Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (27 page)

When Joan rose, a little after dawn, she learned that the remaining English had already assumed battle formation outside the city’s walls. As her wound and its bulky dressing prevented her from putting on plate armor, when she left the city in the company of La Hire, Gilles de Rais, and a few other captains, she wore only a
jasseran
, or light coat of mail fashioned entirely of small rectangular steel plates that overlapped like fish scales. It was a Sunday, and thus permissible for an army to defend itself but not initiate an attack, and Joan didn’t even bother to line up her soldiers, but instead held them at bay,
“as a trainer holds back a pack of eager dogs.” The English, unsure what to make of what looked like a trick, held their ground but didn’t advance. Standing at attention, they watched as Joan asked that a portable altar be fetched and saw how, under her direction, the French all bent their heads under the ministrations of her priests, who invested them with fiendish powers of invincibility. Not one of her men was bothering to stand guard, all of them chanting now, voices too distant to discern their sinister meaning. Among the English, rumor had it that her soldiers stole the host and she washed it, as Satan decreed, in menstrual blood.

The
Chronique de la Pucelle
cited the deposition of a French soldier, Jean Champeaux.
“Look back and see whether the English are turning their backs or their faces,” Joan said to her men and, on hearing they were in retreat, ordered her army, “Let them go, it is not the Lord’s pleasure that we should fight them, today; you will get them another time.”

“Oh God! What do I see!” an English soldier cries in Schiller’s
Joan of Arc.
“She’s there, the horror’s coming! Rising, glowing darkly, out of the flames of fire, like a spirit from the night, out of the jaws of Hell. Where can I run away to? She holds me in her eyes of fire already.”

The English, Jean d’Aulon testified,
“departed discomfited and in confusion,” leaving behind any artillery that was likely to slow their retreat—not just their heavyweight cannon, but their crossbows and arrows as well.

Suffolk took his corps to Jargeau. The greater part of the army left under the command of Lords Talbot and Scales for Meung, where they expected to meet Fastolf, about whom the most recent intelligence indicated he hadn’t left Paris, where he’d gone after the Battle of the Herrings to collect reinforcements, a task that would grow ever more challenging. Though Fastolf provided inspiration for the figure of vanity and cowardice that Shakespeare made of Falstaff, adjusting the real man’s name to suggest impotence, his military career was exemplary. No evidence suggests that Sir John, who would finally clash with Joan at Patay, was anything but a great knight and feared leader. Upon hearing rumors of his marching south from English-occupied Paris with reinforcements, the citizens of Orléans had—before Joan arrived—considered abandoning the city. Still, no one wanted to sign up for an unfair fight whose outcome was predetermined by the handmaid of Satan.

Joan remained in Orléans for two days, resting and allowing her wound to heal. Because frontal attacks were as bloody as they were successful, costly to victor and vanquished alike in terms of fatalities, the French army had been reduced to an estimated two thousand soldiers, not nearly enough to continue to defend Orléans while recapturing all the cities along the Loire currently occupied by the enemy. The violence of the direct charge was part of what terrorized the English, used as they were to haggling over ransoms while pinching off shipments of wine and chasing down spoils of war. If Joan never, as she swore, killed a man, she did inspire a single-minded savagery, and her reputation among the English was as a leader of what both she and her judges termed “massacres.”

The
Chronique de la Pucelle
reported that on May 13 Joan left for Tours, where she met the dauphin to extract money and victuals to replenish her forces. Dunois testified that he and some other captains had accompanied Joan to Loches, some ninety miles southwest of Orléans, to convince the dauphin with the mended sleeves to finance the reinforcements they needed. Dunois’s is the more credible account, not only because it was given under oath. For Dunois the scene at Loches was less an event of military historic interest than the context of his observing, as few others reported having done, Joan in
thrall to her voices. When, upon arrival, the traveling party found the dauphin closeted with his confessor and his advisers, Joan refused to wait for an audience. She knocked on the door of his private quarters, entered before any response was given, and fell on her knees before Charles.
“Do not take such long and copious counsel,” she beseeched him, “but come as quickly as you can to receive a worthy coronation.”

Observing the extravagance of her supplication, Charles’s confessor Christophe d’Harcourt, Bishop of Castres, asked Joan if she would
“say here in the presence of the King how your counsel appears when it speaks to you.” Blushing, she replied to him, “I know enough of what you wish to know, and I will tell it to you willingly.”

Dunois said that she answered, in so many words, that “when she was at all unhappy because what she said on behalf of God was not believed, she went aside and prayed to God, complaining to him that the people to whom she was speaking did not readily believe her, and as soon as the prayer to God was over, she heard a voice say to her, ‘Daughter of God, go, go, go, I will be your aid.’ And, when she heard this voice, she was thrilled and also wished to remain in that state forever. And,” Dunois added, “what is more, in repeating the words of her voice, she had surges of wonderful joy, raising her eyes to heaven.”

Dunois’s is the sole account of what Joan’s direct experience of the divine might have looked like. She said her voices spoke a tongue that wasn’t human, and they spoke only to her; no one other than she heard them. Outside of hurried appeals for God’s protection in battle, or his attention to the mortally wounded begging for absolution, Joan prayed in privacy. Pressed to divulge what it felt like to be consumed by grace, she refused, and the single report of her visions other than Dunois’s offered even less description than the Bastard’s. The 1643
Martyrologie des chevaliers
(Martyrology of knights) recognized a resident of Chécy, Guy de Cailly, at whose home Joan spent the night before escorting the convoy of food into Orléans, as having “shared in the visions of Joan of Arc.” Though Guy appears to have offered no details about the experience, Sackville-West grants the account
“some verisimilitude,” based on Charles’s having ennobled Guy “a few months later (June 1429) in a document couched in,” as she described it, “the strangest language of fantasy and heraldry combined.”

Predictably divided on the subject of how to proceed now that Orléans had been retaken, Charles’s advisers argued among themselves while Georges de La Trémoille set to work furthering his own agenda, which, at the moment, was to take a little shine off the armored Maid. Under La Trémoille’s direction, the dauphin sent out a notice dated May 10, 1429 (preserved among the records of a number of towns), calling upon all citizens of France to give thanks to God for the great victory at Orléans that had been accomplished by captains who,
“through their great prowess and courage in arms, and always by means of the grace of our Lord,… captured the whole of this fortress,” the Tourelles. At the letter’s close, Charles gave Joan a perfunctory acknowledgment that left the impression of an afterthought: “Let us also honor the virtuous deeds and wondrous things … regarding La Pucelle.”

The apparent truth of Joan’s outlandish claims had its effects on everyone. If it frightened the English to oppose the Maid, it worried the French to have a supernatural advantage. No matter his personal feelings toward her, La Trémoille was certain the wisest public course was to minimize the Maid’s presence in the battles she’d won. By now Joan knew better than to count on the embrace of aristocrats whose vantage allowed them to see her power unfold in earthly terms, unlike the uniformly worshipful commoners who lacked the altitude required to see beyond their infatuation. The nobility’s tight embrace of the chivalric code made the idea of retaking Normandy, lost at Agincourt, very tempting, but honor is expensive. Having satisfied the first demand of her vocation, Joan immediately redirected her attention to the second. The way to Reims had to be cleared, and first in line was Jargeau, on the Loire just twelve miles east of Orléans, to be followed by Meung and Beaugency, twenty and twenty-five miles downriver, respectively. Still a commoner, if an uncommon individual, Joan understood better than the nobility how important it was for the dauphin to claim the throne as the indelibly anointed king of France. The people put stock in such rites.

Whether from Tours or from Loches, Charles
“commanded the
nobles of all his lands,” the
Chronique de la Pucelle
reported, accurately this time, “to provide men and arms for the army which was mustered ‘for the cleaning up of the Loire River.’ ”

The advantage given by the lift of the siege boosted recruitment for the French and did the opposite for the English. Unaccountably, the ever-imminent-never-materializing Fastolf had yet to leave Paris with his army of four thousand, dallying there from May 4 until June 8, and, once his reinforcements had mobilized, approached the front very slowly, “fatigued, demoralized, and defeated” by an adversary he hadn’t even seen. Joan’s rumored power was as critical to a battle’s outcome as Fastolf’s had once been, and she would discover that on her ascendency there was more chasing than fighting.

On May 22, Joan was in Selles-en-Berry (now Selles-sur-Cher), a day’s journey closer to her target. There she met Guy and André de Laval, sons of Anne de Laval, the widow of Joan’s hero, Bertrand Du Guesclin. From Selles, Guy wrote to his mother on June 8, telling her that Charles had introduced him to the celebrated Maid, stirring his friends to envy at his good fortune. She “seemed entirely divine” to him, “her deeds, and to see and hear her.” He closed his letter with a reference to a ring Joan had sent his mother three days before their meeting, a gesture Joan had called
“a very small thing and that she would willingly have sent you something better considering your recommendation.” Probably he referred to a letter Anne de Laval had written to their cousin La Trémoille, affirming her good character. Joan left Selles-en-Berry on May 27, and by the end of the month she was with the Duke of Alençon at his home in Saint-Laurent, where she met her pretty duke’s mother, Mary of Brittany, and his wife, Jeanne, whose father was the imprisoned Duke of Orléans. Alençon’s wife told Joan that she was “very much afraid” for her husband. By the age of twenty-three, he had already spent five years as a prisoner, having been
taken at the Battle of Verneuil and held captive in the tower of Le Crotoy, where Joan would find herself the following year, no ransom high enough to buy her freedom. Joan remained with Alençon and his family until June 6, before at last decamping for Jargeau.

All but one suburb of Jargeau was fortified by a wall surrounded by a deep ditch; the city was a miniature of Orléans. Within was the Duke of Suffolk, William de la Pole, and an estimated seven hundred
soldiers. Contemplating the town’s five towers from across the Loire, the captains of the French army, among them Dunois and La Hire, debated whether they should attack at all. It was June 10; trustworthy spies reported that Fastolf was at most two days away; the five towers were said to be packed with gunpowder and artillery. Joan pressed for an immediate charge across the city’s one fortified bridge, Alençon testified, telling her men
“not to fear the numbers or hesitate about attacking the English because God would lead their enterprise.”

Having learned of Joan’s high-handed manner toward seasoned captains and the resulting conflicts with Dunois, Charles had put his cousin Alençon in command of the forces at Jargeau, which, as Alençon ceded all military decisions to Joan, did put an end to squabbling among the various
chefs de guerre.
Joan tore across the bridge with her troops to recapture the outlying, unprotected suburb, expecting little if any resistance. But the English intercepted, coming out from behind the fortifications in such force that the French fell back—all except Joan, who took up her standard and, as Alençon testified,
“set off to the attack, exhorting the men-at-arms to have good courage,” and filling them with such purpose and optimism that they quickly drove the English back into their powder-packed towers and installed themselves in the suburb. Upon rising, Joan fired off a bulletin to the English, who could, she said,
“surrender this place to the King of Heaven and to the gentle King Charles, and then you can go, otherwise you will be massacred.” The message didn’t inspire the derision it had in Orléans, the idea of the French entrusting their army to a witch no longer a joke, nor did it result in retreat. The French initiated an intensive bombardment, firing cannon and other gunpowder artillery from across the river and the suburbs until they’d destroyed one tower completely and so compromised the city’s walls that by the end of the day Suffolk was asking La Hire to arrange surrender. The parlay excluded all the other French captains, including Joan and Alençon, both of whom lambasted La Hire for presuming to take it upon himself to speak on behalf of France. Both refused to honor the English’s terms, which were to remain unmolested in Jargeau for fifteen days, at which point they would leave if the elusive Fastolf hadn’t yet relieved them. Joan’s conditions were that unless the English left immediately, with their horses, they would remain under attack. The
English stayed; Joan launched a direct assault on what remained of the city’s walls and dismissed Alençon’s hesitation by reminding him of their unfair advantage.
“Oh gentle duke, are you afraid?” she chided. “Do not doubt. The time is right when it pleases God. And one ought to act when God wishes. Act and God will act.”