Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (21 page)

Joan had composed the ultimatum six weeks earlier, when still in Poitiers awaiting the result of a trial whose outcome she already knew. Because the French were defending their land against an occupying army, the rules of “just war”—determined by ecclesiastical tradition—released Joan from the responsibility to formally declare war on the English, as required of a leader who initiated hostilities. When war was perceived as a form of propitiation, only those who undertook to right a wrong could successfully appeal to God for aid. Joan didn’t have to warn the English, who knew of her advent in any case. As leader of the army to which God promised victory, she could reasonably hold herself accountable to give the enemy a chance to retreat in face of certain defeat, but her letter wasn’t conceived as a merciful gesture. It was a public platform from which to proclaim herself
chef de guerre
—a title the French generals currently running the war would certainly not have awarded her. For Joan, however, who traveled under the protection of God, the advantage would never lie in stealth, and she had no intention of collecting and maneuvering troops without making the declarations her position entitled her to make—to those at the very top of the English command hierarchy, two of whom were too august to be present at Orléans. The Duke of Bedford was John of Lancaster (
Fig. 17
), the third son of Henry IV, King of England and
acting head of state in France for his nephew Henry VI (
Fig. 18
), the seven-year-old King of England. John Talbot was Earl of Shrewsbury and constable of France, the commander in chief of the Burgundian army. As the Count of Suffolk, William Pole ruled what was settled in the fifth century as the kingdom of Anglia, north of London on England’s east coast; Thomas, Lord Scales, a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of English chivalry, served as the Duke of Bedford’s lieutenant.
These were the men to whom she threw down the gauntlet of what “can be read as a mere license for aggression and violence.”

“Surrender to the Maid … the keys of all the good towns you have taken and violated in France.” Joan’s enemies used sexual slurs to invalidate her claim to power; she called the English occupation an act of rape. “She comes in God’s name to establish the Blood Royal.” Here was the exalted blood necessary to counteract the polluted flow that had first issued from between Eve’s legs—blood that was sacred, as holy as menses were base. Blood at one with that of the immaculate Christ, both mortal and divine, the antidote to Isabeau’s wanton betrayal. Here was Joan, announcing herself as God’s anointed, his messiah: La Pucelle. In naming herself the Virgin, Joan made
“a preemptive strike against being seen as a camp follower,” because it wasn’t only Jacques d’Arc who presumed prostitution was the sole purpose of a woman among soldiers.

“If you obey her, you may join her company”—words spoken down from a considerable altitude—“where the French shall do the fairest deed ever done for Christendom.” Joan’s prose galloped on ahead of her, as mannered and romantic as that of any chanson de geste, switching suddenly to passages whose language and cadence harked back to the God of the Old Testament, demanding his chosen people make genocidal war on those who would occupy their land. “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.” As with other of her letters, Joan refers to herself as both “she” and “I,” reserving the exalted, decorous third person for the Maid, and not adopting the familiar first person but quoting the most exalted of all voices.
“Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh,” God promised Moses. “For with a strong hand [I] will send them out, yea, with a strong hand [I] will drive them out of [your] land.” “I will drive them out,” Joan
warned the occupying army, “if they will not obey, I will put them all to death.”

The letter was unsigned; it would be another six months before Joan took the time to learn to sign her name. That a maid, generally understood as booty to be seized by conquering soldiers, would so thoroughly subvert the accepted order of things as to declare herself
chef de guerre
to the king of England and promise to mete out God’s retribution was a presumption previously unimagined—unimaginable—to those who received the missive and in turn released only one of the two messengers who had been dispatched with it. The Armagnac whore had better go home before they caught and burned her, the English replied to Joan’s challenge. They’d already set tinder under the stake they’d prepared for the messenger they hadn’t released, debating whether or not burning him would break the charm she’d used to bewitch her army. Joan sent the herald who had been released back with her response.

“Go and tell Talbot that if he takes up arms I shall do likewise … Let him have me burnt, if he can catch me.”

Maxwell Anderson, whose
Joan of Lorraine
premiered in 1946, slides the responsibility for what remains, five hundred years later, an unladylike broadcast from a girl whose delusions included her equality to men over to her brothers Jean and Pierre, who take it upon themselves to teach their hand-wringing, timorous sister how to behave like a man, with authority. Joan’s first lesson in what is
“not girl’s work,” as Pierre refers to what Joan’s angels call “speaking boldly,” inspires not confidence but lament.

“Oh, if I could speak large and round like a boy, and could stand that way and make my words sound out like a trumpet—if I could do that, I could do all the things God wants me to do. But I’m a girl, and my voice is a girl’s voice, and my ways are a girl’s ways.” And her lines were written in the aftermath of Rosie the Riveter’s 1942 eruption into the culture as the icon representing all the wives and daughters who selflessly took on jobs their husbands and sons had left to join the army. By the play’s premiere, World War II was over, and the men
had come home to discover that once freed from domestic chores, not every woman could be enticed, or coerced, back to the hearth. Just as disturbing, the ones who refused to relinquish agency that had belonged to men held on to their identities as women. The girl in the “We Can Do It!” poster wears red lipstick with her blue coveralls and glares through movie star eyelashes while showing off her flexed bicep. It’s a war effort poster; Rosie’s pose is confrontational, but the Axis powers aren’t the enemy. The fist she holds up is as blatant a symbol as the sword in the hand of her World War I predecessor. “Joan of Arc Saved France. Women of America, Save Your Country, Buy War Savings Stamps” (
Fig. 36
). The 1917 Joan’s gaze is tender, rapturous, and, like her sword, directed up, toward heaven. Her red lips part, a blaze of white light pours over her head: here is the heroine of
Joan of Lorraine
, whose shining armor protects her “girl’s ways” and whose creator’s vision of Joan was retrospective and romantic. Born in 1888, Anderson was twenty when Joan was beatified, America innocent of world wars to come, and the only war effort a woman was expected to make was as a consumer, spending what was presumably her husband’s money. Not Rosie: she’s discovered what it’s like to have her own, lips closed in what might be a seductive pout if the jut of the bottom one didn’t make her point clear. Rosie’s men’s clothes hide a truer Joan than does the shining armor, a woman who rolls up the sleeve of her coveralls as a warning: a fight stands between her and anyone who might take away her place in the world.

It isn’t numbered among Joan’s miracles, but that a girl of seventeen successfully denied thousands of soldiers the solace of swearing, gambling, and fornicating—every anodyne to the strains of war—is by any measure extraordinary. As described by Louis de Coutes, whose “personal recollections” Twain used as a narrative device, the camp at Blois was filled with “brigands” like
“wolves and … hyenas. They went roaring and drinking about, whooping, shouting, swearing, and entertaining themselves with all manner of rude and riotous horse-play; and the place was full of loud and lewd women, and they were no whit behind the men for romps and noise and fantastics.”
Secular culture tends to judge profanity a failure of manners when it judges it at all, but Joan and everyone she knew understood that to take God’s name in vain was a serious transgression, the sort that invited capital punishment. According to Jean Gerson,
“the whole of France, for all her Christianity, suffers more than any other country from the effects of this horrible sin, which causes pestilence, war, and famine.” The severity of these perceived punishments demonstrated how absolute was the medieval belief in God’s inclination to smite any who offended him. Joan
“told La Hire, whose habit and custom it was to swear frequently, to swear no more,” Seguin testified, “and when he was tempted to swear by God to swear by his staff” instead—an amusing recommendation to an audience alert to the phallic references that saturate narratives of the Maid. Twain’s Joan suggests that
“he might swear by his bâton,” calling it “the symbol of his generalship.” As for gambling, Marguerite La Touroulde remembered Joan
“had a horror of the game of dice.”
It was a horror that demonstrated Joan’s familiarity with the Gospels’ account of the Roman soldiers who, when they were done crucifying Jesus, divided his clothes among themselves by throwing dice. The sword broken over the camp follower’s back suffices to underscore Joan’s determination that her soldiers conduct themselves as chastely as their leader. Under her command, she announced, any soldier caught with a prostitute would be forced to marry her, a punishment that was never imposed, as, Dunois explained,
“when we were in her company we had no wish or desire to approach or have intercourse with women,” adding, “That seems to me almost a miracle.” Promising victory only to an army that demonstrated its faith by living it, she required her chaplain to hold twice-daily services for worship.
“Joan bade me assemble all the priests twice a day, in the morning and the evening,” Pasquerel testified, “and when they came together, they sang anthems and hymns to Saint Mary, and Joan joined them. And she would not let the soldiers mix with the priests unless they had confessed, and she exhorted all the soldiers to confess in order to come to this gathering; and at the gathering itself all the priests were prepared to hear anyone who wanted to confess.”

Though she didn’t conceive them as such, the rites of the Church gave Joan the means to summon her soldiers, thwarting male authority
as she sidestepped the army’s chain of command by seizing the clergy’s. Even more subversive and dangerous, Joan was controlling men by censuring their sexual behavior, promising with authority greater than a pope’s that only soldiers no longer burdened by pollution would ascend to heaven. The rest, by implication dirty and un-absolved, were damned. Perhaps it would have been tolerable for a woman to clothe and armor herself as a man, had she not claimed the arena of a man’s power as well as his costume. A hundred years earlier, when Jean de Montfort, the Duke of Brittany, was captured by the English, his wife, Joanna of Flanders, took up his sword and rode from town to town gathering forces to lead
“a heroic defense in full armor astride a war-horse in the streets, exhorting the soldiers under a hail of arrows and ordering women to cut short their skirts and carry stones and pots of boiling pitch to the walls to cast down upon the enemy. During a lull she led a party of knights out a secret gate, and galloped by a roundabout way to take the enemy camp in the rear, destroyed half their force, and defeated the siege.” Joan would have been familiar with the heroics of “Jeanne la Flamme,” as Joanna was known throughout France for incinerating the tents and supplies of the enemy.
“Le feu! Le feu! Amis, fuyons! C’est Jeanne-la-Flamme qui l’a mis! Jeanne-la-Flamme est la plus intrépide qu’il y ait sur la terre, vraiment!” one popular Breton ballad proclaimed. “Fire! Fire! Friends, flee! It’s Jeanne-la-Flamme who set them! Jeanne-la-Flamme is the bravest on earth, truly!” Though she was dressed and armored as a man, Joanna had undertaken a female war of defense—against a male incursion; once her husband had been killed, she went on fighting, offering her life in trade for that of her son. Her actions might have suggested to some little girls that a woman’s life offered more than domestic servitude, but Jeanne la Flamme was hailed for her devotion as a wife and mother in spite of her possessing the courage and ingenuity reserved for men. For that she was forgiven, not praised.