Once Joan escaped adulation, she returned to the Bouchers’, where a surgeon dressed her wound and, Dunois recalled, she “had her supper, eating four or five toasts soaked in wine heavily watered, and she had taken no other food or drink that day.”
With the single exception of a gift of poisoned carp, the only food Joan is reported to have eaten is the meal commemorated by the Eucharist: the Last Supper at which Jesus broke bread, directing his disciples, “Take and eat; this is my body,” and “Drink, all of you,” the wine that is his “blood of the new covenant.” It seems unlikely that a girl of such vigor and stamina could exist for years on the few mouthfuls of bread and sips of wine reported by Dunois and also Louis de Coutes, who called her eating habits “very abstemious” and remembered that she “often ate only a morsel of bread in a whole day and it was astonishing that she ate so little.” What, and how much, Joan ate was significant. “In the Middle Ages,” Huizinga wrote, “the choice lay, in principle, only between God and the world, between contempt or eager acceptance, at the peril of one’s soul, of all that makes up the beauty and the charm of earthly life. All terrestrial beauty bore the stain of sin.” Jesus demanded his disciples choose between him and all the rest of life. Dunois and Louis de Coutes gave testimony more than twenty-five years after the fact, each having told and retold his adventures with the Maid to countless curious listeners, each convinced of the divinity of the girl who every day had called upon them to confess sins redeemed by Christ’s blood, to partake of the Eucharist. Any of Joan’s comrades might easily associate her most powerfully, or even exclusively, with bread and wine, sparingly served.
When Joan rose, a little after dawn, she learned that the remaining English had already assumed battle formation outside the city’s walls. As her wound and its bulky dressing prevented her from putting on plate armor, when she left the city in the company of La Hire, Gilles de Rais, and a few other captains, she wore only a jasseran, or light coat of mail fashioned entirely of small rectangular steel plates that overlapped like fish scales. It was a Sunday, and thus permissible for an army to defend itself but not initiate an attack, and Joan didn’t even bother to line up her soldiers, but instead held them at bay, “as a trainer holds back a pack of eager dogs.” The English, unsure what to make of what looked like a trick, held their ground but didn’t advance. Standing at attention, they watched as Joan asked that a portable altar be fetched and saw how, under her direction, the French all bent their heads under the ministrations of her priests, who invested them with fiendish powers of invincibility. Not one of her men was bothering to stand guard, all of them chanting now, voices too distant to discern their sinister meaning. Among the English, rumor had it that her soldiers stole the host and she washed it, as Satan decreed, in menstrual blood.
The Chronique de la Pucelle cited the deposition of a French soldier, Jean Champeaux. “Look back and see whether the English are turning their backs or their faces,” Joan said to her men and, on hearing they were in retreat, ordered her army, “Let them go, it is not the Lord’s pleasure that we should fight them, today; you will get them another time.”
“Oh God! What do I see!” an English soldier cries in Schiller’s Joan of Arc. “She’s there, the horror’s coming! Rising, glowing darkly, out of the flames of fire, like a spirit from the night, out of the jaws of Hell. Where can I run away to? She holds me in her eyes of fire already.”
The English, Jean d’Aulon testified, “departed discomfited and in confusion,” leaving behind any artillery that was likely to slow their retreat—not just their heavyweight cannon, but their crossbows and arrows as well.
Suffolk took his corps to Jargeau. The greater part of the army left under the command of Lords Talbot and Scales for Meung, where they expected to meet Fastolf, about whom the most recent intelligence indicated he hadn’t left Paris, where he’d gone after the Battle of the Herrings to collect reinforcements, a task that would grow ever more challenging. Though Fastolf provided inspiration for the figure of vanity and cowardice that Shakespeare made of Falstaff, adjusting the real man’s name to suggest impotence, his military career was exemplary. No evidence suggests that Sir John, who would finally clash with Joan at Patay, was anything but a great knight and feared leader. Upon hearing rumors of his marching south from English-occupied Paris with reinforcements, the citizens of Orléans had—before Joan arrived—considered abandoning the city. Still, no one wanted to sign up for an unfair fight whose outcome was predetermined by the handmaid of Satan.
Joan remained in Orléans for two days, resting and allowing her wound to heal. Because frontal attacks were as bloody as they were successful, costly to victor and vanquished alike in terms of fatalities, the French army had been reduced to an estimated two thousand soldiers, not nearly enough to continue to defend Orléans while recapturing all the cities along the Loire currently occupied by the enemy. The violence of the direct charge was part of what terrorized the English, used as they were to haggling over ransoms while pinching off shipments of wine and chasing down spoils of war. If Joan never, as she swore, killed a man, she did inspire a single-minded savagery, and her reputation among the English was as a leader of what both she and her judges termed “massacres.”
The Chronique de la Pucelle reported that on May 13 Joan left for Tours, where she met the dauphin to extract money and victuals to replenish her forces. Dunois testified that he and some other captains had accompanied Joan to Loches, some ninety miles southwest of Orléans, to convince the dauphin with the mended sleeves to finance the reinforcements they needed. Dunois’s is the more credible account, not only because it was given under oath. For Dunois the scene at Loches was less an event of military historic interest than the context of his observing, as few others reported having done, Joan in thrall to her voices. When, upon arrival, the traveling party found the dauphin closeted with his confessor and his advisers, Joan refused to wait for an audience. She knocked on the door of his private quarters, entered before any response was given, and fell on her knees before Charles. “Do not take such long and copious counsel,” she beseeched him, “but come as quickly as you can to receive a worthy coronation.”
Observing the extravagance of her supplication, Charles’s confessor Christophe d’Harcourt, Bishop of Castres, asked Joan if she would “say here in the presence of the King how your counsel appears when it speaks to you.” Blushing, she replied to him, “I know enough of what you wish to know, and I will tell it to you willingly.”
Dunois said that she answered, in so many words, that “when she was at all unhappy because what she said on behalf of God was not believed, she went aside and prayed to God, complaining to him that the people to whom she was speaking did not readily believe her, and as soon as the prayer to God was over, she heard a voice say to her, ‘Daughter of God, go, go, go, I will be your aid.’ And, when she heard this voice, she was thrilled and also wished to remain in that state forever. And,” Dunois added, “what is more, in repeating the words of her voice, she had surges of wonderful joy, raising her eyes to heaven.”
Dunois’s is the sole account of what Joan’s direct experience of the divine might have looked like. She said her voices spoke a tongue that wasn’t human, and they spoke only to her; no one other than she heard them. Outside of hurried appeals for God’s protection in battle, or his attention to the mortally wounded begging for absolution, Joan prayed in privacy. Pressed to divulge what it felt like to be consumed by grace, she refused, and the single report of her visions other than Dunois’s offered even less description than the Bastard’s. The 1643 Martyrologie des chevaliers (Martyrology of knights) recognized a resident of Chécy, Guy de Cailly, at whose home Joan spent the night before escorting the convoy of food into Orléans, as having “shared in the visions of Joan of Arc.” Though Guy appears to have offered no details about the experience, Sackville-West grants the account “some verisimilitude,” based on Charles’s having ennobled Guy “a few months later (June 1429) in a document couched in,” as she described it, “the strangest language of fantasy and heraldry combined.”
Predictably divided on the subject of how to proceed now that Orléans had been retaken, Charles’s advisers argued among themselves while Georges de La Trémoille set to work furthering his own agenda, which, at the moment, was to take a little shine off the armored Maid. Under La Trémoille’s direction, the dauphin sent out a notice dated May 10, 1429 (preserved among the records of a number of towns), calling upon all citizens of France to give thanks to God for the great victory at Orléans that had been accomplished by captains who, “through their great prowess and courage in arms, and always by means of the grace of our Lord,… captured the whole of this fortress,” the Tourelles. At the letter’s close, Charles gave Joan a perfunctory acknowledgment that left the impression of an afterthought: “Let us also honor the virtuous deeds and wondrous things … regarding La Pucelle.”
The apparent truth of Joan’s outlandish claims had its effects on everyone. If it frightened the English to oppose the Maid, it worried the French to have a supernatural advantage. No matter his personal feelings toward her, La Trémoille was certain the wisest public course was to minimize the Maid’s presence in the battles she’d won. By now Joan knew better than to count on the embrace of aristocrats whose vantage allowed them to see her power unfold in earthly terms, unlike the uniformly worshipful commoners who lacked the altitude required to see beyond their infatuation. The nobility’s tight embrace of the chivalric code made the idea of retaking Normandy, lost at Agincourt, very tempting, but honor is expensive. Having satisfied the first demand of her vocation, Joan immediately redirected her attention to the second. The way to Reims had to be cleared, and first in line was Jargeau, on the Loire just twelve miles east of Orléans, to be followed by Meung and Beaugency, twenty and twenty-five miles downriver, respectively. Still a commoner, if an uncommon individual, Joan understood better than the nobility how important it was for the dauphin to claim the throne as the indelibly anointed king of France. The people put stock in such rites.
Whether from Tours or from Loches, Charles “commanded the nobles of all his lands,” the Chronique de la Pucelle reported, accurately this time, “to provide men and arms for the army which was mustered ‘for the cleaning up of the Loire River.’ ”
The advantage given by the lift of the siege boosted recruitment for the French and did the opposite for the English. Unaccountably, the ever-imminent-never-materializing Fastolf had yet to leave Paris with his army of four thousand, dallying there from May 4 until June 8, and, once his reinforcements had mobilized, approached the front very slowly, “fatigued, demoralized, and defeated” by an adversary he hadn’t even seen. Joan’s rumored power was as critical to a battle’s outcome as Fastolf’s had once been, and she would discover that on her ascendency there was more chasing than fighting.
On May 22, Joan was in Selles-en-Berry (now Selles-sur-Cher), a day’s journey closer to her target. There she met Guy and André de Laval, sons of Anne de Laval, the widow of Joan’s hero, Bertrand Du Guesclin. From Selles, Guy wrote to his mother on June 8, telling her that Charles had introduced him to the celebrated Maid, stirring his friends to envy at his good fortune. She “seemed entirely divine” to him, “her deeds, and to see and hear her.” He closed his letter with a reference to a ring Joan had sent his mother three days before their meeting, a gesture Joan had called “a very small thing and that she would willingly have sent you something better considering your recommendation.” Probably he referred to a letter Anne de Laval had written to their cousin La Trémoille, affirming her good character. Joan left Selles-en-Berry on May 27, and by the end of the month she was with the Duke of Alençon at his home in Saint-Laurent, where she met her pretty duke’s mother, Mary of Brittany, and his wife, Jeanne, whose father was the imprisoned Duke of Orléans. Alençon’s wife told Joan that she was “very much afraid” for her husband. By the age of twenty-three, he had already spent five years as a prisoner, having been taken at the Battle of Verneuil and held captive in the tower of Le Crotoy, where Joan would find herself the following year, no ransom high enough to buy her freedom. Joan remained with Alençon and his family until June 6, before at last decamping for Jargeau.
All but one suburb of Jargeau was fortified by a wall surrounded by a deep ditch; the city was a miniature of Orléans. Within was the Duke of Suffolk, William de la Pole, and an estimated seven hundred soldiers. Contemplating the town’s five towers from across the Loire, the captains of the French army, among them Dunois and La Hire, debated whether they should attack at all. It was June 10; trustworthy spies reported that Fastolf was at most two days away; the five towers were said to be packed with gunpowder and artillery. Joan pressed for an immediate charge across the city’s one fortified bridge, Alençon testified, telling her men “not to fear the numbers or hesitate about attacking the English because God would lead their enterprise.”
Having learned of Joan’s high-handed manner toward seasoned captains and the resulting conflicts with Dunois, Charles had put his cousin Alençon in command of the forces at Jargeau, which, as Alençon ceded all military decisions to Joan, did put an end to squabbling among the various chefs de guerre. Joan tore across the bridge with her troops to recapture the outlying, unprotected suburb, expecting little if any resistance. But the English intercepted, coming out from behind the fortifications in such force that the French fell back—all except Joan, who took up her standard and, as Alençon testified, “set off to the attack, exhorting the men-at-arms to have good courage,” and filling them with such purpose and optimism that they quickly drove the English back into their powder-packed towers and installed themselves in the suburb. Upon rising, Joan fired off a bulletin to the English, who could, she said, “surrender this place to the King of Heaven and to the gentle King Charles, and then you can go, otherwise you will be massacred.” The message didn’t inspire the derision it had in Orléans, the idea of the French entrusting their army to a witch no longer a joke, nor did it result in retreat. The French initiated an intensive bombardment, firing cannon and other gunpowder artillery from across the river and the suburbs until they’d destroyed one tower completely and so compromised the city’s walls that by the end of the day Suffolk was asking La Hire to arrange surrender. The parlay excluded all the other French captains, including Joan and Alençon, both of whom lambasted La Hire for presuming to take it upon himself to speak on behalf of France. Both refused to honor the English’s terms, which were to remain unmolested in Jargeau for fifteen days, at which point they would leave if the elusive Fastolf hadn’t yet relieved them. Joan’s conditions were that unless the English left immediately, with their horses, they would remain under attack. The English stayed; Joan launched a direct assault on what remained of the city’s walls and dismissed Alençon’s hesitation by reminding him of their unfair advantage. “Oh gentle duke, are you afraid?” she chided. “Do not doubt. The time is right when it pleases God. And one ought to act when God wishes. Act and God will act.”
“Terrible and very magnificent,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet said of the attack that began on the morning of Sunday, June 12. By dawn the French soldiers, having “placed themselves in the ditch with ladders and other tools necessary to make an assault, attacked marvelously those who were inside,” who, the Journal du siège d’Orléans reported, “defended themselves most virtuously for a long time.”
Joan fought, as before, with her standard. And, as she had at Orléans, she charged forward with the army, climbed a siege ladder, and was knocked to the ground—this time from a blow to her head from above. Fifteenth-century paintings, such as those that constitute Auvergne’s Vigiles du roi Charles VII, painted c. 1470, depict the type of helmet Joan wore as a capeline; it had no visor attached to its domed crown, and its brim was longer in back, to protect the neck, as does a firefighter’s. On hitting her helmet, the stone fell to pieces like Saint Catherine’s wheel—in some accounts it’s the helmet that shatters—and Joan popped up from the ditch calling for more blood. “Our Lord has doomed the English,” she exhorted her army. “At this very hour they are ours.” Reminded of the source of their commander’s fortitude, the French captains dismissed Suffolk’s second call for a meeting to establish terms of surrender, and the soldiers redoubled their efforts, and “at that moment,” Alençon testified, “the town of Jargeau was taken.”
Alençon, who had been enthralled by the Maid from the moment he’d met her, found himself that much more overawed when Joan made good on her promise to his wife. “During the attack on the town of Jargeau, Joan told me at one moment to retire from the place where I was standing, for if I did not ‘that engine’—and she pointed to a piece of artillery in the town—‘will kill you.’ I fell back, and a little later on that very spot where I had been standing someone by the name of my lord de Lude was killed. That made me very much afraid, and I wondered greatly at Joan’s sayings after all these events.”
The French left Jargeau with a “large garrison of their own soldiers on the bridge,” Jean Chartier explained, to keep the remaining enemy trapped within the city they no longer owned and thus prevent Scales and Talbot’s forces from joining with Fastolf’s four thousand, whenever they arrived. With the addition of twelve hundred troops from Charles, Joan and Alençon commanded an army of about six or seven thousand, recruitment no longer a problem as, according to the Journal du siège d’Orléans, “lords, knights, squires, captains, and valiant men at arms,” many of whom had avoided battle until the raising of the siege, now clamored to join the crusade. Among the new captains was Arthur de Richemont, the constable of France and thus captain of them all, in name anyway. Raised for the most part in the ducal courts of Burgundy, Richemont was effectively orphaned before he turned ten, when his widowed mother married the English king Henry IV. Still, his fealty was not to the Burgundians, as his bosom boyhood friend was the Valois dauphin, Louis of Guyenne, who died of dysentery in 1415—the same year Richemont was taken prisoner at Agincourt and commenced a five-year exile in England. His mother’s marriage to the king granted him uncommon privileges for a hostage, one of these being his marriage to Margaret of Burgundy, the widow of his best friend, Louis, and daughter of John the Fearless. It would be hard to identify a noble whose loyalties were so thoroughly divided, granting him perpetual license to make war from either side. Richemont’s only allegiance was to active combat, and in 1424, when the Duke of Bedford refused to grant him command of an army, Yolande found it easy enough to seduce him across the channel. That he was the king of England’s stepson married to the daughter of John the Fearless didn’t present any ethical or emotional obstacle to his accepting the title constable of France. Upon his arrival at the French court, however, Richemont discovered that La Trémoille, whom he’d counted among his friends, was now an enemy. Yolande hadn’t poached France’s new constable from the other side to make peace. She’d been shopping for a warrior, and La Trémoille wanted to be rid of warriors once and for all and commit to a course of diplomacy—surrender, in Joan’s terms—in which he could control Charles, easily exciting him to paranoia. By 1427, La Trémoille had convinced the dauphin to ban Richemont from court and, by extension, from joining forces with the army maintained by that court.
Alençon, necessarily loyal to his brother-in-law, the dauphin, testified that just as he told Joan he refused to fight in the same army as Richemont, “news came that the English were approaching in great numbers … Then Joan said to me—for I was about to retire because of the lord constable’s arrival—that we had to help one another.”
It was June 17, 1429, and the dreaded Fastolf and his four thousand soldiers had arrived just outside Beaugency in the Beauce region. To retake the town, another with a strategically important bridge, Joan needed Richemont’s troops, and she was innately attracted to a commander as energetically hawkish as she was herself. As Alençon remembered, she introduced herself with what was, for her, admirable tact.
“Ah, my good constable, you have not come by my will, but now that you are here, you are welcome.” The two dismounted, and Joan, with her signature chivalric flourish, fell to her armored knees and embraced the captain’s.
Guillaume Gruel, Richemont’s personal chronicler, recorded the dialogue from his employer’s perspective with an evident taste for the dashing. “Joan, it has been said that you wish to fight with me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God, I do not fear you because God knows my good will. If you are from the devil, I fear you even less.”
Though Joan couldn’t have known it, not yet, she had already begun to demonstrate the Faustian bargain she represented to the dauphin. It was hardly possible to regret the enemy’s flight, but the English hadn’t surrendered as a justly beaten enemy—not on mortal terms—and they made it clear to the French that they interpreted their change in fortune as having been accomplished by sorcery, which, as La Trémoille underscored, would invalidate any diplomatic overtures France’s improved position might encourage it to make. To enter into a friendly alliance with a powerful captain who had fallen out of Charles’s favor was neither wise nor avoidable, but whether or not she knew the cost of disobeying earthly kings, she served a higher liege. Joan needed Richemont’s soldiers, an estimated one thousand to twelve hundred reinforcements collected and salaried by Yolande. Charles, whose irrational suspicions La Trémoille continued to cultivate as a matter of habit, regarded Richemont as a foe until 1433, two years after Joan was executed. Yolande, whose grandson the future Louis XI would describe as having “a man’s heart inside a woman’s body,” had at last swept the fat spider away from the throne and out of the castle.
Fastolf arrived at Beaugency to find the French in battle formation—“6,000 soldiers of which the leaders were Joan the Maid, the duke of Alençon, the Bastard of Orléans, the Marshal of La Fayette, La Hire, Ponton [de Xaintrailles], and other captains,” according to a Burgundian soldier, Jean de Wavrin.
“Many of the King’s men were frightened” of the battle that awaited them, Alençon testified, “and said that it would be a good thing to send for the horses,” but, “as I very well know, the English were routed and killed without great difficulty.
“The next day,” Alençon continued, “we took the Beaugency road, and in the fields we found more of the King’s soldiers, and there an attack was made on the English who held Beaugency. After this attack, the English stripped the city and went into the castle. And guards were placed in front of the castle to prevent their coming out. We were in front of the castle when news came to us that the lord constable was approaching with some soldiers.” At the prospect of being barricaded inside a tower until they became desperate enough to walk out into Richemont’s army, the English requested a treaty of surrender. In return for safe conduct and a promise not to engage in battle for ten days, the French gave them leave to retreat. Fastolf, whose failures in the face of Joan of Arc represent the single stain on an otherwise exemplary military career, would be remembered here for attacks that were “poorly timed … incredibly ineffective … badly organized and completely unassisted by archery or gunpowder weapons.” Cannon was one thing, its weight challenging transport, but when the English archers hadn’t picked up their bows, whether out of fear or disorganization or mutiny, a profound shift had occurred. It wasn’t fifteen years since their mastery of the swift and accurate longbow had determined the outcome of Agincourt, England salting French earth with French blood.
The troops whose command preceded Joan’s would have let the English go all the way back to Paris, but Joan, her single-minded focus fixed on Reims, wasn’t inclined to let an army she’d trounced, one town after another, escape without attempting to demoralize them even further, thus easing the journey to Reims that much more. “In God’s name!” Joan exhorted any captain who hesitated chasing after the English. “We must fight them. If they were hanging in the clouds we should get them. For God has sent them to us for us to punish them. The gentle King shall have the greatest victory today that he has had for a long time. My Counsel tells me that they are all ours.”
Her captains might have hesitated, but Joan, the de facto constable of France, had their allegiance and, increasingly, their respect for her abilities. Several spoke of what struck them as the remarkable, even miraculous, rate at which she acquired the expertise of seasoned knights. Thibault d’Armagnac, who fought under Joan at Patay, testified that “in the leading and drawing up of armies and in the conduct of war, in disposing an army for battle and haranguing the soldiers, she behaved like the most experienced captain in all the world, like one with a whole lifetime of experience.” Alençon, who had been convinced of Joan’s genius upon meeting her, echoed Thibault d’Armagnac. “In the conduct of war she was most skillful, both in carrying a lance herself, in drawing up the army in battle order, and in placing the artillery. And everyone was astonished that she acted with such prudence and clear-sightedness in military matters, as cleverly as some great captain with twenty or thirty years’ experience; and especially in the placing of artillery, for in that she acquitted herself magnificently.”
What should they do? Alençon asked Joan.
“See that you all have good spurs!”
“When those present heard this,” Alençon testified, “they asked her, ‘What did you say? Are we to turn our backs on them then?’ ‘No,’ answered Joan, ‘it will be the English who will put up no defense. They will be beaten, and you will have to have good spurs to pursue them.’ ”
Joan ordered a line of march determined by the speed at which individual corps could travel, placing La Hire in the vanguard with the fastest of the cavalry. Along with Dunois, Alençon, Richemont, and Gilles de Rais, she rode with the main body of cavalry and infantry—in sum, six thousand men, according to the Journal du siège d’Orléans, all of whom answered to Joan. The English had been marching resolutely north for nearly four hours and had stopped to rest just a few miles south of Patay when their army’s rear guard sighted the French cavalry coming up fast on their heels, Joan’s heralds galloping before it with a warning for Fastolf.
Perhaps, as a commander whose expertise was field—rather than siege—warfare, Fastolf felt an echo of his former confidence at the prospect of combat on terrain no different from the flat farmland on which he had trounced and humiliated the French just four months earlier. With Talbot under him, he commanded five thousand men, and he knew the military weaknesses of the French. He’d been at Agincourt, called “one of the most lopsided killing orgies in military history … that epitomized the recurring pattern of almost all the battles of the Hundred Years War: English discipline and skill ruining mindless French valor.” At Agincourt, ten thousand of France’s twenty-four thousand soldiers were slaughtered, while England lost only a few hundred men from an army one-quarter the size of France’s.
He wasn’t running, Fastolf told Joan’s heralds; she could expect the English to stand their ground just where they were, about four miles south of the actual town of Patay, neither advancing nor retreating. Reserving the main body and rearguard of his forces, Fastolf sent the “vanguard, supplies, artillery and non-combatants to hide in the woods” adjacent to the field he’d selected for battle. Talbot, according to Jean de Wavrin, was dispatched with “five hundred elite mounted archers” to secrete themselves “between two strong hedges through which he felt that the French would pass.” His orders were to hold them off until Fastolf had determined a plan of attack and arranged his soldiers. The ambush might well have granted victory, even to a smaller army, but for a stag flushed from the woods by the rank clamor of the lathered French cavalry, La Hire in the lead, having ridden the French corps hard all the way from Meung, fifteen miles to the south. As soon as the stag discovered itself in a clearing, unprotected, it bolted back under cover and, as fate had it, into the formation of English archers. The animal would have been a red deer, whose habitat spreads across Europe. Among the largest of the deer family, the bull’s height approaches that of an elk, and at an average weight of five hundred pounds, the momentum generated by its charge would have provided its antlers with enough thrust to pierce armor. Moving at top speed, the stag couldn’t have stopped even had it wanted, and it “uttered a great cry” as it plunged, hooves thrashing, into the formation of English archers. The military glory of England, their nerves on edge at the approach of the witch, dropped their bows and scattered screaming into the woods, where they collided with their own army’s hidden vanguard and supplies, the ensuing chaos summoning Fastolf from the field, his troops following in disarray. Among those taken prisoner, Alençon testified, was Talbot, who had accompanied Bedford to France in 1427 and had been forced to give up the boulevard of Saint-Loup at Orléans, after having presided blindly over the skirmish before which Joan ushered her parade of bounty.
Were it not for eyewitness testimony, French and English both, it would be tempting to gather the stag into Joan’s flock of undocumented sheep, birds, and butterflies—another creature that migrates across cultures as an archetype that travels between mortal and immortal realms. It is the stag that pulls Artemis’s chariot through the clouds, changing sky to heaven. In one Christian legend, a stag draws a hunter away from his companions and deep into the woods, where the sacred beast confronts him, a crucifix emerging, like the single horn of a unicorn, from the center of its head, between its antlers. Illustrated medieval bestiaries identify the stag as an incarnation of the avenging Christ who tramples and destroys the devil, a manifestation of purity and nobility that dates back to the psalms of the Old Testament. The anonymous Ballade du sacre de Reims—a coronation ballad—echoes Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne in summoning prophecies of a noble cerf volant, a “Flying Stag … arising from the pure roots of the beautiful garden of the noble fleur-de-lys,” she wrote, tidily sowing the soil of Eden with the royal flower of France.
A military history of the Battle of Patay might diminish the stag’s role by lumping it among lightning bolts and other developments beyond mortal influence: “the unplanned, that turns the tide of a battle.” One creatively presents the victory that followed its charge as a default. The English soldiers’ attention having been diverted from sacred responsibility to irresistible sport, they took off after the animal on an impromptu hunt. Whether the stag was temptation or antagonist, its significance lies outside the study of waging war and belongs to the uncanny. The violent trajectory of an animal chosen to represent Christ precipitated a peculiar chain of events that resolved a decisive battle in under an hour, with minimal losses to the French. As to the enemies of God’s chosen, Alençon testified, “four thousand men in dead and prisoners,” a tally that included the capture of Talbot, Scales, and other English captains: in sum, a catastrophic loss. And the typical, and typically superstitious, medieval Christian could not help but regard the stag as a manifestation of the divine—or the diabolic.
Although it was almost twenty miles north of the Loire, and although Joan continued to make war after it was won, the Battle of Patay was the decisive victory of the Loire campaign, the culmination of what Orléans’s war cry had begun. At its conclusion, the citizens of Janville refused to allow the battered English army back within their city walls, seeing the prudence of giving in to the Maid before she did to Janville what she had done to Jargeau. Because something had happened at Jargeau, where Joan had made her customary offer of clemency upon the surrender to her king, after having promised, according to Perceval de Cagny, Alençon’s “master of the horse,” a “massacre” to any who dared resist. When her men faltered, Alençon testified, she told them to take heart, for God had damned the English. At the conclusion of what was a definite rout, many more enemy troops had been executed than taken captive for ransom, and, more unusual still, executions continued after the cease-fire. Although it’s unlikely Joan had condoned the unnecessary carnage, the bloodlust she aroused wasn’t easily switched on and off. As it was her habit to retire after battle to confession, Mass, and the counsel of her voices, she might have been enjoying the company of angels as her men celebrated victory by succumbing to one sin they weren’t denied. “Whatever the relationship of religious fanaticism to the savagery,” one medievalist summarized, “it did not repress the knightly proclivity for turning war into sport.”
From Patay, Joan took her troops to Orléans, where she awaited permission to approach Gien, to which Charles had abruptly moved his court. Within what had very recently been enemy territory, Gien presented a single advantage: its location offered a more direct route to Reims than did Loches—the reason, Joan naturally presumed, for the dauphin’s unexplained relocation. Her impatience gathered for nearly a week, during which Charles was closeted with his advisers. When, on June 24, she at last arrived in Gien, she didn’t, as she expected, meet the dauphin and from there continue with him directly to Reims but was immediately hobbled by the usual intrigues, each courtier proposing a plan tailored to his own greedy agenda. La Trémoille warned Charles that there were too many cities and towns controlled by the Burgundians, the journey to Reims too risky to undertake. But Joan’s argument for making haste to Reims was a pragmatic one. As she said, once Charles “had been crowned and consecrated, the power of his enemy would steadily decline, until in the end they would not be able to harm either the King or the kingdom.” She promised Charles that, contrary to La Trémoille’s dire predictions, the towns between Gien and Reims would surrender without resistance. How dangerous could the journey be with an escort of twelve thousand soldiers, not counting the limitless forces under Saint Michael?
Charles temporized; Joan assuaged her impatience by composing an announcement of her triumph. The letter was distributed to many cities in the realm, like the one Charles had disseminated after Orléans was freed. A copy remains; it was brought to the city of Tournai, in present-day Belgium, some twenty-five miles east of Brussels. Carried by Thierry de Maubray, a messenger bearing news of the realm, it was “copied and transmitted to the thirty-six ‘Banners,’ or sections of the city.” Referring to herself in the third person, Joan proclaimed to each citizen in the land that within eight days, La Pucelle had “chased the English out of all the places that they held on the river Loire by assault and other means.” She listed the enemy captains her army had either killed or captured and closed with a threat couched as an invitation, not so much asking as commanding the recipients’ presence at the coronation. “May God watch over you and grant you grace to uphold the just cause of the kingdom of France.”
Under the spell of Joan’s cockiness, Dunois sent the Earl of Suffolk, taken prisoner at Jargeau two weeks earlier, a note from Gien, “a small piece of paper,” he testified, “four lines that made mention of a maid who would come from the oak wood, riding on the backs of archers.” All Frenchmen knew the prophecy, and now they knew its fulfillment, but it couldn’t hurt to remind an English captain that his losses were ordained, there was no point in struggling.
Joan and her army set out for Reims with the dauphin and his retinue on Monday, June 27, 1429. Cravant, Bonny, Lavau, Saint-Fargeau, Coulanges-la-Vineuse, Auxerre, Saint-Florentin, Brinon, Saint-Phal: all the Loire towns “welcomed the soldier and the Maid, and all made homage to the dauphin,” as if years of enemy occupation were instantly undone—a transformation that often required nothing so cumbersome as the movement of troops. The English army had been too small for it to garrison each town it conquered, and those it did were given minimal manpower. As Joan’s army approached, sources including the Chronique de la Pucelle suggest that most English-occupied towns surrendered without resistance, let alone bloodshed. But Troyes, where Charles’s mother had publicly disowned and humiliated him, proved harder to convince. The city’s identity was informed by the treaty that bore its name, and it had prospered under Anglo-Burgundian rule. One of the few occupied cities that had been garrisoned, Troyes had time to wait on rescue from the English forces, the dauphin’s guarantee of amnesty insufficient to woo its citizens to relinquish the city’s keys.
Initially, Troyes’s garrison of five to six hundred soldiers inspired the conceit that the town might resist Joan and her army. Like everyone else in the realm, the people of Troyes knew of Joan’s victories and their unnatural accomplishment, but not of the magnitude of her forces, thousands strong, and when they sallied out to discover themselves surrounded by a sea of enemy soldiers, they made an about-face and drew the drawbridge up behind them. Having been “told continually by their Anglo-Burgundian leaders that she was led by a force other than God,” after some deliberation they dispatched an envoy to examine Joan in the form of Brother Richard, a mendicant friar and disciple of Saint Bernard of Siena. Brother Richard was one of countless turn-or-burn preachers who emerge from societies whose apocalyptic beliefs warn of imminent extinction. Jesus was as well. Cultures preoccupied with death cannot help but dwell on rewards and retribution, and in Paris a popular preacher could summon a mob twenty thousand strong, the frenzy of devotion predicting an equally fierce rejection. In April, Brother Richard had been run out of Paris and refused entry by several towns between Paris and Troyes, where he’d found asylum and then adulation. The citizens of Troyes, too, would send him packing, but for now he retained their faith, and as Joan testified, “The people of Troyes sent him to me. They said they were afraid I was not a thing sent from God.”
“Come boldly!” Joan said when he drew near her. “I shall not fly away.” Just as a witch could fly, so could holy water set her flesh afire, and Brother Richard sprinkled it liberally over Joan, who faced him defiantly in her indecent clothing, feet planted on the earth as firmly as his own. Joan, on whom the spray of water fell without a sizzle, was unconvinced of the sanctity of Brother Richard and galled by his presuming to judge her. Still, she didn’t waste the opportunity to use him for what he was worth, “since it was he who was entrusted with the delivery of the letter that she addressed to the people of Troyes during the march on Reims, the letter that won their surrender.”
Joan the Maid commands and informs you in the name of the King of heaven, her rightful and sovereign Lord, in whose service she is each day, that you should render true obedience and recognition to the gentle King of France … And if you do not I promise you and certify upon your lives that we will enter, with God’s help, all the towns that should belong to the holy kingdom and establish a good firm peace there, whoever comes against us. I commend you to God, may He watch over you if it pleases him.
Reply soon.
As did every crisis or impasse, the obduracy of the people of Troyes fractured the dauphin’s council. Archbishop Regnault de Chartres, who would perform the coronation, felt the king’s forces had wasted enough time on Troyes and ought to proceed directly to Reims before Joan seized the opportunity to make another stop on her bloody road show, picking up that many more fanatical hangers-on. The Lord of Treves, Robert le Maçon, accorded the wisdom of his years, said Joan should be summoned for her advice, as they owed the past months’ victories to her aid.
“In God’s name,” Dunois remembered Joan telling Charles, “within three days I will lead you into the city of Troyes, by love, force, or courage, and that false Burgundy will be quite thunderstruck.” No amount of gallantry could seduce La Trémoille and his fellow leeches, but Charles granted Joan’s request to answer the Troyens’ resistance with military action. Her troops at the ready, she did indeed amaze the enemy, who watched her forces immediately “set up all of the French gunpowder artillery against the walls and prepared for its use,” moving at what looked like unnatural speed. Beyond the walls, hundreds of other soldiers were making a production of bundling sticks into a rising mountain of fagots to cast into the city’s moat, inviting Joan and all her mortal army to walk over water and position themselves for attack. Recognizing the folly of continuing to hold out against what Joan was advertising as the imminence of one of her infamous massacres, the Troyens delayed capitulating for a single day before sending an envoy to negotiate surrender. Charles entered the city with Joan not behind but next to him, carrying her standard, as they headed up the victory procession, after which “the dauphin dealt mercifully and without punishment with the Troyens, who quickly resupplied his army.”
According to Alençon’s master of the horse, Perceval de Cagny, the towns between the cities of Troyes and Reims fell with providential ease. Joan sent her standard ahead of her as the premature announcement of what was an assured victory for the French, followed by Charles’s offer of amnesty to those who submitted to his rule. One of these towns was Châlons-sur-Marne, as near to Domrémy as Joan had drawn since undertaking her quest, and a few of her old neighbors and friends made the ninety-mile journey to see their famous daughter. Among them were her godfather Jean Moreau and Gérardin of Épinal, the Burgundian whose decapitation Joan had nonchalantly suggested as a gesture of leave-taking. One of the citizens of Domrémy who made the effort required to testify on her behalf at her nullification trial, he recounted her warm reception of him and his traveling companions and remembered what in retrospect he considered a prophecy. But it didn’t require clairvoyance to see that no matter how great her volunteer army, Joan had enemies at court; or that Charles was as devious as the courtiers who curried his favor. She feared but one thing, she told Gérardin, and that was treachery.
Schiller gives Joan’s presentiment the form of a sinister Black Knight, who, she says, “enticed me from the battlefield.”
“Look over there!” the Black Knight says, his face hidden behind his visor. “There rise the towers of Reims, the goal you fought for and your journey’s end. The vast cathedral glitters in the light, which you will enter in triumph, and where you will crown your King, and so fulfill your vow. Do not go in there! Turn back! Hear my warning!”
From Châlons-sur-Marne, Joan set out with Charles and his cortege for Sept-Saulx, the château of Archbishop Regnault de Chartres, just fourteen miles southeast of Reims, as close as the archbishop had drawn to the city since its occupation by the Burgundians and his subsequent attachment to Charles’s court, where he found an ally in La Trémoille. Regnault’s flock hadn’t seen him for twenty years when, on Saturday, July 16, they opened the gates of Reims for him, along with Charles, Joan, and an army in want of food and lodging. Upon entering the city to the frenzy of curiosity and welcome she’d come to expect, Joan discovered that the Burgundians, foreseeing the unavoidable, had done their best to strip the cathedral of its sacred objects. Joyeuse, the legendary sword of Charlemagne, identified by The Song of Roland as the “lance, which wounded Our Lord on the cross,” a relic of inestimable value traditionally present at a coronation, was missing. From vestments to chalices and candlesticks, anything of value that wasn’t nailed down or too heavy to carry had been snatched as spoils of war. But, “secreted away by monks loyal to the dauphin,” the single artifact essential to the transfer of divine right had been hidden and preserved. The Sainte Ampoule had descended from heaven, on Christmas Day 496, transferred from the hands of angels to those of Saint Rémy, bishop of Reims and patron saint of Joan’s parish church: Domrémy. With it, he baptized Clovis the first Christian ruler of the Franks, redefining the crime of Christianity as the mandatory state religion. In the miraculously multiplying manner of loaves and fishes—or the Brothers Grimm’s “Magic Porridge Pot”—the Sainte Ampoule had never run dry, the vial’s contents having hallowed nearly a thousand years’ worth of coronations thus far.
A full midsummer moon gave the citizens of Reims that much more time to prepare for an occasion usually months in the planning, and “all night long the city resounded to the blows of hammers and mallets.” If it wasn’t the pomp of a time of plenty, there was more than enough sparkle and heraldry to gratify Joan and dazzle her parents, who had come to bear witness to their daughter’s transformation from disgraced runaway to exalted virgin and chef de guerre of all France. At nine in the morning, the exuberant celebrants poured into the cathedral after the dauphin, himself under a guard of eight hundred soldiers. No report includes a description of the day’s weather, but it was almost certainly a fine day, bright and clear, as any among Joan’s detractors would have pounced on so obvious an indication of heavenly displeasure as lowering, storm-laden clouds. So the sun shone through the great rose window, spraying coins of colored light over the hushed congregants, whose state costumes were typically “ornamented by hundreds of precious stones” and other furbelows. Perhaps La Hire wore the red velvet cape that impressed itself on his comrades’ memories: it was covered all over with tiny silver bells. Immediately behind Joan and Charles walked the four appointed guardians of the chrism—the admiral of France, the Lord of Graville, the marshal de Boussac, and Gilles de Rais—followed by Dunois and Alençon, carrying crown and scepter. Joan had petitioned Charles to relax his exile of Arthur de Richemont, who as constable should have been present to bear the ceremonial sword that stood as a surrogate for Joyeuse, but Charles refused, suggesting how tenacious was La Trémoille’s hold over him.
Upon reaching the altar, Charles prostrated himself on the floor, and the archbishop did as well, and then the archbishop rose from the dauphin’s side to dab the holy oil on his head, chest, shoulders, elbows, and wrists—points of intelligence, passion, and command. “I anoint you for the realm with holy oil,” Regnault said, “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” and the congregants cried, “Long live the king for eternity!” The archbishop prayed that Charles prove himself worthy of the power with which he had been entrusted, and the consecrated king replaced the simple shift he had worn for his anointment with regalia befitting his role as earthly representative of God’s rule. “Three gentlemen from Anjou … were charged with reporting the ceremony to the Queen, Marie of Anjou, and her mother,” Yolande, as Charles had sent his wife instructions from Gien “to return to Bourges since the operation he was launching was a dangerous one.” Too, “the royal entourage judged that it was the king alone whose coronation then mattered.” Marie would be crowned later in Paris, as were all French queens, in a ceremony to which far less importance was attached. After the crown was placed on the new king’s head, “Everyone cried ‘Noel!’ ” the unnamed trio wrote, “and the trumpets sounded in such a manner so that it seemed as though the vaulting of the roof would be rent.”
“When the Maid saw that the king had been consecrated and crowned,” the Journal du siège d’Orléans recorded, “she knelt before him in front of all the lords standing around them, and she embraced his legs, saying as she cried warm tears, ‘Gentle king, the pleasure of God has been executed. He Who wished that I relieve the siege of Orléans and Who brought you into this city of Reims to receive your holy consecration, demonstrated that you are the true king and the one to whom the kingdom should belong.’ And there was a great pity from all who saw this.” It was a friendly account and ignored expressions inspired by feelings other than sympathy, feelings of those for whom “questions of precedence and etiquette” assumed a “religious significance.”
“Was your standard not made to wave above the king’s head when he was crowned at Reims?” the examiner demanded.
“No,” Joan said. “Not so far as I know.”
“Why then was your standard carried into the church at Reims at the consecration? Why yours rather than those of the other captains?”
“It had been present in the perils,” Joan said. “That was reason enough for it to be honored.”
Called a commoner by men, Joan bore divine heraldry, advertising a status beyond the highest of mortal honors. The spot she claimed was an unprecedented disruption in what was, to the medieval mind, the crucial order upon which human existence depended: an inalterable hierarchy decreed by God. The scala naturae, a Neoplatonic concept of a great chain of being, ranked all of creation down “from the infinite Creator to the smallest of his Productions” by way of angels and demons, mortal princes, both lay and ecclesiastical, nobles, and commoners. Below them fell animals, plants, and minerals in order of their ability to answer human needs and desires. The rite of anointing was symbolism choreographed to amplify and make manifest the sacred transaction that cemented a king in his rightful place in the great chain, as most exalted among mortals. Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII at Reims by Jules Eugène Lenepveu (Fig. 22), an academic painter of the same era as Jean-Jacques Scherrer, illustrates how radical a breach Joan had effected. Lenepveu elevates Regnault, Charles, and Joan above the mass of lesser knights and nobles, all three on a blue dais decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis. To the left of the canvas’s center, the archbishop places the crown on Charles’s head, his eyes cast down on the kneeling king and the king’s eyes fixed on the floor below his knees. Joan, armored and wearing a rich red and gold surcoat, stands slightly to the right of the canvas’s center, which is claimed by the sword in her right hand, the weapon tilted at the familiar suggestive angle and sanctified by a hilt that transforms its shaft into a cross. She is a solitary figure in the packed cathedral. Her placement on the dais separates her from archbishop and king, removes her from the company of all mortals, and lifts her toward the ranks of stained-glass saints overhead. Her eyes are fixed on three beams of light from a source outside the canvas, a symbol of the trinity, and her surcoat falls aside to expose a perfectly round and seemingly nippled plate of armor—like a single, Amazonian left breast. The standard whose staff she grasps with her left hand reaches above all the earthly regalia, and the drape of its white fabric falls behind her shoulders, its outline suggesting a pair of great white-feathered wings. Before all of Europe, a virgin dressed as a man and armored as a knight stepped into the most sacred ritual of her people, fracturing the patriarchal triumvirate of mortal king, divine king, and the high priest who provided the liaison between them, a performance that on a popular level invited the awe reserved for a Demiurge, while igniting fury in Joan’s multiplying enemies among the aristocracy.
“My lord,” La Trémoille warns Charles in Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine. “This girl is ambitious and unscrupulous. She intends to rule France. In your place.” He reminds Charles that her victories on the battlefield have nothing to do with “tactics, relying entirely on her personal prestige, the fanatic enthusiasm of her followers.”
Miracles and those who perform them are by definition unnatural, and Joan attributed hers to a god whose favor depended on the virginity she wore like a badge. By calling herself La Pucelle and wearing men’s clothes, Joan directed attention to her veiled genitalia and held it there. European men’s fashion during the late Middle Ages was both revealing and suggestive. Doublets, short jackets that terminated above the pelvis, were in style, the uncovered groin protected by a codpiece (the word cod is Middle English for scrotum) that not only accentuated the size of a man’s penis but also, as both Brueghel’s genre paintings and courtiers’ portraits make clear, suggested tumescence. The fifteenth century marked the height of these accessories’ popularity, as well as their size and decoration, which often verged on the pornographic. Codpieces were everywhere a girl looked, and only Joan’s richly colored and finely tailored silk velvet chausses, or hosen, conspicuously lacked the addition. As described in the fourteenth of the seventy articles of accusation initially brought against Joan, she wore “short, tight, and dissolute male habits” that advertised her singular sexuality, flaunting her power to both summon and crush desire. Her transvestism was dramatically different from that of the typical cross-dressing martyr, a woman who assumed male dress to pass as a man undetected and thus preserve her chastity. Usually, this attire was a cassock, intended to cloak the entire body of a celibate. Thomas Aquinas pardoned such brave women who, “as a means of hiding from enemies,… protected themselves by total, not partial, sex masquerade.” Joan was different.
Complete in the androgyny she invented for herself, lifted above hunger, lust, and fear, and beyond the reach of physical laws mortals obey, Joan emerged in an era when all extraordinary manifestations were interpreted and understood only inasmuch as they could be placed within the context of Scripture, a time when the abnormal was regarded with terror and read as an oracle. Contemporaneous chronicles of the Black Death, for example, placed its arrival within the context of the ten plagues God visited on Egypt as punishment for enslaving his chosen people. A letter from the papal court in Avignon explained “how terrible events and unheard of calamities had afflicted the whole of a province in eastern India for three days. On the first it rained frogs, snakes, lizards, scorpions and many other similar poisonous animals. On the second … thunderbolts and lightning flashes mixed with hailstones of incredible size.” On the third, a “stinking smoke, descended from heaven and consume[d] all the remaining men and animals and burnt all the cities and settlements in the region.”
Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon writing at the end of the fourteenth century, specified cross-dressing as a catalyst for plague, as “whenever and wherever tournaments were held, troops of ladies would arrive dressed up in a variety of extraordinary male clothing … Mounted on chargers … they abused their bodies in wantonness and scurrilous licentiousness. They neither feared God nor blushed at the criticisms of the people, but were … deaf to the demands of modesty.” Like Joan, they made manifest what women were directed to hide. Whether wanton or virgin, each parodied, and thus dishonored, men, not only destabilizing their sexual identity, but attacking the foundation of a religion whose adherents were instructed to pray to God as “Father”—for God was not woman but man.
“You stand alone, absolutely alone,” Archbishop Regnault warns in Shaw’s Saint Joan. “Trusting to your own conceit, your own ignorance, your own headstrong presumption, your own impiety in hiding all these sins under the cloak of a trust in God.” The simple people, he tells her, “will kiss your hands and feet … and madden you with the self-confidence which is leading you to your destruction. But you will be nonetheless alone: they cannot save you. We and only we can stand between you and the stake.”
At the closing of the coronation ceremony, “the Maid,” Dunois testified, “who was riding between the Archbishop of Rheims and myself, said these words, ‘Here is a good people. I have never seen a people rejoice so much at the coming of so noble a king. May I be lucky enough, when I end my days, to be buried in this soil.’ ”
“Where do you expect to die?” the archbishop asked Joan, yanking her attention back to what he intimated might be her imminent demise.
“Wherever God pleases,” Joan said. “For myself, I do not know the time or the place, any more than you do.”
“I sometimes heard Joan say to the King that she herself would last a year and scarcely more,” Alençon testified, “and that they must think during that year how to do their work well.”
Portents of her doom abounded, but Joan didn’t stoop to curry favor. Covert and temporizing, trending toward a gray realm of compromise, politicking was a degrading mire into which she wouldn’t deign to set her armored foot, not for fear of treachery nor fire. It grew ever clearer, both to Joan and to those who would take it upon themselves to destroy her, that the coronation had invested the Maid, not the dauphin, with a new identity, the anointing having “produced an extraordinary perception of Joan of Arc in France and beyond.” Voices speaking of betrayal to come were not exclusively angelic, but it was too late to consider what fantasies of revenge an archbishop, prince among clerics, might conceive in response to Joan’s having upstaged him during a moment of glory that had belonged to him as much as it had to Charles, each of them outshone, and the king just about pilloried by the national troubadour.
“You Charles, King of France, seventh of that noble name,” Christine de Pizan wrote, “who have been involved in such a great war before things turned out at all well for you, now, thanks be to God, see your honor exalted by the Pucelle who has laid low your enemies … in a short time, for it was believed quite impossible that you would ever recover your country, which you were on the point of losing … A little girl of sixteen … in preference to all the brave men of times past … must wear the crown.” Christine dated her Ditié de Jehanne July 31, 1429. By then, “after an illustrious career,” the poet had been in retirement for eleven years and only broke her silence because she couldn’t resist celebrating, as one historian put it, “the proof Joan offered of Christine’s consistent defense of women from misogyny.”
The entire culture of fifteenth-century France was possessed by Joan. As her stock fell with the court, it rose with the populace. The adulation she had already identified as idolatrous, and a danger to her soul, had force enough by now to elevate her beyond the reach of any earthbound bishop. “The famous holy oil they talked so much about was rancid,” Charles complains in Shaw’s Saint Joan. Too old to be of use, it’s a dead symbol of a bygone order, while Joan herself has become the object of worship. From pamphlets distributed in Paris to papal broadcasts nailed to church doors in Avignon, from epic poems, sermons, and treatises across the Continent, Charles of Valois and all his court melted away in the heat of Joan’s radiance.
After the ceremony, Charles and his entourage and “many other high nobles” retired to the archiepiscopal palace. Joan’s name wasn’t listed among those who attended the reception. The single source of the guest list is the pro-Burgundian Chroniques d’Enguerrand de Monstrelet, whose author might have succumbed to the temptation to deny Joan the sliver of posterity conferred by an invitation to the archbishop’s residence. She might have been there, but it would have been easy enough to exclude her, as her status as a commoner provided an excuse for Regnault to bar her from so august a gathering. In either case, Joan had enjoyed enough of the court’s costumed spectacle. Knowing she might not have another chance to be with her parents, she was ready to put aside her cloth-of-gold surcoat in exchange for the company of her family and wouldn’t have squandered an opportunity to resolve whatever ill feeling remained between her and her father, who was staying, as Hémon Raguier recorded in Charles’s account book, as a guest of the king at an inn called the Striped Ass. Sources differ as to whether Isabelle made the journey to Reims; whether she did or did not, her cousin Durand Laxart accompanied Jacques.
Having planned to march on Paris immediately after the coronation, Joan had announced as much to the Duke of Burgundy (Fig. 19) in a grandiose letter sent the morning of the ceremony, when it was clear he would not witness the anointing, a communication in which Joan swung from politesse to insolence and back again, inadequately cloaking her presumption in hollow formalities and suggesting the distraction of a foreign crusade to satisfy an itch for battle: “Great and mighty prince, Duke of Burgundy, Joan the Maid calls upon you by the King of Heaven … If you want to make war, wage it against the Saracens.”
Medieval Europeans referred to Muslims as Saracens, originally understood to be a dark-skinned people originating in the Sinai Peninsula—Arabs. By the fifteenth century, the term had become a xenophobic catchall for non-Christian peoples, idolaters who worshipped Muhammad and Termagant, a genderless god invented not by Muslims but by Christians, who believed Termagant’s rise to be a harbinger of apocalypse. Capitalized, the name was given to the antagonist in popular mystery plays based on familiar Bible stories; by the late sixteenth century, when Shakespeare used it without an uppercase T, it had come to mean a shrewish, overbearing woman, another instance of the inescapable urge to associate the female with the diabolic.
Joan’s reference to a group of infidels awaiting righteous genocide predicted another letter, one she would send two months before her capture and address to the “heretics of Bohemia,” whom she promised annihilation for their apostasy—a maneuver entirely outside the jurisdiction of her vocation, which, as the following months would demonstrate, was where she was headed.
“I pray, beg, and very humbly request rather than demand that you no longer wage war in the holy kingdom of France.” The implication that Joan had the right to demand anything of the duke rendered the request considerably less humble, especially as she went on to suggest that his well-being hinged on obeying her, the self-proclaimed messenger of God. “And I would have you know, by the king of Heaven, my rightful and sovereign lord, for your good, for your honor and upon your life, that you will not win any battle against loyal Frenchmen, and that all who wage war against the holy kingdom of France, wage war against King Jesus.” She followed the implicit threat by chiding the duke for failing to attend the coronation, which as one of the six peers of the realm he was obliged to do. “I wrote to you and sent letters by a herald, that you should be at the consecration which today, Sunday the seventeenth day of this present month of July, is taking place at the city of Reims.”
The other conspicuous absence was that of Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, who had visited Reims a few weeks earlier to take part in a Corpus Christi procession, on May 26. When he left the city to return to his diocese, he discovered it in the hands of the Armagnacs, having been swept, during his brief absence, into the wake of victories that followed Joan from Orléans to Reims. Expelled from Beauvais, along with all the rest of the Anglo-Burgundians and those loyal to their cause, he was forced to flee to Rouen, the capital of English-occupied France and the city in which he would preside over the trial that condemned Joan to death.
Cauchon was fifty-eight. His nature was calculating; he’d always known whom he could use. Having followed a conspicuously outstanding academic career as a law student at the University of Paris, he’d ascended the hierarchy of the Church Militant with dispatch and efficiency by cultivating every powerful man he encountered. Appointed vidame, or “temporal lord,” of the Reims Cathedral in 1412, from that height he gained access to the Duke of Burgundy and began making himself first useful and then indispensable to Philip, through whose influence he would acquire Beauvais’s bishopric. The same year Joan was born, the man who would be revealed as her archenemy started acquiring the power he’d need to destroy her. Cauchon, whom Michelet identified as“among the most violent in the violent party of the Cabochiens”—revolutionaries whose 1413 coup d’état aimed against the Armagnacs briefly delivered them control of Paris—“went straight to where wealth and power were to be found, in England, with the bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort, who was the half-uncle of King Henry V. He became English, he took to speaking English,” and when Beaufort, who recognized Cauchon’s ambition and greed as a reflection of his own, needed an arm long enough to reach into French intrigue, he had its owner firmly under his sway.