Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (20 page)

Jesus, too, was described as having used physical force just once, when he made a whip of cords and with it drove the moneylenders from the temple, chasing them off before overturning their tables. Like Joan’s, his was a spontaneous, violent rejection of pollution, a righteous anger in hot pursuit of sin, protecting the sanctity of the
temple—“temple” the word chosen by Paul as a metaphor for the body, especially a woman’s.
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You do not belong to yourself.” In either case, architectural or physiological, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit must be preserved from corruption.

“You think you have a right to set foot in the house of God just because of your filthy Mammon, but we know where and how you got it,” Brecht’s Joan of the Stockyards accuses a broker. “We know you haven’t come by it honestly. This time, so help me, you’ve made a big mistake, and you’re going to be driven out, driven out with a club.”

“Where is that sword now?” the examiner asked Joan. “In what town?”

“I cannot say. I used it at Lagny. After, at Compiègne, I no longer had it with me,” because, Michelet conjectures, the sword from Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois was the one Joan had broken over the prostitute’s back, and
“the virgin sword could not bear such a contact; it broke, and no smith could make it whole again.”

“Was it lost?”

“That does not concern your case. Whatever I had when I was captured, my horses and swords and other things worth more than twelve thousand, is now in the possession of my brothers.”

No matter where her arms ended up, she had never used them in combat. “I carried my standard into battle,” she testified, “so as not to kill any one.”

Charles VII’s treasurer, Hémon Raguier, drained the coffers of another “25
livre tournois
” to be given to
“Hauves Poulnoir, painter living at Tours, to pay for fabric and paint a large and small standard for the Maid.” The standard was about twelve feet in length, three feet at its widest, and tapered to two points. As
chef de guerre
, it was Joan who carried the great banner. Aside from preventing her from bearing arms, it allowed her to keep herself the focus of every one of the thousands of soldiers in her wake.

“Who told you to have the figure of Our Lord and the angels painted on the standard you carried?” the examiner asked.

“My saints told me, ‘Take the standard in the name of the King of Heaven.’ For this reason I had it painted so.”

“Was there not something written on the standard as well?”

“The names Jhesus Maria,” Joan said. “It was fringed with silk,” she added.

“Where were these names? Were they written above or at the side or beneath?”

“At the side.”

“At whose direction did you have it painted in this fashion?”

“I have done nothing except at God’s command,” Joan said. “And I have told you this often enough.”

Its design conceived by angels and conveyed by Joan to the banner maker, Poulnoir, Joan’s standard held the attention of her examiners, whose questions were precise enough to allow the creation of a reasonable facsimile (
Fig. 13
).

“What color was this standard?”

“It was white,” Joan said, “of white linen or boucassin. The world was depicted on it, and two angels, one at each side. They were painted on a field of white sown with lilies”—by which she meant golden fleurs-de-lis, the heavily stylized flower that represented both king and country. Only a king could grant the use of a fleur-de-lis; the symbol harked back to Clovis, the first ruler of the Franks, who organized the informal and shifting alliances of the separate tribes of Gaul into a protonation, gathering chieftains loyal to his cause: rule by a single king whose successors would inherit the union. On Christmas day, 1496, seven years into his reign, Clovis converted to Christianity at the behest of his wife, Clotilde, who was visited by the Holy Spirit upon her husband’s baptism at Reims.
A dove descended from on high, bearing three white feathers representing the estates of clergy, nobility, and commoners, elements that would come together as three gilded petals,
likely inspired by the yellow iris common to the area of Languedoc rather than by a white lily. Charles’s official court painter, Fouquet, is the first known visual artist to record an emerging French nationalism. Many of Fouquet’s history paintings survive; most include the motif of a field of gold fleurs-de-lis against a royal blue ground. Dunois remembered the standard somewhat differently, with “the figure of our Lord holding a fleur-de-lis in His hand.”
Still, his version preserves the deliberate symbology of Joan’s standard, which communicated a political message stressing Christ’s role as king, rather than as shepherd or sacrificial lamb, thus underscoring the divine right of kings.

“And which do you prefer,” the examiner asked Joan, “your standard or your sword?”

“I much prefer my standard to my sword,” Joan said. “I prefer it forty times as much,” she said, using forty as it is used in the Bible, as shorthand for a number too great to count, the number of days Noah floated on the face of the drowned earth, the number Jesus spent in the wilderness when tempted by the devil.

“Did you not throw or have others throw holy water on the pennons?”

“I do not know anything about that,” Joan said. “If it was done, it was not at my instruction.”

“Did not other men-at-arms have pennons made in the style of yours?”

“The Lords kept their own [coats of] arms”—as each knight would have to have done. Given the chaos of hand-to-hand combat, family crests were often the only means of telling friend from foe on the battlefield. “Some of my companions in arms had them made at their pleasure,” she said, “others did not.” If they did, she added, it was “merely to distinguish their men from others.”

Heraldry provided an outward, readable sign of noble ancestry and advertised the wearer’s right to bear arms. Once the king had granted a coat of arms to a family, it could be worn by no other, and given the medieval relish for symbol, collectively and individually they were fetishized to the point of cult worship. It was required of every knight to recognize the crest of every friend or foe he was likely to encounter in his career, a language that was highly specialized and visually dense, enough that it took years before most knights mastered what Joan picked up in a few weeks, acquiring what was her first alphabet as well as the ability to read combinations of its elements quickly. Myth insists on the simplicity of Jesus and Joan, but here simplicity might better be called single-mindedness. While their aims might appear uncomplicated—uncompromising—their intellects were without par. Many times the Evangelists cite the response of highly educated audiences
to Jesus’s radical interpretation of Scripture, listeners
“astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” The Duke of Alençon was not the only one to marvel at Joan’s exceptional gifts, her mastery of horsemanship and immediate understanding of weaponry. Like Jesus, regarded by some scholars as unlettered,
^*3
Joan had a memory good enough to obviate her illiteracy; she picked talents worth cultivating; she acquired mastery with unnatural speed and perception.

In Tours, Joan was approached by a young mendicant friar—an acquaintance of her mother, who had met him at Notre-Dame du Puy at Velay, some three hundred miles south of Domrémy.
“Go to the shrine at Puy, Mother,” Victor Fleming’s Joan says to her mother as the two bid each other good-bye at Vaucouleurs, “and pray for us.”

A major shrine, as Lourdes would become a few centuries later, Puy drew multitudes of pilgrims. Isabelle’s prayers did of course focus on her daughter, as did much if not all the talk among a group of pilgrims from Lorraine, and Jean Pasquerel conveyed such saintliness that he appeared to Joan’s mother as God’s answer to those prayers. She and the other pilgrims pressed him to seek Joan out when he returned home to Tours, where he was a lector in the convent there.

An alternate theory holds that Yolande, in need of a reliable reporter from the front of the war she’d financed, arranged Pasquerel’s introduction to the Maid. Yolande, whose own beauty taught her its value, was always busy behind the scenes and had groomed and placed beautiful women in courts all over France, with instructions to find their way into beds and make use of pillow talk—a network of
seductive spies to further her agendas by bringing home information and applying nudges where necessary. There’s no reason to imagine Pasquerel might have fallen prey to feminine wiles, or any other temptation, but one of the men who brought him might have been less immune to pretty ankles and perfumed bosoms.

“Joan was lodged in the house of Jean Dupuy, a citizen of the town,” Pasquerel testified. “I found Joan at his house, and the men who had brought me spoke to her like this: ‘Joan, we have brought you this good Father. If you knew him well, you would like him exceedingly.’ ”

Joan did like Pasquerel exceedingly, so much so that she entreated him to join her holy army, as he did.
“I served her as chaplain and heard her confession and sang her the Mass,” he testified, remaining at Joan’s side until she was captured and providing invaluable eyewitness accounts of the lifting of the siege of Orléans and of subsequent maneuvers.

Once Joan had been outfitted for battle, she and her army of twenty-five hundred set out for Blois, about thirty miles northeast of Tours, escorted, according to Jean, Count of Dunois, by the archbishop of Reims and Raoul de Gaucourt, who served as bailiff at Orléans. Blois was about halfway to Orléans; there Joan was met, Dunois continued, by “the men who were taking in the convoy of food, to wit the lord de Rais, and de Boussac, with whom were the lord de Culant, the admiral of France, La Hire, and the lord Ambroise de Loré, who has since become provost of Paris.” Boussac was Jean de la Brosse, the marshal of France who would take part in all Joan’s campaigns. La Hire, meaning “hedgehog,” the nickname that recognized his prickly temperament, was the mercenary captain Étienne de Vignolles, infamous for the relish with which he undertook the pillaging of land and damsels. Invariably portrayed as loud, vulgar, and corpulent—larger than life—La Hire is a male incarnation of the prostitute with a heart of gold that can’t be obscured by a tawdry costume or uncultured tone.
“With all your sins you are like a bright new coin in the hand of God!” Joan exclaims to La Hire in
The Lark.
At Blois, he was the only captain to welcome Joan immediately, he and the Duke of Alençon the only two among Joan’s comrades who would attempt her
rescue after she was captured and sold. The rest of the guard wasn’t so much following orders as following along for what promised to be a grand adventure if not a victory. Living prophecy or not, in an age when warfare was sanctioned recreation and knights crammed a furlough with jousting, brawling, and bullying, the Maid of Lorraine was marching toward the clash of real battle. If she had yet to establish her divinity, she still offered the excitement of a crusade.

At Blois, Joan paused to introduce herself to the enemy from a remove and warn them of her imminence. Just as she had first approached Charles and his court by means of a couriered letter from the remove of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, so did she send word to the English, telling them who she was and what they could expect from her arrival at Orléans. Even from a distance of six centuries, the salutation alone is a masterpiece of impudence, the repetition of the accusatory “you” and the “calling yourself” startlingly cocky forms of address coming from a peasant to royalty.

King of England, and you Duke of Bedford, calling yourself regent of France, you, William Pole, Count of Suffolk, John Talbot, and you Thomas Lord Scales, calling yourselves lieutenants of the said Duke of Bedford, do right in the King of Heaven’s sight. [Surrender to The Maid] sent hither by God the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns you have taken and laid waste in France. She comes in God’s name to establish the Blood Royal, ready to make peace if you agree to abandon France and repay what you have taken. And you, archers, comrades in arms, gentles and others, who are before the town of Orleans, retire in God’s name to your own country. If you do not, expect to hear tidings from The Maid who will shortly come upon you to your very great hurt. And to you, King of England, if you do not thus, I am “chef de guerre”; and whenever I meet your followers in France, I will drive them out; if they will not obey, I will put them all to death. I am sent here in God’s name, the King of Heaven, to drive you body for body out of all France. If they obey, I will show them mercy. Do not think otherwise; you will not withhold the kingdom of France
from God, the King of Kings, Blessed Mary’s Son. The King Charles, the true inheritor, will possess it, for God wills it, and has revealed it to him through The Maid, and he will enter Paris with a good company. If you do not believe these tidings from God and The Maid, wherever we find you we shall strike you and make a greater tumult [“hahay”] than France has heard for a thousand years. Know well that the King of Heaven will send a greater force to The Maid and her good men-at-arms than you in all your assaults can overcome: and by blows shall the favor of the God of Heaven be seen. You Duke of Bedford, The Maid prays and beseeches not to bring yourself to destruction. If you obey her, you may join her company, where the French shall do the fairest deed ever done for Christendom. Answer, if you desire peace in the city of Orleans; if not, bethink you of your great hurt soon. Written this Tuesday of Holy Week.