Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (31 page)

Miracles and those who perform them are by definition unnatural, and Joan attributed hers to a god whose favor depended on the virginity she wore like a badge. By calling herself La Pucelle and wearing men’s clothes, Joan directed attention to her veiled genitalia and held it there. European men’s fashion during the late Middle Ages was both revealing and suggestive. Doublets, short jackets that terminated above the pelvis, were in style, the uncovered groin protected by a codpiece (the word
cod
is Middle English for scrotum) that not only accentuated the size of a man’s penis but also, as both Brueghel’s genre paintings and courtiers’ portraits make clear, suggested tumescence. The fifteenth century marked the height of these accessories’ popularity, as well as their size and decoration, which often verged on the pornographic. Codpieces were everywhere a girl looked, and only Joan’s richly colored and finely tailored silk velvet
chausses
, or hosen, conspicuously lacked the addition. As described in the fourteenth of the seventy articles of accusation initially brought against Joan, she wore “short, tight, and dissolute male habits” that advertised her singular sexuality, flaunting her power to both summon and crush desire.
Her transvestism was dramatically different from that of the typical cross-dressing martyr, a woman who assumed male dress to pass as a man undetected and thus preserve her chastity. Usually, this attire was a cassock, intended to cloak the entire body of a celibate. Thomas Aquinas pardoned such brave women who,
“as a means of hiding from enemies,… protected themselves by total, not partial, sex masquerade.” Joan was different.

Complete in the androgyny she invented for herself, lifted above hunger, lust, and fear, and beyond the reach of physical laws mortals obey, Joan emerged in an era when all extraordinary manifestations were interpreted and understood only inasmuch as they could be placed within the context of Scripture, a time when the abnormal was regarded with terror and read as an oracle. Contemporaneous chronicles of the Black Death, for example, placed its arrival within the context of
the ten plagues God visited on Egypt as punishment for enslaving his chosen people. A letter from the papal court in Avignon explained “how terrible events and unheard of calamities had afflicted the whole of a province in eastern India for three days. On the first it rained frogs, snakes, lizards, scorpions and many other similar poisonous animals. On the second … thunderbolts and lightning flashes mixed with hailstones of incredible size.” On the third, a “stinking smoke, descended from heaven and consume[d] all the remaining men and animals and burnt all the cities and settlements in the region.”

Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon writing at the end of the fourteenth century, specified cross-dressing as a catalyst for plague, as
“whenever and wherever tournaments were held, troops of ladies would arrive dressed up in a variety of extraordinary male clothing … Mounted on chargers … they abused their bodies in wantonness and scurrilous licentiousness. They neither feared God nor blushed at the criticisms of the people, but were … deaf to the demands of modesty.” Like Joan, they made manifest what women were directed to hide. Whether wanton or virgin, each parodied, and thus dishonored, men, not only destabilizing their sexual identity, but attacking the foundation of a religion whose adherents were instructed to pray to God as “Father”—for God was not woman but man.

“You stand alone, absolutely alone,” Archbishop Regnault warns
in Shaw’s
Saint Joan.
“Trusting to your own conceit, your own ignorance, your own headstrong presumption, your own impiety in hiding all these sins under the cloak of a trust in God.” The simple people, he tells her, “will kiss your hands and feet … and madden you with the self-confidence which is leading you to your destruction. But you will be nonetheless alone: they cannot save you. We and only we can stand between you and the stake.”

At the closing of the coronation ceremony,
“the Maid,” Dunois testified, “who was riding between the Archbishop of Rheims and myself, said these words, ‘Here is a good people. I have never seen a people rejoice so much at the coming of so noble a king. May I be lucky enough, when I end my days, to be buried in this soil.’ ”

“Where do you expect to die?” the archbishop asked Joan, yanking her attention back to what he intimated might be her imminent demise.

“Wherever God pleases,” Joan said. “For myself, I do not know the time or the place, any more than you do.”

“I sometimes heard Joan say to the King that she herself would last a year and scarcely more,” Alençon testified, “and that they must think during that year how to do their work well.”

Portents of her doom abounded, but Joan didn’t stoop to curry favor. Covert and temporizing, trending toward a gray realm of compromise, politicking was a degrading mire into which she wouldn’t deign to set her armored foot, not for fear of treachery nor fire. It grew ever clearer, both to Joan and to those who would take it upon themselves to destroy her, that the coronation had invested the Maid, not the dauphin, with a new identity, the anointing having
“produced an extraordinary perception of Joan of Arc in France and beyond.” Voices speaking of betrayal to come were not exclusively angelic, but it was too late to consider what fantasies of revenge an archbishop, prince among clerics, might conceive in response to Joan’s having upstaged him during a moment of glory that had belonged to him as much as it had to Charles, each of them outshone, and the king just about pilloried by the national troubadour.

“You Charles, King of France, seventh of that noble name,” Christine de Pizan wrote, “who have been involved in such a great war before things turned out at all well for you, now, thanks be to God, see your honor exalted by the Pucelle who has laid low your enemies … in a short time, for it was believed quite impossible that you would ever recover your country, which you were on the point of losing … A little girl of sixteen … in preference to all the brave men of times past … must wear the crown.” Christine dated her
Ditié de Jehanne
July 31, 1429. By then, “after an illustrious career,” the poet had been in retirement for eleven years and only broke her silence because she couldn’t resist celebrating, as one historian put it,
“the proof Joan offered of Christine’s consistent defense of women from misogyny.”

The entire culture of fifteenth-century France was possessed by Joan. As her stock fell with the court, it rose with the populace. The adulation she had already identified as idolatrous, and a danger to her soul, had force enough by now to elevate her beyond the reach of any earthbound bishop.
“The famous holy oil they talked so much about was rancid,” Charles complains in Shaw’s
Saint Joan.
Too old to be of use, it’s a dead symbol of a bygone order, while Joan herself has become the object of worship. From pamphlets distributed in Paris to papal broadcasts nailed to church doors in Avignon, from epic poems, sermons, and treatises across the Continent, Charles of Valois and all his court melted away in the heat of Joan’s radiance.

After the ceremony, Charles and his entourage and “many other high nobles” retired to the archiepiscopal palace. Joan’s name wasn’t listed among those who attended the reception. The single source of the guest list is the pro-Burgundian
Chroniques d’Enguerrand de Monstrelet
, whose author might have succumbed to the temptation to deny Joan the sliver of posterity conferred by an invitation to the archbishop’s residence. She might have been there, but it would have been easy enough to exclude her, as her status as a commoner provided an excuse for Regnault to bar her from so august a gathering. In either case, Joan had enjoyed enough of the court’s costumed spectacle. Knowing she might not have another chance to be with her parents, she was ready to put aside her cloth-of-gold surcoat in exchange for the company of her family and wouldn’t have squandered an opportunity to resolve whatever ill feeling remained between her and her father,
who was staying, as Hémon Raguier recorded in Charles’s account book, as a guest of the king at an inn called the Striped Ass. Sources differ as to whether Isabelle made the journey to Reims; whether she did or did not, her cousin Durand Laxart accompanied Jacques.

Having planned to march on Paris immediately after the coronation, Joan had announced as much to the Duke of Burgundy (
Fig. 19
) in a grandiose letter sent the morning of the ceremony, when it was clear he would not witness the anointing, a communication in which Joan swung from politesse to insolence and back again, inadequately cloaking her presumption in hollow formalities and suggesting the distraction of a foreign crusade to satisfy an itch for battle:
“Great and mighty prince, Duke of Burgundy, Joan the Maid calls upon you by the King of Heaven … If you want to make war, wage it against the Saracens.”

Medieval Europeans referred to Muslims as Saracens, originally understood to be a dark-skinned people originating in the Sinai Peninsula—Arabs. By the fifteenth century, the term had become a xenophobic catchall for non-Christian peoples, idolaters who worshipped Muhammad and Termagant, a genderless god invented not by Muslims but by Christians, who believed Termagant’s rise to be a harbinger of apocalypse. Capitalized, the name was given to the antagonist in popular mystery plays based on familiar Bible stories; by the late sixteenth century, when Shakespeare used it without an uppercase T, it had come to mean a shrewish, overbearing woman, another instance of the inescapable urge to associate the female with the diabolic.

Joan’s reference to a group of infidels awaiting righteous genocide predicted another letter, one she would send two months before her capture and address to the “heretics of Bohemia,” whom she promised annihilation for their apostasy—a maneuver entirely outside the jurisdiction of her vocation, which, as the following months would demonstrate, was where she was headed.

“I pray, beg, and very humbly request rather than demand that you no longer wage war in the holy kingdom of France.” The implication
that Joan had the right to demand anything of the duke rendered the request considerably less humble, especially as she went on to suggest that his well-being hinged on obeying her, the self-proclaimed messenger of God. “And I would have you know, by the king of Heaven, my rightful and sovereign lord, for your good, for your honor and upon your life, that you will not win any battle against loyal Frenchmen, and that all who wage war against the holy kingdom of France, wage war against King Jesus.” She followed the implicit threat by chiding the duke for failing to attend the coronation, which as one of the six peers of the realm he was obliged to do.
“I wrote to you and sent letters by a herald, that you should be at the consecration which today, Sunday the seventeenth day of this present month of July, is taking place at the city of Reims.”

The other conspicuous absence was that of Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, who had visited Reims a few weeks earlier to take part in a Corpus Christi procession, on May 26. When he left the city to return to his diocese, he discovered it in the hands of the Armagnacs, having been swept, during his brief absence, into the wake of victories that followed Joan from Orléans to Reims. Expelled from Beauvais, along with all the rest of the Anglo-Burgundians and those loyal to their cause, he was forced to flee to Rouen, the capital of English-occupied France and the city in which he would preside over the trial that condemned Joan to death.

Cauchon was fifty-eight. His nature was calculating; he’d always known whom he could use. Having followed a conspicuously outstanding academic career as a law student at the University of Paris, he’d ascended the hierarchy of the Church Militant with dispatch and efficiency by cultivating every powerful man he encountered. Appointed
vidame
, or “temporal lord,” of the Reims Cathedral in 1412, from that height he gained access to the Duke of Burgundy and began making himself first useful and then indispensable to Philip, through whose influence he would acquire Beauvais’s bishopric. The same year Joan was born, the man who would be revealed as her archenemy started acquiring the power he’d need to destroy her. Cauchon, whom Michelet identified as
“among the most violent in the violent party of the Cabochiens”—revolutionaries whose 1413 coup d’état aimed against the Armagnacs briefly delivered them control of
Paris—“went straight to where wealth and power were to be found, in England, with the bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort, who was the half-uncle of King Henry V. He became English, he took to speaking English,” and when Beaufort, who recognized Cauchon’s ambition and greed as a reflection of his own, needed an arm long enough to reach into French intrigue, he had its owner firmly under his sway.