Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (5 page)

Witnesses to Joan’s early childhood include friends, neighbors, local clergy, a man who identified himself as Joan’s uncle but who was in fact her cousin’s husband, and four of her dozen or more godparents. When parishes had yet to keep written records and the majority of the populace was illiterate, twelve wasn’t an unusual number of godparents, especially not for the daughter of a prominent villager. The more people who could bear witness to a person’s identity, age, and, most important, baptism, the better. Named Jehanne, or Jehannette, after one of her godmothers, Joan never used the name “Arc.” As she explained to the notary who each day read her recorded testimony back to her to confirm its accuracy—lest “the said Jehanne should deny having made certain of the replies collected”—in Joan’s part of the world, children bore their mother’s surname (suggesting to some biographers that her father’s mother might have come from Arc, ten miles north of Ceffonds). She supposed she might be Jehanne Romée, but she had always chosen to identify herself as Jehanne la Pucelle, Joan the Virgin, child of her heavenly rather than earthly father.

We have no verifiable likeness of Joan and little physical description. Portraits made during her lifetime, including her profile pressed into, as stated in the trial record, “medals of lead or other metal in her likeness, like those made for the anniversaries of saints canonized by the Church,” would have been destroyed in the wake of her execution, no longer devotional objects but devil’s play. The single surviving contemporaneous image of Joan is the work of a man who never saw her, more doodle than drawing. Clément de Fauquembergue, the
greffier
, or “clerk,” who recorded the raising of the siege of Orléans in
Paris’s parliamentary record, sketched a long-haired girl in the register’s margin. Her body is covered by a dress; her face, drawn in profile, wears a severe expression; and she carries a sword in one hand, her standard in the other (
Fig. 1
). If the clerk got one thing right, it was by accident. Her hair, a strand of which was found caught in the wax seal of one of her dictated letters, discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, was the color of his ink, black, as corroborated by an eyewitness at court. It was at court that Boulainvilliers first met the girl whose exploits would fill his correspondence, and he found her an “elegant” figure. She
“bears herself vigorously,” he wrote, “speaks little, shows an admirable prudence in her words. She has a light feminine voice, eats little, drinks little wine,” and “wears a cheerful countenance.” The Duke of Alençon, who, like others of Joan’s comrades-in-arms, “slept on the straw” with her and had occasion to see her disrobe, praised her young body as beautiful, quickly adding that he
“never had any carnal desire for her” and attributing the failure to Joan’s ability to banish the lust of any who might admire her, a power to which other men in her company bore witness.
“Although she was a young girl, beautiful and shapely,” her squire, Jean d’Aulon, said, and he “strong, young, and vigorous,” and though in the course of dressing her and caring for her wounds he had “often seen her breasts, and … her legs quite bare,” never was his “body moved to any carnal desire for her.”

That so many of Joan’s comrades described their inability to summon lust for her as a genuine miracle suggests that she was certainly not unattractive. Probably she was slender, given how universally those who had eaten with her commented on her abstemious habits. As she easily found men’s clothing to fit her while waiting for her own to be made, she might have been taller than most women of her time, perhaps as tall as five feet eight, the average height of a European man of the fifteenth century, although the more romantic accounts of her life tend to present her as petite. A physician who had occasion to examine Joan when she was a prisoner
“found that she was
stricta
, that is, narrow in the hips.” If she and her sister shared that boyish silhouette, it might have ended Catherine’s life, lost as it probably was in childbirth. Without doubt, Joan was an athletic girl, and a strong one. The plate armor she wore immediately upon receiving it, for whole
days at a time, weighed between forty and fifty pounds, enough that knights in training typically took weeks to accustom themselves to carrying the added weight.

As not even a written description of Joan’s face survives, imagination has had centuries of unobstructed influence. Shakespeare’s portrait of Joan in
Henry VI
, first produced in 1597, adroitly skirts the question of her physical appearance. “That beauty am I bless’d with which you see,” Joan tells the dauphin, is the gift of the Virgin, who “with those clear rays which she infused on me” transformed Joan’s appearance, gathering her into the radiance of her purity.
“Black and swart before” as the result of “sun’s parching heat” to which she “display’d [her] cheeks,” now she is fair-skinned, possessing the pallor then held to be beautiful, as only an aristocrat could afford to spend her life in the shade.

Given a blank canvas, many of the painters who have taken Joan as a subject summoned a comely blonde, more Valkyrie than French
paysanne
, just as they fabricated features for the equally unknown face of Jesus, every portrait not only homage but also projection. The hero must always be handsome and the heroine beautiful, attended by light, not dark, to reveal the perfection virtue demands. The black robe in which a witch could expect to be burned is almost without exception whitewashed for Joan,
^*3
more often depicted in her glory, a majestic figure clad in shining armor and mounted on a white horse. To avoid revealing the immodest outline of a woman’s legs, the painted Joan’s armor tends, like a bodice, to terminate at her waist; from it flows a skirt usually originating under an incongruous peplum fashioned of plate mail (
Fig. 2
). Held to a lower standard of modesty, Saint Michael, the leader of God’s armies, typically wears an abbreviated skirt to absent the problematic groin, a locus of pollution angels don’t carry.

To the years preceding the arrival of her voices, Joan’s testimony gives glancing attention. It was a period to which she attached little interest or sentiment, eclipsed as it was by the luster and excitement of what followed. Almost as featureless as her face, Joan’s childhood invites invention, and the fabled Joan tells us less about the real woman than she does the standard tropes of Christian narrative. In 1429, the anonymous cleric known as the Bourgeois of Paris recorded in his journal that when Joan
“was very small and looked after the sheep, birds would come from the woods and fields when she called them and eat bread in her lap as if they were tame.” Birds provide an enduring motif in apocryphal stories of Joan. From the chickens that crowed at her birth to the white dove seen flying from her heart as she died, their presence indicates that of the Holy Spirit, represented in all four Gospels as a dove descending from on high, a dove as old as Noah’s olive branch. Friedrich Schiller imagined Joan prophesying her own advent:
“A white dove will fly up, brave as an eagle, to attack these vultures that tear our land apart.” Anouilh, whose 1955 play about Joan is called
The Lark
, describes her as a bird
“in the skies of France, high over the heads of her soldiers, singing a joyous crazy song of courage. There she was, outlined against the sun … Every once in a while a lark does appear in [the] sky and then everything stupid and evil is wiped out.”

As a child, Jesus, too, had his apocryphal birds, stories of an early life spun between heaven and earth. The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas
describes Jesus
“making sparrows, then slapping his hands so that they may fly away.” John the Baptist recognized Jesus as the Messiah when he
“saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him” and heard “a voice from heaven saying ‘this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’ ”

Like virtually all mothers of the time, Isabelle taught her daughters the domestic skills expected of a woman, an apprenticeship that began as soon as a girl was able to fetch and carry. When asked if she
had learned any craft in her youth, Joan said that she had indeed, boasting that “in sewing and spinning I fear no woman.” As to the importance of those and all other “womanly duties,” there were, she added, “enough other women to do them.”

Enough wives and daughters to milk the cows, skim the cream, churn the butter, make the cheese, to carry grain to the mill, come home with flour, and bake bread. To feed the fowl, collect their eggs, and to slaughter, pluck, and butcher those destined for the pot. To sow, tend, and reap a kitchen garden, and fetch the water for it as well. To make and mend the family’s clothes, render soap from sheep tallow and with it do the washing, then sweep the floor, scrub the pots, collect wood, and lay a fire over which to cook. Enough to suckle and dandle babies, chase toddlers, and nurse whoever fell ill. To follow men into the fields when needed to plow, glean, or thresh. To swing a scythe through the hay, and toss and dry it too. To pick the hops, bring them home to dry, and with them make the beer. And next harvest the flax, winnow out its seeds, soak the stalks, dry and pound them with a mallet, and, at last, spin its fibers into thread. To shear sheep, wash and card their wool, and spin it into yarn.

There was no end to the duties that kept a woman cloistered in her home and under the dominion of her nearest male relation, whether father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or cousin. When something so little as an unwed girl’s poking her head out of a window might be interpreted as evidence of promiscuity, it was a man’s duty to protect a woman from her own nature, inherited from disobedient Eve, lest she fall prey to idleness, gossip, immodesty, or, worst of all, lust. But long before Joan could be married off or secured in a convent, she was shown a different life, whose singular course would not only free her from domestic servitude but also remove her from the company of her own sex and deliver her into an army of randy, blasphemous men whose age and rank—if not physical strength—far surpassed her own and who followed her with the same unquestioning faith she herself placed in God.

Asked why she rather than another had been chosen to accomplish divine will, Joan said, “It pleased God so to do by a simple maid, to drive back the king’s enemies.” It’s a misleading if not exactly disingenuous statement. True, she was not literate, but Joan was no simple
maid. Though she was uneducated, her mental acuity gave her the advantage over Sorbonne-trained theologians three times her age. When she was eleven, her father was appointed the local “dean,” testifying to both his character and his affluence, as villagers tended to select the most prosperous among them to represent their interests. As a dean, Jacques d’Arc received a stipend to perform administrative chores for Domrémy. He checked weights and measures to ensure equitable transactions on market day; he collected taxes, organized the watch, and served as a delegate in local disputes. That same year, 1423, he
“accompanied the mayors of Domrémy, Greux, and seven other ‘notable’ inhabitants of the two villages to pay protection money to the Lord of Commercy,” twenty-five miles to the north. Jacques’s responsibilities often delivered him into the company of other local functionaries, all of them gathered together as they wouldn’t be under any other circumstances, eagerly trading news from different parts of the realm. Travel, and travel alone, carried tidings from town to town along rutted roads that were muddy when they weren’t choked by dust stirred up by countless feet and hooves. Merchants with wagons and barrows, itinerant weavers carrying looms, clerics peddling indulgences, pack trains headed to market or castle, tinkers, tax collectors, self-scourging penitent pilgrims covered in ashes and lament: their voices all flowed together in an endless torrent of rumor and fact. At home, eating at table, sitting before the fire, talking with friends, Joan’s father would have mentioned the names of the men to whom her voices would direct her and from whom she would seek help in making her way to the French court.

Joan was far from the popular conception of her as
“the daughter of a shepherd, who herself followed a flock of sheep,” as the prominent theologian Heinrich von Gorkum described her, echoing his equally respected colleague Jean Dupuy’s description of Joan as a
“young girl who had only watched over animals.” Heinrich and Jean were contemporaries of Joan’s and wrote about her exploits as they unfolded. Like the Bourgeois of Paris, they were educated, worldly, and no more immune to the urge to shape Joan according to the conventions of hagiography than was the chatty courtier Boulainvilliers. As was true in most small towns, herding was a communal responsibility in Domrémy, and Joan’s legendary career as shepherdess was limited to taking
her turn, along with all the other children, keeping an eye on the villagers’ sheep while doing other chores. Usually, Joan brought her spindle with her. The townsfolk had an established routine to secure their livestock when under threat of looters whose imminence made driving their herds to another town impossible. Jacques d’Arc and another townsman, Jean Biget, had led a delegation to lease a small island (long since washed away) in the nearby Meuse from its absentee owner, the Lord of Bourlémont. In so shallow a river, it wasn’t the island itself that the citizens of Domrémy wanted but the abandoned fortress on land not even a quarter mile away from the village. The stronghold provided a ready corral, and when the alarm was raised, all the animals were driven across the shallows and onto the island, their owners running behind them. By the time it was safe for them to return to their homes, the villagers would find them plundered, if not burned entirely, a catastrophe that Joan’s family was spared, living as they did in a stone house.