Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (16 page)

Despite the protests of La Trémoille and Archbishop Regnault de Chartres, the dauphin agreed under pressure from Yolande to retire with Joan to a separate room.
“The Maid talked with our lord the King in private,” Joan’s squire, Jean d’Aulon, wrote of the initial meeting, “and told him certain secrets that I do not know.”

“After hearing her,” Simon Charles added, “the King appeared to
be joyous.” By all accounts, the chronically indecisive and ineffectual dauphin emerged from the private audience radiating optimism and confidence, suddenly appearing as a man capable of rule.

Whatever transpired between the dauphin and the Maid has fueled six centuries of curiosity. Joan refused to discuss it at all, not even to save her life.

“What sign did you bring to Charles showing him you came from God?” the examiner asked repeatedly.

“Go and ask him,” Joan said. “I have already told you that you will not drag this from my lips.”

While Joan’s testimony about her private audience with the dauphin fails to address the obvious point of her judges’ questions—just how exactly had the divine manifested itself?—there’s little sense in parsing each of her inconsistent responses to exhume a truth from their vivisection, not any more than in constructing rationales to explain the inconsistency of her comments, when Joan refused to make any other than a qualified oath to her examiner.

“You may well ask me such things, that to some I shall answer truly, and to others I shall not.” She swore to tell the truth only about what she—not her judges—considered the subject matter of her trial for heresy and witchcraft and refused to divulge her private experience of God. Why would she when, as she said, she was “more afraid of failing the voices by saying what is displeasing to them, than of not answering you”? They were welcome to call other witnesses, she told them; those of her party knew well that the voice was sent to Joan from God, and they knew this voice.

If Charles gave any account of the sign Joan gave him, it was many years after the fact, and history is left with little more than secondhand hearsay from the man Joan called her
gentil dauphin.
^*2
Pierre Sala, a courtier and chronicler during the reign of Charles’s son and successor, Louis XI, wrote that toward the end of his life the king had confided in his chamberlain Guillaume Gouffier, whose duties required him to sleep in Charles’s bedroom. Gouffier told Sala that
Charles had made a
“humble silent request in prayer to Our Lord … in which he begged him devoutly that if it were true that he was His heir … might it please God to protect and defend him.” Otherwise, he asked that God allow him to escape to the court of one of his allies, in Spain or Scotland. Joan, Charles said, had known the prayer he made, known it in enough detail to convince the dauphin of her legitimacy. As all of France understood Charles’s predicament, and suffered his indecision, any of his subjects might guess the nature of his prayers. Whether it was what Joan said, a repetition of his words so precise as to be miraculous, or the fervor with which she said it that convinced the dauphin is impossible to know. The atmosphere at court had been so long imbued with pessimism and anxiety that Joan’s passionate certainty separated her from everyone else the dauphin knew.

Among the nobles summoned to court so that they might see and judge the Maid for themselves was Charles’s cousin Jean II, the Duke of Alençon, a witness for the nullification trial.
“When Joan came to find the King,” Alençon testified, “he was at the town of Chinon, and I at Saint Florent,” no more than a day’s journey away.

I was riding out on a quail hunt when a message came that a Maid had come to the King who maintained that she was sent by God to drive away the English and to raise the siege which these English had laid to Orléans. That is why I went to the King the next day, at Chinon, where he was, and I found Joan talking with the King. Just as I drew near, Joan asked who I was, and the King replied that I was the Duke of Alençon. Then Joan said, “You have come at a good time. The more of the blood royal there are together, the better it will be.”

Alençon had assumed his title as a minor, in 1415, when he was six years old and his father died at Agincourt. Now twenty, the man Joan called her “Pretty Duke,” presumably because he was handsome in the full flower of his manhood, was among Charles’s intimates.
“After dinner the King went to walk in the fields,” Alençon remembered of the day he arrived, “and there Joan ran at a tilt, and when I saw her do this—saw her wield a lance and run at a tilt—I gave her a horse.”

Having navigated eleven nights on horseback under circumstances that demanded absolute control of her mount, Joan had proved herself better than an accomplished rider with remarkable stamina. She had a way with animals that people noted and that she would have been quick to identify as an expression of God’s will.
“I saw her completely covered by plate armor except for her head,” a knight wrote to his mother from court. “A small axe in her hand,” she was waiting for her page to subdue her “great black charger, which reared up fiercely at the entrance of her lodging and would not allow her to mount. Then she said, ‘Take him to the cross,’ which was in front of the church down the street. There she mounted without him moving, as if he had been tied.”

Alençon’s gift of a destrier was no small compliment but a costly tribute to the girl astride a galloping stallion, wielding a weapon twice as long as she was tall. A destrier could cost as much as fifty livres; now Joan had two.

“When the King had seen and heard her,” Raoul de Gaucourt testified, “he wanted more information about her. So he put her in the care of Guillaume Bellier, who was the master of his house, the captain of Troyes, and my lieutenant at Chinon. His wife was a most devout woman with a very high reputation.” A veteran crusader appointed by Charles as the grand master of his household and sent by him to the pope to initiate the nullification proceedings, Raoul de Gaucourt was careful to allude to the high reputation of Joan’s hostess because it was she who, in her de facto role as chaperone, guaranteed the preservation of Joan’s chastity, which had been confirmed by Yolande herself, attended by Lady de Gaucourt and Lady de Trèves.

“When Joan came to the King she was twice examined by women to discover what she was, man or woman, wanton or virgin,” Pasquerel said, his recollection corroborated by Jean d’Aulon, who was chosen by Charles to serve as Joan’s squire and
“keep personal watch over Joan because he was the wisest knight and the man of the most approved honesty at his court.”

“The Queen said and told the King that she and her ladies had found her beyond any doubt to be a true and intact virgin,” Pasquerel testified, “with no signs of corruption or violation.”

Joan had been lucky, some would say blessed, as well as chaste, at a time when the exploration of a girl’s genitalia was an almost meaningless exercise, as it wasn’t medically possible in the fifteenth century to determine with any certitude that a girl was a virgin, especially not if she was athletic and, like Joan, had been on horseback for a week and a half. She’d had more than enough physical activity to tear so delicate a membrane of flesh without her even knowing it had happened; a girl’s hymen can easily be broken without pain or bleeding. In the course of three years, the young woman whose identity was inseparable from her virginity would endure one invasive inspection of her vaginal canal after another; if she ever voiced an objection, it was not recorded. Probably she was as stoic about the need to prove her virtue to those who would otherwise doubt her claim as she was about any other of the sacrifices her vocation demanded of her. And the blessing did hold, as even the exertions of warfare would leave the physical proof of virginity intact for her inquisitors to first double-check and then plot to destroy.

For the few days before Joan was sent to Poitiers for what would be a far lengthier and more thorough examination by clerics than she could have anticipated, the dauphin ordered that she be lodged in the Tour de Coudray, the keep embraced by the westernmost fortifications.
“I lived in that tower with Joan,” Louis de Coutes testified, he “and a certain Raymond” the two apprentice knights assigned to be Joan’s pages. “All the time that she was there I was with her continuously, all day long,” Louis said. “At night, she had women with her, and I well remember that during the time that she was in that tower of Coudray many of high rank came on several occasions to talk with Joan. What they said or did, I do not know, as I always ran off when I saw them coming; and I do not know who they were.” Fourteen or fifteen at the time, Louis had been learning the art of war from Raoul de Gaucourt and was far more impressed by the status of courtiers
than his lower-born mistress, whose piety struck him as exceptional. “I often saw her on her knees and praying, as I supposed. However, I was never able to hear what she said, although sometimes she wept.”

A hundred and fifteen years earlier, Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, had slept in Joan’s tower bedroom—as a prisoner, not a guest. By 1312, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, known informally as the Knights Templar, had been disbanded, its members accused of heresy, apostasy, and idolatry. For two centuries, the order had held Europe in the kind of thrall Joan would inspire, its history indivisible from that of the crusades, its heraldry still familiar: a bloodred cross on a white ground. Knights Templar were held to embody the valor of the knight and the chastity of the cleric; their embrace by the public adumbrated Joan’s, as did their fate. In debt to the order and unable to wring enough taxes out of his people to finance an army, on Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV sacrificed the Templars to the replenishment of his coffers. By then, the organization’s high-minded vows of poverty had long yielded to the greed awakened by the sight of plunder, easy to perceive as recompense for the dangers and hardships of murdering infidels.
Their tax-exempt status—granted by the pope—accelerated the Templars’ arrival at wealth so fantastic that some became moneylenders and went into banking. But it was their autonomy that made it imperative to obliterate the order rather than seize its assets. To furnish the grounds for the arrest of some two thousand Knights,
“the King’s prosecutors dragged into the light every dark superstition and fearful imagining of sorcery and Devil-worship that lay along the roots of the medieval mind,” suborned witnesses to provide false testimony, and extracted confessions under torture.

As Joan’s trial would demonstrate, the injustice inherent in medieval ecclesiastical courts inspired the system’s slavishly scrupulous maintenance of the appearance of justice. Sentencing required proof of guilt, even if that so-called proof was accessed by illegal and immoral means. Jacques de Molay, who had been Philip IV’s friend and his daughter’s godfather, was burned at the stake in front of the
Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, after proclaiming his and the order’s innocence. In the end, sixty-seven Knights Templar abjured their forced confessions and were condemned as lapsed heretics and burned alive before a crowd, satisfying the same need as would Joan’s execution, for propitiation in the form of a human sacrifice that recast a violent crucifixion the Church had yet to convincingly package or contain within the mystery of the Eucharist. The symbolic reenactment of the Mass couldn’t quench the Church Militant’s thirst for real blood—not in the fifteenth century—and for as long as the Inquisition co-opted God’s singular right to judge, and smite, it denied the power of Jesus’s sacrifice to redeem mortal sin.