Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (36 page)

“Have you cured people with those rings?” the examiner asks Joan in Robert Bresson’s
The Trial of Joan of Arc
,
its script based on French trial minutes and witness testimony for the nullification. He speaks in particular of the one she received from her mother and father, bearing the suspiciously heretical joining of the names Jesus and Maria.

“No,” Joan says. She pauses, eyes cast down, considering the question before looking up at the judges ranged before her. “Not by means of the rings,” she says.

The incident at Lagny was different from Joan’s previous miracles,
as winds do shift and waters rise and men fall to their deaths without a divine nudge. Until Lagny, Joan had been associated with highly unlikely but not impossible events. Raising a child from the dead was beyond the reach of reason and partook of the greatest of God’s powers. Once perceived as having triumphed over death, Joan, like Jesus, had arrived at the moment in her career when it was clear to her enemies that there was no longer any time to waste in eliminating her influence.

“Are you so tired already of the visible presence of God,” Schiller’s Joan asks Charles, “that you seek to smash the vessel that contains it, and drag down into the dust, the virgin that God has sent you?”

A week after she left Lagny, “Easter week,” Joan told the examiner, “when I was in the trenches at Melun, I was told by my voices, by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, that I would be captured before St. John’s Day,” which followed Midsummer eve. Joan’s voices repeated the warning “several times, nearly every day,” and they told her this suffering was inescapable: “ ‘It had to be so,’ they told me, and they said I should not be distressed, but take it in good part. They said God would aid me.”

On May 14, Joan was in Compiègne, at a reception given in her honor, by which point the Duke of Burgundy had
“amassed a large army and artillery train” and “begun his move on Compiègne in earnest.” It was the “greatest gunpowder weaponry arsenal” that existed among the powers at war, and “almost all of it was directed entirely against Compiègne and Joan.”

Like Orléans, Compiègne was on the bank of a river, its main entrance accessed by a bridge over the Oise, diverted to fill a moat enclosing all the city’s walls, which boasted an unusual number of towers, forty-four of them in just the length running along the river. “Every day,” Jean Chartier recorded, Joan
“fought large skirmishes against the English and Burgundians” besieging the town. As she was not a defensive fighter but an aggressor who didn’t like being confined within city walls, she made sallies on all the towns within a twenty-mile radius of Compiègne, marching first on Choisy-au-Bac,
a strategically important site, located as it was on the Aisne River. To keep Choisy was to prevent the Burgundians from controlling the town’s bridge and, once over it, surrounding Compiègne, little more than three miles to the southwest. Combat was harsh and bloody, and Joan’s troops, protected only by hastily assembled makeshift bulwarks, hadn’t the ability to withstand the firepower at the duke’s disposal. By May 16 she was forced to withdraw her little army back within the walls of Compiègne, from which she set out with the Count of Vendôme and the archbishop of Reims for the town of Soissons, in hopes of enlisting the support of the town’s garrison and using its bridge to cross the Aisne River.

The Count of Vendôme was a friend, Regnault an enemy in cahoots with Soissons’s captain accompanying Joan in anticipation of what Vita Sackville-West called
“the pleasure of seeing the fresh discomfiture which there awaited her,” one rendered “more bitter by treachery.” Soissons had pledged its loyalty to Charles, but the city’s captain, Guiscard Bournel,
“refused to allow Jeanne and her followers to enter, and persuaded the citizens that they had arrived with the unavowed intention of remaining there as a garrison.” Uncharacteristically, and despite the fact that she and her troops were forced to bivouac in the fields outside the city’s walls, Joan made no attempt to gain access to the bridge by either force or persuasion; instead, she moved on to Crépy-en-Valois to round up
“300–400 more soldiers who had come to fight for the freedom of Compiègne.”

“About Soissons, and Guichard Bournel,” the examiner asked, “did you not deny God and say you would have the captain drawn and quartered if you got hold of him?” The question was based on hearsay, one of many attempts to illustrate what her judges presented as an unnatural thirst for blood and violence.

“No,” Joan said. “Those who said I did were mistaken.”

On May 22, spies reported Philip’s troops were converging on Compiègne, and Joan set off hurriedly, at nightfall, the new moon but one day old and the stars hidden by clouds.

As DeMille envisioned the expedition, Joan rides before her army,
unaware of the dark angel on horseback moving ahead of her, ghostly, transparent. His black wings shimmer among the leaves of the forest that presses in on the shadowed road. The pace of the winged figure is resolute and stately—funereal, as if timed to a dirge. Just outside Compiègne, the dark angel halts his black mount and turns to face Joan, raising one arm to point the way to her doom. Surprised by the specter, Joan lays one hand on her armored breast and pulls up her mount, reeling, inasmuch as a body astride a horse can reel.

“Does thou not see the Black Horseman!”
^*3
her title card cries. But Joan’s confused comrades can’t see the fate that awaits her.

“I have not long,… I have not long!” her next card laments.

^*1
Black armor, like white, indicated rank. The less refined the metal composing its plates, the blacker it was considered to be. Joan’s own armor was white not only for its lack of ornamentation but also because its plates were made of metal pure enough to sustain a polish, and thus more expensive to maintain as well as purchase.

^*2
This was different from the story of Jairus’s daughter, found in the Synoptic Gospels and not in John. “Why do you make a tumult and weep?” Jesus asked Jairus, after banishing an eager, heckling audience. In private he took the girl’s parents to her bedside. “The child is not dead but sleeping.” Near death but not dead. “Taking her by the hand, he said to her ‘Tal’itha cu’mi,’ which means ‘Little girl, I say to you, arise.’ Immediately the girl got up and walked (she was twelve years of age) and they were immediately overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this” and (mis)interpret it as a resurrection.

^*3
The Black Horseman is traditionally interpreted as the famine that follows upon war. Revelation 5:6.

After a hard night’s ride, Joan and her army, now no more than four hundred strong, reached Compiègne at
“a secret hour of the morning”
“and entered the town without having encountered any resistance” and
“without confusion nor disturbance from either herself or her men.” The ease with which she accomplished the operation recalled her equally unhindered entrance into Orléans under siege. Perhaps she took this as auspicious, as she anticipated an efficient triumph over
“a small and unsuspecting garrison, with an open bridge and a friendly town behind her … child’s play,” Sackville-West judged it, “for the victor of Orléans and Patay.” It was the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and as usual Joan heard Mass at dawn and only then approached the captain of Compiègne’s garrison, Guillaume de Flavy, to learn what she could of the present situation. She and her men had spent the night armored and on horseback, but Compiègne was in danger of falling to the enemy, and she hadn’t time to spare. The
“young, violent and formidable de Flavy … told her that the bridge at Margny”—immediately across the river Oise—“was held by the advance guard of the Anglo-Burgundian army.” The Duke of Burgundy waited five miles to the north, with the larger part of the enemy forces. What Guillaume de Flavy did not tell Joan was that while she was slipping through the dark after her Black Horseman, the Duke of Burgundy’s vassal Jean of Luxembourg-Ligny was leading his forces downriver from Clairoix to Margny to meet with the Duke of Burgundy and “eight or ten other gentlemen” to orchestrate the tightening of the siege around the weakening city.

“Not to worry, Charles,” Yolande says in Luc Besson’s
The Messenger.
“If God is still with her, she will be victorious.”

“But her army is so much smaller,” Charles says, suffering a spasm of conscience.

“Then her faith,” Yolande answers, “will have to be bigger.”

It was easy for those who betrayed Joan to comfort themselves. No one needed to worry about rescuing a girl with heaven on her side. If Joan was vanquished, she had fallen from the grace she had once summoned.

“He trusts in God,” the chief priests and elders said of Jesus,
“let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said ‘I am the son of God.’ ”

Not anticipating an attack by French troops, the Anglo-Burgundians had laid aside their weapons to attend to their boulevard and other defensive maintenance, when, at nine in the morning,
“mounted on her horse, armed as would be a man,” Georges Chastellain wrote, Joan sallied out from Compiègne’s main gate, “adorned in a doublet of rich cloth of gold over her armor. She rode a gray steed, very handsome and very proud, and displayed herself in the armor and manners that a captain who leads a large army would. And in that state, with her standard raised high and blowing in the wind, and accompanied by many noble men, around four hours before midday, she charged out of the town” and set out to join a
“large and forceful skirmish [that] was being fought on the meadows outside of town. She armed herself and had her men armed [
sic
] themselves.” Though it was no longer the fashion for knights to wear rich coats into battle, Joan had acquired so many gifts from grateful burghers with their bolts of velvet and satin. God’s
chef de guerre
should look her part.

Joan and her small army “mounted their horses, and went out to join in the mêlée,” and had already moved across the bridge toward Margny before the Anglo-Burgundians ran to rearm themselves.