CHAPTER 7
The first time that I heard the voice, I promised to keep my virginity for as long as it should please God, and that was at the age of thirteen or thereabouts.
—Joan of Arc, in response to an inquisitor’s question at her Trial of Condemnation, 1431
THIRTEEN, THE AGE OF PUBERTY: a rush of hormones accompanied by new and confusing emotions, turbulent mood swings, and a heightened sensitivity to the often conflicting demands of responsibility and desire. The difficult and complex entry into adolescence was made even more challenging in the fifteenth century since thirteen was the legal age at which a girl could be married. Partly, this was a function of economics—for a poor family, an early wedding meant one less mouth to feed. But there was also an element of control involved, as a thirteen-year-old could on the whole be cajoled or bullied into an undesired marriage much more easily than an older girl.
Joan clearly felt this pressure as, by her own admission, her first experience with what she would later identify as the voice of an angel had nothing to do with politics but rather focused on her personal life. In addition to eliciting a promise that she keep her virginity, the voice instructed her in how to behave, which included regular attendance at church. Joan later described the occasion of this first heavenly encounter in detail to her inquisitors. “When I was thirteen years old, I had a voice from God to help me govern my conduct,” she said. “And the first time I was very fearful. And came this voice, about the hour of noon, in the summer-time, in my father’s garden; I had not fasted on the eve preceding that day. I heard the voice on the right-hand side, towards the church; and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. This brightness comes from the same side as the voice is heard. It is usually a great light. . . . After I had thrice heard this voice, I knew that it was the voice of an angel.”
The voice seems to have first come to Joan when she was feeling guilty about her behavior. “I had not fasted on the eve preceding that day” implies that this was something she thought she ought to have done; perhaps it was a fast day and she had forgotten or been too hungry to comply.12 This transgression would have weighed heavily on a girl as pious as Joan; interestingly, the voice takes the responsibility for not fasting away from her by promising to help her better govern her conduct in the future. Similarly, by vowing to keep her virginity “for as long as it should please God”—that is, until the voice tells her not to—Joan also relieved herself of the burden of having to judge the merits of an early marriage, or to be answerable for the disobedience to her family that would be involved in rejecting one. God or the angel acting for God would now make that decision for her.
And her family was, in fact, arranging such an alliance with a man from the nearby city of Toul. Later, when Joan’s inquisitors asked, “What made you cause a certain man at the city of Toul to be summoned for [breach of promise of ] marriage?” she answered, “I did not have him summoned, it was he who had me summoned. And there I swore before the judge to speak the truth and in the end he roundly said that I had made the man no promise whatever.” To be called before a judge in this fashion was tantamount to an indictment; Joan might not have promised the man from Toul anything, but someone did, and this someone was surely one of her parents, as Joan also stated at this time that “I obeyed them [her parents] in all things save only in that lawsuit I had in the city of Toul in the matter of marriage.”
By the third time the voice spoke, Joan had identified it as belonging to Saint Michael. “The first time I had great doubt if it was Saint Michael who came to me, and that first time I was very much afraid; and I saw him afterwards several times before knowing that it was Saint Michael,” she said. When her inquisitors pressed her: “How was it that you recognized Saint Michael rather on that occasion when you did believe [it to be him], than the first time he appeared to you?” Joan answered, “The first time I was a child and was afraid, and afterwards Saint Michael taught me and showed me and proved to me that I must believe firmly that it was him.”
Saint Michael the Archangel occupies a high place in the hierarchy of heaven. He is the princely leader of the angels and their commanding general in the struggle against Satan; his name is synonymous with the war of good against evil. The feats of Saint Michael, who disputed with the devil and battled a dragon, were sure to be repeated, and his aid prayed for, wherever Christian soldiers and men-at-arms were stationed, and there were quite a number of these stationed in the region surrounding Domrémy. In her early teenage years, these soldiers seemed to have exercised some sort of fascination for Joan, because her family remarked on it and worried about it. “When I was still in the house of my father and mother, I was several times told by my mother that my father had told her that he had dreamt that I, Joan, his daughter, would go away with some men-at-arms,” Joan remembered. “And much care did my father and mother have about it and they kept me close and in great subjection. . . . And I have heard my mother say that my father told my brothers, ‘Truly, if I knew that that must happen which I fear in the matter of my daughter, I had rather you drowned her. And if you did not do it, I would drown her myself.’ ”
The implication here is that Joan’s father was not afraid that his daughter would go away with men-at-arms in order that she might lead an army to expel the English from France—there would be no reason to drown her for that (not to mention that such a possibility was beyond comprehension)—but rather that she would run away with soldiers in the more conventionally immoral sense of engaging in relations outside the bonds of marriage. Although it is clear that he did not understand his daughter’s character, parental concerns of this sort are generally based on some degree of observed evidence, which means that Joan’s growing preoccupation with the military during this period was sufficiently obvious that it was heeded by her family.
Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, when events began to move rapidly, the voice continued to speak to Joan. Once she was no longer “a child and . . . afraid,” as she had been when the voice first appeared—in other words, as she got older and identified herself as an adult, probably around the age of sixteen—Joan came to trust that she was hearing the words of an angel. “I believed it quite quickly and I had the will to believe it,” she testified. It seems that over this transitional period, the voice of Saint Michael became more insistently political. “What doctrines did he teach you?” her inquisitors asked. “Before all things he told me to be a good child and that God would help me,” Joan replied. “And, among other things he told me to come to the help of the King of France. . . . And the Angel told me the pity [pitiful state] that was in the Kingdom of France.”
THE VOICE that Joan identified as Saint Michael’s conveyed an all too accurate assessment of Charles’s woeful campaign against the English. From a timid, lonely, insecure boy, Charles had grown into a conflicted, anxious, and insecure adult, easily manipulated by those around him, and hopelessly, almost comically inconstant and indecisive.
For example, in the summer of 1425, Yolande finally succeeded in bringing the duke of Brittany’s brother, Arthur of Richemont, to Charles’s side as constable. However, no sooner had she achieved this diplomatic coup than Jean Louvet, an adviser of long standing jealous of Arthur’s promotion, convinced Charles to turn against his new constable. Arthur, who was in Brittany raising troops, found out about the intrigue against him and, furious, marched back with an army to occupy the royal court at Bourges, a discouragingly predictable reaction that led to Charles and Louvet’s raising an army of their own to fight against him.
As it was hardly useful for Charles’s troops to fight each other rather than the English, Yolande took over. When Charles’s army took a route that required them to travel through Tours, Yolande made sure that the doors of the city were closed to him. “We should not let any men of arms enter who are stronger than the people of [the] town, be he the King our sire, or the president in his attendance, who directs his government, nor other governors who disrupt and prevent the said peace, and whom the lord of Richemont, constable of France, and the said Queen intend to oust shortly from the attendance and government of the King,” she wrote coolly to the captain of the city. Charles, incredulous, halted outside Tours, giving Yolande a chance to intercept him; she arrived on June 8 and with her usual dispatch within two days had delivered on her promise to reorganize the king’s government along lines more to her liking. Louvet was exiled to Provence, Charles was reconciled with Arthur, and the queen of Sicily even used this occasion to send a conciliatory signal to Philip the Good by dismissing Tanneguy du Chastel, whose role in the murder of John the Fearless could not be ignored.
After this incident, to avoid further unpleasantness, Yolande regularly chaired Charles’s council, and the political situation continued to improve. The duke of Brittany abandoned the Triple Alliance and began cautiously to support Charles; even better, the banishment of Tanneguy du Chastel prompted Philip the Good to send emissaries to begin talks with members of Charles’s circle that everyone hoped would lead to reconciliation.
But she could not get her son-in-law to fight the English, and this had to be done, and done quickly, lest the duke of Bedford’s forces succeed in conquering more of the portion of the kingdom that included Yolande’s own territories. Charles, however, was still so unnerved by his defeat at Verneuil that he refused to mount another offensive. Worse, in his impulsive, erratic way, he had formed an attachment to a new counselor, Georges de la Trémoïlle, who was introduced at court by Arthur of Richemont in the summer of 1427. Although Yolande at first approved this appointment—La Trémoïlle had a brother who served the duke of Burgundy, whom the queen of Sicily hoped to use to further a negotiated peace with Philip the Good—she soon came to regret this decision. Corrupt, cunning, and enthusiastically self-serving, La Trémoïlle, described as “a fat man of about forty,” flattered Charles and played upon his vices and insecurities, encouraging inaction. He was especially masterful at detecting weakness in others and exploiting conflict to his own advantage. Charles knew it. “Dear cousin,” he said to Arthur of Richemont when he first introduced La Trémoïlle at court, “you give him to me, but you’ll repent of it, because I know him better than you do.”
And suddenly, with the accession of La Trémoïlle, Yolande, who had been Charles’s primary support and mentor from the age of ten, felt her mastery over her son-in-law recede. This must have been something of a shock, not to mention irritating after all she had done for him. They must have quarreled, as Yolande abruptly quit the royal court and retired to her castle in Saumur in June 1427. She was not the only adviser to feel the chilling effects of Charles’s fickleness; three months later, she was followed by her protégé, Arthur of Richemont, who was also evicted from his position as constable by La Trémoïlle’s influence. With the loss of these two key players, the kingdom was left entirely at the mercy of a councillor whose principal interests lay in undermining the king’s confidence as a means of controlling him and enriching himself as much as possible at the public expense.
This period of Georges de la Trémoïlle’s greatest power—he almost single-handedly ran Charles’s court from September 1427 until the following September—unquestionably marked the low point in Charles’s already none-too-stellar career, and the English were quick to capitalize on it. By the spring of 1428, word reached France that substantial troop reinforcements under the direction of an accomplished general, the earl of Salisbury, were due to arrive that summer in preparation for a major new offensive. On April 28, 1428, the duke of Bedford very publicly summoned a war council to Paris to debate military options and chart the future course of hostilities in preparation for the earl’s arrival. Philip the Good made a special trip to the capital at this time to participate in the conclave. News of these talks, and the impending embarkation of fresh troops from England, were grimly reported to Charles’s court and from there leaked to his supporters; the atmosphere was tense as those who resisted the English-Burgundian alliance on his behalf braced themselves for a new onslaught.
Against this ominous background, Joan made her first attempt to reach Charles.
THE TIMING OF THIS, Joan’s initial foray into the world outside of Domrémy, was no coincidence. Her voices—by now Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret were also speaking to Joan—became exceedingly urgent in May 1428, clearly in reaction to the English war council in Paris and the anticipated arrival of the earl of Salisbury and his troops. “The voice told me that I should go to France and I could not bear to stay where I was,” she said. “The voice told me also that I should make my way to Robert de Baudricourt in the fortress of Vaucouleurs, the Captain of that place, that he would give me people to go with me.”
Unwilling to let her parents know her true intention—“As for my father and my mother, my voices would have been satisfied that I tell them. . . . As for me, I would not have told them for anything in the world,” she admitted—Joan feigned a simple social visit to her aunt and uncle, who lived about halfway between Domrémy and Vaucouleurs. “I went to my uncle’s and I told him that I wanted to stay with him for a time and there I stayed about eight days,” Joan reported. “And I then told my uncle that I must go to the town of Vaucouleurs and my uncle took me there. And when I came to this town of Vaucouleurs I recognized Robert de Baudricourt, whereas never before had I seen him and by my voice I knew this Robert, for the voice told me that it was him. And I told this same Robert that I must go into France.”
Joan’s uncle—actually, he was her mother’s cousin’s husband, she just called him uncle—was named Durand Laxart, and he later confirmed Joan’s account of this episode, detailing the arguments she used to convince him to help her. “I went myself to fetch Joan at her father’s house and I took her to my house,” he reported. “And she told me that she wanted to go to France, to the Dauphin, to have him crowned saying, ‘Has it not been said that France will be lost by a woman and shall thereafter be restored by a virgin?’ And she told me also that I was to go to Robert de Baudricourt that he might have her taken to the place where the lord Dauphin was to be found.”
Accompanied by her relative, Joan reached Vaucouleurs safely. The distinguishing feature of the town was its fortified castle, a twenty-three-stone-tower edifice on the bank of the Meuse supported by an escarpment, at which was stationed a garrison loyal to Charles. The soldiers of this unit were responsible for defending the territory surrounding Vaucouleurs against the Burgundians. Joan and her cousin went searching for Robert de Baudricourt and eventually found him. There followed a conversation that was overheard by a number of bystanders. The event was sufficiently unusual to be remembered long afterward: an unknown sixteen-year-old girl, attired in a shabby red dress or surcoat, loudly declaiming to a seasoned military commander while her adult male cousin looked on uncomfortably. This sort of thing did not occur every day in Vaucouleurs. An eyewitness reported, “Joan the Maid came to Vaucouleurs at the time of the Ascension of Our Lord [approximately May 14], as I recall it, and there I saw her speak with Robert de Baudricourt who was then captain of the town. She told him that she was come to him, Robert, sent by her Lord to bring word to the Dauphin that . . . the Lord wanted the Dauphin to be made King and he was to place his kingdom at her command, saying that despite his enemies the Dauphin would be made King and that she would lead him to his coronation.” The outcome of this first parley was not successful. “This Robert several times told me that I should return her to her father’s house after having cuffed her soundly,” Joan’s hapless cousin Durand Laxart reported.
Durand took the captain’s advice and returned Joan to Domrémy, but the war intervened and she didn’t remain there long. On June 22, taking the recommendation of the military council in Paris, the duke of Bedford ordered the governor of the nearby county of Champagne, Antoine de Vergy, a Burgundian ally who was on the English payroll, to attack the fortress of Vaucouleurs. In July, Antoine invaded the Bar-Lorraine region with an army of some twenty-five hundred soldiers, frightening the inhabitants of all of the villages in the area, including Domrémy. Gathering their possessions and livestock, Joan and her family followed their neighbors and fled to Neufchâteau, the nearest walled city, which was located only about ten miles south of Vaucouleurs.
Neufchâteau was large enough to boast an inn, owned by a woman known as La Rousse (the Redhead), and here Joan lodged, helping out in the kitchen to help pay for her stay. Both the inn and the city were crowded with people and men-at-arms similarly displaced by the war, and as might be imagined, there was much talk about the political situation and the need for Charles’s government to take action against the enemy, particularly when the Burgundians began burning everyone’s fields, an infuriating measure that could be witnessed simply by climbing onto the city’s walls. There was much fear that Vaucouleurs would surrender, but Robert de Baudricourt and his men stubbornly resisted, and by the end of July the enemy, finding the fortress more difficult to conquer than they had expected, lifted the siege and retreated to their home base in Champagne.
FROM HER EXILE in Saumur, Yolande monitored the renewed English military offensive, and Charles’s pathetic response to it, with increasing concern. Ordinarily, as a diplomat, she would have preferred to work quietly behind the scenes in order to regain her former influence at court. But conditions were deteriorating so rapidly that she didn’t have the time. So she effectively staged a coup.
In February 1428, she hosted a small but select conclave at her castle to discuss what could be done to redeem the political and military situation. Attending this private conference were three former members of Charles’s council—Arthur of Richemont (the constable), the duke of Clermont, and the count of Pardiac—all persons of high birth who, like Yolande herself, had left the king’s court the year before. An understanding was reached, an army was mobilized, and by summer a plan of action was in motion.
On June 15, 1428, just after Joan’s first unsatisfactory conversation with Robert de Baudricourt, Charles received a written communication signed by the constable and the two noblemen who had been called by Yolande to Saumur. In their letter, the three called for a meeting between the “États généraux” (a representative assembly from all the territories loyal to Charles) and the king and his councillors, for the purpose of determining the direction of the war. The three “princes of blood” noted that they wished to be reconciled with the king but only if the policies drawn from these deliberations were actually put into effect (a reference to La Trémoïlle’s influence over Charles, which was generally recognized as inhibiting the king’s will to act). To see that this condition was met, they demanded that “the queen of Sicily and those whom she was pleased to designate for this task, be responsible for ensuring the execution” of whatever resolutions came out of these discussions, evidence of Yolande’s guiding influence over these events. That these three princes, with the queen of Sicily’s aid, had managed to raise a substantial army capable of taking over the government with or without Charles’s permission was well known at the royal court, and added greatly to the persuasiveness of their argument.
Charles was in no position to refuse this ultimatum. The prospect of a new offensive by the English frightened him; if the enemy broke through to the south of France he could be captured or killed. He needed allies and troops, and he recognized that the three princes, once reconciled, could bring the forces they were now using to threaten him to his defense. Accordingly, he acceded to all of their demands, and on September 15 a meeting of the États généraux was convened at Chinon. Yolande was back in power.
Having once again organized events to her satisfaction, the queen of Sicily returned to Charles’s court. Mindful of the lessons of her own mother-in-law, Marie of Blois, to ease the process of mediation and smooth over any lingering hurt feelings, Yolande thoughtfully remembered to pack 500,000 francs, which she immediately donated to Charles’s war effort. Even more important, she brought with her two new influential allies, the duke of Alençon and the count of Vendôme, high-ranking noblemen who, with Richemont, Clermont, and Pardiac, now formed the core of her political party.
Reconciliation was effected, and the queen of Sicily resumed her former position of authority within the royal council. At the September meeting, the États généraux, in combination with the councillors of the court, recommended that a new battalion be raised to meet the English threat, and, as previously agreed, Yolande was put in charge of organizing and supplying this army. She now had the policy she wanted—to meet the English with force—and the authority to implement it. She worked feverishly over the next few months to assemble the best and most experienced military commanders and soldiers available from within Charles’s dominion and to gather the necessary provisions and equipment. By winter, all was in readiness, awaiting only the king’s command to attack.
But despite all of her efforts, she was unable to convince Charles to act militarily, and only the king could order the army to advance. Subtler methods would be necessary to effect that transition.
BY SEPTEMBER, the reinforcements under the command of the earl of Salisbury had arrived in Paris and the English once more made plans to launch an offensive. Against the orders of the duke of Bedford, who wanted to attack and hold Anjou, the earl of Salisbury instead chose the city of Orléans, about halfway between Paris and Bourges, as his primary target. Orléans, on the north bank of the Loire, was protected by a number of walls and moats but was vulnerable to a blockade. In October, the earl of Salisbury had seized a number of towns in the surrounding area, including an important fort on the south side of the river, effectively isolating the city. Although Salisbury died from wounds incurred in the attack, he was immediately replaced by the earl of Suffolk, whose plan was simply to starve the inhabitants into submission. The English forces encircled the city and dug in for the winter, and so began the siege of Orléans.
Charles, despite having earlier agreed to implement the war policies recommended by his councillors and the general assembly, hesitated. He was terrified of losing, and this fear manifested itself in the form of an obsession with the possibility that he might be illegitimate. As part of a propaganda campaign to win the allegiance of their French subjects, the English had circulated a poster depicting in verse and images Henry VI’s lineage, tracing the child’s genealogy back to the great French king Louis IX. (Louis IX had later been deified Saint Louis; everyone in France, from the lowest peasant to the most exalted aristocrat, knew and revered Saint Louis.) The poem that accompanied this exceedingly clever and persuasive pictorial representation stressed the legitimacy of Henry V’s son to the French crown. “How this Herry in the eight degree / Is to seint Lowrys sone and very heire / . . . For to possede by enheritaunce / Crownes two of englond and of Fraunce,” the poet charged with this task wrote. The implication, of course, was that Charles was not legitimate—that he was instead the bastard son of Louis, duke of Orléans, by Isabeau of Bavaria, an accusation that Isabeau herself strenuously denied, and that the chronicler Jean Chartier accused the English of spreading deliberately, after which, he wrote, the queen “never again had joy in her heart.”
Although the taint of Charles VII’s illegitimacy would follow him throughout the centuries, the bulk of the evidence sustains the theory that he was in fact the son of the king of France. Disapproval of Isabeau’s relationship with the duke of Orléans was not even hinted at by any chronicler until 1405, and Charles was conceived in 1402, when Isabeau’s fidelity to her husband was never questioned. Moreover, based upon the date of his birth, February 22, 1403, modern science is able to pinpoint the period of Charles’s conception as occurring between May 30 and June 1, 1402. The Monk of Saint-Denis specifically stated that “at the beginning of the month of June [1402]” the duke of Burgundy was apprised of the recovery of the king from one of his psychotic episodes. However, the duke of Burgundy was at this time in his northern territories, which meant that it would have taken a messenger at least a few days, if not a week, to transmit this information to him, so Charles VI had likely recovered by the last week in May. To prove that he was healthy again, the king would have once more begun sleeping with his wife, an action that resulted in Charles VII.
But no matter how many times Yolande assured him that he was legitimate—“you are the son of a king,” she had told him repeatedly over the years—Charles continued to be racked by the fear that he was not legally heir to the kingdom, and so was fated to have his armies lose to the English. Even worse, egged on by Georges de la Trémoïlle, who was at his most influential when the king was faltering, instead of launching a counterattack, Charles instead began to toy with the idea of fleeing the kingdom as a means of avoiding disgrace or capture. One of Charles’s chamberlains later reported that in 1428, Charles went into his private chapel and silently prayed, “saying nothing, but begging God in his heart that if he were indeed the true heir of the blood and noble house of France, and the kingdom lawfully his, God would protect and defend him; or at least grant him grace to be spared death or captivity, and escape to Spain or Scotland, whose kings had long been brothers in arms and allies of the kings of France; hence he had chosen them as his last refuge.”
To have her son-in-law abandon the kingdom was the worst possible scenario, not simply for her daughter Marie but for Yolande herself. If the king fled, the English army would march uncontested into his territory and the queen of Sicily would lose all her lands and castles and estates in Anjou and Saumur. This was unacceptable. And she knew all about his plan. Charles might have thought that he was keeping his prayers to himself, but the sentiments he professed to express only to God would hardly have been mysterious to those around him, particularly his wife and mother-in-law. Yolande had eyes and ears all over the court; many of the domestics who waited upon the king had initially been in service with the queen of Sicily or a member of her family and remained loyal to her. Not that spies were particularly necessary in this instance; the idea of escaping to Scotland, for example, was one that had already been openly broached by Charles’s advisers. As early as April 1428, Charles had sent ambassadors to try to arrange a marriage between his young son Louis and the daughter of the Scottish king as a means of further enabling this option. So widespread were the reports of Charles’s Scottish project that Joan herself mentioned Scotland in a chance conversation with a man who was at the time a complete stranger to her. “I must be at the King’s side, though I wear my feet to the knees. For indeed there is nobody in all the world, neither king nor duke, or daughter of the King of Scotland, nor any other who can recover the kingdom of France,” she said.
Well indeed should Charles seek an alliance with the king of Scotland and get on his knees and beg God for assistance. The assault on Orléans was a blow meant to wound emotionally as much as militarily, a symbol of the futility of his efforts. Apprehensive that the return of the popular duke of Orléans might lead to further uprisings in France, the regency government had refused to set a ransom figure on him, and so thirteen years after Agincourt, the duke was still a prisoner of the English. To have a royal prince of once-mighty France held in captivity for so long was disgraceful enough, but for his captors to take advantage of his absence to seize and perhaps occupy his birthright was, at least to the common people, unthinkable. And yet throughout the winter of 1428 and into the early months of 1429, the king remained completely immobilized. It was as though Charles was waiting, yearning—begging—for a sign from God to tell him who he was and what to do.
The frustration Yolande of Aragon experienced at the king’s obstinacy must have been overpowering. She had struggled to raise and supply a strong army and Charles refused to use it! And the English were within months, or perhaps even weeks, of taking Orléans! Desperate to shake him from his lethargy, the queen of Sicily was forced to intervene once again.
Around this time—the date was not specifically recorded—a royal messenger named Colet de Vienne was quietly dispatched to the court of Lorraine. Subsequent events would prove that he was not ordered away by the king, as Charles was unaware of his whereabouts or his role in the drama that would later unfold. Most likely, then, the messenger was sent under the guise of a routine family communication between Yolande (or Queen Marie, acting for her mother) and her son, as no one else of note at court would have had business in Lorraine. But Colet de Vienne’s errand was anything but ordinary.
The king needed the confidence that God was with him in order to pursue the military policy she favored? Very well, Yolande of Aragon would arrange to have his prayers answered.
BY THE WINTER of 1428, the crisis was so acute that the French clergy was enlisted to organize regular weekly processions in the hopes that a public display of piety would find favor with God and lead to “the prosperity of the king’s arms.” In response, Joan’s voices became even more urgent and they again told her to approach Robert de Baudricourt, this time with a new mission. “The voice told me, twice or thrice a week, that I, Joan, must go away and that I must come to France and . . . that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orléans,” she later told her inquisitors. “And me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.” Sometime in either December 1428 or early January 1429, Joan again enlisted the aid of her cousin and went to Vaucouleurs. She did not try to approach Robert de Baudricourt immediately as she had done previously, but instead took up residence at the home of a husband and wife, Henri and Catherine Le Royer, who owned a house in the town. By this time, Joan was convinced that she was the virgin referred to in the prophecy and made no secret of her belief or the reason for her visit. “At the time when Joan sought to leave the town she had been in my house for a period of three weeks,” Catherine Le Royer later testified. “And it was then that she sent to have speech with the lord Robert de Baudricourt that he take her to that place where the Dauphin was. But the lord Robert would not. And when Joan saw that Robert would not take her, she said—I heard her—that she must go to the place where the Dauphin was: ‘Have you not heard it said that it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virgin from the Lorraine marshes?’ I remembered having heard that and I was stupefied . . . and after that I believed in her words and with me many others,” Catherine said.
This was Robert’s second refusal to take Joan, but it was not nearly as scornful or vehement as his first rejection. During the three weeks she spent in Vaucouleurs, Joan had begun gathering support for her mission. Those she lived with were so impressed by her speech, her piety, and her passion—and so in agreement with her views that the siege of Orléans ought to be lifted and Charles crowned at Reims and restored to his hereditary position as king of France—that they offered to take her themselves. Together with Durand Laxart and another man from Vaucouleurs, Jacques Alain, Joan started out on her own to reach Charles’s court. But she soon thought better of it and returned to Vaucouleurs, telling her companions that it was “not thus that they should depart.” Still, the attempt was an indication that public opinion in the town had shifted enough in her favor to give Robert de Baudricourt pause.
Robert might have been the reigning power in Vaucouleurs, but like any knight he was also the vassal of a great lord, with whom he kept in regular contact and from whom he received military instructions. Robert was particularly close to his seigneur, and would later become his chamberlain and valued counselor. Robert de Baudricourt’s great lord was—Yolande of Aragon’s son René, the future duke of Bar and Lorraine.
René was now twenty years old, the father of two sons and a daughter. Both his uncle and his father-in-law were ailing—each would die within the next two years—and René was shouldering the brunt of the work associated with the administration of Bar and Lorraine. René had maintained his love of art and was still a devoted reader of romances and a loyal follower of the chivalric tradition, but he was also keenly aware of the conflict with England and the need to protect his duchies from encroachment. Robert de Baudricourt was one of his best men; he had been instrumental in holding the important fortress at Vaucouleurs. The two were in frequent communication. “The register of the Archives of La Meuse . . . bears trace of a regular correspondence between the Duke of Bar [René] and Baudricourt,” wrote the great French scholar Anatole France.
Robert, uncertain of what to do about Joan, who was rapidly developing a following as a seer or holy woman, must have apprised the court of Lorraine of her existence. Because on January 29, 1429, after receiving a dispatch from René, he suddenly subjected Joan to the first in a series of tests. To the great surprise of her hostess, Catherine Le Royer, the captain, accompanied by a priest, appeared at the Le Royers’ door one day—clearly something that had never happened before—and asked for Joan. “I saw Robert de Baudricourt, then Town Captain at Vaucouleurs, come into my house with Messire Jean Fournier,” Catherine later testified. “I heard him telling Joan that the latter, a priest, was wearing a stole, and that he had exorcised it in the Captain’s presence, saying that if there was any evil thing in her, she would draw back from them, and if there was something good, she would approach them. And Joan approached the priest, and gone onto her knees.”
The precaution of exorcism having been satisfied, a messenger from the court of Lorraine next appeared in Vaucouleurs seeking Joan. She was informed that the old duke—René’s father-in-law—was sick and wished to consult her about his illness; the messenger had brought with him a letter of safe conduct for her to the town of Nancy, where the duke was staying. This invitation must have been a cause for excitement among the townspeople, for Joan was suddenly the beneficiary of an outpouring of generosity. Especially, there was concern that her clothes were too shabby to appear before the duke or to protect her adequately from the rigors of a long journey in winter. “When Joan the Maid came to the place and town of Vaucouleurs, in the diocese of Toul, I saw her, dressed in poor clothes, women’s clothes, red,” reported Jean de Novellompont, another resident of the town. After Joan received the summons from the duke of Lorraine, “I asked her if she wanted to go in her own clothes,” Jean continued. “She replied that she would rather have men’s clothes. Then I gave her clothes and hose of my servants that she might don them. And that done, the inhabitants of Vaucouleurs had men’s clothes made for her and shoes and all things necessary to her and they delivered to her a horse which cost about sixteen francs. When she was dressed and had a horse, with a safe conduct from the Duke of Lorraine, the Maid went to speak with that lord and I went with her to the city of Toul.”
So the impetus to change her dress came not from Joan herself but from a kind supporter who was worried about the impression she would make if she went in her own garments. Nor did he find it strange that she chose to clothe herself in men’s attire. Joan was going on a journey where, despite the safe conduct, she would be vulnerable to men-at-arms and other bandits; she would also be accompanied by men for the entire trip and would be forced to live and sleep beside them. Joan was a virgin and it was important that she remain so; the less temptation the better. Male apparel in this instance served as a practical form of protection.
Interesting too was the purchase of the horse. Since Joan did not protest when the people of Vaucouleurs provided her with a mount but simply thanked them and set off for Nancy, it must be presumed that by this time she had learned to ride. Her neighbors may even have helped her to master this skill, knowing that she would need it in the future to complete her mission. This may also perhaps explain why Joan waited three weeks or so before approaching Robert de Baudricourt the second time. She was already fascinated by soldiers and might have been using this interlude to observe the men in their military exercises so as to be able to emulate them. Certainly, if she had wished to acquaint herself with army behavior and tactics she could not have chosen a better venue than the fortress of Vaucouleurs.
Suitably outfitted, Joan obeyed the duke’s summons and left for Nancy, probably at the beginning of February 1429. “The Duke of Lorraine required that I be taken to him,” Joan reported. “I went and I told him that I wanted to go to France, and the duke questioned me about the restoration of his health and I told him that of that I knew nothing; I said little to him about my journey, but I said to the duke that he [should] give me his son and some men to take me into France and that I would pray to God for his health; I went to him by means of a safe-conduct and I returned afterwards to the town of Vaucouleurs.” Joan’s reference to the duke’s “son” indicates that René sat in on this audience.
René was thus given a chance to observe Joan’s behavior and assess her character. He already knew from Robert that she claimed to be the virgin of the prophecies, and was believed to be such by the townspeople of Vaucouleurs, and what René saw of Joan in her interview with his father-in-law would only have confirmed that picture. Despite the male attire, here was a modest, obviously pious, extremely articulate young woman, purporting to come from God, who showed immense confidence and self-possession in the presence of a high aristocrat. In addition to asking the duke to aid in her quest, Joan had apparently gently admonished him for having left his wife for another woman. According to a witness, Joan “had told him [the duke] that he was behaving badly and that never would he recover his health if he did not mend his ways, and she exhorted him to take back his good spouse,” another indication that news originating with the duke of Lorraine’s entourage reached as far as Domrémy, for Joan was very specific about the intelligence she received from her angels, and nowhere in her testimony did she mention that they had supplied her with this bit of gossip.
René would also already have been familiar from Robert de Baudricourt with everything Joan had said about Charles being the true king of France and the need to lift the siege of Orléans, and these would have reflected René’s own views (which was hardly unusual, as Joan’s opinions had been shaped over the years by information emanating from his court). “Precisely because her assumptions accorded so well with the prophecies then current among Charles’ supporters, she was almost guaranteed a warm reception, at least from those whose own views coincided with hers,” observed renowned medievalist Charles T. Wood. If Joan was not some incarnation of Melusine, she gave a very good impersonation of her; she had been vetted by a priest; she was obviously holy; she was worth a chance.
René must have informed his mother of Joan’s existence prior to this interview, because Colet de Vienne, the royal messenger sent by Yolande, was already in Nancy awaiting instructions when Joan made her appearance there. And immediately following this audience, Colet de Vienne was dispatched to Vaucouleurs with a communication for Robert de Baudricourt from René. Colet rode quickly and arrived before Joan, who stopped along the way to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine.
So it was that upon her return, Joan found that Robert de Baudricourt had for no apparent reason reconsidered her request; more than this, he was now suddenly prepared to accede to her wishes and provide her with an escort to the royal court at Chinon, where Charles was currently in residence.13 Colet de Vienne, who had made the journey previously and knew the back ways, would lead her party. “Robert twice refused and repulsed me, and the third time he received me and gave me men,” Joan later recalled. “The voice had told me that it would happen so.”
Joan left Vaucouleurs for Chinon on February 12, 1429. Robert de Baudricourt was at Joan’s leave-taking; he had given her a sword for protection on the journey, which she held in her hand. “Robert de Baudricourt caused those who escorted me to swear that they would lead me truly and surely,” Joan later recounted. “And Robert said to me, ‘Go’ as I set off, ‘Go and let what is to be come to pass.’ ”