While Charles lay prone on the floor of Reims Cathedral, the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Bedford were conferring in Paris on how best to respond to the most recent stunt by the French, especially given its having been accomplished by so dangerous a means as sorcery. Reims was less than a hundred miles from Paris, whose citizens were growing increasingly restless at the approach of the virgin witch and her fatal spells, a topic that summoned less hilarity and more hysteria with each mile she drew closer to their walls. It had been six weeks since Jargeau fell “in a frenzied and gory assault,” and rumors had traveled as they do, more sensational with each retelling, alleging atrocities that much more atrocious.
As the English had installed their bureaucracy in Rouen, an attack on France’s former capital wouldn’t compromise the administrative arm of the occupation, but even so, to lose Paris, the uncontested jewel of Europe, would be a morale-destroying reversal. To lose it to a witch would be an unprecedented abomination, a manifestation of the devil’s might. English-occupied Paris was preparing for a battle it couldn’t afford to lose, Joan’s plan to immediately take the city stymied first by the newly crowned king’s obligatory round of fetes and then by his departure on Thursday, July 21, for Corbeny. Seventeen miles northwest of Reims, Corbeny was the site of the abbey of Saint Marcouf, patron saint of the scrofulous. The king and his retinue remained there through July 23, when Charles fulfilled his duty in “touching for scrofula,” known during the Middle Ages as the King’s Evil because the power invested in a new sovereign’s freshly anointed hand was believed to cure the unsightly tubercular infection of the lymph nodes in the neck. Inevitably, hundreds of other ailing pilgrims came as well, bearing other diseases. All received a “touch piece” as a souvenir of Charles’s ministration and were directed to keep the medals hung where they’d been placed, around their necks. The implicit message was that to remove them was to sever contact with the life-sustaining divine, even when that contact was a degree removed, as more than a few post-plague monarchs avoided communing with an unwashed populace and chose instead to touch the coins to be distributed or pass a jeweled hand and mumbled prayer over a sack of the things. Typically stamped with an image of Saint Michael slaying Satan in the form of a dragon, touch pieces were in essence amulets to ward off disease, their origin in what James Frazer called “sympathetic magic,” a system of superstitions whose “law of contagion” assures those who practice it that holy properties are transferred by touch. The misapprehension is so primitive as to predate logic—a limbic wish universal to the species. Though the Church would have objected to the analogy, aboriginal peoples in Polynesia and elsewhere practiced the converse of the Christian rite, believing that were a tribesman to accidentally brush against a sacred chief and fail to perform a subscribed ceremony “for the purpose of removing this sacred contagion,” he would “swell up and die, or at least be afflicted with scrofula or some other disease.”
Touching for the King’s Evil guaranteed a long day, not so much for Charles, inclined to linger wherever he was the center of attention, as for Joan, restless whether in or out of the public eye. Increasingly desperate to embark on the remainder of a vocation she now saw, and presented, as unfulfilled, she told Alençon she’d “had four missions: to expel the English; to have the King crowned and anointed at Reims; to free the Duke of Orléans from English hands; and to raise the siege the English had laid to Orléans town.” The duke remained in England; the English remained in France: she had much to accomplish in a year Charles was forcing her to fritter away. Alençon’s testimony was given from a remove of twenty-seven years, by a man overwhelmed by his first sight of the Maid, under whose command he remained until forcibly removed by the king, a man who had heard Joan say innumerable things for months on end. With respect to Joan’s stated vocation, he is a less reliable source than Seguin Seguin, the consistently clear witness from Poitiers, whose firsthand experience of Joan was limited to the beginning of her public career. Seguin identified only “two reasons, for which she had been sent by the King of Heaven: one was to raise the siege of Orléans, the other to lead the King to Reims for his anointing and coronation.” When she was examined at Poitiers—only four months earlier—Joan had yet to raise the siege or escort Charles to Reims. She hadn’t looked beyond the two mortally impossible challenges that lay before her. Now, having accomplished what God asked, she had no defined quest on which to fix her purpose, and she was not only uncomfortable without a concrete goal but also unmoored at the apex of her fame. Joan’s voices had banished the girl who’d lived the simple, anonymous life of a farmer’s daughter. That girl had been thoroughly and irretrievably eclipsed by the identity Joan forged to answer God’s call: the Maid, a virgin heroine whose narrative hinged on making holy war on France’s enemies and winning with the force of heaven on her side. She still had France’s enemies to fight, but the path to victory wasn’t illuminated by the bird’s-eye view of angels. Saints Catherine and Margaret no longer came to her with names of people who would aid her cause or places where sacred swords were hidden. An intimate of the king’s, she’d outgrown such help, and the discourse between Joan and her voices had changed. What began as her responding to their direction had become her appealing to them for advice and for permission the king withheld.
“If my Voices do not answer, if no injunction is laid on me, then I cannot stay here. I must arm again, and find the enemy, and fight as before,” Joan says to God in Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine. “I have courage to die, but not to die thus, in small, sick ways, daily.” Shaw portrays her as an addict of war, seeking its thrills. “Oh, dear Dunois, how I wish it were the bridge at Orléans again! We lived at that bridge … it is so dull afterward when there is no danger: oh, so dull, dull, dull!”
“You will miss the fighting,” La Hire agrees. “It’s a bad habit but a grand one, and the hardest of all to break yourself of.”
As “the medieval Western European conception of the ideal military commander placed far greater stress on the commander’s moral qualities than on his technical competence in planning and fighting battles,” Joan’s rectitude afforded her the deference of the majority of the French captains. In the case of Paris, there wasn’t one captain who didn’t share her conviction: retaking Paris was key to cementing Charles’s rule. Once France’s rightful capital, Paris, had been restored, the English would be forced to retreat across the Channel. The key was to mobilize and attack swiftly, before the English had time to pack a few thousand more longbowmen within its city walls, recognized throughout Europe as the largest and strongest—almost thirty feet high, topped with wall walks, and punctuated by rectangular towers that rose high above the walks. A population of 200,000 made Paris an enormous city, with six points of entry protected by “massive gate houses … with angular towers, arrow slits, gun-ports, murder-holes, portcullises and drawbridges built into them” and enough room to accommodate hundreds of soldiers within them. France had but one advantage to seize—time.
“What voices do you need to tell you what the blacksmith can tell you,” Shaw’s Joan demands of the feeble sybarite the playwright makes of Charles, “that you must strike while the iron is hot?”
From the abbey at Laon, king and courtiers decamped to Soissons, where they lingered, twenty-five miles closer to Paris, until July 28. Unable to wait even a day longer before underscoring Charles’s arrival at legitimate rule with a show of force, on the twenty-ninth Joan secured permission from the king to line up her soldiers, as many as six or seven thousand, at Château-Thierry, about halfway along the sixty-mile route from Reims to Paris, where she kept them at the ready all day, in battle formation, in hopes that “the duke of Bedford would come to do battle.” He never did, as the king, who had gone on to Provins, must have known he would not. La Trémoille had been negotiating an armistice, if not the indefinite peace that would require Charles’s capitulation, since June 30—two and a half weeks before the coronation. On that day, well in advance of Joan’s bellicose letter to the Duke of Burgundy, La Trémoille had arrived at the duke’s court in Dijon to begin talks that resulted in the duke’s dispatching an envoy to the coronation with a letter intended for Marie and Yolande “expressing optimism that the King would conclude a treaty.” Had Joan, who understood the cost of even a day’s inaction, any presentiment that she’d embarked on “eight months of drifting about with the King and his council, and,” as Twain called it, Charles’s “gay and showy and dancing and flirting and hawking and frolicking and serenading and dissipating court—drifting from town to town and from castle to castle,” she would have been that much more impatient with the fairy-tale procession described by Michelet: “The expedition seemed but a peaceful affirmation of ownership, a triumphal journey, a prolongation of the celebration at Reims.” With magical ease, “the paths were made smooth before the king, the cities opened their gates and lowered their drawbridges,” and Joan complained.
While La Trémoille finagled offstage, composing ententes in anticipation of forthcoming signatures, the king did his diplomatic best to avoid conflict with Joan by means of conciliatory gestures intended to distract her from warmongering. On July 31, Charles forever exempted the citizens of Domrémy and Greux from taxation, an entitlement they enjoyed until the French Revolution swept away all such indulgences, and in early August, after following the wide berth Charles made around Paris to Provins, still fulminating over a putative truce about which she, chef de guerre, was not consulted, Joan received the much better consolation of René of Anjou, Yolande’s son, at last joining the French army. Whatever small internecine coup had delivered René to Joan suggests Charles’s mother-in-law had not withdrawn her support of the Maid in response to the unwelcome communication she received from the duke.
Having received René’s arrival as a portent that God remained with her army, Joan couldn’t resist letting off a war whoop in the form of an open letter to the people of Reims. “Joan the Pucelle sends you her news and prays and requests that you do not have any doubt about the merit of her cause that she is waging for the blood royal. And I promise and certify that I shall never abandon you so long as I live. And it is true the king has made truces with the duke of Burgundy,” she wrote, but “no matter how many truces are made like this, I am not at all happy, and I do not know if I will keep them. But if I do it will only be to protect the honor of the king, and also that they do not take advantage of the blood royal.” Whether or not an accord had been signed—and there was every reason to keep Joan in the dark with respect to statecraft—for as long as she was kept from active military engagement, the unofficial truth was as good as a truce. After reassuring the citizens of Reims that her first allegiance was to the blood royal—albeit a qualified fealty that allowed her to ignore the court’s political efforts—Joan closed by asking them to “let me know if there are any traitors who wish to harm you, and as soon as I can I will drive them out … Written this Friday, 5th day of August, near Provins, in a camp in the fields on the way to Paris.”
On August 7, the Duke of Bedford—John of Lancaster, regent of France—responded to news of the coronation for both himself and the Duke of Burgundy by issuing a challenge to Charles and his forces to meet them on the battlefield. The letter was not a pro forma provocation to war. Its value was as propaganda; for this reason the dukes dispatched it from Montereau, the town on whose bridge the Duke of Burgundy’s father had been assassinated ten years earlier. Charles did, the two dukes announced, “without cause entitle yourself King” and “wrongfully made new attempts against the crown and lordship of the most high and excellent prince, my sovereign lord Henry, by the grace of God natural and rightful king of the kingdoms of France and England … And you are seducing and abusing ignorant people, and you are aided by superstitious and damnable persons, such as a woman of disorderly and infamous life, dressed in man’s clothes, and of immoral conduct, together with an apostate and seditious mendicant friar … both of them … abominable to God.” Charles was to meet the English “in the field in the country of Brie,” or anywhere in the Île-de-France, “in person, bringing the deformed woman and the apostate cited before, and all the perjurers and other force that you wish and can muster.” Until now, they told Charles, they had shown uncommon generosity to a pretender whose “fault and connivance” were to blame for “that most horrible, detestable and cruel murder … committed, against every law and the honor of chivalry, against the person of our late very dear and well beloved father”—John the Fearless.
That the dukes threw down the gauntlet even as they negotiated for a cease-fire suggests that events were unfolding as Joan predicted. The English weren’t looking for peace. They’d vacillate, contradict, haggle, and protest to prolong the cease-fire and buy as much time as possible for Paris to ready itself for attack. As Joan told Charles, “Peace was to be found only at the tip of a lance.”
Joan and her army reached Montépilloy on August 14, having passed through Coulommiers, La Ferté-Milon, Crépy-en-Valois, Lagny, and Dammartin, confirming each town’s fealty to Charles without having to resort to force. At Dammartin, however, Joan had the opportunity to observe the English army “ordered in a good formation and placed in an advantageous position,” as reported by the Journal du siège d’Orléans, and she saw as much as she could of them the next day, August 15, when the French awoke to discover Bedford had mobilized his troops in the dark, anticipating a battle with the French army on the flat, dry fields between Montépilloy and Senlis, where the French were bivouacked, about thirty miles north of Paris’s walls. Bedford had also made Philip, Duke of Burgundy, the governor of Paris, “so that a prince of the blood royal could be said to exercise political authority over the capital of France.” The English had assumed the same formation as they had at the Battle of the Herrings, but the day was so hot and the earth so parched that neither army could see the other for all the dust hanging in the air between them. Joan had but six or seven thousand soldiers to Bedford’s eight or nine thousand, but the outsize confidence of her army made up for the difference, and a few peripheral skirmishes couldn’t obscure the fact that the opposing armies were at a stalemate. The English squatted behind their defenses, waiting for Joan to lose her patience, order a charge, and impale her cavalry on their portable rampart of spikes. Charles and La Trémoille “rode about the battlefield with the duke of Bourbon,” and Joan lost her patience and used herself as bait to tempt the enemy. Knowing how much they would prize her capture, she placed herself at the very front of her army’s vanguard, leading her men“as close as the shot of a culverine [cannon],” according to an eyewitness account from the Berry herald, Gilles Le Bouvier. Given Joan’s repeated insistence that she’d rather die than fall into the hands of the English—as both the trial record and the nullification witnesses attest—and given what happened once she did fall into those hands, Joan’s decision, perhaps more impulsive than strategic, to insert herself into so needlessly perilous a situation betrays how desperate she was growing. “A bad habit,” Shaw calls Joan’s thirst for war, but it was worse than that. She wasn’t just addicted to battle; she was adrift without it.
But the English left her unmolested. She announced she would allow them the privilege of drawing up their lines while she and her troops withdrew until such time as they said they were ready. And still they didn’t venture out from behind their defenses. The day’s single gratification was that La Trémoille fell off his horse, and such was his girth that it took his entire entourage to get him back in the saddle of the unfortunate beast below it. Two years after Joan was executed, his enemies at court failed to assassinate him when “his assailants’ daggers cut only fat.”
Joan waited until dusk to release her men to return to camp for the night, unaware of the betrayal the following day would bring. On August 16, the archbishop of Reims came to Paris with Raoul de Gaucourt and other dignitaries to greet Philip in person with the news that Charles was willing to accept responsibility, and make reparations, for the murder of John the Fearless. In return for Burgundy’s neutrality, Charles agreed to surrender four cities that had only just promised him fealty: Compiègne, Senlis, Creil, and Pont-Sainte-Maxence. By the time he arrived, all that remained of the English was a circle of holes where spikes had been pulled up and a river of hoofprints and wheel tracks hastening toward Rouen, where Bedford had taken his army. Joan celebrated the outcome of Montépilloy as a rout, presenting it as a partial fulfillment of her promise that the king’s approach to Paris would be like that to Reims, the enemy one by one relinquishing all those cities that belonged to their rightful king. If she understood that her king had betrayed her, she didn’t disclose it to any witness. But she couldn’t help but recognize how gingerly was the Armagnacs’ approach to Paris, especially measured against the accelerated pace of their victory march to Reims. August 17 predicted further frustration, when Charles discovered how luxurious were the royal apartments in Compiègne, whose citizens welcomed him, unaware that he’d only just offered them up in a negotiation returning them to the enemy. Newly ensconced, Charles made no effort to bring himself to leave. “The Maid,” Perceval de Cagny, Alençon’s master of the horse, reported, “was deeply grieved that he wished to extend his stay.”
“We have feasted in Campiegne [sic], Senlis, and Beauvais, and we must feast in many more if the plans hold,” she prays in Joan of Lorraine. “But, O King of Heaven, the food is bitter. It is bought with money the King has accepted for provinces and cities … And my Voices have said nothing … they have not spoken, they are silent.”
While Charles enjoyed the privileges of his new status, the English purchased Brittany’s neutrality with “the unprecedented offer of the county of Pitou” and held out the title constable of the army to Richemont, along with the honored position’s clout, an invitation that, had he accepted it, would have included the distinction of having become the highest-paid mercenary in the Hundred Years War. Though he refused the English, he also “stayed away from the new king and even, unfortunately for her, from Joan,” who appealed to Alençon when Charles evaded her requests to initiate hostilities. “My fair duke,” she said, “equip your men and those of the other captains. By my banner, I want to go see Paris from closer than I have ever seen it.” On August 28, Charles signed a truce of four months with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and Joan was now just seven miles north of Paris, at Saint-Denis, where she had been for two days, with the three or four thousand men accompanying her and Alençon. Joan’s refusal to wait for a command from the king had effectively split the French army. Captains were unwilling to follow her if it meant La Trémoille would arrange for their exile from court: Richemont’s case had provided an instructive example. Six weeks had passed since Charles’s coronation, and Joan, the instrument of God’s will, had lost at least half of her men, and most of the faithful who remained were soldiers whose bankrupt king hadn’t ever paid them wages to join his army. They fought under Joan in the expectation that God would reward their valor and service.
By the time Joan approached her target, Charles had been crowned for seven weeks, and “the defenses of Paris were strengthened … boulevards were constructed in front of the gates, houses built next to the walls were knocked down, gunpowder weapons were mounted and stones were gathered … 1,176 cannonballs … delivered to the gates of Paris … and placed near the city walls.” Between Joan’s forces, stationed at Senlis, and the walls was a moat, the moat surrounded by a trench. The English army, eight or nine thousand strong, stood between this trench and their characteristic fence of sharpened stakes aimed at the cavalry’s advance, a liberal peppering of chausse-trappes awaiting the foot soldiers.
Joan spent nearly two weeks skirmishing around the walls of Paris, whose fortifications were built, as one military historian put it, “as much to intimidate any enemy into not attacking as … to defend against any onslaught.” Without Charles’s permission to mobilize, it was all the fighting she could get away with, and in any case its purpose was to provide an excuse to reconnoiter. By September 8, when Charles at last gave his wan go-ahead, she was poised to attack the point she’d determined most vulnerable, the Saint-Honoré Gate, on the Seine’s right bank, some sixty feet wide and thirty feet high, based on archaeological evidence. “They began by bombarding the walls with their gunpowder weapons and by throwing large bundles of sticks, wood, carts, and barrels into the moat,” over which Joan was the first to walk, entering “near to the Pigmarket,” Alençon’s master of the horse, Perceval de Cagny, wrote. “The attack was hard and long and it was a marvel to hear the sound and noise of the cannon and couleverines which those inside fired at those outside.” The Armagnac Perceval claimed “not any man was killed or was wounded who was not able to return to his side and his tent without aid,” which was almost certainly untrue. Clément de Fauquembergue reported a great number of casualties, and fatalities, by gunfire. The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris “happily estimated the Armagnac casualties at 1,500.” The men of their party were “so full of great error and foolish trust that on the advice of a creature … in the shape of a woman—who this was, God knows”—they believed “they would certainly win Paris by assault” and “would all be made rich with the city’s goods.” They made what the Bourgeois described as “a very savage attack,” during which they “said many vile insults to the Parisians: ‘You must surrender to us quickly, for Jesus’s sake, for if you do not surrender yourselves before it becomes night we will invade you by force,’ Joan said, ‘willing or not, and you will be put to death without mercy.’ ”
“ ‘See here, you whore, you slut,’ said one. And he shot his crossbow right at her and it went right through her leg, and she fled. Another went right through the foot of the man who carried her standard, and when he felt himself to be wounded, he lifted his visor to see to draw the bolt from his foot, and another man shot at him and hit him between the eyes and mortally wounded him.” If Joan fled, it wasn’t far. Monstrelet, a Burgundian chronicler, reported that she was so gravely wounded she “remained the whole day in the ditches behind a small mound.” Both Joan and the standard under which she fought were down; “the attack was very violent … and lasted until four hours after noon,” when “the Parisians became confident in themselves” and fired “their cannon and other artillery so many times that the army charging at them recoiled.” Against the protests of Joan, who had to be dragged away from the trench into which she’d fallen and carried back to camp, Alençon took the opportunity to call a cease-fire and “stopped their attack, and they left.” As the French retreated, the Parisians “fired into their backs, which was very terrible. Thus it was put to an end.”
But on September 9, “encouraged by the arrival of the count of Montmorency and fifty to sixty” knights, all of whom had “defected from the city, wishing to fight with her and the French army against their former allies,” Joan sent for Alençon and prepared for battle, despite what was a significant wound, which took, she testified, five days to heal, by which she meant that it had stopped bleeding; weeks later she was still suffering the injury’s effects. But they hadn’t a chance to assemble for battle before René of Anjou and the Count of Clermont arrived, both envoys of Charles, who demanded Joan and Alençon report to him in Saint-Denis, where, “over the vehement objections of Joan, Alençon, and others,” Charles said there were to be no further attacks, as he “saw that the town of Paris was too strongly fortified.” “And thus,” Perceval de Cagny wrote, “was broken the will of the Maid and of the king’s army.”
“If I had not been wounded, I would not have left. I was wounded in the trenches before Paris, after I left Saint-Denis.”
“Was that not the feast day of the Holy Nativity of Our Lady?” the examiner asked Joan of the day she initiated the assault.
“I think it certainly was.”
“Do you think it was right to attack the town of Paris on the day of the Festival of the Blessed Mary?”
“It is good to observe the Festival of the Blessed Mary.”
“Do you think it was a good thing to do, to make war on a holy day of obligation?”
“Pass on,” Joan said.
“My Father is working still, and I am working,” Jesus said to the Jews who condemned him for healing on the Sabbath.
“And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus,” the Evangelist John explained. “This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”
For “he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the Sabbath.’ ”
The basilica at Saint-Denis protected the burial vaults of nearly every French king and held an embarrassment of relics, the bones of earthly rulers who in death, as in life, were petitioned for political favors. The site—rather than Reims—of queens’ coronations, the abbey church had great significance for France, and thus for Joan as well. Saint-Denis’s heraldry, a blue ground sown with fleurs-de-lis, would provide the background for the coat of arms she would be given upon her knighthood; hers included a sword and crown (Fig. 25). Not surprisingly, Joan withdrew into its sanctuary, where she remained far longer than the average supplicant, long enough to draw the attention of bystanders and thereby offer her persecutors another opportunity to make use of rumors spread by her enemies.
“What arms did you offer to Saint-Denis?”
“It was a whole black suit of armor,*1 for a man-at-arms, with a sword. I wore the suit at Paris.”
“To what end did you make an offering of these arms?”
“It was an act of devotion, such as soldiers perform when they are wounded. I had been wounded before Paris, and so I offered them to Saint-Denis.”
“You did this so that the arms might be worshiped.”
“No. Because it was the war-cry of France—”
“At Saint-Denis in France you offered and deposited in the church in a high place the armor in which you had been wounded in the assault on Paris, so that it might be honored by the people as relics.”
“I denied this once before,” Joan said.
“Further, in the same town, you had waxen candles lit, and from them poured melted wax on the heads of little children, foretelling their fortune, and making by these enchantments many divinations about them.”
“No,” Joan said. She’d stayed at the altar for as long as she had to for the counsel she needed and eventually received. “My voice told me to remain at Saint-Denis in France, and I wished to remain.”
“But you did not remain.”
“No. Against my will my lords took me away.”
The failure to take Paris, the wound she sustained in her thigh, and the unfortunate timing of these two incidents, on a holy day of obligation she failed to honor, all suggested a rupture between Joan and God; they inspired doubt. As one military historian summarized her predicament, “While Joan had been victorious, others had been able to replace La Trémoille in Charles’s favor, but after she had lost … and had been badly wounded in the process, the former king’s favorite returned to his chief counselor position with even greater power and influence.” An unfortunate result of La Trémoille’s holding Joan away from the stage of battle, “where he could balk and hinder her,” as Twain put it, was that it removed her far enough from the eye of the public that fewer and less detailed sources follow Joan’s movements from the fall of 1430 until the spring of the following year, when her capture reignited her celebrity.
In October 1429, Joan was recuperating from the wound in her thigh at Bourges, the capital of Berry, where she was the guest of René de Bouligny, the king’s finance counselor, and his wife, Marguerite La Touroulde, and where she encountered a rival visionary, Catherine de La Rochelle, dismissed by the medievalist Pernoud as a “member of a vagabond lunatic fringe.” Without a military operation to occupy her attention, Joan was irritated enough by Catherine’s claim of intimacy with a “White Lady covered in gold” who visited her at night that she challenged Catherine to produce the White Lady and sacrificed two nights’ sleep to prove Catherine to be the “very uninteresting fraud” Vita Sackville-West judged her. “On the first night, Jeanne, having stayed awake till midnight, evidently got bored and went to sleep. In the morning, when she asked if the ‘white lady’ had appeared, Catherine assured her that she had indeed appeared,” prophesying the discovery of hidden treasure to pay an army that would oust the English, “but that she, Catherine, had been unable to awaken her, Jeanne, adding that the ‘white lady’ would surely appear again next night.”
For this, Joan told the examiner, she prepared by sleeping all day, “so that she might stay awake the whole of the succeeding night. And that night she went to bed with Catherine, and watched all night; but saw nothing, although she often asked Catherine whether the lady would come, and Catherine answered: ‘Yes, presently.’ ” When the White Lady failed to appear, Joan advised Catherine “to return to her husband, to run her household, and to nourish her children,” in essence pushing her offstage to join the ranks of the “plenty of other women” who shaped their lives in answer to the demands of men rather than God. “The business of this Catherine is nothing but folly,” Joan wrote to Charles—folly that proved expensive to expose, however, as “Catherine later reciprocated by testifying to the ecclesiastical court at Paris that ‘Jeanne would have left her prison by the aid of the Devil if she had not been well guarded.’ ”
From Bourges, Charles sent Joan on the fool’s errand of besieging Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, more village than town, but an expertly fortified village that he didn’t expect to buckle under her weakened charge. “Her army, of which she was only a minor commander, was woefully undersupplied,” and her commission an ignominious one. What La Trémoille identified as the first strike in an upper Loire campaign was a match not only to settle a personal grudge but also to pit Joan against a purely mercenary foe, as the area was controlled by Perrinet Gressart. Currently in service to the Burgundians who paid his bills, Gressart had made himself known to La Trémoille when he captured him en route to a negotiation and failed to honor his guarantee of safe passage, demanding an extravagant ransom of fourteen thousand ecus to release him. The siege of Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier was to be the first in a series of smoldering conflicts that eluded decisive outcomes; the upper Loire campaign was designed to exhaust Joan’s forces’ morale along with her patience. On November 8, “the French were forcibly compelled to retire,” when, Jean d’Aulon testified, Joan told him she had “fifty thousand men in her company and would not leave that spot until she had taken the town.
“Whatever she might say,” Jean continued, “she had not more than four or five men with her, which I know for certain as do several others who also saw her.” Apart from what sounds, even coming from Joan’s ever-awed squire, like a delusion on Joan’s part and hyperbole on his, Joan did take the town with her handful of men, ordering them to bring “faggots and withies to form a bridge over the moat” so that it might be possible for her army of five earthbound and who knew how many celestial forces to scale Saint-Pierre’s wall.
“They were immediately brought and put into position,” Jean testified. “The whole thing utterly astonished me, for the town was immediately carried by assault … there was no great resistance.” He went on to avow his faith that “all the Maid’s exploits seemed to me rather divine and miraculous than otherwise.”
Joan celebrated her victory by arranging for an encore. In a letter to the nearby city of Riom, she asked its citizens to demonstrate their loyalty to the king by sending supplies to La Charité, the town to which she was to next lay siege. She wanted “gunpowder, saltpeter, sulphur, arrows, heavy crossbows and other military supplies” and advised the letter’s recipients to be quick about it “so that no one may say that you were negligent or unwilling,” chasing her threat with a benediction. “May our Lord God protect you.” Beneath the words is the first, and shakiest, of the three surviving examples of her signature.
The siege of La Charité lasted a month and was abandoned on Christmas Eve, as the French could make no effective attack on the heavily fortified town, with its large garrison and stockpiles of artillery and ammunitions. The gift of 1,300 ecus from the citizens of Bourges to the king’s forces couldn’t hire and provision enough soldiers to prevail in a contest that, Joan made clear to her examiners, she had undertaken not upon counsel of her voices but at the behest of “men-at-arms,” who “told her it was better to go first against the town of La Charité,” when she herself had eyes only for Paris. The diversion La Trémoille conceived for Joan had been expensive and effective. The Berry herald characterized the defeat as shameful, accomplished as it was, “even without any relief having come to the aid of the besieged.” The French “lost their bombards and artillery.” Upon her retreat to Jargeau, on Christmas Day, Joan received letters from Charles conferring nobility on her and her family in “thanks for the multiple and striking benefits of divine grandeur that have been accorded us through the agency of the Maid” and in consideration of “the praiseworthy, graceful, and useful services already rendered by the aforesaid.” Joan already possessed the equivalent of a coat of arms, bestowed by a ruler far more august than Charles, who, in conferring knighthood, had, as Régine Pernoud put it, “acted like a minister of state granting a decoration to a functionary he is about to send into retirement.”
The Maid’s ascent to the nobility cannot have aligned with any fantasy inspired by chansons de geste. As described in L’ordene de chevalerie, the investiture was a public sacrament that began in ritual purification. “The candidate [for knighthood] first was bathed, the bath symbolizing the washing away of his sins. Then he was clothed in a white robe symbolizing his determination to defend God’s law, with a narrow belt to remind him to shun the sins of the flesh. In the church, he was invested with his accoutrements: the gilded spur, to give him courage to serve God; the sword, to fight the enemy and ‘protect the poor people from the rich.’ Finally, he received the colée, a blow of the hand on the shoulder or head, ‘in remembrance of Him who ordained you.’ ” It almost appeared that the paper dubbing had been timed to vanish in the blur of feasting and drinking and dancing between Christmas and Joan’s posthumously conferred birthday: Twelfth Night.
A bleak winter was setting in, bitterly cold and clouded with disappointments for Joan, who spent the greater part of it cooped up in Sully-sur-Loire, La Trémoille’s family château some thirty miles upriver from Orléans, to which, on January 19, she traveled to attend a banquet given by the city council. The thirty miles between village and city included a stop midway, at Jargeau, and gave Joan the opportunity to note that “the activity of royalist ‘partisans’ was seen everywhere,” a grassroots shiver of awakening nationalism that inspired their allegiance to the Maid who championed their independence. Charles had moved with such eager dispatch in concluding the truces with England and Burgundy that he “crushed the élan of the royal army, which began to show signs of discontent.”
As Joan had prophesied without aid of her heavenly counsel, the Duke of Burgundy continued to avoid the peace conference that had been the truces’ alleged aim, and Joan spent much of February and nearly all of March looking forward to military action she hadn’t been given leave to undertake, pacing Sully’s courtyard under a rectangle of gray sky as she dreamed of battles to come, retiring for long hours into its chapel, the ringing of the Angelus inviting her to her knees and the possibility of the comfort that first arrived on the notes of church bells. From Sully, Joan sent a second letter to the citizens of Reims, dated March 16. “Joan the Pucelle has received your letters mentioning that you fear being besieged,” she wrote, reassuring them that she would intercept any army that marched on their city.
“If it should so happen that I do not encounter them coming to you, shut your gates, because I will be with you shortly. And if they are there I shall make them put on their spurs in such haste that they will not know where to put them.”
A week later, on March 23, Jean Pasquerel sent a letter on Joan’s behalf to the Hussites of Bohemia, the predominantly Czech followers of Jan Hus, a priest and university master in Prague whose theology reprised that of the English heretic John Wycliffe. From the pulpit the Church had awarded him, Hus was so brazen as to attack what he called the corrupt clergy, and he made a point of taking no side in the schism as he considered one pope as depraved as the other. Hus was condemned for his social consciousness, which not only allowed women to assume priestly roles, including teaching, but also denounced the practice of selling indulgences, by which only the moneyed could purchase sacred power; this was no different from Jesus’s reviling those who sold sacrificial doves in the temple, and its outcome was as fatal. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, galvanizing his followers to take up his campaign to separate church and state and inspiring the Church to make bounty hunters of crusaders willing to capture or kill its detractors. The Hussite Wars, as they were later called, continued from 1419 until 1434, bracketing Joan’s career and in their viciousness betraying how serious a threat Hus’s teachings presented to the Church. Panegyrics like Christine de Pizan’s, published only two weeks after Charles’s anointing, not only congratulated Joan for fulfilling her original vocation but also suggested future ones. Both loud and respected, Christine’s voice was unavoidable by anyone, like Joan, who moved among the knights and courtiers who were the paean’s intended audience. “She will restore harmony in Christendom … She will destroy the Saracens, by conquering the Holy Land.” Probably, Joan’s impatience to engage in active combat had inspired fantasies of setting off on what was unambiguously a pilgrimage, with an objective that seemed from her remove to be purely divine, beyond the reach of mortal politics, and firmly within the mandate of the Church.
“For some time now,” Joan dictated to Pasquerel, “rumor and public comment has reported to me, Joan the Pucelle, that from true Christians you have become heretics. Like the Saracens you have blighted the true religion and worship, embracing a disgraceful and criminal superstition … What rage or madness consumes you?” she demanded of the Hussites. “Do you believe that you will remain unpunished for it?… To tell you frankly, If I was not occupied with these English wars, I would have come to see you a long time ago.” If the Hussites did not reform, she promised to “set off against you so that, by the sword if I cannot do it any other way, I may eliminate your mad and obscene superstition and remove either your heresy or your lives.” Because this letter was unique for having been written in Latin, its style different from Joan’s other communications, its authorship has been questioned. But a cleric would naturally compose an ecclesiastical communication in the language of the Church, especially if he couldn’t assume its Czech recipients would be literate in French. Too, any translation of Joan’s spirited vernacular into Latin’s formal confines would necessarily sacrifice its distinctive cadence.
In Saint Joan, Shaw gives Joan of Arc credit for what was in truth John Wycliffe and Jan Hus’s challenge to ecclesiastical authority, using one of his characters to identify Joan’s defiance as “the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God. I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it.” But Shaw’s characterizing Joan as a Church reformer is a flight of imaginative projection, as she hotly defended all that Wycliffe, Hus, and their intellectual heir Martin Luther abhorred: veneration of the saints and holy images, confession to and absolution by clerics, intercession for the dead, anointing the sick, the sale of indulgences, and the conferring of last rites, none of which, they argued, had scriptural basis.
The Hussites presented a safety risk and international scandal serious enough that in July, Beaufort, the bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Bedford’s uncle, had little trouble financing an army of 350 mounted archers to set on the distant heretics, and less trouble still marching them from the docks of Calais straight to Paris, with no thought of saving Bohemia—uncle and nephew being of like mind and scruples.
It’s not only Shaw who imagined Joan as a social reformer or retroactively credited her with ideas she would have found foreign. Brecht gave his Joan, not of Arc, but of the Stockyards, a socialist agenda and magnified the populism she borrowed from Jesus until it eclipsed the far greater part of the historical Joan’s vision. “Slums breed immorality, and immorality breeds revolution,” she preaches to the stockbreeders who are driving up the price of meat, appealing to their self-interest with a bleeding heart’s naïveté. It is another three scenes before she understands. “I know their money, like a cancerous growth, has eaten away their ears and human face.” The judgment would have more likely issued from Hus than from the girl who couldn’t resist velvet tunics and cloth of gold.
No matter what topics Joan fulminated about in her correspondence, her focus hadn’t wavered from recapturing Paris, where in March bourgeois factions within the city’s walls, including “clerks, artisans, and merchants,” had organized under the leadership of Carmelite monks and were planning a revolt. But when one of them was arrested and tortured until he gave up the others, she retrained her attention on Compiègne, for whose people she said she “always prayed with her counsel.” Having been squabbled over by Armagnacs, Burgundians, and English, the citizens of Compiègne had been besieged eight times in the previous fifteen years. Joan’s was the single command they followed. For the Maid they had pledged their allegiance to Charles and sent him the city’s keys before his coronation, and for her they refused to obey Charles’s subsequent order that they surrender to the Duke of Burgundy, “resolute to undergo every risk for themselves, their children, and their infants, rather than be exposed to the mercy of the duke.” The citizens of Compiègne reflected Joan’s own stubborn courage back at her and reignited her determination to prevail over the enemy or die trying.
To expire in battle was to enter eternal glory, and after writing one final letter to the people of Reims, Joan marshaled her troops. It was the last letter she would ever send; in it she warned the people of Reims of a traitorous alliance within its walls, its purpose “to betray the city and let the Burgundians inside.” Promising Charles’s aid were the city besieged, Joan left Sully “without the knowledge of the king, and not taking leave from him,” as Perceval de Cagny wrote. “She went to the town of Lagny-sur-Marne because those of that place were making good war against the English in Paris and elsewhere,” a battle half won even before Joan arrived. Her movements were not covert; once she and her small army of zealots reached Lagny, she sent word to Charles, requesting reinforcements. Of the exultant tide of twelve thousand soldiers that accompanied her to Reims the previous July, only five hundred men remained; the rest had ebbed and vanished, her army so reduced she couldn’t maintain even a rudimentary military household and had no page or herald, upon which communication depended. Still, far better to take on a small battle with a small army than to forgo fighting.
Joan spent three weeks in Lagny and from there made war on Anglo-Burgundian troops under the command of Franquet d’Arras, easily chasing off the infamous mercenary. With or without a sizable army or adequate entourage, she retained the reputation of a sorceress who bent the odds of battle, and Lagny was just twenty miles outside Paris, the hub of medieval media. The witch was drawing closer and had recovered whatever she had lost back at the Saint-Honoré Gate. Recruiting was a problem for the English, desertions so common that the Duke of Bedford was forced to issue an edict on May 3, 1430, against captains and soldiers who refused to embark for France. “Each and every captain and soldier in the city of whatever rank or condition who has been retained to make the voyage” to France, he announced in the name of the boy king Henry VI, “who are found delaying in London will be seized immediately and arrested with their horses and armor kept as surety and they shall be imprisoned,” a penalty that stopped just short of death.
By this time Charles had yet to admit having been duped by Bedford, and Joan took Franquet prisoner and held him hostage in hopes of trading him for Jacquet Guillaume, who had been captured in the plot recently uncovered in Paris and whom Joan hoped to use as a means of mustering forces within the city. Once she learned Guillaume had been executed along with all the others who had been arrested for treason, she surrendered the now worthless Franquet to the jurisdiction of the bailiff of Senlis. “As the man I wanted is dead, do with this fellow as justice demands,” she told the bailiff. Such exchanges and negotiations were routine, and in this case the public was satisfied by what was regarded as the just execution of a known rapist who, she said, also “confessed himself a murderer, a thief, and a traitor.” Still, Joan’s examiners presented Franquet’s execution as evidence of a bloodthirsty vengefulness outside the confines of battle, and they accused her of bribery.
“Did you not send money, or have money sent, to him who had taken the said Franquet?”
“What am I, Master of the Mint or Treasurer of France,” Joan said, “that I should pay out money?” Had she had any, it would have been spent on provisioning her army.
The victory at Lagny returned luster to Joan’s trajectory, and she was embraced by the fervid crowds she’d grown to expect, and perhaps even need, as they demonstrated a confidence in her prowess that official sources now withheld. Excited at their having joined those citizens of France lucky enough to be rescued by the Maid, the people of Lagny mustered all they could for public celebrations in Joan’s honor, enough that anyone who wanted to see or touch her would have had the chance. During the three weeks she remained in town, a bereaved family approached her for intercession on behalf of a child who died at birth and, having not been baptized, was doomed to suffer purgatory.
“How old was this infant?” the examiner asked Joan.
“Three days old. They told me three days had passed with no sign of life in the child, which was as black as my coat of mail.”
She was in church, kneeling before an image of the Virgin, when the boy’s mother and sisters came to her with his corpse, and she prayed with them, and, as she testified, “at last life appeared in the child, which yawned thrice, and was afterwards baptized, and immediately it died and was buried in consecrated ground. But when it yawned, the color began to return.”
“Was it said in the town that the resuscitation was due to your prayers?”
“I did not inquire about it,” Joan said, although she knew better than any that “the incident was trumpeted as a miracle.”
If Joan, like others present at the baby’s fleeting return to life, believed she had raised him from the dead, she knew better than to admit such a thing. She was praying with the baby’s family when “life appeared in the child.” That was all. Her judges could make what they would of it.
Fixed as it was on the ever-looming torment of death, the medieval imagination was possessed by the story of Lazarus of Bethany. John is the only Evangelist to tell the story, characterized by the single instance of Jesus’s use of the word “dead” to describe the person he subsequently raised, a miracle he orchestrated to prove his divinity.*2 “But if I do them [perform miracles],” Jesus said of his plan for a spectacle, “even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
“I know,” Lazarus’s sister Martha said to Jesus, “that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” By then, Lazarus had been entombed for four days. Before a great crowd of mourners and onlookers, Jesus called upon God for help.
“ ‘I have said this on account of the people standing by,’ he said aloud, ‘that they may believe that thou dist send me.’ When he had said this he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ ”
The miracle prefigured Jesus’s resurrection and caused so much public unrest that, according to John, “the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said ‘What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation,’ ” and it was “from that day on that they took counsel how to put him to death.”
“Never,” Péguy’s Joan says of Jesus, “had a man stirred up so much hate in a man.”
Historians generally finesse Joan’s revival of the infant in Lagny as that of “a newborn baby on point of death” or dismiss it as “a curious incident” that “demonstrated Joan’s growing cult.” Joan didn’t equivocate; the baby she saw was as black as her coat of mail—not her “white armor,” but chain with a dark, bluish cast—and had been described by family members as lifeless for three days.
“Have you cured people with those rings?” the examiner asks Joan in Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, its script based on French trial minutes and witness testimony for the nullification. He speaks in particular of the one she received from her mother and father, bearing the suspiciously heretical joining of the names Jesus and Maria.
“No,” Joan says. She pauses, eyes cast down, considering the question before looking up at the judges ranged before her. “Not by means of the rings,” she says.
The incident at Lagny was different from Joan’s previous miracles, as winds do shift and waters rise and men fall to their deaths without a divine nudge. Until Lagny, Joan had been associated with highly unlikely but not impossible events. Raising a child from the dead was beyond the reach of reason and partook of the greatest of God’s powers. Once perceived as having triumphed over death, Joan, like Jesus, had arrived at the moment in her career when it was clear to her enemies that there was no longer any time to waste in eliminating her influence.
“Are you so tired already of the visible presence of God,” Schiller’s Joan asks Charles, “that you seek to smash the vessel that contains it, and drag down into the dust, the virgin that God has sent you?”
A week after she left Lagny, “Easter week,” Joan told the examiner, “when I was in the trenches at Melun, I was told by my voices, by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, that I would be captured before St. John’s Day,” which followed Midsummer eve. Joan’s voices repeated the warning “several times, nearly every day,” and they told her this suffering was inescapable: “ ‘It had to be so,’ they told me, and they said I should not be distressed, but take it in good part. They said God would aid me.”
On May 14, Joan was in Compiègne, at a reception given in her honor, by which point the Duke of Burgundy had “amassed a large army and artillery train” and “begun his move on Compiègne in earnest.” It was the “greatest gunpowder weaponry arsenal” that existed among the powers at war, and “almost all of it was directed entirely against Compiègne and Joan.”
Like Orléans, Compiègne was on the bank of a river, its main entrance accessed by a bridge over the Oise, diverted to fill a moat enclosing all the city’s walls, which boasted an unusual number of towers, forty-four of them in just the length running along the river. “Every day,” Jean Chartier recorded, Joan “fought large skirmishes against the English and Burgundians” besieging the town. As she was not a defensive fighter but an aggressor who didn’t like being confined within city walls, she made sallies on all the towns within a twenty-mile radius of Compiègne, marching first on Choisy-au-Bac, a strategically important site, located as it was on the Aisne River. To keep Choisy was to prevent the Burgundians from controlling the town’s bridge and, once over it, surrounding Compiègne, little more than three miles to the southwest. Combat was harsh and bloody, and Joan’s troops, protected only by hastily assembled makeshift bulwarks, hadn’t the ability to withstand the firepower at the duke’s disposal. By May 16 she was forced to withdraw her little army back within the walls of Compiègne, from which she set out with the Count of Vendôme and the archbishop of Reims for the town of Soissons, in hopes of enlisting the support of the town’s garrison and using its bridge to cross the Aisne River.
The Count of Vendôme was a friend, Regnault an enemy in cahoots with Soissons’s captain accompanying Joan in anticipation of what Vita Sackville-West called “the pleasure of seeing the fresh discomfiture which there awaited her,” one rendered “more bitter by treachery.” Soissons had pledged its loyalty to Charles, but the city’s captain, Guiscard Bournel, “refused to allow Jeanne and her followers to enter, and persuaded the citizens that they had arrived with the unavowed intention of remaining there as a garrison.” Uncharacteristically, and despite the fact that she and her troops were forced to bivouac in the fields outside the city’s walls, Joan made no attempt to gain access to the bridge by either force or persuasion; instead, she moved on to Crépy-en-Valois to round up “300–400 more soldiers who had come to fight for the freedom of Compiègne.”
“About Soissons, and Guichard Bournel,” the examiner asked, “did you not deny God and say you would have the captain drawn and quartered if you got hold of him?” The question was based on hearsay, one of many attempts to illustrate what her judges presented as an unnatural thirst for blood and violence.
“No,” Joan said. “Those who said I did were mistaken.”
On May 22, spies reported Philip’s troops were converging on Compiègne, and Joan set off hurriedly, at nightfall, the new moon but one day old and the stars hidden by clouds.
As DeMille envisioned the expedition, Joan rides before her army, unaware of the dark angel on horseback moving ahead of her, ghostly, transparent. His black wings shimmer among the leaves of the forest that presses in on the shadowed road. The pace of the winged figure is resolute and stately—funereal, as if timed to a dirge. Just outside Compiègne, the dark angel halts his black mount and turns to face Joan, raising one arm to point the way to her doom. Surprised by the specter, Joan lays one hand on her armored breast and pulls up her mount, reeling, inasmuch as a body astride a horse can reel.
“Does thou not see the Black Horseman!”*3 her title card cries. But Joan’s confused comrades can’t see the fate that awaits her.
“I have not long,… I have not long!” her next card laments.
*1 Black armor, like white, indicated rank. The less refined the metal composing its plates, the blacker it was considered to be. Joan’s own armor was white not only for its lack of ornamentation but also because its plates were made of metal pure enough to sustain a polish, and thus more expensive to maintain as well as purchase.
*2 This was different from the story of Jairus’s daughter, found in the Synoptic Gospels and not in John. “Why do you make a tumult and weep?” Jesus asked Jairus, after banishing an eager, heckling audience. In private he took the girl’s parents to her bedside. “The child is not dead but sleeping.” Near death but not dead. “Taking her by the hand, he said to her ‘Tal’itha cu’mi,’ which means ‘Little girl, I say to you, arise.’ Immediately the girl got up and walked (she was twelve years of age) and they were immediately overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this” and (mis)interpret it as a resurrection.
*3 The Black Horseman is traditionally interpreted as the famine that follows upon war. Revelation 5:6.