Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (34 page)

“If I had not been wounded, I would not have left. I was wounded in the trenches before Paris, after I left Saint-Denis.”

“Was that not the feast day of the Holy Nativity of Our Lady?” the examiner asked Joan of the day she initiated the assault.

“I think it certainly was.”

“Do you think it was right to attack the town of Paris on the day of the Festival of the Blessed Mary?”

“It is good to observe the Festival of the Blessed Mary.”

“Do you think it was a good thing to do, to make war on a holy day of obligation?”

“Pass on,” Joan said.

“My Father is working still, and I am working,” Jesus said to the Jews who condemned him for healing on the Sabbath.

“And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus,” the Evangelist John explained. “This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”

For
“he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the Sabbath.’ ”

The basilica at Saint-Denis protected the burial vaults of nearly every French king and held an embarrassment of relics, the bones of earthly rulers who in death, as in life, were petitioned for political favors. The site—rather than Reims—of queens’ coronations, the abbey church had great significance for France, and thus for Joan as well. Saint-Denis’s heraldry, a blue ground sown with fleurs-de-lis, would provide the background for the coat of arms she would be given upon her knighthood; hers included a sword and crown (
Fig. 25
). Not surprisingly, Joan withdrew into its sanctuary, where she remained far longer than the average supplicant, long enough to draw the attention of bystanders and thereby offer her persecutors another opportunity to make use of rumors spread by her enemies.

“What arms did you offer to Saint-Denis?”

“It was a whole black suit of armor,
^*1
for a man-at-arms, with a sword. I wore the suit at Paris.”

“To what end did you make an offering of these arms?”

“It was an act of devotion, such as soldiers perform when they are
wounded. I had been wounded before Paris, and so I offered them to Saint-Denis.”

“You did this so that the arms might be worshiped.”

“No. Because it was the war-cry of France—”

“At Saint-Denis in France you offered and deposited in the church in a high place the armor in which you had been wounded in the assault on Paris, so that it might be honored by the people as relics.”

“I denied this once before,” Joan said.

“Further, in the same town, you had waxen candles lit, and from them poured melted wax on the heads of little children, foretelling their fortune, and making by these enchantments many divinations about them.”

“No,” Joan said. She’d stayed at the altar for as long as she had to for the counsel she needed and eventually received. “My voice told me to remain at Saint-Denis in France, and I wished to remain.”

“But you did not remain.”

“No. Against my will my lords took me away.”

The failure to take Paris, the wound she sustained in her thigh, and the unfortunate timing of these two incidents, on a holy day of obligation she failed to honor, all suggested a rupture between Joan and God; they inspired doubt. As one military historian summarized her predicament,
“While Joan had been victorious, others had been able to replace La Trémoille in Charles’s favor, but after she had lost … and had been badly wounded in the process, the former king’s favorite returned to his chief counselor position with even greater power and influence.” An unfortunate result of La Trémoille’s holding Joan away from the stage of battle,
“where he could balk and hinder her,” as Twain put it, was that it removed her far enough from the eye of the public that fewer and less detailed sources follow Joan’s movements from the fall of 1430 until the spring of the following year, when her capture reignited her celebrity.

In October 1429, Joan was recuperating from the wound in her thigh at Bourges, the capital of Berry, where she was the guest of René de Bouligny, the king’s finance counselor, and his wife, Marguerite La
Touroulde, and where she encountered a rival visionary, Catherine de La Rochelle, dismissed by the medievalist Pernoud as a
“member of a vagabond lunatic fringe.” Without a military operation to occupy her attention, Joan was irritated enough by Catherine’s claim of intimacy with a “White Lady covered in gold” who visited her at night that she challenged Catherine to produce the White Lady and sacrificed two nights’ sleep to prove Catherine to be the “very uninteresting fraud” Vita Sackville-West judged her.
“On the first night, Jeanne, having stayed awake till midnight, evidently got bored and went to sleep. In the morning, when she asked if the ‘white lady’ had appeared, Catherine assured her that she had indeed appeared,” prophesying the discovery of hidden treasure to pay an army that would oust the English, “but that she, Catherine, had been unable to awaken her, Jeanne, adding that the ‘white lady’ would surely appear again next night.”

For this, Joan told the examiner, she prepared by sleeping all day, “so that she might stay awake the whole of the succeeding night. And that night she went to bed with Catherine, and watched all night; but saw nothing, although she often asked Catherine whether the lady would come, and Catherine answered: ‘Yes, presently.’ ” When the White Lady failed to appear, Joan advised Catherine “to return to her husband, to run her household, and to nourish her children,” in essence pushing her offstage to join the ranks of the “plenty of other women” who shaped their lives in answer to the demands of men rather than God.
“The business of this Catherine is nothing but folly,” Joan wrote to Charles—folly that proved expensive to expose, however, as
“Catherine later reciprocated by testifying to the ecclesiastical court at Paris that ‘Jeanne would have left her prison by the aid of the Devil if she had not been well guarded.’ ”

From Bourges, Charles sent Joan on the fool’s errand of besieging Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, more village than town, but an expertly fortified village that he didn’t expect to buckle under her weakened charge.
“Her army, of which she was only a minor commander, was woefully undersupplied,” and her commission an ignominious one. What La Trémoille identified as the first strike in an upper Loire campaign was a match not only to settle a personal grudge but also to pit Joan against a purely mercenary foe, as
the area was controlled by Perrinet Gressart. Currently in service to the Burgundians who paid
his bills, Gressart had made himself known to La Trémoille when he captured him en route to a negotiation and failed to honor his guarantee of safe passage, demanding an extravagant ransom of
fourteen thousand ecus to release him. The siege of Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier was to be the first in a series of smoldering conflicts that eluded decisive outcomes; the upper Loire campaign was designed to exhaust Joan’s forces’ morale along with her patience. On November 8,
“the French were forcibly compelled to retire,” when, Jean d’Aulon testified, Joan told him she had “fifty thousand men in her company and would not leave that spot until she had taken the town.

“Whatever she might say,” Jean continued, “she had not more than four or five men with her, which I know for certain as do several others who also saw her.” Apart from what sounds, even coming from Joan’s ever-awed squire, like a delusion on Joan’s part and hyperbole on his, Joan did take the town with her handful of men, ordering them to bring “faggots and withies to form a bridge over the moat” so that it might be possible for her army of five earthbound and who knew how many celestial forces to scale Saint-Pierre’s wall.

“They were immediately brought and put into position,” Jean testified. “The whole thing utterly astonished me, for the town was immediately carried by assault … there was no great resistance.” He went on to avow his faith that “all the Maid’s exploits seemed to me rather divine and miraculous than otherwise.”

Joan celebrated her victory by arranging for an encore. In a letter to the nearby city of Riom, she asked its citizens to demonstrate their loyalty to the king by sending supplies to La Charité, the town to which she was to next lay siege. She wanted
“gunpowder, saltpeter, sulphur, arrows, heavy crossbows and other military supplies” and advised the letter’s recipients to be quick about it “so that no one may say that you were negligent or unwilling,” chasing her threat with a benediction. “May our Lord God protect you.” Beneath the words is the first, and shakiest, of the three surviving examples of her signature.

The siege of La Charité lasted a month and was abandoned on Christmas Eve, as
the French could make no effective attack on the heavily fortified town, with its large garrison and stockpiles of artillery and ammunitions. The gift of 1,300 ecus from the citizens
of Bourges to the king’s forces couldn’t hire and provision enough soldiers to prevail in a contest that, Joan made clear to her examiners, she had undertaken not upon counsel of her voices but at the behest of “men-at-arms,” who “told her it was better to go first against the town of La Charité,” when she herself had eyes only for Paris. The diversion La Trémoille conceived for Joan had been expensive and effective. The Berry herald characterized the defeat as shameful, accomplished as it was,
“even without any relief having come to the aid of the besieged.” The French “lost their bombards and artillery.” Upon her retreat to Jargeau, on Christmas Day, Joan received letters from Charles conferring nobility on her and her family in
“thanks for the multiple and striking benefits of divine grandeur that have been accorded us through the agency of the Maid” and in consideration of “the praiseworthy, graceful, and useful services already rendered by the aforesaid.” Joan already possessed the equivalent of a coat of arms, bestowed by a ruler far more august than Charles, who, in conferring knighthood, had, as Régine Pernoud put it,
“acted like a minister of state granting a decoration to a functionary he is about to send into retirement.”

The Maid’s ascent to the nobility cannot have aligned with any fantasy inspired by chansons de geste. As described in
L’ordene de chevalerie
, the investiture was a public sacrament that began in ritual purification.
“The candidate [for knighthood] first was bathed, the bath symbolizing the washing away of his sins. Then he was clothed in a white robe symbolizing his determination to defend God’s law, with a narrow belt to remind him to shun the sins of the flesh. In the church, he was invested with his accoutrements: the gilded spur, to give him courage to serve God; the sword, to fight the enemy and ‘protect the poor people from the rich.’ Finally, he received the
colée
, a blow of the hand on the shoulder or head, ‘in remembrance of Him who ordained you.’ ” It almost appeared that the paper dubbing had been timed to vanish in the blur of feasting and drinking and dancing between Christmas and Joan’s posthumously conferred birthday: Twelfth Night.

A bleak winter was setting in, bitterly cold and clouded with disappointments for Joan, who spent the greater part of it cooped up in Sully-sur-Loire, La Trémoille’s family château some thirty miles
upriver from Orléans, to which, on January 19, she traveled to attend a banquet given by the city council. The thirty miles between village and city included a stop midway, at Jargeau, and gave Joan the opportunity to note that
“the activity of royalist ‘partisans’ was seen everywhere,” a grassroots shiver of awakening nationalism that inspired their allegiance to the Maid who championed their independence. Charles had moved with such eager dispatch in concluding the truces with England and Burgundy that he “crushed the élan of the royal army, which began to show signs of discontent.”

As Joan had prophesied without aid of her heavenly counsel, the Duke of Burgundy continued to avoid the peace conference that had been the truces’ alleged aim, and Joan spent much of February and nearly all of March looking forward to military action she hadn’t been given leave to undertake, pacing Sully’s courtyard under a rectangle of gray sky as she dreamed of battles to come, retiring for long hours into its chapel, the ringing of the Angelus inviting her to her knees and the possibility of the comfort that first arrived on the notes of church bells. From Sully, Joan sent a second letter to the citizens of Reims, dated March 16.
“Joan the Pucelle has received your letters mentioning that you fear being besieged,” she wrote, reassuring them that she would intercept any army that marched on their city.