Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (19 page)

The examiner didn’t send to the king, not any more than he called any other witness to confirm or deny what was an unusual report from a mystic, that others present, and not just a few, had shared her visions. But what witness was needed to demonstrate that Joan believed a heavenly host appeared to bestow a mystical crown on Charles and thereby establish his birthright? That she asked for her testimony to be corroborated by the king of France, no less, was proof enough.

^*1
Le Berger would suffer the predictable reversal and find himself reviled and condemned to death, although “Le Berger was spared the misery of long imprisonment and the farce of a protracted trial, but was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river by the English without more ado.”

^*2
In this context,
gentil
is understood as an antecedent to the title of dauphin, an indication of caste, as in “gentleman,” rather than its modern translation as “kindly.”

^*3
While Paul wrote nearly half of the New Testament’s books, they represent just under a third of the text.

^*4
Langue d’oïl
and
langue d’oc
were the two predominant medieval French dialects, each translated as the “language of yes.”
Oïl
—now
oui
—was used as the affirmative in northern and central France,
oc
in the south.

On April 6, 1429, a week after her presentation to the court at Chinon, Joan arrived in Tours, about five miles northwest of Chinon, to be equipped for battle. She was accompanied by her squire, Jean d’Aulon, her page, Louis de Coutes, and the army’s new bursar, Jean de Metz, to whom Charles’s treasurer, Hémon Raguier, had entrusted nearly six thousand livres to disperse among the two dozen or so commanders in Joan’s army to cover the expenses of waging war. While Joan is popularly imagined as the leader of a
“peasant army,” the core of her troops was “composed of the usual groups of aristocrats, mercenaries, municipal levies, and other typical elements.” Joan did attract a great number of soldiers who had heretofore avoided joining a losing battle, but they were not different from the men-at-arms who typically volunteered. Knights were noblemen; they traveled with retinues that might include their wives, children, footmen, personal chefs, valets for the men, and maids for the ladies; a medieval army was followed by merchants eager to capitalize on the ready market it represented. Several entries in Raguier’s 1429 account book relate specifically to Joan, the first being,
“To the Master Armorer, for a complete harness for the Maid, 100
livres tournois.
” As the armor was intended to protect the body of a girl, not a man, it was necessarily made to order, and thus costly.
“She was armed as quickly as possible,” Jean Chartier wrote, “with a complete harness such as would have suited a knight … born in the king’s court.”

To furnish context where no exchange rate exists, the armor worn at Agincourt by the Duke of Orléans had cost only eighty-five livres. Joan was outfitted in what was called “white armor”—not white in color but simple, lacking the decorative flourishes of ceremonial armor. Luster was determined by cost. Not all suits of armor were shining and silver,
“the ‘steel’ used in the age of plate armor … quite different
from the homogeneous refined material in use today. It was a very streaky steel that could vary from wrought iron to medium carbon steel in the same piece and often had a good deal of slag throughout.” The work of a master armorer was
“handed down from grandfathers and fathers to sons and grandsons.”

From one fitting to the next, there was never a bride more excited by her gown than Joan was by her armor. Between her clothing and what was commonly called a “harness,” Joan wore a heavy, quilted doublet, stuffed, like a mattress, with horsehair. A gambeson, as it was called, the vest cushioned the body and prevented the suit’s metal plates from chafing and abrading the skin, offering just that much more resistance to arrows released with enough momentum to pierce plate. In fact, those who couldn’t afford plate armor often wore a gambeson alone. Chain mail
^*1
sewn to the gambeson covered whatever plates of steel could not—the backs of the knees, for example—thus providing full-body protection.
Contrary to the irresistible popular misconception, epitomized by the farcical image of a knight hoisted by a crane onto the back of his charger, a suit of armor no more immobilized the wearer than protective gear does a present-day firefighter. A harness consisted of enough individual elements to allow a nearly full range of motion, and the weight of well-crafted armor was distributed evenly over the body.
Experiments with genuine fifteenth-century plate armor have demonstrated that even an untrained man can mount and dismount a horse, lie flat on the ground and get easily to his feet, run, and move his arms freely, all without discomfort—so long as his armor was properly fitted, as Joan’s certainly was. The polished breastplate included a flange attached to its right side, an
arrêt de cuirasse.
This “arrest” stabilized the lance for better aim and allowed a mounted knight to hold the weapon firmly enough under his—her—arm to stop it from sliding backward on impact. With an
arrêt
, the entire breastplate and gambeson absorbed the shock of a successful strike and minimized injury to the right shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand. A mounted knight required no codpiece, as the front
bow of a war saddle was armored to protect the groin. Three styles of helmet were available to Joan.
The open-faced
bascinet
(
Fig. 12
) was no more than a steel skullcap with a pointed crown; the
sallet
, with a rounder crown, offered more protection and might include a visor; the
capeline
, with a brim, was best for scaling walls. According to her comrades, Joan
“often went about with her head bare,” as did many military commanders of high rank.

There is no teller of Joan’s story, including—especially—Joan, who doesn’t pay careful attention to her swords. Most biographers recognize the subject as inviolate and honor Joan’s account of them. She’d arrived in Chinon carrying the weapon Robert de Baudricourt gave her when she left Vaucouleurs. It was a blade of no distinction, a concession to her need for protection while crossing enemy territory—a place keeper for the sword that would identify Joan, just as Excalibur had King Arthur. While in Tours, Joan “sent for a sword which was in the church of Ste. Catherine de Fierbois, behind the altar,” she testified. She’d known its location, she told the examiner, not because she’d discovered it herself during the hours she spent in the church but because she had learned of it “through her voices” months after she’d left Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. “Immediately it was found there, all rusted over,” she said. “It was in the ground, rusted over, and upon it were five crosses.”

“You had been to Ste. Catherine de Fierbois?”

“Yes. From there I sent letters to my king, and from there I went to Chinon. In Fierbois, I heard Mass three times on the same day.” Given her continual attendance, Joan must have come to know the monks to whom she wrote “asking if it was their pleasure that I should have the sword, and they sent it to me. It was not buried deep behind the altar. I believe I wrote saying it was behind.

“The local priests gave me a scabbard, as did those of Tours,” Joan told the examiner, “one of crimson velvet, and the other of cloth of gold.” As neither was practical for use in battle, she “had another made of very strong leather.”

“Who brought you this sword?”

“I never saw the man who fetched it. But I know he was a merchant, an armorer of Tours. As soon as the sword was found, the priests rubbed it, and the rust fell off at once without effort.”

Comparisons to King Arthur’s sword are unavoidable, each a phallic blade possessed by the female earth and withheld until its rightful owner emerges, Arthur’s embedded up to the hilt in stone,
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Joan’s hidden entirely, under dirt and rust. In the Middle Ages metallurgy was regarded as a sister art to alchemy, and a sword, like a saint’s relic, was an object accorded reality in both natural and supernatural spheres. Metallurgy was magic that transformed matter, a power that in Scripture belonged only to God, who gave David the sword with which he slew Goliath. In the book of Revelation a
“sharp, two-edged sword” of righteousness issues from the risen Christ’s mouth.

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth,” Jesus said. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Luc Besson’s
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
uses the shortcut of a mystical dream sequence to deliver a physical sword to the young Joan’s side. Released in 1999, the film is laced with psychosexual trip wires, trimming Joan’s vocation to fit a plot of mortal vengeance. The first to wield Joan’s sword is a looting enemy soldier, who seizes it and gores her beloved sister to death before he rapes her, violating both blade and victim. The image isn’t new or even repurposed. Martial d’Auvergnes’s illustrations from the fifteenth-century
Vigiles du roi Charles VII
depict enemy soldiers goring women wearing the floor-length red dresses of peasants. In one, a nobleman, richly robed, thrusts his sword directly into the region of her groin; below them the cobbles are splashed with blood, a decapitated head turns its eyes away. In the other, an infantryman’s blade enters a bit higher, into her lower abdomen; still, if the soldier’s aim isn’t as good as the nobleman’s, his weapon is more impressive, with its unnecessarily distinct phallic outline. The
Vigiles
’s Joan presides over an attack on Paris while wearing a long red skirt, the phallic hilt of an oversized sword projecting from her groin (
Fig. 26
). The latter is missing in the scene of her being tied to the stake, the vanquished Maid unarmored as well as unarmed, her long hair restored. The delicate, mannered gestures of the genre can’t mask the murderous fantasies Joan inspired, using
elements of an alphabet of ancient symbols we all recognize: a man’s sword, a girl’s long hair, her dress, presenting us with equally familiar equations between, for example, the loss of virginity and death.

If, as legend holds, the sword retrieved from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois had once belonged to Charles Martel, he had buried it himself behind the altar, in secret, bequeathing it to whomever God chose as its next owner. Joan’s physical description of the five crosses etched into its blade is consistent with decorative motifs typical of the eighth, rather than the fifteenth, century. If it was Martel’s sword, it had been carried, used, and bathed in the blood of infidels by the first king of the Franks. To be given such a sword through mystical revelation was another sign that Joan was truly what she claimed to be: God’s anointed and, thus, France’s savior.

By the end of her military career, Joan would have owned five swords: Baudricourt’s gift; the one retrieved from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois; two she left on the altar of the church of Saint-Denis, outside Paris, as an offering of thanks for having been protected in battle; and one taken
“as a prize of war from an Anglo-Burgundian leader.” That one, Joan said, had been particularly useful for giving “de bonnes buffes et de bons torchons”—hard buffets and clouts. And yet the only witness who testified to ever seeing Joan using a sword was Jean, Duke of Alençon, who watched her
“chase a girl who was with the soldiers so hard, with her sword drawn, that she broke her sword” (
Fig. 16
) over the prostitute’s back, a significant blow as
a battle sword typical of its time was a large weapon intended to be used with both hands and weighing as much as ten pounds. After that, in
Joan of Lorraine
, Dunois, the captain with whom Joan would relieve the siege of Orléans, tells La Trémoille that the whores left.
“All of them. In a mess of tears and shrieks and bundles.”