Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (23 page)

As it happened, the English didn’t do little; they did nothing. Witnesses for the nullification called this miraculous and didn’t offer the pedestrian explanation for their inaction reported by the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
: the English, who had been strangling the city for six months, systematically starving its citizens, would not have allowed a great caravan of provisions unobstructed entry into the walled city had they not been successfully distracted by the people of Orléans. No more than five thousand of the
estimated twenty thousand citizens of Orléans were men capable of doing battle, and prepared to guard the convoy, they
“sallied out in great strength, and went charging and skirmishing before Saint Loup” with the result that “there were many dead, wounded, and captured on both sides.” The convoy rolled and clopped and squealed slowly past a churning mass of soldiers so intent on killing one another that they didn’t so much as check to make sure a guard remained on the Burgundy Gate.
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By the time the living were counting up the dead, it was too late. Slow as it was, the convoy had entered the city as if there were no siege to lift.

Untroubled as she was by the imperatives of mortal warfare that preoccupied Dunois—forces, weaponry, munitions—Joan was so intent on making an immediate frontal attack on the English that she didn’t want to be delayed by gratitude. As far as she understood it, she’d yet to accomplish anything for which she deserved to be thanked, and Dunois had
“begged her to agree to cross the Loire and enter the city of Orléans, where they were most eager for her.” He managed to separate Joan from her army only by ordering its captains to return to Blois and await reinforcements there. Having
“succeeded in rendering them ‘well-confessed, penitent and of goodwill,’ a state of affairs which might suffer erosion in her absence,” Joan wanted to make war immediately, before her men had a chance to sin their way out of God’s grace and die unconfessed. While she bristled at his not receiving her as an equal, Dunois, as convinced of Joan’s holiness now as he had been suspicious before, held himself responsible to protect her, from herself as much as from others.

Jean Luillier, a merchant, remembered how ardent was the people’s response to Joan when she at last materialized, rumor made flesh, on the evening of April 29, 1429.
“Her entrance was greatly desired by
all the town’s inhabitants, because of her renown and of the rumors abroad,” and, Luillier added, because “they did not know where to turn for help except for God.” Accompanied by a detail of knights, Joan entered the Burgundy Gate astride a white charger, armored and carrying her white standard with Dunois at her side, and was received “with as much joy and enthusiasm as if she had been an angel of God.” Thousands,
“men, women, and small children,” the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
reported, strained toward the Maid and the white horse that lifted her above the crowd and showed her to the far edges of the craning multitude. It was eight in the evening, the sun low enough in the sky to flare off armor, conjure flames on a breastplate. The heads and shoulders of the people around her horse were packed so tight she couldn’t see the ground below, and the clamor pressed in.
“There was a very extraordinary rush to touch her or even to touch the horse on which she sat.” At some point,
“such was the press around her, as they tried to touch her or her horse, that a torch set fire to her pennant. At this, Jeanne struck spurs into her horse, turning it with great skill and herself extinguishing the flame.”

For six months a rain of punishments had fallen on the people who now surrounded Joan and her captains. Siege warfare was a waiting game, and the moment the English had surrounded Orléans, they began cultivating an atmosphere of dread fatalism to accelerate what physical deprivation couldn’t accomplish on its own. Water mills had been destroyed as soon as possible to prevent the French from grinding any grain they had stored. Without any means to remove waste from within the city’s walls, sanitary conditions deteriorated and encouraged the spread of disease. Rumor of betrayal was constant, both from within and from without, especially after a hole was discovered in the city’s north gate the previous month. Either French traitors had been poised to allow the enemy in, or the English had already penetrated the city. Caught within the walls that protected them, hungry enough to cook rats, driven, some of them, to infanticide, the citizens had endured everything from a sudden unexpected cannonade to random arrows falling from the sky, dipped in pitch and set alight in hopes of striking tinder. What used to be a marketplace was empty now, supplanted by a black market’s secret barter. But for months even the rich had found little to buy or trade, and they stood among the commoners
reaching for a touch or even the secondhand touch of someone whose fingers brushed Joan’s armored thigh, caste having done nothing to free them from want. Whoever didn’t feel it himself could see it all around him; whatever Joan kindled in the thousands of eyes fixed on her was little different from that burning in those fixed on a messiah whose impossible multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed a hungry mass thousands strong is held among his greatest miracles, a messiah who taught his followers to pray for their daily bread.

I have
“been sent for the consolation of the poor and destitute,” Joan said of herself. As a warning to her enemies, and thus the enemies of God, Schiller gives her an additional line, plucked from Isaiah, the prophet of apocalypse from the eighth century
BC
quoted by all four of the Evangelists: “The day of vengeance is near at hand.”

Charles Péguy, a socialist with a mystical bent, emphasizes Joan’s preoccupation with the poor, “who are starving and who get nothing to eat.” She watches two children fall upon the bread she gives them “as if they were animals” and feels sick at “them being as glad as they were.” She’s a prisoner to her guilt over their suffering. “I thought of all those in misery who get no comfort, I thought of the worst off of all, those who come last, those who are really cast off.

“Who is going to give them their daily bread? Lord, I can’t give it to them all the time. I can’t give everything. I can’t give to everybody.”

“Who was it that touched me?” Jesus cried when the multitudes pressed upon him, grasping for him. “Someone touched me for I perceive that power has gone forth from me.”

“Jesus, your people are hungry today, and you don’t satisfy your people,” Péguy’s Joan accuses Christ. “Will it be said you won’t multiply fishes and loaves any more? Will it be said you won’t weep for this multitude?”

“If their baseness is beyond measure, so is their poverty,” Joan of the Stockyards accuses a corrupt broker. “You have shown me not the baseness of the poor but
the poverty of the poor.
”

When the crowd at last fell quiet enough that she could be heard, Joan “exhorted everyone to trust in God,” Luillier testified, and thus
“be delivered from our enemies.” It took the combined efforts of the Count of Dunois, La Hire, Jean d’Aulon, and Louis de Coutes to usher Joan out of the boiling sea of people, allowing her to break away, at which point—accounts differ—she went either to the cathedral to receive Communion or straight to the home of an accountant named Boucher and there took the Eucharist before retiring for the night. Her page remembered she had been “most exhausted when she arrived, for she had not taken her armor off to sleep the night before she left Blois.” Boucher was “one of the important citizens of the town, who had married one of its most important ladies.” The couple’s combined rank measured how great an honor it was to play host to the Maid, as it had been for those who gave shelter to the equally itinerant Jesus, who chose his companions from among the destitute and the outcast, those destined, as he told them, to inherit the earth. A messiah is an exalted mendicant, depending on the kindness of strangers.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Encamped, Joan slept on the ground among soldiers; when inside a besieged city’s walls, on her host’s bed. Once she left her earthly father’s home, she claimed no mortal place.

Immediately upon rising, perhaps woken by the citizens of Orléans,
“still in so great a state of excitement about her that they almost broke down the door of her lodging in their desire to see her,” Joan sent two messengers to the English demanding the release of the herald they had yet to free. If they did not, she promised, as the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
reported,
“she would kill with a brutal death all the English who were prisoners in Orléans, and also those who were held among the lords of the English who were being held as ransom for others.” Outraged to discover no battle plan under way, Joan
“went to see the Bastard of Orléans and spoke with him,” her page testified, “and she came back very angry as there were no plans to attack that day,” April 30. No further plans at any rate. While Joan argued with Dunois, La Hire and a small party of knights led a charge of ragged infantry, townsmen bearing improvised weapons, on the English occupying the fort that guarded the city’s two northern gates. Though they forced the enemy back behind the portcullis of their stolen tower, the victory was so minor as to have escaped the notice of Joan, who was on the other side of Orléans, surrounded by townsfolk.

A night’s rest having restored her restless energy, once Joan and Dunois parted company, she answered her impatience by learning her way around the walled city, taking directions from the worshipful throng that followed her wherever she went—until she found
“a certain bulwark that the King’s men held against the bulwark of the English and from there,” as recorded in the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
, “she addressed the English opposite, requesting them in God’s name to retire, otherwise she would drive them away.” The bulwark was that of Belle-Croix, on the French-controlled side of the bridge that spanned the Loire between Orléans and the river’s left bank. One of the lords she addressed,
“called the Bastard of Granville,” her page testified, “answered Joan most abusively, asking whether she expected them to surrender to a woman and calling the French who were with Joan ‘unbelieving pimps.’ ”

In trying to pull together the factions of the increased forces, Dunois confronted a similar outrage on the part of his unconvinced captains. An
“absence of echeloned units” characterized France’s stillfeudal armies, another instance of progress stymied by French hauteur, as without any system of rank no captain was accorded military command over another. As the grandiloquent Lord of Gamaches made clear, the social hierarchy was supreme, untrumpable.
“Since you pay more heed,” Gamaches said, “to the advice of a little saucebox of low birth than to a knight such as myself … I lower my banner and am no longer anything than a simple squire. I prefer to have a noble man as my master, rather than a hussy who may once have been God knows what.”

If being called a whore by the enemy provoked her to tears of rage, Joan found the accusation that much more offensive and unacceptable from someone she presumed a friend, or at least a civil comrade, and it required Dunois and the cooler-headed among his captains to effect a reconciliation between noble knight and lowborn saucebox, one as loath as the other to bring mouth and cheek together in a forced kiss of peace. But the Battle of the Herrings remained in recent memory; the French army had succumbed to fatal disorganization even when its members were enthusiastically allied. With or without divine assistance, Dunois wasn’t going to squander lives by initiating hostilities when his captains were feuding and demoting
themselves out of responsibility. But the Maid and her effect on the people teetering toward mass hysteria within the besieged city’s walls and on the increasingly nervous English without—but not beyond hearing distance of a crowd thousands strong—made it difficult to prevent an uncontrolled conflagration. By now Joan had provoked the English in a second letter Dunois described as
“written in her mother tongue, in very simple language. The substance of the letter was that they, these English, must agree to give up the siege and return to the kingdom of England, or else she would attack them so strongly they would be forced to retire.” He went on to identify the enemy’s receipt of Joan’s letter as the point at which their former power evaporated so that “four or five hundred soldiers and men at arms could fight against what seemed to be the whole force of England,” unnerving the English so that “they dared not leave their strongholds and bastilles.” Luillier, too, remembered the English’s reaction to Joan’s second letter as a tipping point:
“From that moment the English were terrified and no longer had the powers of resistance that they had previously had.” Even so, they did send the message that they would catch,
“torture and burn her, and that she was nothing but a rustic, and that she should return to herding her cattle.”

Though he was reluctant to leave her outside his direct supervision, Dunois was concerned that, either by intent or as a result of her helpless militancy, Joan would provoke a conflict before he could receive and organize his reinforcements, and on May 1 he
“left Orléans for Blois to confer with the Count of Clermont and to collect other troops who were waiting there,” as many as 4,000 soldiers, as Blois’s garrison had swelled by then to 2,000, and
“the town militia may have added another 2,000.” The English, forced to divide their limited forces among the French cities they’d seized and now occupied, typically did not capture a city by means of a surprise attack meant to deliver it into their hands with a single coup de main. Instead, they took over outlying structures that controlled passage through the walls’ major points of egress, thus preventing the delivery of food and supplies to the people within, who made do, starved, and finally surrendered. In the case of Orléans, these satellite fortifications were the Tourelles, freestanding turrets that flanked the bridge over the Loire, the river serving as a moat that extended along the stretch of
wall protecting the city’s south side, and the bastille of the Augustins, a fort made from the abandoned ruins of a convent that squatted at the end of the bridge. Both were on the far side of the river, the bastille of Saint-Loup squatting by the road to the Burgundy Gate, in its east wall. There were three smaller gates, two in the city’s north wall and one in its west, but without access to the Loire they were of less tactical import. Too, medieval warfare was as mannered as any other social interaction of the age. A knight threw down his gauntlet to challenge an enemy, who picked it up to accept the invitation to fight. A captain declared war with a grandiose dispatch asserting his army’s just cause for attack. It was easy enough for a single captain or small party to come and go unannounced without reprisal, and Dunois would have had little trouble leaving to organize forces to move in and retake the critical towers and bastilles, reopen the city, and break the siege.