Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (14 page)

“My Voices have brought word to me, and it is true. A battle was lost to-day, and you are in fault to delay me so.”

That the French had initiated hostilities made the loss that much more ignominious. As the armies of France and their ally, Scotland, crossed the treeless plain on which the armies met, the English had been able to see the approach of the enemy and, under the command of Sir John Fastolf, stopped advancing and circled their wagons. Around the primitive fortification, they set spikes to discourage the charge of the French cavalry, a strategy that had served them well in earlier battles when they had been outnumbered. Time had proved the incompetence of
“French knights [who] continued to see war as an arena in which to display their chivalrous qualities, not as an instrument of state policy.” Perhaps even more costly, as military histories attest, was the inability of French commanders to work cooperatively with the commoners they disdained.
“No member of the noble class trusted the local rural peasants enough to permit them to have weapons of such effectiveness as the longbow,” whereas
“the noble-born English knights and the common-born English longbowmen respected each other’s skill and courage, and had long experience working together as a team.” Over and over, the French—
“individualistic glory-seekers … dilettantes” who “scorned … fellow soldiers in their own army, as social inferiors”—charged quixotically into a storm of arrows that assailed them before they were close enough to discharge their weapons effectively. Mounted on horses whose heads alone were armored, the cavalry corps trampled one another, as their destriers were more often maddened than incapacitated by enemy arrows. This time the leaders of the French and Scot forces failed to coordinate attacks and thus appeared to vacillate in their resolve to seize the convoy. Perceiving hesitance as cowardice, the English took advantage of the enemy’s confusion and counterattacked from behind, putting the combined French and Scot forces, as many as four thousand men-at-arms, to flight.

Joan and her escorts waited for dusk to fall before venturing
beyond the gates of Vaucouleurs. While both contemporaneous narratives and later revisions explained Baudricourt’s apparent change of heart as accomplished by supernatural means, their authors were either innocent of Yolande’s offstage direction or intent on eclipsing it. Neither Joan nor any witness suggested Joan had foreseen the battle’s carnage, but she cannot have traveled far before she learned, through mortal means, what four hundred fatalities made official: the French had been decimated. Baudricourt died before the nullification trial; we have witness only to his actions and words, but whether or not the story of Joan’s second sight is apocryphal, it was Yolande’s orders that determined Sir Robert’s response. She would become one of several figures critical to the advancement of Joan’s career whose influence has generally been ignored or downplayed because it undermines the conventions of the messianic narrative. Too, the story of Joan of Arc tends to exonerate Charles’s mother-in-law as it doesn’t his mother, Isabeau, because Yolande served Joan’s mission. In truth, the women were alike in ambition, each manipulating weak men to gain political advantage.

Chinon, about 350 miles to the west, was at the end of an eleven-day journey through English-occupied territory, the rivers in flood as they were every February,
“no roads and no bridges left.” Even though they took the precaution of proceeding only under cover of night, that seven men-at-arms—or six, and one armed girl—traveled on horseback undetected and undisturbed by soldiers guarding roads and circling the towns along the way is often cited as the first miracle to demonstrate Joan’s uncanny powers. A story was told by
“some soldiers who had gone to intercept her when she was on her way to find the King,” Seguin Seguin testified for the nullification proceedings. A Dominican friar who provided the sole eyewitness account of Joan’s first formal ecclesiastical examination, at Poitiers, Seguin is considered by historians to have provided the most reliable of testimony. They “had laid an ambush to capture her and rob her and her company,” he said. “But at the moment when they were about to do so, they had found themselves unable to stir from their positions; and
so Joan had escaped without difficulty together with her company.” There would be other miracles, both less ambiguous and more dramatic. Still, whether it was accomplished with or without the grace of God, that so large a party eluded both enemy soldiers and the bandits spawned by anarchy was at least lucky and by no means expected. After all, Baudricourt had provided Joan a military guard for a reason.

What conflict emerged was internecine and came in the form of power struggles between Joan and those members of her escort who, like Baudricourt, were just following orders—except Sir Robert was safe within the walls of a fortified city and they were being asked to risk their lives for a girl who not only claimed she heard voices from God but dressed as a man. Husson Lemaître, a tinker from Viville, not ten miles from Domrémy, testified for the nullification that he’d
“heard it said that while Joan was being taken from Vaucouleurs to the King, some of the soldiers of her escort pretended to be the enemy troops, and that those who were with her made a show of being about to take to their heels. But she said to them, ‘In the name of God, do not run away. They will do us no harm.’ ” And, though Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy were firm defenders of Joan’s holiness from the outset, her other companions plotted to undo the audacity of this inconvenient virgin, only to discover why it was that one of the king’s squires, Gobert Thibault, heard
“Joan’s intimates say that they never had any desire for her. That is to say, that sometimes they had a carnal urge, but never dared to give way to it; and they believed that it was impossible to desire her … Suddenly their sexual feelings were checked.” Whether the gift betrayed heavenly or, as her enemies would attest, demonic influences, and though her apologists would hardly have characterized it in such terms, Joan was believed to have safeguarded her virginity by using supernatural powers to emasculate would-be assailants.

“I afterward heard the men who led her to the King talking,” Marguerite La Touroulde said,

and heard them say that at the outset they thought her presumptuous and that they meant to put her to the test. But once they were on the road, escorting her, they were ready to do anything that she wanted and were as anxious to bring her before
the King as she was herself to get there. They could never have denied her anything that she asked. They said that … they wanted to make sexual advances to her, but at the moment when they were about to speak they were so ashamed that they dared not tell her their intentions or utter so much as a word.

“We escorted her to the King … as secretly as we could,” Jean de Metz remembered. The need for cover prevented Joan from attending Mass as regularly as she liked; given the opportunity, she went more than once a day. “If only we could hear a Mass it would be a grand thing,” Jean remembered her saying. “But, to my knowledge, we only heard the Mass twice on the way,” once on the first night, when the party of travelers reached the town of Saint-Urbain and were invited to sleep in the abbey, and again a few days later, when they passed through Auxerre and Joan attended Mass in the principal church there. On February 21 the seven travelers paused at the village of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, a day’s ride from Chinon, that much farther to the west. From Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, Joan told the examiner, she’d requested permission to approach the dauphin at the castle. “I sent letters to my king telling him I had traveled a good hundred and fifty leagues to come to his aid, and I told him also that I knew many things to his advantage.”

Once again, Joan’s reputation had preceded her, and the dauphin’s advisers were divided as to whether Charles should receive her. Members of the house of Anjou had little choice but to fall in line behind Yolande, although few if any other than René would have known it was she who arranged for the delivery of this living prophecy fulfilled. In Fierbois, Joan waited two days for an invitation to court. The idea of such a meeting between nobility and commoner wasn’t as fantastic then as it would be now. Yolande was working within what was becoming the French kings’ tradition of privatizing their relationship to the divine. Long before Joan was captured, the archbishop of Reims had started grooming Joan’s replacement,
Le Berger
^*1
—the
Shepherd—a genuine rustic chosen from among the ongoing pageant of mediums and prognosticators who had slipped into the widening breach between competing papacies. Ever since the election of Pope Urban VI in 1378, and the subsequent emergence of Clement VII, who left Rome and established a rival papacy in Avignon, the schism had aroused such intense animosity between opposing factions that families and tradesmen relocated to cities based on their allegiances to one or the other pope. Avignon might have been more accessible than Rome, but history has judged it
“a virtual temporal state of sumptuous pomp, of great cultural attraction, and of unlimited simony.” In other words, France’s papacy was so palpably corrupt that the court had withdrawn its faith in popes and retrained it on visionaries like Marie Robine, whose access to political power had become more rule than exception. But Georges de La Trémoille, Charles’s grand chamberlain and if not royal favorite then the most formidable among the dauphin’s advisers, didn’t want the help of a visionary complete with a train of hysterical followers, especially not a sword-rattling female one tricked out like a man. An opportunist devoted to protecting his own interests over any other, La Trémoille had a brother who served the Duke of Burgundy, and he wanted surrender, even at the cost of France’s independence. He wasn’t going to lose his hard-won control over Charles, whom he’d flattered, bribed, and browbeaten into submission, not without a fight.

Joan assuaged her impatience at another delay the only way she knew how: she went to Mass as often as the monks celebrated it and spent as many hours as she could within the sanctuary of the shrine at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, where Charles Martel was said to have left his sword as a trophy of his victory over the Muslims in 732. Martel was the grandfather of Charlemagne, who is recognized as the father of chivalry—from the French
cheval
, for horse—as his armies’ increased dependence on cavalry gave birth to knighthood. Tales of miracles associated with Sainte-Catherine multiplied, and the shrine, on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, became
the destination of countless knights who, having escaped their English captors, came bearing offerings of weapons and armor as well as
“fetters, shackles, balls and chains, and other tools of imprisonment from which the saint had miraculously relieved her votaries.” There would be many altars before which Joan kneeled in her short life, from the most humble to those in cathedrals of a size and splendor unimaginable to a rural peasant. By force of circumstance she paused longer at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois than she would at others, on her knees among the ex-votos.

In its size and splendor, Chinon would have struck most small-town girls, few of whom traveled far from where they were born, as a vision from a fairy tale, an imposing stone structure complete with conical turrets whose bright, restless pennants advertised its occupants’ coat of arms. The foundations of the castle were built at an altitude higher than any land in sight; its battlements rose from a ledge of rock that overlooked the river Vienne, a slab of shadow looming over any army so foolish as to try to scale its height. The Vienne is a major tributary of the Loire, its banks peopled ever since rivers were used as trade routes, in prehistory, and the strategic advantage granted by the château’s height was joined by its unusual physical grace. Joan reached Chinon in the middle of the day on March 4, 1429, and lodged at a house belonging to a woman she characterized, in anticipation of her examiner’s maligning her hostess, as having a good reputation. There she was forced again to do what she hated: wait.