Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (10 page)

“Don’t get involved in earthly strife. It will engulf you. Your purity won’t last,” Bertolt Brecht’s 1900 chorus warns Joan, offering medieval advice. “Your bit of warmth will perish in the all-pervading cold. Goodness departs from those who leave the comforting hearth.”
Saint Joan of the Stockyards
is one of three plays Brecht wrote about Joan of Arc, and it unfolds in a mythical Dreiserian Chicago, where Joan, “at the head of a shock troop of Black Straw Hats”—as Brecht christened his Salvation Army—must make her way through the minions of Pierpont Mauler to approach the Meat King herself. She promises his already hungry workers she will convince him not to close his canning factory for his own financial gain.
“In a dark time of cruel confusion, of ordained disorder, of systematic lawlessness, of dehumanized humanity,” she cries to an agitated crowd, “we propose to bring God back.”

Christian socialism underscored the antiestablishment, egalitarian message of Jesus, prefiguring Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. Whether set in the fifteenth or the twentieth century, the
war Joan brings is revolutionary. “This campaign of ours is undoubtedly the last of its kind,” Joan of the Stockyards tells the crowd of workers. “The last attempt to set Him up again in a crumbling world.” The situation is apocalyptic, accelerating toward the Jesus who came bearing a sword of justice rather than a bleeding heart.
“We are soldiers of God,” Joan cries. “Wherever conditions are unsettled and violence threatens we come marching with our drums and banners, to remind people of God, whom they’ve all forgotten, and lead their souls back to Him.”

Discouraged if not defeated, Joan went home to find roving bands of looters circling Domrémy. By July, when Burgundian forces advanced on Vaucouleurs, Joan’s family had been forced once again to take refuge in Neufchâteau, driving their herds into the fields as they left. For two weeks they stayed at an inn kept by a woman known as La Rousse—the Redhead.
Joan “did not like living in those parts,” she told a neighbor, “but preferred to live at Domrémy.” Still there was much to be gleaned from wayfarers’ conversation around a tavern’s communal dinner table, information that fueled Joan’s impatience to set off on her God-given errand. She didn’t object to working in La Rousse’s kitchen in exchange for room and board. She would rather pass the time doing chores than wait in idleness for her life to begin. But, as inquisitorial spies would later report, there were soldiers staying at the inn, a sliver of information her judges used to fabricate the allegation that Joan, “of her own will and without the leave of her said father and mother, went to the town of Neufchâteau in Lorraine and there for some time served in the house of a woman, an innkeeper named La Rousse, where many young unguarded women stayed, and the lodgers were for the most part soldiers.”

Having insinuated that La Rousse was a madam and Joan a prostitute, the judges found an additional use for the slander. As stated in the ninth of the seventy “articles of accusation” brought against her, Joan, “when in this service, summoned a certain youth for breach of promise before the magistrate of Toul, and in the pursuit of this case, she went frequently to Toul, and spent almost everything she had.
This young man, knowing she had lived with the said women, refused to wed her, and died,
pendente lite
[pending litigation]. For this reason, out of spite, Jeanne left the said service.”

The motif surfaces in every narrative genre of the time, including the minutes of a kangaroo court: a duplicitous, unchaste woman lures a trusting young man to his death as he struggles to free himself from her sexual stain.

No, Joan objected, she’d made no promise to any young man. She had consecrated all of her being to God, her chastity both symbol and proof of her faith. She would never wed, unless at God’s command. “It was he who summoned me,” Joan corrected the examiner. “Saints Catherine and Margaret assured me I would win my case.” As they promised, the magistrate dismissed the suit and acquitted Joan, guilty of nothing but refusing to wed whomever her father had chosen to inherit the problem she’d become—a local boy, it’s assumed. While parents commonly resorted to bribery, threats, and even violence to coerce a child to accept an unwanted spouse, by the fifteenth century Church law protected such children, and fathers no longer had the right to marry off daughters without their leave. Joan might have considered herself overprotected, but she wasn’t chattel, not officially, and the ninth article was eventually dropped from the charges held against her. As for the maligned La Rousse, the innkeeper was a decent, proper woman, as several witnesses to Joan’s childhood testified.

Had she not already, Joan would discover that to advertise her chastity was to ask for that claim to be challenged or, worse, rendered false, and for as long as she was in Neufchâteau, she remained always in the company of her parents, the whole family living among neighbors from Domrémy, insulated from strangers. There was no one more committed to guarding Joan’s reputation than Joan herself, who had begun to perceive the lineaments of her future as a public figure and understood that rumor had power where truth did not. As soon as it was safe to do so, Joan’s family returned to Domrémy to find, once again, most of their homes burned, the church left in ruins.

“Do you know,” Péguy’s Joan demands of those who counsel her to control her temper … “that the soldiers are attacking towns and breaking their way into churches everywhere?… And they shout all
sorts of vile things at the Blessed Virgin, to our mother the Blessed Virgin, and they call names and blaspheme Jesus on his cross …[T]hey foul the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Jesus … Jesus’s sacred body.”

On October 12, 1428, the English laid siege to Orléans. As it was the single remaining bastion that prevented them from crossing the Loire and occupying what remained of France, there was talk of little else. The kingdom that had reigned supreme in Europe just a hundred years earlier now faced extinction. Should Orléans fall, all of France would follow it, and all who called themselves French would find themselves under the rule of the king of England. It grew ever harder to manufacture hope in the face of what appeared inevitable defeat. Soldiers too honorable to defect sank into the apathy of the condemned, and the French clergy found themselves marching circles around the army’s frozen infantry, processing through the streets on a regular basis to demonstrate the constancy of their devotion in hopes of summoning a miracle. The dauphin, whose fear of illegitimacy inspired fatalism, was making plans to abandon his sinking kingdom for the castle of one of France’s allies—Scotland or Spain.

By December, Joan was back in Vaucouleurs. Her voices promised her success; she had only to persevere, in this case by using Laxart’s wife’s advanced pregnancy as an excuse to travel north. Joan persuaded her parents to let her go with her uncle Durand to stay for a few weeks in his home and help her mother’s cousin during her confinement, a ruse to which Jacques might not have agreed had he not been exasperated by the botched marriage plot that left Joan on his hands. He might reasonably have assumed his daughter would have given up her wild scheme after being dressed down by Sir Robert de Baudricourt in public and subsequently ridiculed. Not that Joan had disclosed what happened the last time she’d visited her uncle in Burey. In her parents’ home, Joan had been as circumspect as always, continuing to cloak her preoccupation with her voices’ demands. She’d practiced doing that for years. But the world in which Joan lived was small, and a grandnephew of Isabelle’s had told Joan’s brothers about
her first meeting with Baudricourt. The report of so incongruous a transaction between their sister and the city’s captain aroused Jean and Pierre’s suspicions, as would any scenario involving Joan and men-at-arms, and they in turn told their parents about a spectacle that had already provided irresistible fodder for gossips.

For whatever reason—and perhaps it was nothing more than her own impatience—Joan left Domrémy in haste, a leave-taking remembered primarily for her cryptic good-byes. She left quickly but not in secret, bidding farewell to those she encountered as she was heading out of town. If she looked, she never found an opportunity to tell Hauviette that she was leaving, and Hauviette, who said she
“loved her very dearly,” had “cried very bitterly about her going.” Mengette, with whom Joan spun and “did other household chores,” did get a last embrace, perhaps due to proximity, as her “father’s house was almost next door to Joan’s father’s.”

“When she went away, she said good-bye to me,” Mengette testified. “Then she departed and prayed God to bless me, and set out for Vaucouleurs.”

“All I know,” the farmer Gérardin of Épinal testified, “is that when she was about to go away, she said to me: ‘Friend, if you were not a Burgundian, there is something I would tell you.’ ” It would appear Gérardin was the single enemy sympathizer in town, whose head Joan would have been happy to “take off,” should God ask her to. As for Gérardin, he assumed Joan’s secret was no different from that of any other girl of her age, “something about a lad she wanted to marry,” he guessed.

“No eggs! No eggs!!” Sir Robert says to his steward in
Saint Joan
, by George Bernard Shaw. The play opens like a fairy tale, in a castle, and amplifies the apocryphal bird imagery that lifts Joan’s story above those of other mortals and loans her the vantage of angels. “Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by no eggs?” How can it be that all Sir Robert’s hens—“the best layers in Champagne”—have stopped producing eggs?

“There is no milk,” his steward tells him. “There are no eggs:
tomorrow there will be nothing …[T]here is a spell on us: we are bewitched … as long as the Maid is at the door.”

Joan, however, wasn’t waiting at the castle door. Nor was she staying outside town with her uncle in Burey, but lodging with friends of his, Henri and Catherine Le Royer, who owned a house within the walls of Vaucouleurs. She had no intention of returning to Sir Robert before strengthening the legitimacy of her request by attracting more and more powerful adherents to her cause. Word had spread in the eight months since Joan’s earlier visit. Before the siege of Orléans, it had been easy to laugh off the odd girl in the homespun red dress, but news of the pivotal city’s imminent fall delivered the French to a desperation that transformed Joan from the butt of a joke into a young woman who merited serious attention. Perhaps she really was who she claimed to be, the prophesied virgin from the marshes of Lorraine.
“I heard it said many times that she was to restore France and the blood royal,” her childhood friend Jean Waterin testified.

Joan had no sooner arrived in Vaucouleurs than the whole city knew of her return. Impatient for a first look at her, a throng gathered around the Le Royers’ door.

“What are you doing here, my dear?” asked Jean de Metz, a squire stationed in the city garrison. “Is it not fated that the King shall be driven from his kingdom, and that we shall all turn English?” Jean asked her, his tone arch. A knight in training, like Bertrand de Poulengy, he was playing to an audience at Joan’s expense, unprepared for sincerity so absolute it didn’t acknowledge sarcasm.