Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (29 page)

He wasn’t running, Fastolf told Joan’s heralds; she could expect the English to stand their ground just where they were, about four miles south of the actual town of Patay, neither advancing nor retreating. Reserving the main body and rearguard of his forces, Fastolf sent the
“vanguard, supplies, artillery and non-combatants to hide in the woods” adjacent to the field he’d selected for battle. Talbot, according to Jean de Wavrin, was dispatched with
“five hundred elite mounted archers” to secrete themselves “between two strong hedges through which he felt that the French would pass.” His orders were to hold them off until Fastolf had determined a plan of attack and arranged his soldiers. The ambush might well have granted victory, even to a smaller army, but for a stag flushed from the woods by the rank clamor of the lathered French cavalry, La Hire in the lead, having ridden the French corps hard all the way from Meung, fifteen miles to the south. As soon as the stag discovered itself in a clearing, unprotected,
it bolted back under cover and, as fate had it, into the formation of English archers. The animal would have been a red deer, whose habitat spreads across Europe. Among the largest of the deer family, the bull’s height approaches that of an elk, and at an average weight of five hundred pounds, the momentum generated by its charge would have provided its antlers with enough thrust to pierce armor. Moving at top speed, the stag couldn’t have stopped even had it wanted, and it
“uttered a great cry” as it plunged, hooves thrashing, into the formation of English archers. The military glory of England, their nerves on edge at the approach of the witch, dropped their bows and scattered screaming into the woods, where they collided with their own army’s hidden vanguard and supplies, the ensuing chaos summoning Fastolf from the field, his troops following in disarray. Among those taken prisoner, Alençon testified, was Talbot, who had accompanied Bedford to France in 1427 and had been forced to give up the boulevard of Saint-Loup at Orléans, after having presided blindly over the skirmish before which Joan ushered her parade of bounty.

Were it not for eyewitness testimony, French and English both, it would be tempting to gather the stag into Joan’s flock of undocumented sheep, birds, and butterflies—another creature that migrates across cultures as an archetype that travels between mortal and immortal realms. It is the stag that pulls Artemis’s chariot through the clouds, changing sky to heaven.
In one Christian legend, a stag draws a hunter away from his companions and deep into the woods, where the sacred beast confronts him, a crucifix emerging, like the single horn of a unicorn, from the center of its head, between its antlers. Illustrated medieval bestiaries identify the stag as an incarnation of the avenging Christ who tramples and destroys the devil,
a manifestation of purity and nobility that dates back to the psalms of the Old Testament. The anonymous
Ballade du sacre de Reims
—a coronation ballad—echoes Christine de Pizan’s
Ditié de Jehanne
in summoning prophecies of a noble
cerf volant
, a
“Flying Stag … arising from the pure roots of the beautiful garden of the noble fleur-de-lys,” she wrote, tidily sowing the soil of Eden with the royal flower of France.

A military history of the Battle of Patay might
diminish the stag’s role by lumping it among lightning bolts and other developments beyond mortal influence:
“the unplanned, that turns the tide of a battle.” One creatively presents the victory that followed its charge as a default.
The English soldiers’ attention having been diverted from sacred responsibility to irresistible sport, they took off after the animal on an impromptu hunt. Whether the stag was temptation or antagonist, its significance lies outside the study of waging war and belongs to the uncanny. The violent trajectory of an animal chosen to represent Christ precipitated a peculiar chain of events that resolved a decisive battle in under an hour, with minimal losses to the French. As to the enemies of God’s chosen, Alençon testified,
“four thousand men in dead and prisoners,” a tally that included the capture of Talbot, Scales, and other English captains: in sum, a catastrophic loss. And the typical, and typically superstitious, medieval Christian could not help but regard the stag as a manifestation of the divine—or the diabolic.

Although it was almost twenty miles north of the Loire, and although Joan continued to make war after it was won, the Battle of Patay was the decisive victory of the Loire campaign, the culmination of what Orléans’s war cry had begun. At its conclusion, the citizens of Janville refused to allow the battered English army back within their city walls, seeing the prudence of giving in to the Maid before she did to Janville what she had done to Jargeau. Because something had happened at Jargeau, where Joan had made her customary offer of clemency upon the surrender to her king, after having promised, according to Perceval de Cagny, Alençon’s
“master of the horse,” a “massacre” to any who dared resist. When her men faltered, Alençon testified, she told them to take heart, for God had damned the English. At the conclusion of what was a definite rout, many more enemy troops had been executed than taken captive for ransom, and, more unusual still, executions continued after the cease-fire. Although it’s unlikely Joan had condoned the unnecessary carnage, the bloodlust she aroused wasn’t easily switched on and off. As it was her habit to retire after battle to confession, Mass, and the counsel of her voices, she might have been enjoying the company of angels as her men celebrated victory by succumbing to one sin they weren’t denied.
“Whatever the
relationship of religious fanaticism to the savagery,” one medievalist summarized, “it did not repress the knightly proclivity for turning war into sport.”

From Patay, Joan took her troops to Orléans, where she awaited permission to approach Gien, to which Charles had abruptly moved his court. Within what had very recently been enemy territory, Gien presented a single advantage: its location offered a more direct route to Reims than did Loches—the reason, Joan naturally presumed, for the dauphin’s unexplained relocation. Her impatience gathered for nearly a week, during which Charles was closeted with his advisers. When, on June 24, she at last arrived in Gien, she didn’t, as she expected, meet the dauphin and from there continue with him directly to Reims but was immediately hobbled by the usual intrigues, each courtier proposing a plan tailored to his own greedy agenda. La Trémoille warned Charles that there were too many cities and towns controlled by the Burgundians, the journey to Reims too risky to undertake. But Joan’s argument for making haste to Reims was a pragmatic one. As she said, once Charles
“had been crowned and consecrated, the power of his enemy would steadily decline, until in the end they would not be able to harm either the King or the kingdom.” She promised Charles that, contrary to La Trémoille’s dire predictions, the towns between Gien and Reims would surrender without resistance. How dangerous could the journey be with an escort of twelve thousand soldiers, not counting the limitless forces under Saint Michael?

Charles temporized; Joan assuaged her impatience by composing an announcement of her triumph.
The letter was distributed to many cities in the realm, like the one Charles had disseminated after Orléans was freed. A copy remains; it was brought to the city of Tournai, in present-day Belgium, some twenty-five miles east of Brussels. Carried by Thierry de Maubray, a messenger bearing news of the realm, it was
“copied and transmitted to the thirty-six ‘Banners,’ or sections of the city.” Referring to herself in the third person, Joan proclaimed to each citizen in the land that within eight days, La Pucelle had
“chased the English out of all the places that they held on the river Loire by
assault and other means.” She listed the enemy captains her army had either killed or captured and closed with a threat couched as an invitation, not so much asking as commanding the recipients’ presence at the coronation. “May God watch over you and grant you grace to uphold the just cause of the kingdom of France.”

Under the spell of Joan’s cockiness, Dunois sent the Earl of Suffolk, taken prisoner at Jargeau two weeks earlier, a note from Gien,
“a small piece of paper,” he testified, “four lines that made mention of a maid who would come from the oak wood, riding on the backs of archers.” All Frenchmen knew the prophecy, and now they knew its fulfillment, but it couldn’t hurt to remind an English captain that his losses were ordained, there was no point in struggling.

Joan and her army set out for Reims with the dauphin and his retinue on Monday, June 27, 1429. Cravant, Bonny, Lavau, Saint-Fargeau, Coulanges-la-Vineuse, Auxerre, Saint-Florentin, Brinon, Saint-Phal: all the Loire towns
“welcomed the soldier and the Maid, and all made homage to the dauphin,” as if years of enemy occupation were instantly undone—a transformation that often required nothing so cumbersome as the movement of troops. The English army had been too small for it to garrison each town it conquered, and those it did were given minimal manpower. As Joan’s army approached, sources including the
Chronique de la Pucelle
suggest that most English-occupied towns surrendered without resistance, let alone bloodshed. But Troyes, where Charles’s mother had publicly disowned and humiliated him, proved harder to convince. The city’s identity was informed by the treaty that bore its name, and it had prospered under Anglo-Burgundian rule. One of the few occupied cities that had been garrisoned, Troyes had time to wait on rescue from the English forces, the dauphin’s guarantee of amnesty insufficient to woo its citizens to relinquish the city’s keys.

Initially, Troyes’s garrison of five to six hundred soldiers inspired the conceit that the town might resist Joan and her army. Like everyone else in the realm, the people of Troyes knew of Joan’s victories and their unnatural accomplishment, but not of the magnitude of her
forces, thousands strong, and when they sallied out to discover themselves surrounded by a sea of enemy soldiers, they made an about-face and drew the drawbridge up behind them. Having been
“told continually by their Anglo-Burgundian leaders that she was led by a force other than God,” after some deliberation they dispatched an envoy to examine Joan in the form of Brother Richard, a mendicant friar and disciple of Saint Bernard of Siena. Brother Richard was one of countless turn-or-burn preachers who emerge from societies whose apocalyptic beliefs warn of imminent extinction. Jesus was as well. Cultures preoccupied with death cannot help but dwell on rewards and retribution, and in Paris
a popular preacher could summon a mob twenty thousand strong, the frenzy of devotion predicting an equally fierce rejection. In April, Brother Richard had been run out of Paris and refused entry by several towns between Paris and Troyes, where he’d found asylum and then adulation. The citizens of Troyes, too, would send him packing, but for now he retained their faith, and as Joan testified, “The people of Troyes sent him to me. They said they were afraid I was not a thing sent from God.”

“Come boldly!” Joan said when he drew near her. “I shall not fly away.” Just as a witch could fly, so could holy water set her flesh afire, and Brother Richard sprinkled it liberally over Joan, who faced him defiantly in her indecent clothing, feet planted on the earth as firmly as his own. Joan, on whom the spray of water fell without a sizzle, was unconvinced of the sanctity of Brother Richard and galled by his presuming to judge her. Still, she didn’t waste the opportunity to use him for what he was worth,
“since it was he who was entrusted with the delivery of the letter that she addressed to the people of Troyes during the march on Reims, the letter that won their surrender.”