Joan of Arc (7 page)

The effect that Joan had on the weak and vacillating Charles is a kind of metaphor for her effect on the whole kingdom of France. Like its leader, the realm was demoralized, depressed, and divided against itself. No one had any ideas about how to make anything better; a stagnating and diminishing warfare had sapped people's resolve, their hope and faith. Suddenly, a young, brash creature appeared from the countryside. Her way had been prepared by prophecy: She might well be the virgin whose saving of them had been multiply foretold. She had no doubts, no hesitations. They couldn't find anything to do; therefore, they had nothing to lose. Why not take a chance on her? At least she had an appetite for action.

We can imagine her entering the court like an arrow shot from a doorway, focusing the attention of the bored, dispirited, and purposeless courtiers. All eyes are on the arrow's landing point, waiting for the second when the steel tip pierces the stone surface of the ancient wall, the final moment when the feathered end quivers; then the stillness, until the crowd feels that it can again draw breath.

Quite quickly, Joan seemed to have aroused in Charles an impulse to obey her. She used this in a curious ritual in which she had Charles relinquish the kingdom of France to her.

This act shows Joan's highly developed understanding of symbolic action and its power. She is expressing a complex and multifaceted idea: She has power over Charles, but it comes from God, and it is God moving through her who will enable the actions that must, if they are going to be effectual in this world, come from the king. She establishes a tripartite relationship involving herself, the king, and God, with God the fixed point. All things return to the fixed point, God, in the face of whom the relative power difference between king and commoner grow insignificant.

However inspired Charles may have been by Joan's presence, he was not going to provide her with an army and the resources to keep it going without the support of the Church. He insisted that before he send Joan to Orléans, she be examined by a group of clergymen in order to make sure that her mission was, as she claimed, divinely inspired.

The examining body was made up of seventeen or eighteen members, including the archbishop of Rheims, two other bishops, and the confessors of the king and queen. The records of this interrogation are lost, and the loss marks an important gap in our knowledge of Joan. She was proud, however, of her ability to deal with the learned doctors with equanimity, for she repeatedly suggested at her later trial that her judges refer to the record of Poitiers and stop wasting her time. She was undaunted, even at that first trial, by the gap between the judges' learning and her own. She later bragged that she had said in answer to the judges, “There is more in Our Lord's books than your own,” and when she was asked if she believed in God, she said, “Yes, better than you.”
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It is a sign of the temper of the times that one of the decisive factors in the clerics' decision to approve Joan was their sense that she was the fulfillment of the prophecy that a virgin would come to save France. Fifteenth-century Church doctors had no trouble placing prophecy alongside testimony garnered through legal investigation, and weighing both.

After she had passed the examination by the learned clerks at Poitiers, Joan went to Tours, where she was given a retinue and had a suit of armor made for her. This delighted her; she was always excited by the accoutrements of knighthood, or of war. At Tours, she was offered a sword, but insisted that the one she needed could be found at St. Catherine's Church at Fierbois. She said, should the messengers dig behind the altar, they would find a sword concealed there. The priests who were sent on this errand did what they were told and found the sword. When they rubbed it, the rust that had encrusted it immediately fell off, and it was discovered that the sword had five crosses on the hilt and was imprinted with fleurs-de-lis.

Joan claimed that she had never seen the sword and that she was told of its existence by her voices. She had, however, spent a lot of time in the church while she was waiting for a response to her letter to the king at Chinon. Although it is possible that she didn't know of the sword's existence on a conscious level, it is certainly possible that at least unconsciously she had known about it from stories she had heard and forgotten. What is important is Joan's comprehension of the symbolic power of the sword and its method of discovery. She was understood to have prophetic gifts, and the sword was a symbol of her approval by God. Later, it would be understood by the English as a sign of her demonic power.

At Tours, the king also provided payment for the standard she had ordered. This standard became the most famous of her props; the design for the banner was given to her by her voices. The background was white; there was an image of the Trinity, flanked by two angels. It was made of thin linen, and the fabric was embossed with lilies. On the reverse of the banner was an azure shield, supported by two angels, bearing a white dove. The dove held a scroll in its beak, and on the scroll were the words
“de par le Roi de
Ciel”
(of the party of the King of Heaven). These words referred to her divine mandate.

She was preparing for her display, and the preparation called up the part of her genius that brilliantly understood the use of symbols. A few weeks earlier she had appeared before Baudricourt in the traditional red dress of a peasant girl; that dress had been replaced by men's clothing and would not be seen again. But now she would have armor made for her, and she was given a retinue worthy of a prince. She was in command of men whom, for most of her life, she would not have thought of speaking to. Jean d'Aulon was appointed master of her household. Did it seem remarkable to her that she would have a household, to say nothing of one with a master? He would accompany Joan until her capture. She chose a confessor who would also be with her until she was imprisoned, a mendicant friar named Jean Pasquerel, who had met Joan's mother on a pilgrimage.

She set off from Chinon with a long train of horsemen, men-at-arms, wagons, four hundred head of cattle, and priests in front intoning the Veni Creator Spiritus. Her whole retinue consisted of four thousand men. They encamped at the town of Blois, near Orléans. Joan was much concerned with the spiritual state of her soldiers. She insisted that they confess and receive communion. She lectured them, not only on the state of their souls, but on the quality of their language. She forbade them camp followers. They slept in the field the first night, and Joan awoke bruised and weary, unused to the weight of her armor.

CHAPTER III

TRIUMPHANT IN BATTLE, THE KING'S ANOINTER

JOAN HAD IMAGINED that she would ride into Orléans and immediately engage in battle with the English. But the commanders in charge had other plans. She may have thought of herself as a
chef de guerre,
but they thought of her as a mascot, someone who would ride with them, inspire the troops and the citizens, and then, happy to do what she was told by her olders and betters, fall into line. With this in mind, they tricked Joan, who had not paid attention to anything like maps and plans—believing in the strength of her mission and the good faith of her companions-at-arms. Her naïveté is astonishing, but it makes her lack of experience more real, and perhaps justifies some of the professional soldiers' lack of faith in her.

The trick was this: Joan was brought to the south side of the Loire, whereas the English were encamped on the north side. The Bastard of Orléans, who was in charge of the besieged town, had no confidence that Joan's army was strong enough to confront the English. Instead, he wanted to use Joan's forces, not to fight, but to accompany the food and supplies that would relieve the besieged citizens. His plan was to send boats to the side of the river where Joan was, fill them with supplies, and have them cross the river so that they could enter the one gate of the city that was still open. This plan made great practical sense; the populace could not withstand the siege if it was starving.

We can only guess why the Bastard of Orléans and the other captains didn't tell Joan their plans. Perhaps they didn't take her seriously enough to include her in their councils, or perhaps they understood the intransigence of her personality and knew she'd be dissatisfied with such an undramatic beginning to her military life. Perhaps, when the Bastard of Orléans came across the river to greet Joan, he thought he would be meeting “La Pucelle,” a young woman whom he could quickly talk around. Instead, he encountered a furious and frustrated captain with ideas of her own and no inclination to tractability.

The Bastard of Orléans, also known as Dunois, was the illegitimate but acknowledged son of the duke of Orléans, who was in captivity in England. He was in charge of the city and had been interested in Joan since her arrival at Chinon; he'd sent a party there to get the sense of her. It was a mark of his courtesy that he came across the river to Blois to greet her personally.

Joan's initial encounter with Dunois is a comic scene that illuminates her impetuous, hubristic nature. She marched up to him and told him that she had counsel that was of far greater importance than his, and that if he ever did anything like that trick to her again, she'd have his head cut off. “I believe you,” he replied. Joan had no hesitation venting her rage in the most aggressive and disrespectful way possible to a man whose blood was at least one-half royal, to the son of her hero (the poetic duke of Orléans), and the ruler of the town she had not yet even seen. But he seems to have shown no resentment of her treatment of him; he always handled her with tact and generosity, and he valued and respected her consistently after their rocky overture.

The city of Orléans is located eighty miles south of Paris on the northern, or right, bank of the Loire. It is currently known as the Newark of France. But in the fifteenth century, its position on the Loire made it of great economic and geographical importance, and the English reckoned that if they could control Orléans they would have control of the surrounding Loire area.

In 1429, Orléans was a city of thirty thousand inhabitants. It was heavily fortified with a complete wall upon which twenty-one cannons were mounted. There were several barred gates guarded with towers and moats and other fortifications outside the walls: Once inside the walls and gates of the city, the inhabitants were safe from their invaders. The English, understanding this, and having failed to pierce the walls with their cannon, decided to capture Orléans through a prolonged siege. When Joan appeared on the scene in April of 1429, the town had been under siege for six months. Both sides seemed hypnotized to the point of paralysis. The English were bogged down because they had not been given the troops or supplies to mount the kind of attack they considered necessary; the French because they were imprisoned in their city.

Dunois convinced Joan that it was necessary for her men to accompany the provisions into Orléans. But even after she agreed to fall in with his plan, there was another problem. The boats were upstream, and the wind prevented them from sailing down to Orléans. It was at this point that Dunois witnessed one of Joan's most important miracles. She told him not to worry about the wind. As soon as she said this, the direction of the wind changed, allowing the boats to proceed.

Joan responded to this nonchalantly: She'd told Dunois not to worry, and she'd meant what she said. Dunois, however, was amazed, and from that time on his faith in Joan was ardent. He persuaded her to cross the river and enter the city with him, leaving her army behind. She was reluctant—she knew the men were eager for battle; but she agreed. They sent the main army back to Blois, taking with them only a task force from the Orléans garrison. Mounted on a white horse, her banner and pennants streaming, Joan triumphantly entered the Burgoyne gate of Orléans at 1 P.M. on April 29.
The Journal of the Siege of Orléans,
an anonymous contemporary chronicle, breathlessly reports the event:

The press of the crowd was so great that one of the torch-bearers set Joan's pennant aflame. She exhibited extraordinary horsemanship, controlling her terrified horse and putting out the fire. The journal remarks, “She put out the fire as easily as if she had long war expertise; the men at arms considered this a great marvel.”
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