Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (9 page)

“She was not so much warned by the oracle of the gods above,” Alain Chartier recorded in his
Epistola de Puella
of 1429, “as threatened with a very harsh punishment unless she went swiftly to the King.” Alain Chartier, of no relation to Jean Chartier, Charles VII’s secretary, was one of France’s two great poets of the era—the other was Christine de Pizan—and is unusual in identifying Joan’s vocation as the product of divine coercion, perhaps intending to feminize his subject by ignoring a fervor satisfied only by making war. Similarly, Schiller’s Joan bemoans her fate.
“A terrible contract binds me to the spirit-world, powerful, invulnerable, and enjoins me to put to the sword and slaughter every living thing sent fatally against me by the god of battles.”

But more than a few little girls must have imagined themselves as warriors striding into tales of fantastic chivalry, girls who dreamed of heroism—and martyrdom—for the Church, dreamed of destinies no man would grant them the authority to fulfill. The limited media of medieval Europe meant that very few trouvères, or writers of chansons de geste, achieved the popularity, and thus the cultural sway, of the twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes, who enriched and enlarged the Arthurian cycle, bringing in ancient Celtic heroes, the theme of the Holy Grail, and Camelot as Arthur’s capital. The extraordinary number of surviving copies of works translated and adapted throughout Europe, volumes replicated and illustrated by hand, proves the extent to which Chrétien de Troyes’s vision saturated late medieval society.
Érec et Énide
,
Cligès
,
Lancelot
,
Yvain
, and
Perceval
: in each the knight-errant is the central character. He is courteous, generous, and of noble birth, a man who values his honor over his life and whose exploits are not confined to tournaments and warfare, but include fairy-tale elements like dragons, giants, and enchanted castles. The medieval imagination was crowded with the conventions of a literature not only written in the vernacular but also read and performed aloud, as were Easter passion plays and other liturgical productions. Every child knew heroism came in the form of a knight whose perfect virtue found its reflection in that of his lady, increasingly conflated with the Virgin Mary. As the medievalist Frances Gies observed,
“The terms in which earthly women were flattered in troubadour poems were often borrowed—daringly—from those used to praise the Virgin Mary: the troubadour ‘worshipped’ his lady, there was ‘no woman like her.’ ” Even in satire, Don Quixote’s romantic delusions are centered on his peerless Dulcinea, so heavenly as to be forever out of reach.

Chansons de geste stimulated the cult surrounding the Virgin, whose popularity ascended steeply during the Middle Ages, perpetuated not so much by the Gospels’ handful of references as by an extensive pseudepigrapha,
^*1
noncanonical texts that gathered miracles
and myths from a growing oral culture about the life of Mary, whom the theologian Jaroslav Pelikan stresses was
“completely human in her origin, like all other human beings. Yet because she had been chosen by God to be the Theotokos [Greek, for Mother of God], her completely human nature had been transfigured.” Virginity was the key to Mary’s transfiguration, as it was for that of Joan, who described her vocation in terms familiar from
The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary
(today attributed to a ninth-century Carolingian scholar, Paschasius Radbertus).
“Daily was she visited by angels,” the gospel read, “daily did she enjoy a divine vision, which preserved her from all evil, and made her to abound in all good. And so she reached her fourteenth year.”

Every Saturday, Joan went to Notre-Dame de Bermont, a hilltop shrine two miles north of Domrémy that was consecrated to the Virgin Mary, her devotion inspiring Schiller to replace bellicose Saint Michael as the bearer of Joan’s vocation with an apparition of the Virgin, who, Joan says,
“appeared in front of me, carrying a sword and a flag, but dressed in every other way like a shepherdess.” When Joan protests she has no abilities as a warrior, the Holy Mother tells her, “a virgin without stain can accomplish all the good deeds in the world, if she withstands the love that’s
of
the world. Only look at me. I was like you, a chaste maid, yet I gave birth to the Lord, the Lord Divine; I am myself divine!”

“And then,” Schiller’s Joan says, “she touched my eyelids, and when I looked up, the heavens were full of angels … And as she spoke, the shepherdess’s dress fell away from her, and she stood there, clad in the brightness of a thousand suns, the golden clouds lifted her up, slowly taking her from my sight, to Paradise.”

Sword and flag notwithstanding, Mary’s shepherdess costume is warning enough that Schiller’s vision is romantic, reaching to feminize Joan, whose chastity did not mean she identified with passive divinity any more than she fantasized about giving birth to a messiah. She saw that role as her own. Probably, it was the remoteness of the shrine that attracted Joan more than its being consecrated to the Virgin, whom she mentions seldom and never with the fervor reserved for Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. In the future, she wouldn’t hesitate to seize a military advantage on the Festival of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, attacking Paris while its citizens were occupied by Masses and processions in the Virgin’s honor. “Pass on,” she said to the examiner who pressed her to admit the transgression, responding with the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Joan didn’t speak of whom the shrine paid tribute to, only of the little pilgrimage required to reach it. The climb from Joan’s house to the chapel is much the same today as it was when she made it, lovely in every season and especially so in spring, through high pastures divided by streams of bloodred poppies and along paths lined with a froth of Queen Anne’s lace, and finally into the forest, carpeted in places with tiny strawberries. She carried a few sous
^*2
for a candle to light, as well as the flowers she’d picked on her way, and her angels kept her company. They assured her, she testified, that “God would clear a road for me to go to the lord Dauphin.”

That road, however, was not immediately apparent. Joan’s youth and gender held her captive to the supervision of any and every adult in Domrémy, and it was the spring of 1428, when Joan was sixteen, before she found a means of making her way to Robert de Baudricourt herself—for it was Sir Robert whom her voices told her to ask for assistance. Sir Robert, as Joan knew, had access to the dauphin, and according to her voices he “would give me men-at-arms” to accompany her west from the little pocket of resistance represented by the Duchy of Bar, which included Domrémy and Vaucouleurs, and through enemy territory to Chinon, where she would find the dauphin Charles.

Joan could have walked the twelve miles to Vaucouleurs, she could have started in the morning and arrived before noon, but there was little point in running away when she couldn’t successfully navigate the world of men by herself. Both a girl and a stranger in a realm that allowed women no autonomy, she needed a man to provide her an introduction to the captain. But who? Willing as Joan was, she hadn’t any idea how to accomplish what God asked of her. She should ask her uncle Durand for help, her voices said. At forty, Joan’s mother’s cousin’s husband, Durand Laxart, was old enough to be Joan’s uncle, and so she called him by that term of endearment and respect. But as
intimate as the two families were, they lived ten miles apart, and Joan had to wait for an opportunity to visit her uncle without alerting her father to a plan that could only further harden his heart against her.

By now Joan had determined that to align herself with God’s will required the occasional earthly deceit and had reconciled herself to either hiding the truth or, when necessary, lying outright. “My voices would have been glad for me to tell them,” she said of her parents, “had it not been for the difficulties they would have raised had I done so. For my part, I would not have told them for anything.” Faith didn’t allow Joan the luxury of mortal attachment. God claimed her devotion as absolutely as her voices directed her actions. “If I had had a hundred parents,” she said to the examiner who had called attention to her failure of filial responsibility, “I would have gone nevertheless.” She, like her judges, remembered Jesus’s admonition to his would-be followers:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple … Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”

“He’d been a good son to his father and mother, until the day he began his real task,” Péguy’s Joan says of Jesus. “Everybody was very fond of him … until the day he began his real task.”

Laxart, a farmer who lived in the hamlet of Burey, just outside Vaucouleurs, was as rough in dress and manner as any peasant and equally reluctant to approach a member of the aristocracy. Joan might well have been, as he believed her to be, a
“well-behaved, pious, and patient” hard worker who “confessed gladly” and went to church often, but what man of his station would agree to escort even such a paragon of virtue to one of the dauphin’s captains, especially a paragon with so impudent a request?

A week of Joan’s company taught Laxart how obdurate was her will.
“Was it not said that France would be ruined through a woman, and afterward restored by a virgin?” Joan asked him. She was that prophesied virgin, she told her uncle, she was La Pucelle, and she told the examiner she had no choice but to go. Saints Catherine and
Margaret spoke of it continuously. “The voices told me I must leave and go to France.” She could no longer stay where she was. “They said I was to go to the Dauphin, to have him crowned.” As astounding as Joan’s announcement was, Laxart received it as would a man typical of his time and place, who understood the world as subject to visits from God’s emissaries, as well as of course from those of Satan. Joan was possessed, that was clear, but Laxart knew Joan, and he knew her goodness too well to imagine she might be possessed by a demon.

On May 13, 1428, Laxart brought Joan to Robert de Baudricourt, who, once he understood he was being asked to deliver a delusional peasant girl to the dauphin, suggested Laxart
“give her a good slapping and take her back to her father.” Joan’s father was, of course, someone Baudricourt saw routinely, a man who had been made a village dean for his clear reason and good sense. Upon first hearing of Joan’s mission, the captain must have taken pause at the idea of Jacques d’Arc having so mad a daughter—just as he would stop and wonder at every other thing he’d learn about her. For, by the following summer, all of Europe would know about the virgin warrior who had emerged from a remote village in Lorraine. One day she was a shepherdess, the next a knight on a charger. God’s finger had brushed the earth, and no one, no matter his faith or lack thereof, could turn away from the spectacle. Some would say she was a witch, of course, and the finger Satan’s. But as far as Baudricourt was concerned, for now Joan was no more than Jacques d’Arc’s willful hoyden of a daughter, far afield from hearth and home, where she belonged, and a ready candidate for marriage and children—whatever it took to keep her tied down and too busy to think up such drivel.

Aside from Laxart, the only eyewitness on record to describe Joan’s first confrontation with Sir Robert was Bertrand de Poulengy, a squire, or apprentice knight, stationed in Vaucouleurs. Immediately convinced of Joan’s sanctity, Poulengy became a friend of her parents and often visited their home in the years after Joan’s death.
“I saw her there, talking to Robert de Baudricourt,” to whom she said she had come “on behalf of her Lord, to ask him to send word to the Dauphin that … the Lord would send him help before mid-Lent.”

Who, Sir Robert wanted to know, was this Lord?

“The King of Heaven,” Joan said, and she explained that France
belonged not to any mortal ruler but to God, who wished to entrust it to Charles and who “promised that the Dauphin would be made king … and that she herself would lead him to be anointed.”

Sir Robert laughed. He had another idea. Why not, he said, “hand her over to the pleasure of his soldiers” instead? That was one way to disarm a presumptive virgin.

The Lark
introduces Baudricourt as predator rather than procurer. After offering to
“kick [her] in the place where it will do the most good,” the captain negotiated terms for himself rather than his men, explaining his “rate of exchange” to the girl he called an “infernal nuisance” and “horrible mosquito.” She could have her horse, man’s clothes, and an escort, as long as he got what he wanted in recompense for his “benevolence.”
“The village girls have told you all about it, haven’t they?” he asks Joan.

Of the confrontation, Jean Chartier, the royal historiographer from 1437 to 1450, said
“they only laughed and mocked her for all this.”