Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (13 page)

Joan’s zeal for battle was apparent, but she knew better than to present herself to powerful men without a veneer of humility and a few words to suggest a reluctance to undertake so immodest a quest. Long before she was on trial for her life, she was careful to underscore her lack of personal ambition.

“It’s no good breaking your heart to make men understand anything,” Joan’s mother tells her in
The Lark.
“All you can do is say ‘yes’ to whatever they think, and wait till they’ve gone out to the fields. Then you can be mistress in your house again.”

But Joan didn’t stoop to gather unacknowledged power.
“If God didn’t mean me to be proud, why did He send an Archangel to see me, and saints with the light of heaven on them to speak to me?” Anouilh has her ask her inquisitor. “He only had to leave me looking after the sheep, and I don’t think pride would ever have entered my head.”

“I would much prefer to stay with my poor mother and spin,” Joan said to Jean de Metz, “for this is not my station. But I must go, and I must do it, for my Lord wishes me to perform this deed.” Once her vocation had been fulfilled, however, Joan didn’t return to the hearth but refused to relinquish her identity as a military chieftain. That she had been a child exemplary in her obedience speaks to her commitment
to her voices’ direction to be good, not to her embrace of domestic routine, to which she never intended to return.

“I am a soldier,” Shaw’s Joan declares. “I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge and of placing the big guns.”

DeMille’s vision of his heroine’s potency is even less subtle. “If thou comest from God,” Sir Robert says to Joan, “show me what answer he would make to this!” Baudricourt rises from his throne-like chair to unsheathe and brandish his sword. Standing in profile, he points to its blade with his left hand, while with his right he holds its hilt just at the height of his pelvis; the length of it projects from his groin at an angle and rigidity suggesting tumescence. Provoked, Joan borrows a dagger-size knife from a page standing beside her and holds it up as if it were a chalice, her face tipped heavenward to receive the divine grace that infuses her little blade with miraculous power. With it she halves the much longer shaft of Sir Robert’s weapon. Immediately, Sir Robert agrees to give Joan whatever she asks, but he cannot meet her eye as he speaks; his gaze is fixed on his severed sword. “I am convinced and will send thee to thy King,” his unnecessary title card reads. If the scene provides unintended comedy for today’s audience, it remains useful for the aggressive transparency of its symbolism, its release having preceded psychology’s imposition of self-consciousness on popular culture. What could more obviously convey the nature of the fear Joan of Arc has always inspired than her unmanning her opposition with a supernaturally enhanced phallic weapon?

When she at last set out for Chinon, it was with six men, of whom at least one would admit to starting the trip contemplating her rape as a means of robbing her of the power she claimed.

^*1
Unlike the apocryphal texts included in the Vulgate, pseudepigrapha, from the Greek
pseud
, “false,” and
epigraphein
, “to inscribe,” are not included in any scriptural canon.

^*2
There were twenty sous to the livre.

^*3
Canon 68, Fourth Council of the Lateran, convoked by Pope Innocent III.

^*4
jihad: An Islamic term meaning “to struggle in the way of Allah” rather than a necessarily violent “holy war.”

The traveling party of seven included the two knights who financed the trip: Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy; Bertrand’s servant, Julien; Yolande’s messenger, Colet de Vienne; Richard the Archer; and the servant he shared with Vienne, Jean de Honecourt. “They were all knights and servants of Sir Robert de Baudricourt,” Joan testified. “Sir Robert had sworn them to conduct me well and safely.”

“Go,” Robert said to Joan as she departed. “Go, and come what may.” It was hardly a benediction, but Baudricourt was obeying orders, not acting out of faith. No matter his opinion, the price of getting rid of the obstinate girl had been to provide her an escort and a formal letter of introduction to the dauphin—a bargain, as it turned out. Even had Yolande not been scheming from afar, by now the citizens of Lorraine were traveling miles to get a glimpse of their Maid, thronging around her. Were Baudricourt to refuse to promote what they believed was her God-given mission, he’d risk an uprising.

With the formal introduction she needed, Joan and her six companions set out for Chinon on the night of February 12, 1429, “to go,” as she said, “to the lord Dauphin, and for that I was born.” Her phrasing often mimicked that of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, an echo here of Christ’s admonition to those who tried to detain him from his vocation.
“I was sent for this purpose.”

Joan of Arc Leaving Vaucouleurs
, Jean-Jacques Scherrer’s monumental history painting, first exhibited in 1887 (
Fig. 8
), has insinuated itself into the origin myth of France much as Emanuel Leutze’s equally narrative
Washington Crossing the Delaware
has shaped the vision of countless American schoolchildren. Life-size, regal, and handsomely attired in brown tunic, cape, and leggings, her yet-to-be-shorn hair falling over her shoulders and down her back—her transformation
incomplete—Joan pauses on the threshold of her magnificent and terrible fate. The Maid’s horse lifts her to a heroic height. Like George Washington towering over his seated rowers, she is more than head and shoulders above the crowd around her, a sweep of caste from beggar to courtier;
“the mother of her country,” history has judged her, “the George Washington of France.” She raises her left hand in farewell, her right reaches for the symbol of her vocation: a sword, its hilt and blade divided by the hand guard, emphasizing its cruciform outline and reminding us that her war is a holy one.

“No sword!” Sir Robert exclaims in Victor Fleming’s 1948 film,
Joan of Arc.
“Here,” he says. “Take mine!”

Scherrer’s painting has a focal point. The silver gleam of the weapon being passed from the captain to the Maid captures the eye and holds it on the critical moment, as a man of wealth and status relinquishes the symbol of his potency to a much younger woman. Just below that transaction is another reminder: painted in profile, the pommel of Joan’s armored saddle projects forward from her groin like an abbreviated phallus. Sir Robert reaches over his head and past the pommel to extend the tied scroll of a letter along with the weapon. Behind him, a peasant woman weeps in the arms of a man whose eyes beseech Joan. But Joan’s gaze, like Washington’s, is visionary, fixed on what she alone can see.

The mourners are Joan’s parents, of course, often inaccurately included at the scene of her departure from Vaucouleurs, the painter’s sleight of hand reaching forward to the time when Joan’s accomplishments and the awe they inspired would render her father’s distrust meaningless. During the nineteenth century the painting was exhibited internationally; Joan’s canonization made it into an image recognized all over the world; it remains popular in reproduction. Maxwell Anderson, who adapted his 1946 play within a play,
Joan of Lorraine
, for Fleming’s film, placed Joan’s mother in the crowd around Joan, mounted and wearing a man’s traveling cloak.

“A mother bears children and she gives them to the world and she thinks she knows them, but she doesn’t know them at all,” Isabelle says. Before Joan can pass through the city’s gates, before she exits one world to enter another from which she cannot return, her mother presses forward to give her the memento upon which her judges would
fix, the subject first raised during the preliminary trial that determined the charges brought against Joan. By then she’d been in captivity for a year, shackled for the last six months in the endless dusk of an unlit cell, ill-fed, brutalized daily, and still obstinately immune to the efforts of seventy judges to dismantle her resolve.

“Did you not have some rings?” the examiner asked Joan.

“You have one,” she said. “Give it back to me. The Burgundians have the other.”

“Who gave you the ring now in the possession of the Burgundians?”

“Show me my ring if you have it.”

“Who gave you the ring taken by the Burgundians?”

“My father or my mother, at Domrémy.”

“What distinguished it from any other ring?”

“The names Jesus Maria were written on it.”

“Who wrote them?” the examiner asked, and he repeated the question, inspired by
“a contemporary debate between the Franciscans, who encouraged reverence for the names of Jesus and Mary, and the Dominicans, who urged the papacy to forbid it as a satanic cult.”

The words did suggest a flight from orthodoxy. One effect of the Papal Schism had been a proliferation of covert proto-Protestant sects that wanted nothing to do with any pope. Joan’s examiners lingered over every conceivable means of implicating her in heresy or witchcraft and pressed her in hopes of forcing her to admit the names were an incantation of some sort. As they were throughout the trial, trumped-up religious charges cloaked the political agendas of the avaricious Sorbonne-trained clergy, just as they had hidden those of the Sanhedrin who pronounced judgment on Jesus. Both tribunals kowtowed to occupying forces while preserving what influence they could. “Jesus Maria” was a device used by mendicant friars of all orders: a means of identifying one another as separate from the clergy they considered corrupt. Collette of Corbie, for example, the visionary hermit and saint who founded the Poor Clares, is known to have
“traveled in Joan’s region, using the emblem ‘Jesus Maria’ in her letters.” The judges who assembled in Rouen to try Joan, the majority of them creatures of the university, considered the use of sacred names for any purpose outside the ordained celebration of the Mass
a crime of insurrection, of failing to submit to the ruling patriarchy’s prescribed forms and traditions.

“Who wrote the names?”

“I have told you I don’t know.”

“Was there any stone set in it?”

“There were three crosses on it, and no other mark that I know of, except Jesus Maria. My brother gave me the one you have. Give it to the Church if you will not return it to me.”

“Why did you look at this ring before going into battle?”

“Out of pleasure, and in honor of my father and mother.”

“For no other reason?” the examiner asked.

“Saint Catherine appeared before me, and the ring was on my finger when I touched her.”

“What part of Saint Catherine did you touch with the ring?”

“About that,” Joan said, “you will get nothing more from me.”

On the day of Joan’s departure for Chinon, the French initiated hostilities with the English on a flat, barren plain some 150 miles southwest of Vaucouleurs to block the progress of a three-hundred-wagon convoy of munitions and barrels of salt-cured herring the English had requisitioned in anticipation of Lent’s restriction on meat. According to the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
and Cousinot’s
Chronique de la Pucelle
, Joan persuaded Sir Robert
“to arm her because she knew, with clairvoyance, about the defeat of the French in the battle of Rouvray, near Orleans, the so-called Battle of the Herrings, in February and told him about it
before
the news reached Vaucouleurs.”

“In God’s name, Robert de Baudricourt, you are too slow about sending me,” Joan says in Mark Twain’s
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
, “and have caused damage thereby, for this day the Dauphin’s cause has lost a battle near Orleans, and will suffer yet greater injury if you do not send me to him soon.”

The governor was perplexed by this speech, and said—“To-day, child,
to-day
? How can you know what has happened
in that region to-day? It would take eight or ten days for the word to come.”