Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (15 page)

“I was continually praying that God would send a sign for the king,” Joan said, and at last he did. “I was in my lodging when the angel came, and afterwards we went together to the king.” Joan and her angel had company as they climbed the steep switchback trail that led up to the castle’s gates. Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy walked alongside them.

The confessor who traveled with Joan, Jean Pasquerel, testified that as Joan
“was going into the royal lodgings that day, a man sitting on his horse near the entrance said, ‘Is not that the Maid there?’ swearing to God that if he had her for a night she would be no maid
next morning. Then Joan said to the man, ‘Oh, in God’s name, do you take His name in vain when you are so near your death?’ And an hour later that man fell into the river and was drowned.” Pasquerel didn’t join Joan’s army until after their meeting at Tours, where she would be outfitted for battle, so he had not seen the event himself, but several eyewitnesses whom he considered trustworthy had confirmed it. Graham Greene’s adaptation of Shaw’s
Saint Joan
for Otto Preminger’s 1957 film of the same title compressed the transaction into a single scene in which a loutish mercenary quits the company of a gaggle of whores to try to pull Joan down from the back of her horse. “You little slut,” he says to her. “You think you’re for the officers only, do you?”

“Let the poor man be,” she scolds the squires who come to rescue her, “he’s very near his end.” The mercenary lunges toward Joan and falls to the ground dead as his fingers graze her cloak.

That a levelheaded pragmatist like Robert de Baudricourt had provided a guard for a girl who claimed to be the Virgin of Lorraine; that the captain had parted with knights and horses he could ill afford to sacrifice; that he risked his reputation by publicly supporting La Pucelle, as she called herself: La Trémoille knew the letter would have precisely the effect on Charles that his mother-in-law had intended. Simon Charles, the president of the Chamber of Accounts—considered among the dauphin’s advisers as the courtier who, according to Régine Pernoud,
“most faithfully records the reactions of the King, with whom he was intimate”—testified that it was
“because of that letter the King was impelled to hear her, and Joan was accorded an audience.”

But when Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy were admitted to the dauphin’s chambers upstairs, they discovered that Charles wasn’t expecting the arrival of the Maid from Lorraine. La Trémoille had intercepted the letters Joan sent from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, destroying hers and confiscating Baudricourt’s, which, upon the dauphin’s learning of its existence, he produced, demonstrating his duplicity.

“There is nothing in that court but evil,” Alain Chartier warns in
Joan of Lorraine.
“A weak ruler draws evil to him as a dead dog draws buzzards.”

Held downstairs in the guardhouse, Joan insisted she had a message
for the dauphin and none other, but,
“pressed in the King’s name to explain the reason for her mission,” and otherwise barred from his presence, she had no choice but to cooperate. There are “two reasons for which I have been sent by the King of Heaven,” Joan said. “One is to raise the siege of Orléans, the other to lead the King to Reims for his anointing and coronation.”

“When they heard this,” Simon Charles testified, “certain of the King’s counselors”—La Trémoille foremost among them—“said that he must put no trust whatever in Joan, and others said that since she claimed to have been sent by God and had something to say to the King, the King ought at least to hear her.”

Schiller introduces a fictional knight from Lorraine to convince Charles of the validity of Joan’s claim; he brings tidings of a battle never fought, with an army she had yet to command, prefiguring her victory at Orléans.
“And while the generals discussed among themselves what or what not to do, and still unable to decide—before our eyes, a miracle! Suddenly a girl stepped out of the depths of the woods, a helmet on her head like some goddess of war, and beautiful yet at the same time terrifying. Her hair fell in dark curls around her neck; a sort of heavenly aura seemed to play about her figure.” The knight describes how, struck dumb with wonder, and almost against their wills, her soldiers made such an onslaught against the terrorized enemy that “it was no battle—it was butchery! Two thousand dead lie on the field, not counting those the river swallowed up: on our side not a single man was lost … She calls herself a prophetess sent by heaven and promises to save Orléans before the moon has changed.”

The precaution of a preliminary theological inquiry was undertaken immediately, before Joan was allowed an audience with the dauphin. The clerics assembled included, as one of Joan’s comrades-in-arms would testify, the king’s confessor, Gérard Machet, a University of Paris scholar, Pierre de Versailles, and a handful of bishops, including Jourdain Morin of Poitiers and Hugues de Combarel, all judged by history as
“moral, serious, and ethical men,” whose responsibility was only to “provide basic confirmation of her Catholic practices, morals, and purity.” On the insistence of his advisers, Charles took the further precaution of soliciting
“a respected but entirely independent opinion” from Jacques Gelu, who cautioned the yet-to-be-anointed king
against any credulous embrace of Joan’s claims. Charles must not, he wrote,
“make himself ridiculous in the eyes of foreign nations, the French having quite a reputation for the ease with which their nature leads them to be duped.” Joan came from Lorraine, Gelu reminded the dauphin, a region notoriously tolerant of witchcraft and one that shared a border with Burgundian sympathizers. Even were her motives pure, she was a gullible shepherdess. The wisest course was a slow one. Patience, Gelu advised, patience. Evil couldn’t be hidden indefinitely; it would have to emerge from behind mortal attempts to hide it.

If Joan was daunted by her arrival in a world so unlike her own, where wealth had the power to banish the squalor of peasant life, she betrayed no discomfort. If she felt any awe at entering the castle of a king, she showed none to her companions. Chinon, to which Charles fled when the Duke of Burgundy’s army seized Paris in 1418, was the pearl of the Loire valley, a favorite residence of kings and queens for centuries. Like the great majority of the castles in the region, it belonged to the house of Anjou—to Yolande—and had since the collapse of Roman rule, in the fifth century. Most of the structure was completed under the auspices of Henry II, who, having acquired France by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine, died within its walls in 1189. Chinon was plumbed and heated. Its halls were hung with tapestries, and the coverlets over its down-filled beds were lined with ermine. The floors were marble; there were sconces and candelabra enough to banish the dark.

But Joan’s attention was elsewhere, already beyond the château, galloping ahead of her. Long before she arrived at court, Joan had embarked on a prolonged visionary experience that would end only at her death; the ascension through social strata that delivered her to the highest level of aristocracy wasn’t so ear popping for her as it would be for the average peasant girl. Still, having known only the beauty of nature, she discovered a new form, a shining man-made splendor she couldn’t have imagined for herself: jeweled fingers and throats and hair that took more than one pair of hands to dress, clothes that required a lord have a valet and a lady a maid, and everywhere she
looked silk gauze veils floating from the steeple-sharp points of the ladies’ conical hennins, for the latest fad when Joan arrived at court was the headdress history has chosen as an emblem of the era’s fashions. Crowns whose beauty couldn’t match but necessarily informed her attempts to describe the ones her angels wore. The era’s visual art betrays the conflation of earthly and heavenly riches, an equivalence introduced by the Bible. The book of Revelation’s heaven is a city of pure gold, with foundations of precious stones, each of its twelve gates made of a single pearl.

Already, the citizens of Chinon were out milling in the streets, gossiping and waiting for a chance to see the Maid. Outside its walls were growing ranks of aspiring foot soldiers, as
“French people of all ages and professions leave their homes to join the army and march towards Jeanne, like the Magi following their star.” Multitudes of mostly simple folk walking with clogs on their feet, carrying axes, pitchforks, and pikes—farm implements that provided prototypes for weapons used in hand combat—
“crowds of people along every road that leads from Lorraine to Chinon” came to volunteer their lives to serve in the army of the virgin warrior who had passed unmolested
“through the territory of the King’s enemies, and … almost miraculously, forded many rivers in order to come to the King.”

“There is something strange about this girl,” Yolande tells Charles in
The Lark
, “something remarkable. Or so everybody thinks, and that’s what matters.”

With Yolande overtly propping up his resolve, Charles defied La Trémoille and his cadre of Burgundian spies and sympathizers and demanded that Joan be brought upstairs. The scene in which Joan at last meets the dauphin claims a prominent role in every telling of her story, identifying her immediate discovery of the dauphin, who had hidden himself among a crowd of courtiers, as her first significant miracle, the one that ignited the fuse of her messianic trajectory. After all, she’d never seen him or his likeness before—what other than her voices could have tipped her off? Predictably, the scene grew more fantastic with every telling, although in the case of Joan the religious
truth embraced by hagiography can’t eclipse historical fact. The first meeting between Joan and Charles included only a handful of people. The second was a reenactment of the first and took place months later, after Joan had been thoroughly vetted by a Church tribunal.

“He came from on high,” Joan said of the angel who accompanied her on her initial visit, and he “went with me by the stairs to the king’s chamber.”

“Who entered first?” the examiner asked.

“The angel went in first. He came by Our Lord’s command.”

“How?”

“He came in through the door,” Joan said, and “from the door the angel stepped upon the ground and he walked towards my king.”

“How far was the distance between this angel and your king?”

“The space of a good lance-length,” she said, that distance being anywhere between nine and fourteen feet.

“And did anyone else see or hear this angel? Anyone other than you?”

“My king and several others heard and saw the voices which came to my aid,” Joan said, a characterization that evinces how oblique and cryptic she became when interviewed about angels and saints and their properties. No witness for the nullification claimed to have seen, or heard, her voices, though they trusted they were real. Not one of Joan’s contemporaries suggested she had ever lied about her experience of what she believed was a heavenly manifestation.

“Who were the others present?”

“Charles de Bourbon and perhaps three others”—Yolande, La Trémoille, and a handful of the dauphin’s closest advisers.

“When the King learned that she was approaching,” Simon Charles testified, “he withdrew behind the others; Joan, however, recognized him perfectly.”

Among the courtiers, the grand master of the king’s household and erstwhile crusader, Raoul de Gaucourt, remembered that Joan—he too called her a “poor shepherd girl”—
“appeared before His Royal Majesty in great humility and utter simplicity. I heard her speak the following words to the King: ‘Most noble Lord Dauphin, I have come and am sent by God to bring help to you and your kingdom.’ ”

Joan fell to her knees before the dauphin as she did before her
angels and saints, Charles being one of the few mortals before whom she lowered herself in obeisance. She was wearing what she had on the journey from Vaucouleurs—
“a black doublet with hose attached, a short tunic of coarse black material, black hair, cut round, and a black cap on her head.” If she was surprised by the physical appearance of the man she had imagined countless times, she didn’t betray it. Isabeau is reputed to have been beautiful in her youth, but her children, three of whom died in infancy, were an unprepossessing lot. Charles lived to be fifty-eight, longer than any of his siblings. If his official court portrait by Jean Fouquet (
Fig. 10
) is not of the warts-and-all school, then the dauphin must have been repellent. The lower half of his face, with its full-lipped, petulant mouth and fleshy chin, suggested sated appetites; the eyes above his bulbous nose were, as observed by his contemporaries, small and calculating.
“If he can make three sous profit on any virtue you bring him he’ll sell you out, and throw you in the corner like an empty sausage skin,” Chartier observes in
Joan of Lorraine.
The dauphin’s arms and legs were so spindly as to shock those who saw him when he was not upholstered in ceremonial velvet and fur but wearing his everyday green tunic. An inexpensive garment that wasn’t discarded but repaired when the elbows gave out, it demonstrated well enough the poverty into which France’s court had descended. Though Joan would find herself increasingly impatient with Charles’s vacillation and what seemed like timidity, and he would sacrifice her life to his ambition, she never judged him. She saw no wrong in righteously criticizing most of the rest of the world, either collectively or one man at a time, but Charles was God’s anointed. If she believed she could budge his resistance to undertaking military maneuvers he perceived as risks and she understood as opportunities, Joan would remonstrate with him for an hour, but she regarded Charles as she did the pope, both representatives of divine will who stood outside the reach of mortal censure—as did she.