Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (4 page)

Then, as now, a perfectly pastoral landscape spread around Domrémy’s tight little clutch of mostly one-story homes: a patchwork of greens, a white spatter of sheep, a river’s serpentine course coiling through hills that gradually rose into the Bois Chenu, the looming dark Oak Wood in whose dusky shadows wolves lurked, hoping for a wayward lamb. And there were more fearful predators, for, as everyone knew, it was behind the dark curtain of trees that the devil changed costume, lying in wait for two-legged prey.

Like Vaucouleurs to the north and Neufchâteau to the south, Domrémy was a less provincial village than it might have been were it not located on the Via Agrippa, the network of old Roman roads crisscrossing France and connecting, in the case of Domrémy, Verdun and Dijon by way of Langres. As it was, the town received timely news of the outcome of every skirmish, as well as the dauphin’s subsequent response, disseminated by his pages. A less fortunate aspect of Domrémy’s position was its vulnerability to passing raids, as a road was as good as an invitation to enjoy the spoils of one town after another. While urbanites in nearby Reims or Metz had the protection of fortified walls, the farmers and vintners who lived in the countryside and whose labor provided cities with all they consumed found themselves running every which way from marauding bands of soldiers, as well as deserters, mercenaries, and looters drawn to insufficiently protected property.
Écorcheurs
, they were called, or flayers, and if they didn’t skin the land while engaged in what was almost exclusively siege warfare, when unemployed they plundered whatever they chose. Captain John Fastolf, a respected military tactician whom Joan would face in battle, summarized the modus operandi that accompanied siege warfare, whose ultimate objective was to capture dynastic rule by kidnapping and ransoming royalty. Occupying armies were directed to systematically ravage the land, burning whatever they didn’t steal—homes, grain, fruit trees, crops—and killing livestock they didn’t take for their own.
The strategy was intended to demoralize as well as enervate the citizenry. Once the seemingly interminable war had drained the coffers of France and England both, some soldiers were forced to steal that they might feed and clothe themselves; others succumbed to the temptation of vandalism, rape, and murder that would go unpunished. It was an age of unchecked violence, the plague’s devastation inuring the populace to grotesque physical torment, which became an object of fascination and even entertainment. The upper class lived for the sanctioned slaughter of warfare punctuated by tournament melees, mock battles that produced unfortunately real effects, different from Roman gladiatorial contests only in their assuming a veneer of high-minded chivalry. Peasants gaped at heads on pikes and bodies left hanging from gibbets until the flesh dropped off their bones.

By the fifteenth century, famine, plague, and warfare had so drained the land of able bodies that the economic and social fabric no longer supported serfdom, and the system of government that had characterized western Europe for nearly a thousand years had all but collapsed. Those whom the Black Death didn’t kill, it freed from bondage. Peasants, serfs, laborers—tens of thousands of commoners—seized the chance to turn on the aristocracy they’d served for as long as anyone could remember, taking over the châteaus of those who had died intestate to feel the warmth of a feather bed and taste the spell a silver goblet imparted to a mouthful of wine. Of course, not everyone turned to murder and thievery. Once out from under vassalage, a skilled worker could demand payment for his labor and make his way up in the world.
Born in 1375, when civil unrest was at its most widespread, Joan’s father, Jacques d’Arc, lived in a time of unprecedented mobility, when an enterprising man might take advantage of depressed land values to increase his real estate and when the loosening of the social order inspired a similar instability in the fixed systems of thought that had accompanied it. By attacking his creation so indiscriminately and catastrophically, God had lost a little of his power of persuasion, and inasmuch as a man freed himself from the proscribed thoughts of the Church fathers, he had the capacity to think independently. It would be centuries before Western society valued the freethinking individual over the conformist, but a shift had occurred.

A
villein
, or free peasant, from Ceffonds, in Champagne, fifty miles west of Domrémy, Joan’s father owned forty acres over which he rotated his crops and pastured his sheep and another ten acres in the Bois Chenu, into which townsfolk ventured only as far as they needed to drive their pigs to forage acorns and grow fat. Jacques d’Arc had his own home, and he owned the furnishings within it. Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, was born in 1377 and raised in Vouthon, just five miles northwest of Domrémy. It’s likely that Isabelle’s brother (sometimes identified as her uncle) Henri de Vouthon, the prior of a Benedictine monastery in Sermaize, arranged her betrothal to Jacques d’Arc. Just
as the child Joan has been cast in the role of humble shepherdess, her family has often been represented as diminished in circumstances, socially isolated, naive, and untouched by the corruption inherent to worldliness. But few among the peasantry could claim a Church superior in his or her immediate family; few were landed. Isabelle owned property in Vouthon as well as what she would inherit when Jacques died in 1431, of grief, some said, as Joan was executed that year. Romée was not a conventional surname—nor did a fifteenth-century peasant necessarily have a surname—but a distinction conferred on Isabelle (or possibly her mother) for having made a pilgrimage to Rome, a significant expense that bore witness to an unusual commitment to one’s faith. To undertake such a journey required not only money but also the willingness to expose oneself to brigands who lay in wait along all pilgrim roads, as well as to plague and leprosy. A medieval pilgrim often sold all he owned to finance a journey from which he didn’t necessarily expect to return. As friends and neighbors universally attested, both Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée were
“true and good Catholics, upright and brave.”

“Honest farmers,” they grew rye and oats, but the local diet, and their livelihood, was based on livestock—milk, cheese, eggs, fowl, and pork. The wool Jacques sheared from his sheep each spring bought what the family didn’t grow or make for itself. Prosperous among the peasantry, they had a few hundred francs
^*2
in savings, as well as food and room enough to offer the occasional traveler dinner and a night’s rest, either on the floor before the hearth downstairs or in one of the two lofts that formed the second story of
“the only house in the village that was built of stone, not wood and thatch,” in an age when almost all dwellings, urban as well as rural, were made of wood.

The fourth of her parents’ five children, Joan was born in 1412, after her brothers Jacquemin and Jean and her only sister, Catherine, and before Pierre. Sources are inconsistent as well as incomplete, however, with respect to the birth order of Joan’s siblings and their respective ages. According to some, Jacquemin, the eldest, was born
in 1406, when Isabelle was thirty, which would have made him a very young groom in 1419, the year he is said to have married and settled on his mother’s land in Vouthon, where he remained until the spring of 1429. By then, Joan’s fame had drawn all her siblings into its glare and on into history books, a rare destination for a peasant. After Jean and Pierre followed their little sister into battle, Jacquemin returned to Domrémy to help his parents, who were then in their mid-fifties, run the family’s farm. By then, Catherine had married, moved to the neighboring town of Greux, and died, most likely in childbirth.

The accuracy of the day traditionally celebrated as that of Joan’s birth, January 6, or Twelfth Night, is called into question by the date’s sole extant source, an excitedly florid letter from a courtier within the dauphin’s inner circle—a man who was almost certainly not present at a remote village’s celebration of a Church feast day.
“It was during the night of the Epiphany that she first saw the light in this mortal life,” Perceval de Boulainvilliers wrote to the Duke of Milan in June 1429.
“Wonderful to relate, the poor inhabitants [of Domrémy] were seized with an inconceivable joy …[and] ran one to the other, enquiring what new thing had happened. The cocks, as heralds of this happy news, crowed in a way that had never been heard before, beating their bodies with their wings; continuing for two hours to prophesy this new event.” The only of Lord Perceval’s letters known to have survived, it was written on June 21, 1429, a month after Joan had raised the siege of Orléans, eclipsing the festering shame of Agincourt and demonstrating God’s long-awaited mercy. As king’s councillor and a recruiting officer for the French army, Boulainvilliers had reason to celebrate a triumph that made his job not only possible but also effortless. Men who had previously fled from the front made an about-face to chase after Joan for a chance to fight under her command. The court was jubilant, even giddy, but the dauphin Charles of Valois wasn’t the center of its attention. That was occupied by Joan, the international sensation to whom France owed its victory. Letters like Boulainvilliers’s flew from Chinon to castles and manors across Europe. That every literate European spoke and read French accelerated
the trajectory of Joan’s fame, the impulse to embroider what was already fantastic as irresistible to a lord as to a gossiping housewife at market. Human prophets had predicted Joan’s advent; now nature, one species anyway, had confirmed her arrival. As it was not the habit of medieval people to take note of birth dates, it was that much easier for the unreliable apparatus of human memory to nudge Joan’s winter arrival to align with a date befitting her glory. It mattered little whether an Epiphany birthday resulted from heavenly manipulation, happy coincidence, Lord Perceval’s imagination, or was the gift of a fabulist somewhere in the chain of rumor that delivered news to the French aristocracy; more important was that Joan’s birth be met with fanfare and its date carry meaning. Epiphany marks the Magi’s paying homage to Jesus, the infant Messiah who represents the “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation, a book dear to the medieval mind for its wealth of symbol and allegory. For a girl who understood herself as God’s agent—“the reason I was born” to save the people of France and deliver its crown to God’s chosen king—there was no more fitting birthday. Jesus borrowed December 25 from Sol, who, like most solar deities, had timed his arrival to follow on the heels of the winter solstice, and Jesus took Sol’s halo as well—as did the Roman emperors.

Where no tangible historical records or artifacts provide a counterweight to the pull of a narrative tradition shaped by faith, the historical truth of a life like Joan’s or Jesus’s gives way to religious truth. Deities in mortal form must have parents, places of birth, and childhoods, and Boulainvilliers unwittingly aligned Joan’s birthday with an event that might never have taken place. No evidence supports any wise men’s pilgrimage to the newborn Son of God; no astronomer recorded any celestial phenomenon that might have been interpreted as a guiding star. The idea of Jesus’s being laid in a manger derives from a mistranslation of the Aramaic to the Greek; he was probably born in an underground room used for pressing olives, far from a manger, with no space for receiving shepherds and magi. The Nativity might not have occurred in Bethlehem. Among the five cities archaeologists have identified as possible birthplaces for Jesus, Nazareth is the most likely, as his name suggests.
The Evangelist Matthew chose Bethlehem to fulfill a messianic prophecy made eight hundred years earlier by Micah:
“You, oh Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no
means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel.” John’s Gospel chose a different validation:
“We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” summoning in the case of Moses a tradition dating as far back as the Bronze Age. As it had been for Jesus, so it would be for Joan; an origin myth was added as a prefix to what was known of her extraordinary life, an auspicious beginning that predicted the subsequent miracles—prophecy applied retroactively to provide context for phenomena witnessed by hundreds of people and, as nothing else explained them, experienced as divine.