Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (8 page)

A statue of another of the Holy Helpers, Saint Margaret of Antioch, stood just next door to Joan’s family home, in the little church of Saint-Rémy. The second of Joan’s heavenly guides, she was a daughter of royalty as well, if in a different sphere. Her father was a pagan priest who disowned her when she converted to Christianity and vowed to remain a virgin; she escaped his house disguised as a man. A Roman governor tried to make Margaret his wife at the cost of her faith, but she renounced him instead, defying a series of tortures by means of miracles, the most remarkable of which was her escaping from inside the dragon that swallowed her by using her cross to rake the inside of the beast’s stomach until it vomited her back up. Eventually, Margaret’s petitions went unanswered, or perhaps she saw more clearly what lay on the other side of mortal life and gave it
up. Said to have been martyred in 304, she was declared apocryphal in 494, a finding that had no impact on her popularity or the reality accorded her by the faithful.

For Joan, as much as it had for the virgin martyrs of the early Church, being good meant being chaste, in mind and spirit as well as in body. Among the three acceptable modes of existence for a woman—virgin, wife, and widow—only a virgin escaped the pollution inherent to her sex. Three “orders of merit” clarified their relative worth:
“Virgins would be rewarded a hundred times their deserts; widows sixty times; and wives thirty times.” Within each of the three modes,
“an explosion of female categories” betrayed a Linnaean determination to impose order on the gender held to be more primitive, lacking the moral restraint and cerebral capacity of men.
Sexually immature girls, adolescents ready for marriage, married women, spinsters, late marriers, women past procreating: rankings observed from the perspective of something like animal husbandry were each subdivided according to a social hierarchy that reached from royalty all the way down through minor aristocrats, nuns, servants, and chicken dealers—prostitutes not worthy of inclusion, even in a group so universally disdained.

“Art thou not formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness? Shalt thou not be food for worms?” a medieval cleric ranted. Scholars of the period mined the classics for validation of the early Church’s hostility toward women, which found an ideal target in menstrual blood, both tangible evidence and ready symbol of women’s uncleanness. The
“foul substance was blamed for preventing seeds from germinating, for turning grape mash bitter, for killing herbs, for causing trees to shed their fruit, for rusting iron and blackening brass, for giving dogs rabies.”
Aristotle taught that the gaze of a menstruating woman was so impure it would darken a mirror, stealing light from the other side of the glass, a conclusion rationalized by Galenic theories of harmful vapors, such as those that issued from menopausal women “because various excess humors no longer eliminated by menstruation now exited through the eyes.” Tertullian memorably described a woman as
“a temple built over a sewer,” summoning Christ’s image of
“whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”

But Joan, her squire reported, didn’t menstruate. During all the months that he dressed and served her, Jean d’Aulon saw no evidence she was afflicted by the “female malady.”
“In her, the life of the spirit dominated, absorbed the lower life, and held in check its vulgar infirmities,” Michelet wrote. “Body and soul she was granted the heavenly grace of remaining a child.” Perhaps the fervor of her vow of chastity was enough to forestall menarche indefinitely. Perhaps the strain of warfare and imprisonment suppressed what would have been her natural reproductive cycle. The reason is irrelevant to the story. In memory, and then in biography and history, Joan would remain forever on the cusp of womanhood, not only chaste, but yet to fall under Eve’s shadow or bear her stain.

Friends noted Joan’s withdrawal from their company and must have wondered at her new solitary life. Perhaps they felt sorry for her, a girl too pious to have fun, but they’d never been visited by angels or shown the glories of paradise. They didn’t know Joan had traded their company for a rapture that consumed her several times each day, and never more dependably than when she was in the woods and far from their company.

“I was only born the day you first spoke to me,” Anouilh’s Joan says to her voices, dismissing not only the childhood that hagiographers were so eager to fill with birdsong but the very notion of her ever having existed outside her vocation. “My life only began on the day you told me what I must do, my sword in hand.”

Had Joan’s conduct not been that of an exemplary Christian before the visitation, now her virtue was so intense it demanded her separation from earthly pastimes. As she herself put it, “Since I learned that I must come to France, I had taken as little part as possible in games or dancing.” (Here and elsewhere in the trial transcript, Joan’s use of “France” derives from the confusion inspired by Domrémy’s ambiguous position on the border.)

“She gave alms gladly and had the poor of the village gathered together, and she wanted to sleep beside the hearth and to let them lie in her bed,” testified Isabellette, an older girl who remained in Domrémy
and married a farmer there. “One never saw her hanging about the streets, but she stayed in church to pray. She did not dance, and often we other young people used to notice that and talk about it. She was always working and spinning and digging the ground with her father,” Isabellette testified for the nullification.

So devout she inspired gossip, Joan was derided as well.
“She was deeply devoted to God and the Blessed Virgin,” Colin, a childhood friend, remembered, “so much so that some other lads and I—for I was young then—used to tease her.” One of those lads, Jean Waterin, said the same.
“I and the others made fun of her,” he admitted.

“I say my prayers, yes, Joan,” Hauviette chides her friend in Péguy’s
The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
, “but you, you never leave off saying them, you say them all the time, you say them at everyone of those crosses by the roadside, the church isn’t enough for you. The crosses by the road have never had so much wear … You are our friend, but you’ll never be like we are.”

If Joan hadn’t been a solitary soul before, she soon became one, her vision so firmly fixed on the glories and terrors of her vocation that she was immune to any pressure to conform to her peers’ expectations, unaffected by censure from any mortal source.
“She liked going to church and went often,” her friend Mengette said. Joan confessed so frequently that the vicar commented on it, and others remembered seeing her on her knees at every opportunity. “She gave alms out of her father’s goods, and she was so good and simple and pious that the other girls and I used to tell her that she was too pious.” And, Mengette added, she was industrious. “She liked working and undertook all sorts of jobs.”

She was holier, by far, than they, her only sin to evade chores so she could pray in the woods or visit a chapel
“when her parents thought she was at the plough, in the fields, or somewhere else,” her godfather Jean Moreau testified.

“When I was in the woods I easily heard the voices come to me,” she told the examiner.

In fact, the dialogue between Joan and her voices was growing ever more urgent. Giving alms and devotedly caring for the sick were not enough for God, nor was a vow to remain a virgin for as long as he wanted. “Joan, Child of God,” her voices called her, and they told
her it would soon be time to leave her home and set out on a holy quest. And not only Joan was given presentiments of her leaving. “My mother told me several times that while I was still at home my father said he had dreamed of my going away with soldiers,” Joan testified, “and my parents took great care to keep me safely.”

Like most men of his era, Jacques d’Arc held dreams to be oracular and prophetic, and when he dreamed more than once that his younger daughter went off with men-at-arms at a time when the only women to do so were prostitutes, he received it as not only a dire warning but also a call to action.

“If I thought this thing would happen which I have dreamed about my daughter,” Jacques said to his sons, “I should want you to drown her; and if you would not, I would drown her myself.”

“They held me in great subjection,” Joan testified.

“You were crying out to someone,” Joan’s father says in
The Lark
, when he catches her praying aloud. “The bastard fled before I could catch him. Who was it? Who was it? Answer me. Answer me or I’ll beat you to salt marsh.”

“I was talking to the Blessed Saint Michael.”

Jacques strikes Joan. “That will teach you to lie to your father,” he says. “You want to start whoring like the others. Well, you can tell your Blessed Saint Michael that if I catch you together I’ll plunge my pitchfork into his belly and strangle you with my bare hands for the filthy rutting cat you are.”

If Jacques d’Arc’s recurring nightmare didn’t prove him clairvoyant, it was disturbing enough that her family remembered and recounted something that delineated a significant conflict between Joan and her father. Years after the fact, when spies were plundering the memories of Joan’s childhood friends and neighbors, they stumbled across what storytellers preserved not only for its drama but because it provides an element the virgin martyr’s plot requires: a controlling father who intends to stymie her vocation, a forced betrayal typically the first obstacle to her glory. Chaste as she was, some aspect of Joan’s behavior must have communicated insubordination, enough to eventually inspire Jacques’s efforts to let another man take a turn at containing her. But, as Joan’s father would discover, it’s not easy to marry off a daughter who has given herself to God.

History is rarely kind to a heroine’s antagonist, and Jacques d’Arc’s misreading of his daughter’s character amounted to perversion. She wouldn’t follow an army but lead one, and the power she claimed would rest on her virginity, the most profound and closely guarded aspect of her identity, the one that provided the name with which she christened her reborn self: La Pucelle, the Maid, derived from the Latin
puella
, a girl yet to enter womanhood.

^*1
Derived from
Lotharingia
, Lorraine was one of the three territorial divisions of the Carolingian Empire, formed in AD 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III.

^*2
The name given a one-livre coin, minted between 1360 and 1641. Livre, from Latin
libra
, was a measure of weight, like the English pound.

^*3
That exception is a fifteenth-century mural within the chapel of Notre-Dame de Bermont, a mile north of Domrémy. In it, a black-robed—and blond-haired—Joan awaits execution.

^*4
The most recent was Vatican II, 1962–65.

^*5
The fourteen are Agathius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Denis, Erasmus, Eustace, George, Giles (the only of the fourteen who was not martyred), Margaret of Antioch, Pantaleon, and Vitus.

When Joan was fifteen, her father was summoned to Vaucouleurs, some twelve miles north of Domrémy, to meet with the town’s captain, Robert de Baudricourt, about the
“escalating tensions between the warring factions.” Aside from Mont Saint-Michel, and Tournai, both hundreds of miles to the west, Vaucouleurs was the single town north of the Loire to remain in France’s possession, testimony to Baudricourt’s grit and the tenacity of the men stationed in the garrison he oversaw. It was 1427, and Joan’s voices were speaking no longer of virginity but of battle. She knew she was the chosen one and that there was, as she said, “no one on earth, be he king, or duke, or the King of Scotland’s daughter, or anyone else, who can restore the kingdom of France.” The “King of Scotland” wasn’t a random allusion. Reflexively hostile toward England, Scotland was France’s ally, and the king of the Scots’ daughter had recently been betrothed to the dauphin’s son Louis, who was not yet four years old. Only a girl who followed dynastic politics would have known of such a development, and only Joan, her voices made clear, could lead the dauphin’s army to victory and him to his coronation at Reims, where all French kings were made.