait sur la terre, vraiment!” one popular Breton ballad proclaimed. “Fire! Fire! Friends, flee! It’s Jeanne-la-Flamme who set them! Jeanne-la-Flamme is the bravest on earth, truly!” Though she was dressed and armored as a man, Joanna had undertaken a female war of defense—against a male incursion; once her husband had been killed, she went on fighting, offering her life in trade for that of her son. Her actions might have suggested to some little girls that a woman’s life offered more than domestic servitude, but Jeanne la Flamme was hailed for her devotion as a wife and mother in spite of her possessing the courage and ingenuity reserved for men. For that she was forgiven, not praised.
In contrast, Joan would prove as much a demagogue as Jesus, whose radical departure from law to love demanded social justice. A refusal to remain within the confines imposed on gender was a potentially even more disruptive departure from convention than a commitment to embrace the underclass, especially a refusal that was broadcast to ever more people. “Whoever listened to the voice and looked into the eyes of Joan of Arc fell under a spell,” Twain explained, “and was not his own man any more.”
“When Joan departed from Blois to go to Orléans,” Pasquerel testified, “the priests marched in front of the army,… singing the Veni Creator Spiritus,” a ninth-century Latin hymn (we would recognize it as a Gregorian chant) sung a cappella whether in a chapel or on a military campaign. Its first verse translates “Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest, and in our hearts take up Thy rest. Come with Thy grace and heavenly aid, to fill the hearts which Thou hast made.” As the vanguard of priests parted the air with sacred song, preparing the way for the promised Virgin from Lorraine, Joan moved before her troops at a more stately pace than she would ever allow them again, through an expanse of moor and forest known as the Sologne. There, Pasquerel remembered, “they camped that [first] night in the fields and did the same on the night following.” As able a horsewoman as Joan was when armored, she was unused to sleeping in armor and, according to her page, Louis de Coutes, “awoke bruised and weary” and dismissed the pain, which had no place in her vision of the quest on which she’d embarked. It wasn’t, after all, a battle wound, which would prove less easy to deny. Just as the Templars had regarded Jerusalem as a holy city possessed by infidels, so did Joan see Orléans, the city she and her crusaders were to save in the name of God. This was the quest’s picturesque aspect, not consciously choreographed as a romance but informed by the stories Joan knew so well, among them that of Lorraine’s own Baldwin and Godfrey, leaders of the First Crusade, the elder dubbed Baldwin I of Jerusalem for his holy courage, the first among crusaders to bear the title King of Jerusalem.
A great marshy basin inadequately drained by the Loire, the Sologne was uninhabited at the time, its population sparse and migratory—a landscape claimed by spies who would have quite a scene to report back to the English. Joan and the convoy emerged from the woods at Chécy, just five miles east of Orléans, where they were met by the famed and noble Bastard of Orléans, Jean, Count of Dunois, who was, as he testified, “in charge of the city, being lieutenant general in the field.” The son of Louis I—Duke of Orléans and Charles VI’s younger brother—the Bastard of Orléans (Fig. 15) would fight alongside Joan at Orléans and for the rest of the Loire campaign, one of only two of her comrades who proved unwaveringly loyal to her to the very end.
Not surprisingly, long before Joan arrived, Dunois had ferreted out all he could about the girl who was coming to win the war he was losing. His envoys “the lord de Villars, seneschal of Beaucaire, and Jamet du Thillay, who was afterward bailiff of Vermandois,” had returned from Chinon to confirm that whoever she was, she had the Church’s approval and the dauphin’s army, augmented by corps of fanatical followers, a “rough band of looters and libertines,” according to one source, from which “Joan forged a disciplined army of soldiers.” The count “immediately collected a great number of soldiers,” Jean d’Aulon testified, “to go out and meet her” and discovered the Maid in command of far more reinforcements and provisions than he had expected. Tethered to a city whose debilitated citizens fixed on one religious cure after another, Dunois had seen them come and go, all of them, flocks of self-scourging, nearly unclothed penitents, wailers and keeners rubbing ash into their wounds, whole monasteries processing through the streets with banners and crucifixes, chanting prayers purchased by those who could afford them. The siege wrung insanity from the city, squeezing zealots out onto the streets until every corner had its own harangue. Naturally, the people of Orléans were fixed on the Maid, but here was evidence of her sway beyond the city’s walls. Not only had the bankrupt dauphin clearly gone further into debt to outfit Joan for battle, but he had also sent her in the company of captains of high rank. Joan’s grip on the whole of France’s imagination was proved by the number of soldiers who enlisted to fight under her command—twenty-five hundred was a large army by medieval measure. Dunois noted that she had convinced a great number of clerics to join her army as well—enough chaplains, Joan informed him, to have confessed every last one of her soldiers. They were ready to fight, and she to allow them to face death.
Between Blois and Orléans, however, were Beaugency and Meung, both occupied by the English, who also controlled all major roads on that (west) side of Orléans. The only reasonable course was to make a wide berth around the two towns so that they could approach the city from the east, which was less heavily guarded, “instead of going straight to where Talbot and the English” were, as Joan had assumed.
“Was it you who advised me to come here, on this side of the river?” Joan demanded of Dunois when she discovered in which direction she had unknowingly been led. Her squire, Jean d’Aulon, testified that Dunois answered yes. “I answered that I and others, who were the wisest, had given that advice in the belief that it was the best and surest.”
Joan had approached Orléans under the assumption that she was off to wage war, leading an army intended to drive off the English, but “in actual fact it had as its immediate aim the revictualing of the city,” a mission conceived, according to Charles’s counselor, Guillaume Cousinot, “as a test for Joan.” To deliver a convoy that included, according to Jean Chartier, “many wagons and carts of grain and a large number of oxen, sheep, cattle, pigs, and other foodstuffs” required a circuitous approach that couldn’t accommodate the thousands of soldiers under Joan’s command. They would have to wait while the convoy crossed the Loire at Chécy, just east of Orléans, as Chécy presented the advantage of unguarded access to the river’s right bank, on which Orléans lay. Here the river was about four hundred yards wide, “shallow, rapid, but navigable, with many sand banks and islands.” Unfortunately, an unexpected obstacle had presented itself. An adverse wind, blowing east instead of west, now prevented the use of barges to transport provisions to the estimated twenty thousand hungry citizens waiting within the city’s walls. The situation, as Dunois presented it, was beyond mortal control. That was exactly why she had been sent, Joan argued. As Dunois and his captains noted, her assumption that she was being led directly to the enemy—on the other side of the Loire—betrayed a profound lack of understanding of the geography she’d covered.
“In God’s name,” Joan said to all members of the war council that had excluded her, “the counsel of the Lord God is wiser and surer than yours … It is the help of the King of Heaven. It does not come through love for me, but from God himself who, on the petition of Saint Louis and Saint Charlemagne, has had pity on the town of Orléans and has refused to suffer the enemy to have both the body of the lord of Orléans and his city”—the Duke of Orléans having been captured at Agincourt. As the leader of the Armagnac party, the duke, who was Dunois’s legitimate half brother,*4 was literally priceless—not offered for ransom—and had been incarcerated across the channel for more than fourteen years. This was the only time Joan was observed to have mentioned Charlemagne or Saint Louis, invoking earthly and immortal powers and conflating kings with saints, a confusion that wasn’t hers alone but inspired by the divine right of kings, which granted the anointed immunity to mortal judgment, thus dangling the temptations of tyranny. Charlemagne, never canonized, reigned as the first Holy Roman emperor from 800 to 814; it was his protection of the papacy that first married church to state. Saint Louis, the only king of France to be canonized, reigned from 1226 until 1270 and led two crusades. A petition to undertake a holy war couldn’t have found a more likely, and ultimately ironic, voice: it was Saint Louis who, in pursuit of the Cathars (who believed the material world was the work of Satan and rejected the Eucharist, arguing that Jesus’s body could not be contained in a piece of bread), established the Inquisition’s power and reach, thus sanctioning an indefinite state of holy war, its first target a sect free from gender bias. Catharism placed no value on one sex over the other; not only did it attract women as converts, but it invited them into the clergy.
“You thought you had deceived me,” Joan said to the captains who had sidelined her, “but it is you who have deceived yourselves, for I am bringing you better help than ever you got from any soldier or any city.”
“Immediately, at that very moment,” Dunois recalled of his initial collision with Joan, “the wind, which had been adverse and had absolutely prevented the ships carrying the provisions for the city of Orléans from putting out, changed and became favorable.” On the river’s bank, the beech saplings’ slender trunks righted themselves and then pitched their limbs to the west. Immediately, the barges were loaded, their sails raised, and the provisions borne across the river. From this point forward Dunois remained convinced of Joan’s sanctity and the divine source of the aid she brought. “That is the reason why I think that Joan, and all her deeds in war and in battle, were rather God’s work than man’s,” he testified, “the sudden changing of the wind, I mean, after she had spoken.”
Pasquerel’s version was a little different, and no less marvelous: “Now the river was so low that the ships could not ride up or touch the bank where the English were; and suddenly the water rose, so that the ships could touch land on the French side.”
*1 Chain mail: A modern pleonasm, as both “chain” and “mail” mean the same thing, chain originally indicating mail with a chain-like appearance.
*2 In some versions of the Arthurian legend, Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone are one; in others they are two separate swords.
*3 While Jesus’s relative poverty argues for his not having had the education lavished on boys from more affluent families, two scriptural references suggest he could read. Luke 4:17 tells of Jesus’s reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue of Nazareth. In John 8:6, Jesus “drew in the dirt” to avoid being caught in the Pharisees’ rhetorical trap, interpreted by some as an inability to write, although some versions of the book replace “drew” with “wrote,” and later manuscripts refer to his having written the sins of the Pharisees in the dirt.
*4 Jean Dunois, Count of Dunois (and later Count of Longueville), was the illegitimate son of Prince Louis d’Orléans and his mistress, Mariette d’Enghien.