Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (18 page)

“God cannot wish us to believe in you,” Seguin said to Joan, “unless he sends us a sign, to show that we should believe in you. We cannot advise the King to entrust you with soldiers, whom you would run into danger, merely on your bare assertion. Have you nothing more to say?”

She did.
“I have not come to Poitiers to make signs,” she told all eighteen judges present. “But lead me to Orléans, and I will show you the signs I was sent to make.”

It didn’t take a cleric to recognize Joan’s rebuke as an echo of Jesus’s to the self-righteous Pharisees who asked him to prove his divinity with a sign sent from God.
“An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign,” Jesus told them, a generation that served the letter of the law before its spirit and one whose wickedness he presented in terms of unlawful sexual conduct. Implicitly, Joan said as much to the sanctimonious priests who demanded a sign from her. By the time the discernment trial was over, the subject who had disingenuously warned the Poitiers examiners of her ignorance, assuring them,
“I do not know A from B,” had had occasion to remind them, “There is more in our Lord’s books than in yours.”

If Joan was guilty of anything, it was impertinence, and this the Poitiers commission forgave, concluding that
“no evil is to be found in her, only goodness, humility, virginity, devotion, honesty, and simplicity.” Beyond that, Joan inspired the people to
“much pious belief, to the praise of God.”

Or, as the Earl of Warwick, Joan’s jailer in Rouen, summarizes for Anouilh,
“In the end they agreed to use Joan as a sort of a flagpole to nail their colors to: an attractive little mascot, well qualified to charm the general public into letting themselves be killed.”

Had Yolande determined the length—as well as the outcome—of the Poitiers deliberations? No gathering of French eminences could evade her influence, and, calculated or not, to withhold the Maid from the populace for a few weeks was an effective tease. Mobs are volatile. Most rulers fear them. And the violent uprising of the Jacquerie was well within the court’s memory. Two generations earlier, the imposition of punitively high taxes on the underclass (whom nobles derided as Jacquerie for the padded vests, or
jacques
, that distinguished them as peasants) ignited riots directed at the lords who maligned and ill-treated the peasants on whose labor they depended. Encouraged by Étienne Marcel, Paris’s provost of merchants—a title equivalent to mayor—a group of agitators gathered one spring evening in 1358 in the cemetery at Saint-Leu, some twenty-five miles north of the city, to plan an attack on those nobles they judged so autocratic as to have withdrawn their allegiance to the king. The revolt was extinguished within three weeks, but the atrocities committed in the name of social justice provided an indelible reminder to the upper classes of how deep was the commoners’ enmity and what savagery it could inspire—enough to capture and disembowel a knight before his family, winding his intestines on a spool while he was still alive, roast his gutted corpse on a spit, and force-feed him to his wife and children. It took a ruler like Yolande, whose confidence in her earthly power matched that of a messiah’s trust in divine assistance, to cultivate so volatile a means of furthering her political agenda as mass hysteria. Without any other marvel to occupy its attention, let alone dangle a promise of salvation, the populace made do with spreading rumors, as ever more people streamed into Chinon, drawn to a swiftly widening pinprick of hope.

On March 27, 1429, Joan was officially presented to the wider court. No princess in all Europe has ever made so memorable a debut. The Count of Vendôme, one of Yolande’s retinue, escorted Joan into the Grande Salle on the upper floor of the Château du Milieu, a
“splendid apartment … some seventy feet long by twenty-five feet wide, with a vast hooded fireplace at one end, three large windows overlooking the gardens of the inner court, and one smaller window overlooking the town, the river, and the landscape beyond.” Once
the staring, hushed crowd had parted to allow Joan and the count to make their way to the throne, the count presented her to the man sitting there. It was not Charles. Before Joan’s entrance, the dauphin had explained the ruse to all those assembled: as a means of testing the counsel of Joan’s voices, he would change clothes with one of his courtiers, who would take Charles’s place on the dais while the dauphin hid among the crowd. In Marco de Gastyne’s
La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc,
Joan herself suggests the challenge, conveyed to Charles by one of his courtiers, and in George Bernard Shaw’s
Saint Joan
the dauphin exchanges clothes with Gilles de Rais, the notorious Breton knight who fought alongside Joan and whose career as a serial rapist and murderer of as many as two hundred children would inspire the creation of Bluebeard and end in his execution by hanging in 1440, at the age of thirty-six. There’s no reason to imagine it was Gilles de Rais who pretended to be the dauphin—no evidence that Gilles de Rais was present or that the dauphin switched places with anyone, only that
“he withdrew behind the others,” as Simon Charles reported. But the conceit allowed Shaw, and others who followed his lead, to call attention to what had been a genuine and striking coincidence. Although he did not turn to the occult and the sacrifice of children until after Joan was executed—as if there were no lust so evilly ravenous that her proximity couldn’t dismantle it—Gilles de Rais had in fact been one of Joan’s comrades-in-arms, and as such invited their overt juxtaposition, as stark as black and white: the most vile and destructive manifestation of lust side by side with luminous, absolute purity. Joan’s unquestioning acceptance of any soldier for God, no matter how burdened by sin, recalls the embrace of Christ, who turned no sinner away, a narrative flourish that sanctifies Joan and redeems one of the great villains of history.

Joan wasn’t fooled by the impostor but went immediately to the dauphin. “Joan recognized him perfectly,” Simon Charles remembered.

“I recognized him among many others by the counsel of my voice,” Joan told the Rouen judges, “which revealed him to me.”

“How do you come to know me?” Brecht’s Meat King asks Joan of the Stockyards.

“Because you have the cruelest face,” she tells him.

“Was there an angel over the dauphin’s head when you saw him for the first time?” the examiner asked.

“If there was,” Joan testified, “I did not see it.”

“Was there a light?”

“There were three hundred knights and fifty torches, without counting the spiritual light, and I seldom have revelations but there is a light.”

As Yolande intended, the crowd was thrilled and astounded by the immediate demonstration of Joan’s supernatural power. Among them, only a handful knew Joan had already picked the dauphin out of a gathering so small it would be surprising if an intelligent and observant girl hadn’t identified the dauphin, if only by virtue of the deference the others present were required to show him. That they kept silent bears witness to the force of Yolande’s grip. Among that handful, only Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of the king’s household, testified for the nullification, characterizing Joan’s presentation as a single event, rather than an original meeting followed by a subsequent, amplified reenactment. Gaucourt was eighty-five when he testified; the conflation was likely an innocent one. Twenty-seven years had passed, a long time for an old man to resist the impulse to revise the beginning of Joan’s career to predict its subsequent glory, countless retellings and thus endless reimagining of his one claim to fame, which depended entirely on his proximity to “that poor shepherd girl.”

The focus of every eye in the packed room, Joan fell to her knees to embrace the dauphin’s legs, the same obeisance she made to her angels. Perhaps she had been coached to execute
“the same bows and reverences customarily made before the King,” as Jean Chartier recorded in
Chronique de Charles VII,
“just as if she had been brought up at court.” She was wearing the rough black traveling clothes appropriate to Yolande’s production, rather than the new finery she preferred. It’s difficult to know if or how much Joan endorsed Yolande’s
use of creative deception. There’s little reason to assume, and no evidence to suggest, she disapproved of what had been orchestrated to garner support for her mission or that she didn’t understand by now that such demonstrations were useful, even necessary. After all, she’d been working assiduously for many months to enlist the support of a fraction of the number of courtiers Yolande convinced in an hour by staging and amplifying what had, after all, already happened. Joan’s entrance was an announcement made to courtiers, an entirely mortal transaction; it was not a sign recklessly demanded of God. If Joan hadn’t already understood the power of simple gestures and images to sway a multitude, she did now. Under interrogation, she conflated the original and the restaged versions; the composite included details from each meeting.

“Was any one else with you when you showed the sign to your king?”

“I think there was not, although many people were fairly near.”

Asked again, two days later, after the interrogation had been moved from the public venue to Joan’s cell—her judges’ hostility that much more oppressive in close quarters—she changed her report, claiming that what had occurred privately during the original first meeting had been witnessed by the crowd assembled for her presentation to the court. “God willed that those of my party who were there should see the sign,” she said, and thus take confidence in the divine assistance she promised. She added that it was not only her supporters who were impressed but also those who had called her motives or her sanity into question.

“The clergy ceased opposing me when they had recognized the sign,” she told the examiner, a crown “so rich and precious that I do not know how to count or appreciate its riches. It signified that the dauphin would gain the kingdom of France.”

“Does this sign still exist?”

“Yes,” she said, “certainly, and it will last for a thousand years and more.”

“Where is this sign?”

“Preserved with the king’s treasure.”

“Did you yourself see it on his head?”

“I cannot tell you without perjury,” Joan said. “My voices have not given me leave to speak of it.”

“Was it of gold or silver? Were there precious stones? What was this sign? Was it a crown?”

“It was a crown, yes, but no man could describe so rich a thing as this sign.”

“Did the crown have a good odor? Did it glitter?”

“Yes, it was of good odor and it will always be so, as long as it is well and duly guarded.”

To the medieval mind, Joan’s characterization of a heavenly sign as having material substance, rather than confined to a mystical realm only she could see, wasn’t nonsensical or even incredible. If devils and saints took on a convincing corporeal reality, so could a sign. Too, just as it was natural to express love, whether human or divine, in concrete material terms, so was it unavoidable to use mortal measures to communicate things of the spirit, splendid raiment
“fully adequate to express spiritual purity.” The crown, Joan said, had been carried to the king by “an angel from God, and from none other but Him. After I left the gathering I learned that more than three hundred people saw the sign,” including Charles and his courtiers. If the examiner didn’t believe her, he could send to the king to ask him.

“What reverence did you show the sign when it came to your king?” the examiner pressed.

“I uncovered my head, and I knelt down many times. I thanked Our Lord for my deliverance from the trouble arising from the opposition of the clergy.”

“Of what appearance and size was this angel from God?”

“I have not leave to tell you that.”

“Was he alone, or did other angels accompany him?”

“There were others as well.”

“And these angels, were they all of the same appearance?”

“Some of them were fairly like one another, and some were not, as far as I could see. Some had wings or were crowned, others were not … And in their company were St. Catherine and St. Margaret who were with the … angels up to the very chamber of the king. Send to the king and he will tell you,” she said.