Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (33 page)

On August 7, the Duke of Bedford—John of Lancaster, regent of France—responded to news of the coronation for both himself and the Duke of Burgundy by issuing a challenge to Charles and his forces to meet them on the battlefield. The letter was not a pro forma provocation to war. Its value was as propaganda; for this reason the dukes dispatched it from Montereau, the town on whose bridge the Duke of Burgundy’s father had been assassinated ten years earlier. Charles did, the two dukes announced,
“without cause entitle yourself King” and “wrongfully made new attempts against the crown and lordship of the most high and excellent prince, my sovereign lord Henry, by the grace of God natural and rightful king of the kingdoms of France and England … And you are seducing and abusing ignorant people, and you are aided by superstitious and damnable persons, such as a woman of disorderly and infamous life, dressed in man’s clothes, and of immoral conduct, together with an apostate and seditious mendicant friar … both of them … abominable to God.” Charles was to meet the English “in the field in the country of Brie,” or anywhere in the Île-de-France, “in person, bringing the deformed woman and the apostate cited before, and all the perjurers and other force that you wish and can muster.” Until now, they told Charles, they had shown uncommon generosity to a pretender whose “fault and connivance” were to blame for “that most horrible, detestable and cruel murder … committed, against every law and the honor of chivalry, against the person of our late very dear and well beloved father”—John the Fearless.

That the dukes threw down the gauntlet even as they negotiated for a cease-fire suggests that events were unfolding as Joan predicted. The English weren’t looking for peace. They’d vacillate, contradict, haggle, and protest to prolong the cease-fire and buy as much time as possible for Paris to ready itself for attack. As Joan told Charles, “Peace was to be found only at the tip of a lance.”

Joan and her army reached Montépilloy on August 14, having passed through Coulommiers, La Ferté-Milon, Crépy-en-Valois, Lagny, and Dammartin, confirming each town’s fealty to Charles without having to resort to force. At Dammartin, however, Joan had the opportunity to observe the English army
“ordered in a good formation and placed in an advantageous position,” as reported by the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
, and she saw as much as she could of them the next day, August 15, when the French awoke to discover Bedford had mobilized his troops in the dark, anticipating a battle with the French army on the flat, dry fields between Montépilloy and Senlis, where the French were bivouacked, about thirty miles north of Paris’s walls. Bedford had also made Philip, Duke of Burgundy, the governor of Paris,
“so that a prince of the blood royal could be said to exercise political authority over the capital of France.” The English had assumed the same formation as they had at the Battle of the Herrings, but the day was so hot and the earth so parched that neither army could see the other for all the dust hanging in the air between them. Joan had but six or seven thousand soldiers to Bedford’s eight or nine thousand, but the outsize confidence of her army made up for the difference, and a few peripheral skirmishes couldn’t obscure the fact that the opposing armies were at a stalemate. The English squatted behind their defenses, waiting for Joan to lose her patience, order a charge, and impale her cavalry on their portable rampart of spikes. Charles and La Trémoille
“rode about the battlefield with the duke of Bourbon,” and Joan lost her patience and used herself as bait to tempt the enemy. Knowing how much they would prize her capture, she placed herself at the very front of her army’s vanguard, leading her men
“as close as the shot of a culverine [cannon],” according to an eyewitness account from the Berry herald, Gilles Le Bouvier. Given Joan’s repeated insistence that she’d rather die than fall into the hands of the English—as both the trial record and the nullification witnesses attest—and given what happened once she did fall into those hands, Joan’s decision, perhaps more impulsive than strategic, to insert herself into so needlessly perilous a situation betrays how desperate she was growing. “A bad habit,” Shaw calls Joan’s thirst for war, but it
was worse than that. She wasn’t just addicted to battle; she was adrift without it.

But the English left her unmolested. She announced she would allow them the privilege of drawing up their lines while she and her troops withdrew until such time as they said they were ready. And still they didn’t venture out from behind their defenses. The day’s single gratification was that La Trémoille fell off his horse, and such was his girth that
it took his entire entourage to get him back in the saddle of the unfortunate beast below it. Two years after Joan was executed, his enemies at court failed to assassinate him when
“his assailants’ daggers cut only fat.”

Joan waited until dusk to release her men to return to camp for the night, unaware of the betrayal the following day would bring. On August 16, the archbishop of Reims came to Paris with Raoul de Gaucourt and other dignitaries to greet Philip in person with the news that Charles was willing to accept responsibility, and make reparations, for the murder of John the Fearless. In return for Burgundy’s neutrality,
Charles agreed to surrender four cities that had only just promised him fealty: Compiègne, Senlis, Creil, and Pont-Sainte-Maxence. By the time he arrived, all that remained of the English was a circle of holes where spikes had been pulled up and a river of hoofprints and wheel tracks hastening toward Rouen, where Bedford had taken his army. Joan celebrated the outcome of Montépilloy as a rout, presenting it as a partial fulfillment of her promise that the king’s approach to Paris would be like that to Reims, the enemy one by one relinquishing all those cities that belonged to their rightful king. If she understood that her king had betrayed her, she didn’t disclose it to any witness. But she couldn’t help but recognize how gingerly was the Armagnacs’ approach to Paris, especially measured against the accelerated pace of their victory march to Reims. August 17 predicted further frustration, when Charles discovered how luxurious were the royal apartments in Compiègne, whose citizens welcomed him, unaware that he’d only just offered them up in a negotiation returning them to the enemy. Newly ensconced, Charles made no effort to bring himself to leave. “The Maid,” Perceval de Cagny, Alençon’s master of the horse, reported,
“was deeply grieved that he wished to extend his stay.”

“We have feasted in Campiegne [
sic
], Senlis, and Beauvais, and
we must feast in many more if the plans hold,” she prays in
Joan of Lorraine.
“But, O King of Heaven, the food is bitter. It is bought with money the King has accepted for provinces and cities … And my Voices have said nothing … they have not spoken, they are silent.”

While Charles enjoyed the privileges of his new status, the English purchased Brittany’s neutrality with “the unprecedented offer of the county of Pitou” and held out the title constable of the army to Richemont, along with the honored position’s clout, an invitation that, had he accepted it, would have included the distinction of having become the highest-paid mercenary in the Hundred Years War. Though he refused the English, he also
“stayed away from the new king and even, unfortunately for her, from Joan,” who appealed to Alençon when Charles evaded her requests to initiate hostilities. “My fair duke,” she said,
“equip your men and those of the other captains. By my banner, I want to go see Paris from closer than I have ever seen it.” On August 28, Charles signed a truce of four months with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and Joan was now just seven miles north of Paris, at Saint-Denis, where she had been for two days, with the three or four thousand men accompanying her and Alençon. Joan’s refusal to wait for a command from the king had effectively split the French army. Captains were unwilling to follow her if it meant La Trémoille would arrange for their exile from court: Richemont’s case had provided an instructive example. Six weeks had passed since Charles’s coronation, and Joan, the instrument of God’s will, had lost at least half of her men, and most of the faithful who remained were soldiers whose bankrupt king hadn’t ever paid them wages to join his army. They fought under Joan in the expectation that God would reward their valor and service.

By the time Joan approached her target, Charles had been crowned for seven weeks, and
“the defenses of Paris were strengthened … boulevards were constructed in front of the gates, houses built next to the walls were knocked down, gunpowder weapons were mounted and stones were gathered … 1,176 cannonballs … delivered to the gates of Paris … and placed near the city walls.” Between Joan’s forces, stationed at Senlis, and the walls was a moat, the moat surrounded by a trench. The English army, eight or nine thousand strong, stood between this trench and their characteristic fence of
sharpened stakes aimed at the cavalry’s advance, a liberal peppering of
chausse-trappes
awaiting the foot soldiers.

Joan spent nearly two weeks skirmishing around the walls of Paris, whose fortifications were built, as one military historian put it,
“as much to intimidate any enemy into
not
attacking as … to defend against any onslaught.” Without Charles’s permission to mobilize, it was all the fighting she could get away with, and in any case its purpose was to provide an excuse to reconnoiter. By September 8, when Charles at last gave his wan go-ahead, she was poised to attack the point she’d determined most vulnerable, the Saint-Honoré Gate, on the Seine’s right bank, some sixty feet wide and thirty feet high, based on archaeological evidence.
“They began by bombarding the walls with their gunpowder weapons and by throwing large bundles of sticks, wood, carts, and barrels into the moat,” over which Joan was the first to walk, entering “near to the Pigmarket,” Alençon’s master of the horse, Perceval de Cagny, wrote.
“The attack was hard and long and it was a marvel to hear the sound and noise of the cannon and couleverines which those inside fired at those outside.” The Armagnac Perceval claimed “not any man was killed or was wounded who was not able to return to his side and his tent without aid,” which was almost certainly untrue. Clément de Fauquembergue reported a great number of casualties, and fatalities, by gunfire. The
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris
“happily estimated the Armagnac casualties at 1,500.” The men of their party were
“so full of great error and foolish trust that on the advice of a creature … in the shape of a woman—who this was, God knows”—they believed “they would certainly win Paris by assault” and “would all be made rich with the city’s goods.” They made what the Bourgeois described as
“a very savage attack,” during which they “said many vile insults to the Parisians: ‘You must surrender to us quickly, for Jesus’s sake, for if you do not surrender yourselves before it becomes night we will invade you by force,’ Joan said, ‘willing or not, and you will be put to death without mercy.’ ”

“ ‘See here, you whore, you slut,’ said one. And he shot his crossbow right at her and it went right through her leg, and she fled. Another went right through the foot of the man who carried her standard, and when he felt himself to be wounded, he lifted his visor to see to draw the bolt from his foot, and another man shot at him and hit him
between the eyes and mortally wounded him.” If Joan fled, it wasn’t far. Monstrelet, a Burgundian chronicler, reported that she was so gravely wounded she
“remained the whole day in the ditches behind a small mound.” Both Joan and the standard under which she fought were down; “the attack was very violent … and lasted until four hours after noon,” when “the Parisians became confident in themselves” and fired “their cannon and other artillery so many times that the army charging at them recoiled.” Against the protests of Joan, who had to be dragged away from the trench into which she’d fallen and carried back to camp, Alençon took the opportunity to call a cease-fire and “stopped their attack, and they left.” As the French retreated, the Parisians
“fired into their backs, which was very terrible. Thus it was put to an end.”

But on September 9, “encouraged by the arrival of the count of Montmorency and fifty to sixty” knights, all of whom had
“defected from the city, wishing to fight with her and the French army against their former allies,” Joan sent for Alençon and prepared for battle, despite what was a significant wound, which took, she testified, five days to heal, by which she meant that it had stopped bleeding; weeks later she was still suffering the injury’s effects. But they hadn’t a chance to assemble for battle before René of Anjou and the Count of Clermont arrived, both envoys of Charles, who demanded Joan and Alençon report to him in Saint-Denis, where,
“over the vehement objections of Joan, Alençon, and others,” Charles said there were to be no further attacks, as he “saw that the town of Paris was too strongly fortified.” “And thus,” Perceval de Cagny wrote,
“was broken the will of the Maid and of the king’s army.”