Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (26 page)

Jean d’Aulon described the battle’s final charge in greater complexity. Retreat had been sounded and was under way, he said, when Joan returned from prayer and saw her standard in the hands of a knight to whom she hadn’t entrusted it—as that knight had offered to take a turn carrying what had by then become a heavy burden for her page. When the knight failed to immediately release the banner’s staff, Joan, in the ensuing tussle,
“shook the standard so vigorously that I imagined others might suppose that she was making a sign to them.” According to Jean, the Maid’s soldiers had seen a signal where there was none and “rushed together and immediately rallied, and they attacked the bulwark so sharply that within a short time they had taken both it and the bastille, from which the enemy retired.”

“The she-warrior,” Alain Chartier wrote, “had destroyed the conquered fortresses like a tempest …[L]ike lambs to the slaughter, they [the English] were all defeated and finally killed.” Clément de Fauquembergue, the same parliamentary scribe who doodled a long-haired girl armed with a sword in the margin of his register, summarized the critical battle as
“a maid all alone holding a banner between the two enemy forces.”

The English might have decided to relax their hold on Orléans only briefly, expecting Fastolf and reinforcements; they might have decided to refocus their efforts on towns with stone fortifications that couldn’t be burned away from under their feet. They might have attributed their failure to overcome the French to exhaustion and concluded that there was no choice but to allow the army to recover its strength. But the Duke of Bedford’s memorandum to his
nephew Henry VI, England’s seven-year-old king, for whom he acted as regent, made what had inspired their flight clear enough.
“There fell by the hand of God a great stroke upon your people assembled there,” caused by “unlawful doubt aroused by a disciple and follower of the fiend, called the Pucelle, who used false enchantment and sorcery, and drained the courage of the remaining soldiers in ways that were marvelous.” The Duke of Alençon, who wouldn’t join the French fighting under Joan’s influence, if not her official command, until she moved on from Orléans to Jargeau, said from what he
“heard from the soldiers and captains who were there, they all regarded almost everything that happened at Orléans as a miracle from God; they considered it to have been the work of no human hands but to have come from on high.” No matter the source, as one military historian summarized,
“the myth of English invincibility was shattered.”

It was midnight and the streets were thronged when Joan and her captains did, as she had promised, enter Orléans over the bridge, hastily restored to allow a party of knights to pass through the city’s main gates, as no French citizen had done since before the siege. “Paid, forty sous for a heavy piece of wood obtained from Jean Bazon when the Tourelles were won from the English, to put across one of the broken arches of the bridge,” the city’s 1429 account book records. A fisherman, Jean Poitevin, received
“eight sous for having beached a chaland,” or barge, under the bridge, and the team of carpenters who had feverishly repaired what they could of the bridge were rewarded with sixteen sous “to go and drink on the day the Tourelles were won.”

Every church bell in Orléans was ringing as Joan materialized from out of the dark, she and her white standard polished by torchlight. Night had fallen to lend the spectacle a theatricality impossible in daylight hours. Again the populace exalted her, straining toward the light that fell on their virgin warrior astride her white horse,
“giving wondrous praise … especially above all to Joan the Maid,” as recorded for posterity the
Journal du siège d’Orléans.
So many bells, enough ringing even for Joan. When they fell silent, the clergy led the people in singing “Te Deum laudamus”—a fourth-century hymn
of praise. “All the earth doth worship thee … To thee all Angels cry aloud; To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy.”

“He was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light,”
“glistening … as no fuller on earth could bleach them.”
“And when they lifted up their eyes they saw no one but Jesus only.”

The transfiguration is singular among the Gospel miracles. In every other instance, it is Jesus who effects change in others: people, a herd of swine, a fig tree cursed and
“withered away to its roots,” water changed to wine, and wine to blood. In this one instance, Jesus himself is changed, anointed with light before—or by—his onlookers’ eyes. It was dark, past nightfall on the mountaintop where he had taken his disciples to pray and where, with their willing spirits and weak flesh, they’d fallen asleep. Suddenly awakened, they saw
“the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white.” The unnatural brilliance is associated with mystical experience in both New and Old Testaments, blinding Saul and remaking him into Paul on the road to Damascus, when
“suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, Why do you persecute me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus.’ ” When Moses received the Ten Commandments, a cloud descended over Mount Sinai. From it God spoke, and when the prophet returned to his people,
“Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” On the mountain of Jesus’s transfiguration,
“lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them [the disciples], and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my beloved son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to him.’ ” As he did for John the Baptist, God identified Jesus to his followers as the Messiah, bathed him in unearthly radiance, and bade them take heed. Jesus was a holy messenger, and so was the Maid of Orléans, resplendent in her circle of light.

“O unique virgin, worthy of all glory and praise, worthy of divine honors, you, pride of the kingdom,” Alain Chartier wrote, “you lamp, you light, you pride not only of the French but also of all Christians.”

Intent as she was on how her deeds were received by God and his angels, Joan hadn’t paused to consider the mortal response, which in any case her vocation rendered irrelevant.
“Master Pierre de Versailles,” one of Joan’s examiners at Poitiers, “was once in the town of Loches in the company of Joan,” where he observed “that the people threw themselves before the feet of her horse to kiss her hands and feet.” Pierre “said to Joan that she did wrong in allowing such things which were not suitable for her and that she ought to distrust such practices because she made men into idolaters.”

“In truth,” Joan replied, “I would not know how to protect myself from such things, if God does not protect me.”

Jesus inspired the same hunger; his steps were dogged; his clothes were unraveled by countless hungry hands.
“And all the crowd sought to touch him,” Luke wrote, “for power came forth from him and healed them all.”

People came to her home, Marguerite La Touroulde remembered,
“bringing paternosters [rosaries] and other holy objects for her to touch.” Joan laughed at the requests. “You touch them!” she said to Marguerite. “They will be as good from your touch as from mine.”

Jesus not only attracted but cultivated his followers’ attention and feverish adulation with public miracles. Each crossed the threshold from gossip to that of broadcast—an earthbound mortal confined and magnified by celebrity, a leader summoned from the underclass in fulfillment of prophecy, a peasant without regard for mortal measures, moving among the power elite, undaunted, cloaked with the arrogance of the consciously anointed. Jesus, like Joan, was a messiah as political as the prophecy that summoned him, promising salvation, deliverance from an enemy, and preaching love and violence. A king, humble and riding on an ass, a girl leading an army from the back of a charger, each possessing royalty that cannot be conferred by any hand but God’s. Figures of purity, free from sexual stain. Impossible people, alien architects of their own destruction.

The people of Orléans couldn’t relinquish her; they had to touch
her, lay their charms and beads and rings against her, kiss, if she allowed it, her hands, her feet. By the time she extracted herself from their grasp, her mud- and blood-spattered armor shone again, like new. The reach of countless fingers had polished it as bright as the night was dark.

^*1
From Dutch
bolwerc.

^*2
The single gate on the east side of the city, also known as the Saint-Aignan Gate, and accessed directly by the Via Agrippa.

Once Joan escaped adulation, she returned to the Bouchers’, where a surgeon dressed her wound and, Dunois recalled, she
“had her supper, eating four or five toasts soaked in wine heavily watered, and she had taken no other food or drink that day.”

With the single exception of a gift of poisoned carp, the only food Joan is reported to have eaten is the meal commemorated by the Eucharist: the Last Supper at which Jesus broke bread, directing his disciples,
“Take and eat; this is my body,” and “Drink, all of you,” the wine that is his “blood of the new covenant.” It seems unlikely that a girl of such vigor and stamina could exist for years on the few mouthfuls of bread and sips of wine reported by Dunois and also Louis de Coutes, who called her eating habits
“very abstemious” and remembered that she “often ate only a morsel of bread in a whole day and it was astonishing that she ate so little.” What, and how much, Joan ate was significant.
“In the Middle Ages,” Huizinga wrote, “the choice lay, in principle, only between God and the world, between contempt or eager acceptance, at the peril of one’s soul, of all that makes up the beauty and the charm of earthly life. All terrestrial beauty bore the stain of sin.” Jesus demanded his disciples choose between him and all the rest of life. Dunois and Louis de Coutes gave testimony more than twenty-five years after the fact, each having told and retold his adventures with the Maid to countless curious listeners, each convinced of the divinity of the girl who every day had called upon them to confess sins redeemed by Christ’s blood, to partake of the Eucharist. Any of Joan’s comrades might easily associate her most powerfully, or even exclusively, with bread and wine, sparingly served.