Even without a magically rising river or fortuitous shift of wind, the convoy’s entry into Orléans proceeded with the unnatural ease of parting seas. “The Maid immediately boarded the boat, and I with her, and the rest of her men turned back toward Blois,” her squire, Jean d’Aulon, testified, “and we entered the city safe and sound with my lord Dunois and his people.”
Joan’s page reported an equally uneventful arrival. “Joan, I, and several others were conveyed across the water to the city side, and from there, we entered Orléans.” To approach the city from the east required passing unimpeded before the bastille of Saint-Loup, occupied by the enemy, before which was the boulevard of Saint-Loup. In this context the word “boulevard” means not a road but a bulwark*1 intended to provide cover from gunpowder artillery. Constructed of earth and wood, the boulevard’s walls were both low enough to fire over easily and yielding enough to absorb cannon strikes without breaking or crumbling like the stone walls they protected. The French had used them for about twenty-five years—for as long as they’d had bombards—and the English, seeing their effectiveness, adopted the practice. As Dunois had sent most of Joan’s army and all the clergy except Pasquerel back to Blois, the provisions traveled under a minimal guard of about two hundred soldiers in expectation of minimal interference. There was no hope of transporting so much food stealthily, or any more quickly than an ox moved.
As it happened, the English didn’t do little; they did nothing. Witnesses for the nullification called this miraculous and didn’t offer the pedestrian explanation for their inaction reported by the Journal du siège d’Orléans: the English, who had been strangling the city for six months, systematically starving its citizens, would not have allowed a great caravan of provisions unobstructed entry into the walled city had they not been successfully distracted by the people of Orléans. No more than five thousand of the estimated twenty thousand citizens of Orléans were men capable of doing battle, and prepared to guard the convoy, they “sallied out in great strength, and went charging and skirmishing before Saint Loup” with the result that “there were many dead, wounded, and captured on both sides.” The convoy rolled and clopped and squealed slowly past a churning mass of soldiers so intent on killing one another that they didn’t so much as check to make sure a guard remained on the Burgundy Gate.*2 By the time the living were counting up the dead, it was too late. Slow as it was, the convoy had entered the city as if there were no siege to lift.
Untroubled as she was by the imperatives of mortal warfare that preoccupied Dunois—forces, weaponry, munitions—Joan was so intent on making an immediate frontal attack on the English that she didn’t want to be delayed by gratitude. As far as she understood it, she’d yet to accomplish anything for which she deserved to be thanked, and Dunois had “begged her to agree to cross the Loire and enter the city of Orléans, where they were most eager for her.” He managed to separate Joan from her army only by ordering its captains to return to Blois and await reinforcements there. Having “succeeded in rendering them ‘well-confessed, penitent and of goodwill,’ a state of affairs which might suffer erosion in her absence,” Joan wanted to make war immediately, before her men had a chance to sin their way out of God’s grace and die unconfessed. While she bristled at his not receiving her as an equal, Dunois, as convinced of Joan’s holiness now as he had been suspicious before, held himself responsible to protect her, from herself as much as from others.
Jean Luillier, a merchant, remembered how ardent was the people’s response to Joan when she at last materialized, rumor made flesh, on the evening of April 29, 1429. “Her entrance was greatly desired by all the town’s inhabitants, because of her renown and of the rumors abroad,” and, Luillier added, because “they did not know where to turn for help except for God.” Accompanied by a detail of knights, Joan entered the Burgundy Gate astride a white charger, armored and carrying her white standard with Dunois at her side, and was received “with as much joy and enthusiasm as if she had been an angel of God.” Thousands, “men, women, and small children,” the Journal du siège d’Orléans reported, strained toward the Maid and the white horse that lifted her above the crowd and showed her to the far edges of the craning multitude. It was eight in the evening, the sun low enough in the sky to flare off armor, conjure flames on a breastplate. The heads and shoulders of the people around her horse were packed so tight she couldn’t see the ground below, and the clamor pressed in. “There was a very extraordinary rush to touch her or even to touch the horse on which she sat.” At some point, “such was the press around her, as they tried to touch her or her horse, that a torch set fire to her pennant. At this, Jeanne struck spurs into her horse, turning it with great skill and herself extinguishing the flame.”
For six months a rain of punishments had fallen on the people who now surrounded Joan and her captains. Siege warfare was a waiting game, and the moment the English had surrounded Orléans, they began cultivating an atmosphere of dread fatalism to accelerate what physical deprivation couldn’t accomplish on its own. Water mills had been destroyed as soon as possible to prevent the French from grinding any grain they had stored. Without any means to remove waste from within the city’s walls, sanitary conditions deteriorated and encouraged the spread of disease. Rumor of betrayal was constant, both from within and from without, especially after a hole was discovered in the city’s north gate the previous month. Either French traitors had been poised to allow the enemy in, or the English had already penetrated the city. Caught within the walls that protected them, hungry enough to cook rats, driven, some of them, to infanticide, the citizens had endured everything from a sudden unexpected cannonade to random arrows falling from the sky, dipped in pitch and set alight in hopes of striking tinder. What used to be a marketplace was empty now, supplanted by a black market’s secret barter. But for months even the rich had found little to buy or trade, and they stood among the commoners reaching for a touch or even the secondhand touch of someone whose fingers brushed Joan’s armored thigh, caste having done nothing to free them from want. Whoever didn’t feel it himself could see it all around him; whatever Joan kindled in the thousands of eyes fixed on her was little different from that burning in those fixed on a messiah whose impossible multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed a hungry mass thousands strong is held among his greatest miracles, a messiah who taught his followers to pray for their daily bread.
I have “been sent for the consolation of the poor and destitute,” Joan said of herself. As a warning to her enemies, and thus the enemies of God, Schiller gives her an additional line, plucked from Isaiah, the prophet of apocalypse from the eighth century BC quoted by all four of the Evangelists: “The day of vengeance is near at hand.”
Charles Péguy, a socialist with a mystical bent, emphasizes Joan’s preoccupation with the poor, “who are starving and who get nothing to eat.” She watches two children fall upon the bread she gives them “as if they were animals” and feels sick at “them being as glad as they were.” She’s a prisoner to her guilt over their suffering. “I thought of all those in misery who get no comfort, I thought of the worst off of all, those who come last, those who are really cast off.
“Who is going to give them their daily bread? Lord, I can’t give it to them all the time. I can’t give everything. I can’t give to everybody.”
“Who was it that touched me?” Jesus cried when the multitudes pressed upon him, grasping for him. “Someone touched me for I perceive that power has gone forth from me.”
“Jesus, your people are hungry today, and you don’t satisfy your people,” Péguy’s Joan accuses Christ. “Will it be said you won’t multiply fishes and loaves any more? Will it be said you won’t weep for this multitude?”
“If their baseness is beyond measure, so is their poverty,” Joan of the Stockyards accuses a corrupt broker. “You have shown me not the baseness of the poor but the poverty of the poor.”
When the crowd at last fell quiet enough that she could be heard, Joan “exhorted everyone to trust in God,” Luillier testified, and thus “be delivered from our enemies.” It took the combined efforts of the Count of Dunois, La Hire, Jean d’Aulon, and Louis de Coutes to usher Joan out of the boiling sea of people, allowing her to break away, at which point—accounts differ—she went either to the cathedral to receive Communion or straight to the home of an accountant named Boucher and there took the Eucharist before retiring for the night. Her page remembered she had been “most exhausted when she arrived, for she had not taken her armor off to sleep the night before she left Blois.” Boucher was “one of the important citizens of the town, who had married one of its most important ladies.” The couple’s combined rank measured how great an honor it was to play host to the Maid, as it had been for those who gave shelter to the equally itinerant Jesus, who chose his companions from among the destitute and the outcast, those destined, as he told them, to inherit the earth. A messiah is an exalted mendicant, depending on the kindness of strangers. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Encamped, Joan slept on the ground among soldiers; when inside a besieged city’s walls, on her host’s bed. Once she left her earthly father’s home, she claimed no mortal place.
Immediately upon rising, perhaps woken by the citizens of Orléans, “still in so great a state of excitement about her that they almost broke down the door of her lodging in their desire to see her,” Joan sent two messengers to the English demanding the release of the herald they had yet to free. If they did not, she promised, as the Journal du siège d’Orléans reported, “she would kill with a brutal death all the English who were prisoners in Orléans, and also those who were held among the lords of the English who were being held as ransom for others.” Outraged to discover no battle plan under way, Joan “went to see the Bastard of Orléans and spoke with him,” her page testified, “and she came back very angry as there were no plans to attack that day,” April 30. No further plans at any rate. While Joan argued with Dunois, La Hire and a small party of knights led a charge of ragged infantry, townsmen bearing improvised weapons, on the English occupying the fort that guarded the city’s two northern gates. Though they forced the enemy back behind the portcullis of their stolen tower, the victory was so minor as to have escaped the notice of Joan, who was on the other side of Orléans, surrounded by townsfolk.
A night’s rest having restored her restless energy, once Joan and Dunois parted company, she answered her impatience by learning her way around the walled city, taking directions from the worshipful throng that followed her wherever she went—until she found“a certain bulwark that the King’s men held against the bulwark of the English and from there,” as recorded in the Journal du siège d’Orléans, “she addressed the English opposite, requesting them in God’s name to retire, otherwise she would drive them away.” The bulwark was that of Belle-Croix, on the French-controlled side of the bridge that spanned the Loire between Orléans and the river’s left bank. One of the lords she addressed, “called the Bastard of Granville,” her page testified, “answered Joan most abusively, asking whether she expected them to surrender to a woman and calling the French who were with Joan ‘unbelieving pimps.’ ”
In trying to pull together the factions of the increased forces, Dunois confronted a similar outrage on the part of his unconvinced captains. An “absence of echeloned units” characterized France’s stillfeudal armies, another instance of progress stymied by French hauteur, as without any system of rank no captain was accorded military command over another. As the grandiloquent Lord of Gamaches made clear, the social hierarchy was supreme, untrumpable. “Since you pay more heed,” Gamaches said, “to the advice of a little saucebox of low birth than to a knight such as myself … I lower my banner and am no longer anything than a simple squire. I prefer to have a noble man as my master, rather than a hussy who may once have been God knows what.”
If being called a whore by the enemy provoked her to tears of rage, Joan found the accusation that much more offensive and unacceptable from someone she presumed a friend, or at least a civil comrade, and it required Dunois and the cooler-headed among his captains to effect a reconciliation between noble knight and lowborn saucebox, one as loath as the other to bring mouth and cheek together in a forced kiss of peace. But the Battle of the Herrings remained in recent memory; the French army had succumbed to fatal disorganization even when its members were enthusiastically allied. With or without divine assistance, Dunois wasn’t going to squander lives by initiating hostilities when his captains were feuding and demoting themselves out of responsibility. But the Maid and her effect on the people teetering toward mass hysteria within the besieged city’s walls and on the increasingly nervous English without—but not beyond hearing distance of a crowd thousands strong—made it difficult to prevent an uncontrolled conflagration. By now Joan had provoked the English in a second letter Dunois described as “written in her mother tongue, in very simple language. The substance of the letter was that they, these English, must agree to give up the siege and return to the kingdom of England, or else she would attack them so strongly they would be forced to retire.” He went on to identify the enemy’s receipt of Joan’s letter as the point at which their former power evaporated so that “four or five hundred soldiers and men at arms could fight against what seemed to be the whole force of England,” unnerving the English so that “they dared not leave their strongholds and bastilles.” Luillier, too, remembered the English’s reaction to Joan’s second letter as a tipping point: “From that moment the English were terrified and no longer had the powers of resistance that they had previously had.” Even so, they did send the message that they would catch, “torture and burn her, and that she was nothing but a rustic, and that she should return to herding her cattle.”
Though he was reluctant to leave her outside his direct supervision, Dunois was concerned that, either by intent or as a result of her helpless militancy, Joan would provoke a conflict before he could receive and organize his reinforcements, and on May 1 he “left Orléans for Blois to confer with the Count of Clermont and to collect other troops who were waiting there,” as many as 4,000 soldiers, as Blois’s garrison had swelled by then to 2,000, and “the town militia may have added another 2,000.” The English, forced to divide their limited forces among the French cities they’d seized and now occupied, typically did not capture a city by means of a surprise attack meant to deliver it into their hands with a single coup de main. Instead, they took over outlying structures that controlled passage through the walls’ major points of egress, thus preventing the delivery of food and supplies to the people within, who made do, starved, and finally surrendered. In the case of Orléans, these satellite fortifications were the Tourelles, freestanding turrets that flanked the bridge over the Loire, the river serving as a moat that extended along the stretch of wall protecting the city’s south side, and the bastille of the Augustins, a fort made from the abandoned ruins of a convent that squatted at the end of the bridge. Both were on the far side of the river, the bastille of Saint-Loup squatting by the road to the Burgundy Gate, in its east wall. There were three smaller gates, two in the city’s north wall and one in its west, but without access to the Loire they were of less tactical import. Too, medieval warfare was as mannered as any other social interaction of the age. A knight threw down his gauntlet to challenge an enemy, who picked it up to accept the invitation to fight. A captain declared war with a grandiose dispatch asserting his army’s just cause for attack. It was easy enough for a single captain or small party to come and go unannounced without reprisal, and Dunois would have had little trouble leaving to organize forces to move in and retake the critical towers and bastilles, reopen the city, and break the siege.
It was a Sunday; Joan went to Mass and then rode through town with her squire and her two pages. Inspecting the battlements, she made slow progress as everywhere she went crowds pressed thick around her and her horse. The next day, she left everyone behind to reconnoiter outside the city’s walls and discover the environs’ blind spots and strongholds, and on Tuesday, May 3, the people of Orléans held a formal citywide procession in Joan’s honor and “presented money and gifts to the Maid and her companions, and asked them to deliver their town from its siege.” As was her habit, Joan ended the day in prayer, this time in the cathedral, and from there went back to the Bouchers’ and to bed.
The next morning, “as soon as she learned we were returning and bringing the reinforcements we had gone to fetch,” Jean d’Aulon testified, “the Maid immediately mounted her horse and rode out with some of her men to meet and help us,” adding that “if it had been necessary she would have rescued us.” With the aid of her own and better counsel, she escorted Dunois and the augmented army back to Orléans “before the enemy’s eyes,” ushering every soldier from the nearby garrisons of Gien, Montargis, Châteaudun, and Châteaurenard through the Burgundy Gate without incident. She was eager to tell Dunois how much she’d learned about the city’s fortifications, and he to confirm that rumors of Sir John Fastolf’s approach were true. Fastolf and his army had reached Janville, no farther north than a day’s march, at which point the French could assume they’d join the English forces already gathering at Saint-Loup. It seemed to Jean d’Aulon that “the Maid was highly delighted with this news,” for she immediately prevailed upon Dunois to mobilize for an attack.
“Bastard, Bastard,” he remembered her saying, “in the name of God, I command you to let me know as soon as you hear of Fastolf’s coming. For if he gets through without my knowing it, I swear to you that I will have your head cut off.”
“I do not doubt that,” Dunois said, exhibiting the courtly patience he’d be called on to use in many if not most of his dealings with the Maid, “and I will be certain to let you know.”
Joan and Jean returned to the Bouchers’, where they intended to rest in preparation for combat. Joan lay down on a bed with Charlotte, the Bouchers’ daughter, who was nine and a child “much-honored” by such intimacy and who, Sackville-West hoped,“observed the rules that children were then taught to observe when sharing a bed: to keep to their own side, not to fidget, and to sleep with their mouths shut.” Jean was dozing “on a couch that was in the Maid’s room,” when Joan was roused by her voices’ strident call, and Pasquerel, who was lodged with the others, remembered her leaping from Charlotte’s bed and crying, “Where are the men who should be arming me? The blood of our men is flowing on the ground!” She woke Jean. “In the name of God!” she said. “My counsel has told me that I must attack the English, but I do not know if I should go to their bastille, or against Fastolf, who is to revictual them.” While Jean was being armed, there came a great tumult from the street outside the Bouchers’, “a great noise and loud cries from those in the city, who shouted that the enemy were doing great harm to the French.”
“Oh wicked boy!” Joan said when she found her page awake and therefore accountable. “Why did you not tell me that French blood is being spilled?”
“She urged me to go and fetch her horse,” Louis de Coutes testified. “In the meantime, she had herself harnessed by her hostess and her hostess’s daughter.” They began at her feet, with the leather shoes worn under the armored boot, called sabatons, identified by their exaggeratedly long and memorably pointed toes, and then, one to a leg, moved up to the greaves, or shin plates, followed by a plate for each knee and thigh, followed by the gambeson—worn under the shirt, like a bulletproof vest—over which went a tunic of chain lined on top with a layer of leather, the hauberk, the cuirass (breastplate), spaulders (which protected the shoulders), gauntlets, and at last the helmet. In sum, a lot of buckling.
“When I had harnessed her horse,” Louis said, “I found her ready in her armor” and highly irritated to discover that in his agitated rush her page had forgotten her standard, which he had to run inside to fetch and pass to her through the window. Immediately, “Joan galloped off in the direction of the Burgundy gate, and her hostess bade me run after her, which I did.” As she passed through the gate, she saw a gravely wounded French soldier being carried into the city and began to weep, telling Jean d’Aulon, who had caught up with her, that “she never saw French blood without her hair standing on end.” By now it was clear the battle was at the boulevard of Saint-Loup, and she hurried east on the Via Agrippa to join the charge. En route, “she found many wounded, which distressed her greatly,” Pasquerel testified.
Joan rode with the cavalry, a medieval army’s assault troops, her presence exciting them to giddy bloodlust. The battalion of mounted knights led the charge, galloping full tilt with foot soldiers following in their wake, ranks of archers proceeding under the cover of a shield wall carried by infantry, followed by pikemen and hand-to-hand combat soldiers armed with axes, hammers, maces, and morning stars (spiked clubs). Knights used lances only for the initial strike and often broke and discarded them upon penetrating the enemy line. Once past that line and into the melee, they switched to hand-to-hand combat with swords. Illustrations from the period, validated by archaeological evidence, allow for a reasonably accurate picture of siege warfare, not only the combat formations and the structures under attack, but the weaponry as well. Gunpowder artillery was as yet crude, but it was effective. “By 1429 purchases of gunpowder by the French royal treasury were in thousands of pounds rather than the hundreds of the previous century.” A culverin, or hand cannon, was an inexpensive weapon—no trigger, just a barrel and a muzzle loader—its projectile more likely to penetrate plate armor than a longbow’s arrow was, but far less accurate. The big cannon, however, didn’t need to be accurate to knock down heavy fortifications, making doors of walls, and the combustion of gunpowder brought the fire-and-brimstone smell of sulfur and a hellish level of noise that was in itself a weapon against both man and beast, testing the skills of seasoned knights. Reserved for battle, destriers were restless, charged stallions that demanded a much higher level of horsemanship than any other mount. A well-timed series of blasts could dismantle an otherwise organized charge of riders mounted on horses unprepared to be terrorized by the din.
Chansons de geste couldn’t have warned Joan of the reality of combat, not any more than the plundering of écorcheurs had approximated warfare. If it had been difficult for her to reconcile the chaste knights of romance—“protectors and defenders” who were “the big and the strong and the handsome and the nimble and the loyal and the valorous and the courageous, those who were full of the qualities of the heart and the body”—with lesser men of lower morals, it was far worse to learn that picturesque skirmishes conceived by troubadours to fit the niceties of assonance had hidden the filth and degradation of battle. “The Franks there strike with vigour and with heat, / Cutting through wrists and ribs and chines in-deed,” The Song of Roland sung, “Through garments to the lively flesh beneath; / On the green grass the clear blood runs in streams.” In reality, no more than one in four cavalry forces was of noble birth or manners. The weight of mounted horses with infantry underfoot rendered marshy land, like that on either side of the Loire, into a slippery muck of dirt and blood and excrement that made it a rough slog, when not an impossibility, to drag heavy artillery—cannon, counterweight trebuchets, or catapults, and bombards—and its equally heavy ammunition within range of enemy boulevards. Still, three hours of hard fighting delivered the French to a decisive victory, and having emptied the ramparts of Saint-Loup, the soldiers set about destroying them. According to the author of the Journal du siège d’Orléans, by the time it was done, 140 Englishmen had been killed, and another forty taken prisoner—representing all the enemy forces, Jean d’Aulon testified, the French having carried out the “assault with very few losses.” Had the Maid’s entry into the war been met with failure, it would have punctured and deflated her army’s confidence, made evident by the fierceness of their attack. While her comrades celebrated what was a critical if small victory, Joan, sickened by the carnage she’d inspired, wept.
“They’re dead,” she says to Dunois in Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine. “Horribly dead … In the midst of evil. And it was I that killed them … I have been the death of many men … I thought victory would be beautiful. But it’s ugly and bloody and hateful.”
“The voice of Heaven drives me on,” Schiller’s Joan bemoans, “not my own will—rage like an angry spirit … no joy to me, dealing out death.”
According to Pasquerel, Joan refrained from fighting on May 5, as it was Ascension Day, and made do with warmongering on paper.
You men of England, who have no right to this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Pucelle, to abandon your strongholds and go back to your country. If not, I will make a war cry [“hahu”] that will be remembered forever. And I am writing this to you for the third and final time; I will not write anything further.
Jesus Maria
Joan the Pucelle
[In postscript] I have sent my letters to you in an honest manner but you are holding my messengers [or “heralds” in French], for you have kept my herald called Guyenne. If you are willing to send him back to me I will return you some of the men captured at the fortress of Saint-Loup, for they are not all dead.
“She took an arrow,” Pasquerel testified, “tied the letter with a thread to the tip and told an archer to fire this arrow at the English,” crying, “Read, this is news!”
“News from the Armagnac’s whore!” they shouted upon reading the letter. “When she heard this, Joan began to sigh and weep copious tears, invoking the King of Heaven to her aid.” She would always be quick to tears and equally quick to dry them. This time she had been comforted, she later reassured Pasquerel, “for she had had news of her Lord.” Too, once she considered the transaction, she saw it made little material difference that the English had taunted and insulted her. Whatever they said, they hadn’t ignored or even dismissed her; in fact, the prompt return of her herald suggested that they took her seriously enough to proceed with caution.
Like Schiller, Joan’s confessor downplayed the bloodlust—in service to a cause for which Joan would readily lay down her own life, but bloodlust nonetheless—that inspired her remorse and made sure to testify as to Joan’s punctilious observation of a holy day, an overdue riposte to her inquisitors having made much of those occasions on which she chose war over worship. Still, her squire and her page remembered that she didn’t allow the previous day’s euphoria to fade, but, as Jean d’Aulon told it, “when the Maid and her people saw how great a victory they had won over their enemies on the day before, they came out of the city in fair order to attack a certain other bastille in front of the place, called the Bastille of Saint Jean le Blanc.”
The boulevard of Saint-Jean-le-Blanc was on the riverbank opposite Orléans and required Joan and her forces to “cross to a certain island,” the Île aux Boeufs, “that lay in the Loire, where they would assemble” and from there launch an attack by using two barges to create a bridge to the shore. From there the troops charged over the boulevard—ramparts—to the fortress, only to find it deserted. In that retaking the bastille of Saint-Jean-le-Blanc was accomplished without active combat, Pasquerel was technically correct that Joan hadn’t engaged in battle on May 5, but she had been looking for one. Still, it was hard to be disappointed in a bloodless victory when the English, with their superior forces, had turned and run to hide in the stronger battlement of the bastille of the Augustins, one of the two great bridgehead fortifications blocking the main entrance to the city. Along with the Tourelles, immediately to its north, it squatted at the end of what functioned as a drawbridge does over a moat; to cross the Loire and enter Orléans, one had to get past both fortifications. Even had the French chosen to move on from the small wins of Saint-Loup and Saint-Jean-le-Blanc to the equally winnable skirmishes required to chase the English from the northern and western avenues, they would eventually have had to attack the choke hold on the city represented by the Augustins and the Tourelles, considered by military historians among “the most imposing fortifications ever built”: twenty meters long, twenty-six meters wide, surrounded by a ditch eight meters deep.
Dunois and the other captains argued for the kind of conservative gambit favored by Bertrand Du Guesclin, a national hero whose military career Joan had admired. Like Joan, Du Guesclin was one of a handful of military leaders throughout the Middle Ages whose extraordinary victories catapulted them from middle-class anonymity to knighthood, a process analogous to making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, as it required ennobling a commoner and endowing him—or, in the case of Joan, her—with a coat of arms. Among European countries, France was the most inflexible in requiring irrefutable proof of noble ancestry from the would-be knight. Lettres d’ennoblissement were issued rarely and didn’t deliver Joan or her hero Du Guesclin to the aristocracy so much as remove them from the hierarchy of social strata, freeing them to form bonds of attachment with all people. Joan’s ability “to use the power of her charisma to persuade Frenchmen of all social classes to serve the higher cause of France with little or no pay” would prove key to her success. “Perhaps as true a knight as a real-life man of the fourteenth century could be,” Joan’s hero was, like her, a figure of “extraordinary popularity”—a man revered as a true-life Galahad, his reputation that of “being ‘the most courteous’ and ‘the least covetous’ knight as well as a terrific fighter and born leader.”
As the constable of France—commander in chief of its armed forces—from 1370 to 1380, Du Guesclin “managed to subordinate French notions of chivalrous conduct to intelligent planning and execution.” He characteristically avoided frontal assaults to carry out a battery of separate minor attacks that guaranteed expeditious and definitive victories, fracturing the attention of the enemy’s military captains and destroying the morale of their forces. The Roman emperor Fabius Maximus, who delivered Rome’s 202BCvictory over Carthage during the Second Punic War, is credited for instituting what came to be called the Fabian strategy and earned him the title “Father of Terrorism.” Dunois’s council, to which he had not invited hotheaded Joan, determined that the numerical inferiority of the French forces demanded they use diversionary tactics as well as incite the general populace to undertake acts of sabotage. To follow a course of uncloaked aggression could only end in slaughter and defeat, they reasoned, an invitation for the enemy to cross over the Loire and obliterate the whole of France. Joan picked the direct strike as the only feasible strategy for an army that trusted in the protection of God: a course of stealth and surprise implied a failure of faith.
According to the testimony of Simon Charles, as reported to him by Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of Charles’s household and captain of Chinon, “Any attack or charge was out of the question.” Gaucourt was deputized to watch at the city’s gates “and prevent anyone from breaking out.” Joan ignored the command.
Finding her way blocked, she called Gaucourt “wicked,” as she had her page, a word reserved for anyone, friend or foe, who frustrated her cause. “Whether you like it or not,” she said, “the soldiers will charge, and they will win as they have done in other places.” Backed by the town’s garrison and the citizenry, largely in agreement with Joan, the army she’d infused with her impatience “broke out” of Orléans, and Dunois girded himself for what he expected to be a costly and unavoidable disaster. No matter what inexperienced nonsense Joan planned, the soldiers were behind her, and the captains’ council was left with no choice but to align their focus with hers. The dreaded imminence of Fastolf and fresh enemy forces allowed them to produce a face-saving rationalization as they set out with Joan, La Hire, “and many other knights and squires and around four thousand soldiers,” as the Journal du siège d’Orléans reported.
“La Hire and the Maid,” Jean d’Aulon testified, “who were always in the van[guard] to protect the rest, swiftly couched their lances and were the first to strike out at the enemy.” The French army crossed the Loire east of the city and made a westerly charge along the boulevard of the Augustins, where they met the English, who “sallied out of the Tourelles in great strength, shouting loudly, and falling on the French.” On both sides combat was “strong and harsh,” but, the Journal continued, “the Maid and La Hire all of their army joined together and attacked the English with such great force and courage that they caused them to recoil all the way.” The bastille of the Augustins was taken, the English locked inside the Tourelles, the “majority of the enemy … killed or captured,” Jean testified, “and the lords with their men and their Maid remained beside [the bastille] all that night,” sleeping armored on the ground, Joan happy for the excuse to stop limping. When she’d dismounted to enter the Augustins on foot with her jubilant infantry, mostly commoners like herself, she’d stepped on a chausse-trappe, a little bit of mischief designed to sprain an ankle or pierce a foot. Known today as a “caltrop” (from the Latin calcitrapa, or foot trap), the weapon was a simple one, four iron spikes arranged so that three formed a tripod base and one projected upward, waiting for the tread of man or beast, penetrating that much more deeply when a foot or hoof struck it while running. Intended to slow the advance of both infantry and cavalry,chausse-trappes were strewn over battlefields, not so lowly a contrivance that images of them weren’t included in coats of arms as a symbol of resistance.
“Get up early tomorrow, earlier than you did today,” Joan told Pasquerel before retiring. “Keep close to me all the time. For tomorrow I shall have much to do, more than I ever had, and tomorrow the blood will spurt from my body above my breast.”
Having decided that their unexpected success rested on what had turned out to be a surprise attack, in that the English would never have expected the French to take such a suicidal gamble, the captains met to review their position at the end of the day, again excluding Joan. Given the size of the English army relative to the French, whose one significant victory was so impossible that only a fool would expect another like it, the council decided that the French would pause to rest and send out spies and then fine-tune their battle plan with the secrets they gathered, the only way to match the might of a larger army. “Seeing that the city is well-stocked with provisions, we shall very likely be able to hold Orléans until the King sends aid,” they told Joan. “The council does not think it needful for the soldiers to sally forth tomorrow.” The captains ought to have guessed Joan’s response to their temporizing; they’d heard it often enough.
“You have been to your council, and I to mine,” she said. “And believe me, the counsel of my Lord will be put into effect, and will endure, while your counsel will perish.”
“Behold you scoffers, and wonder, and perish,” the Evangelist Luke wrote, summoning the seventh-century BC prophet Habakkuk’s apocalyptic message, which resounds throughout the New Testament, proclaiming a cornerstone of Christianity: “The just shall live by his faith,” the faithless perish.
The soldiers did believe the Maid, and the dissenting captains were left again with no choice but to follow the lead of an army that would mutiny at their failure to fall in behind her. They saw no point in hurrying a conflagration that was in any case guaranteed, as the English would eventually have to burst from the Tourelles. Caught between Orléans’s hive of fevered citizens, every hour more of them, women and children included, swarming over the ramparts with their helmet-splitting rocks and pots of boiling oil or lime, and a French army under a spell of energetic savagery that made their numerical disadvantage irrelevant, the English could wait to make a move until hunger decided their fate. If they could wait for a few days before attacking, Dunois and the others had reasoned, reinforcements might arrive. Still, better to join the Maid in acting rashly than to allow her to publicly pull rank on them by assuming all of their soldiers. Whether or not they were to prevail, the French would trade their lives to outrun the dishonor of failing to keep up with a girl, even if she had bewitched the horse she sat on.
Joan was up by sunrise on the morning of Saturday, May 7, preparing for what would prove the “bloodiest military engagement of the Hundred Years War since Agincourt” just as she would any other day. She made her confession to Pasquerel, she heard Mass, and she received the Eucharist. As the French army had slept in the field, clothed and armored, she had her forces mobilized by dawn and had charged at the English before they’d had a chance to even inspect, let alone repair, the bulwark around the Tourelles, and the Journal du siège d’Orléans reported a “spectacular assault during which there were performed many great feats of arms …[T]he French scaled the different places adeptly and attacked the angles at the highest of the strong and sturdy fortifications so that they seemed by this to be immortal.” Having nowhere to run, the English fought back as desperately as the situation merited, and the French losses were severe as well.
“I myself was the first to plant the ladder against the said fortress of the Bridge,” Joan told the examiner, under a rain of arrows, rocks, and cannonballs. “I was raising the ladder, and as I was raising the ladder I was wounded in the neck by a crossbolt”—distinguished from the crossbow by the projectile it launched, which looked more like a dart than an arrow and was discharged by a bow mounted on a stock. The bolt, shorter and heavier than an arrow, fell from above and penetrated the mail between her harness’s breast and shoulder plates, its impact great enough to stun and fell her. According to the Histoire du siège d’Orléans, the Lord of Gamaches, the same who had called Joan a “little saucebox,” “rode up hastily to defend her with his axe, seeing that the English were about to descend from their walls to surround her. ‘Take my horse,’ he said, and added a generous apology.” The Histoire was written by J. B. P. Jollois in 1833; Gamaches’s vindication may reflect a chivalrous impulse rather than the historian’s discovery of fact. Whether or not the captain resigned himself to the peculiar power Joan represented, he would never know that his toehold in history would rest on his proximity to a girl who seized control of not just one but two armies.
The wound did bleed copiously enough to merit Joan’s prediction that it would “spurt from my body,” and as she was carried to safety, English soldiers were exulting, screaming that they’d “killed the witch!” Once she had been released from her harness to allow for the removal of the bolt, it was clear that, though its head had, as Dunois remembered it, “penetrated her flesh between her neck and her shoulder for a depth of six inches,” it had stopped fortuitously short of puncturing a lung or severing a major artery. No eyewitness remembered Joan pulling the bolt from her own breast, and reports of her doing so, like that in the Chronique de la Pucelle, are likely apocryphal, Joan’s valiant defense of her inviolate body amplifying her virginity. Her confessor wouldn’t have replaced heroism with tears, not any more than Dunois would relate the depth of the wound without mentioning that she had taken hold of the projectile’s shaft and extracted it herself. Probably, she endured its removal by a medic, whose arsenal of curatives was limited, in the case of flesh wounds, to olive oil and pig’s grease. “When some soldiers saw her thus wounded, they wanted to lay a charm on her,” Pasquerel testified, “but she refused it, saying, ‘I would rather die than do what I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s law.’ ”
Having established Joan’s punctilious observance of a scriptural command, her confessor added that “she said she knew she must die one day, but she did not know when, where, how, or at what hour.” Joan allowed the wound to be bandaged and afterward confessed to Pasquerel “with tears and lamentations,” for each time she returned from battle her conscience carried a new burden of casualties and deaths. Refusing to rest after the bleeding had slowed under the bandage’s pressure, she demanded to be re-armored and, despite what would have been an incapacitating if not fatal injury for any other mortal, returned to the front for another six hours of combat, appearing to the enemy as having been resurrected by a supernatural means. Then she told her soldiers “that when they saw the wind blowing in the direction of the fortress, then they would capture it,” her page testified.
“Glasdale, Glasdale, give in, give in to the King of Heaven!” she shouted at the captain in charge of the eight hundred or so English occupying the Tourelles. “You have called me a whore, but I have great pity for your soul and for your men’s souls.” Below them, the river burned, the people of Orléans having dragged one of the city’s barges under the bridge and set it on fire. “Then,” Pasquerel continued, “Glasdale, armed from head to foot, fell into the Loire and was drowned, and Joan, moved to pity, began to weep bitterly for the soul of this Glasdale and of all the rest, who were drowned there in great numbers.” The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris provided a funereal epilogue: “Afterwards [Glasdale] was fished up, cut in quarters, and boiled, and embalmed.” It was in this reduced and disassembled state that the vanquished waited a week for passage home, to a cemetery across the channel.
What few English survived the battle were taken captive, and the French remained in control of the smoking bridge when Dunois called off hostilities, as beyond the bridge the two armies had been locked in indecisive combat for hours. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and he told the exhausted army to retreat for the night into the city, where they would be fed and allowed to rest.
“Then the Maid came up to me,” Dunois testified, “and requested me to wait a little longer. Thereupon she mounted her horse and herself retired into a little vineyard at some distance from the crowd of men, and in that vineyard, she remained at prayer for eight minutes.” When she came back, she promised her soldiers, “In God’s name, tonight we shall enter the city over the bridge.”
“Immediately,” Dunois said, Joan “took up her standard and placed it on the edge of the ditch. As soon as she was present, the English trembled and were seized by fear; the soldiers of the King recovered courage and began the ascent, delivering the boulevard by assault without meeting any resistance. The boulevard was thus taken and the English found there were put to flight and all killed.”
Jean d’Aulon described the battle’s final charge in greater complexity. Retreat had been sounded and was under way, he said, when Joan returned from prayer and saw her standard in the hands of a knight to whom she hadn’t entrusted it—as that knight had offered to take a turn carrying what had by then become a heavy burden for her page. When the knight failed to immediately release the banner’s staff, Joan, in the ensuing tussle, “shook the standard so vigorously that I imagined others might suppose that she was making a sign to them.” According to Jean, the Maid’s soldiers had seen a signal where there was none and “rushed together and immediately rallied, and they attacked the bulwark so sharply that within a short time they had taken both it and the bastille, from which the enemy retired.”
“The she-warrior,” Alain Chartier wrote, “had destroyed the conquered fortresses like a tempest …[L]ike lambs to the slaughter, they [the English] were all defeated and finally killed.” Clément de Fauquembergue, the same parliamentary scribe who doodled a long-haired girl armed with a sword in the margin of his register, summarized the critical battle as “a maid all alone holding a banner between the two enemy forces.”
The English might have decided to relax their hold on Orléans only briefly, expecting Fastolf and reinforcements; they might have decided to refocus their efforts on towns with stone fortifications that couldn’t be burned away from under their feet. They might have attributed their failure to overcome the French to exhaustion and concluded that there was no choice but to allow the army to recover its strength. But the Duke of Bedford’s memorandum to his nephew Henry VI, England’s seven-year-old king, for whom he acted as regent, made what had inspired their flight clear enough. “There fell by the hand of God a great stroke upon your people assembled there,” caused by “unlawful doubt aroused by a disciple and follower of the fiend, called the Pucelle, who used false enchantment and sorcery, and drained the courage of the remaining soldiers in ways that were marvelous.” The Duke of Alençon, who wouldn’t join the French fighting under Joan’s influence, if not her official command, until she moved on from Orléans to Jargeau, said from what he “heard from the soldiers and captains who were there, they all regarded almost everything that happened at Orléans as a miracle from God; they considered it to have been the work of no human hands but to have come from on high.” No matter the source, as one military historian summarized, “the myth of English invincibility was shattered.”
It was midnight and the streets were thronged when Joan and her captains did, as she had promised, enter Orléans over the bridge, hastily restored to allow a party of knights to pass through the city’s main gates, as no French citizen had done since before the siege. “Paid, forty sous for a heavy piece of wood obtained from Jean Bazon when the Tourelles were won from the English, to put across one of the broken arches of the bridge,” the city’s 1429 account book records. A fisherman, Jean Poitevin, received “eight sous for having beached a chaland,” or barge, under the bridge, and the team of carpenters who had feverishly repaired what they could of the bridge were rewarded with sixteen sous “to go and drink on the day the Tourelles were won.”
Every church bell in Orléans was ringing as Joan materialized from out of the dark, she and her white standard polished by torchlight. Night had fallen to lend the spectacle a theatricality impossible in daylight hours. Again the populace exalted her, straining toward the light that fell on their virgin warrior astride her white horse, “giving wondrous praise … especially above all to Joan the Maid,” as recorded for posterity the Journal du siège d’Orléans. So many bells, enough ringing even for Joan. When they fell silent, the clergy led the people in singing “Te Deum laudamus”—a fourth-century hymn of praise. “All the earth doth worship thee … To thee all Angels cry aloud; To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy.”
“He was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light,” “glistening … as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” “And when they lifted up their eyes they saw no one but Jesus only.”
The transfiguration is singular among the Gospel miracles. In every other instance, it is Jesus who effects change in others: people, a herd of swine, a fig tree cursed and “withered away to its roots,” water changed to wine, and wine to blood. In this one instance, Jesus himself is changed, anointed with light before—or by—his onlookers’ eyes. It was dark, past nightfall on the mountaintop where he had taken his disciples to pray and where, with their willing spirits and weak flesh, they’d fallen asleep. Suddenly awakened, they saw “the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white.” The unnatural brilliance is associated with mystical experience in both New and Old Testaments, blinding Saul and remaking him into Paul on the road to Damascus, when “suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, Why do you persecute me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus.’ ” When Moses received the Ten Commandments, a cloud descended over Mount Sinai. From it God spoke, and when the prophet returned to his people, “Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” On the mountain of Jesus’s transfiguration, “lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them [the disciples], and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my beloved son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to him.’ ” As he did for John the Baptist, God identified Jesus to his followers as the Messiah, bathed him in unearthly radiance, and bade them take heed. Jesus was a holy messenger, and so was the Maid of Orléans, resplendent in her circle of light.
“O unique virgin, worthy of all glory and praise, worthy of divine honors, you, pride of the kingdom,” Alain Chartier wrote, “you lamp, you light, you pride not only of the French but also of all Christians.”
Intent as she was on how her deeds were received by God and his angels, Joan hadn’t paused to consider the mortal response, which in any case her vocation rendered irrelevant. “Master Pierre de Versailles,” one of Joan’s examiners at Poitiers, “was once in the town of Loches in the company of Joan,” where he observed “that the people threw themselves before the feet of her horse to kiss her hands and feet.” Pierre “said to Joan that she did wrong in allowing such things which were not suitable for her and that she ought to distrust such practices because she made men into idolaters.”
“In truth,” Joan replied, “I would not know how to protect myself from such things, if God does not protect me.”
Jesus inspired the same hunger; his steps were dogged; his clothes were unraveled by countless hungry hands. “And all the crowd sought to touch him,” Luke wrote, “for power came forth from him and healed them all.”
People came to her home, Marguerite La Touroulde remembered, “bringing paternosters [rosaries] and other holy objects for her to touch.” Joan laughed at the requests. “You touch them!” she said to Marguerite. “They will be as good from your touch as from mine.”
Jesus not only attracted but cultivated his followers’ attention and feverish adulation with public miracles. Each crossed the threshold from gossip to that of broadcast—an earthbound mortal confined and magnified by celebrity, a leader summoned from the underclass in fulfillment of prophecy, a peasant without regard for mortal measures, moving among the power elite, undaunted, cloaked with the arrogance of the consciously anointed. Jesus, like Joan, was a messiah as political as the prophecy that summoned him, promising salvation, deliverance from an enemy, and preaching love and violence. A king, humble and riding on an ass, a girl leading an army from the back of a charger, each possessing royalty that cannot be conferred by any hand but God’s. Figures of purity, free from sexual stain. Impossible people, alien architects of their own destruction.
The people of Orléans couldn’t relinquish her; they had to touch her, lay their charms and beads and rings against her, kiss, if she allowed it, her hands, her feet. By the time she extracted herself from their grasp, her mud- and blood-spattered armor shone again, like new. The reach of countless fingers had polished it as bright as the night was dark.
*1 From Dutch bolwerc.
*2 The single gate on the east side of the city, also known as the Saint-Aignan Gate, and accessed directly by the Via Agrippa.