Joan of Arc (12 page)

What can they have made of it? Perhaps they received it with a mixture of outrage and disbelief that accounts for their failing to respond to it at all. After the incident of the miracle of the wind changing, when Joan had the confidence of Dunois and his men and her spirits were high, she was frustrated by the English silence and shouted her challenge at them over the ramparts. They shouted back; there was a war of words during which she was called a “cowgirl.”

After she had been taken into Dunois's confidence at Orléans and heard the whole of his strategic plan (which she approved), still frustrated with the English nonresponsiveness, she fired a message, wrapped in a crossbow bolt, into the bastille of Les Tourelles. It said, “Abandon your bastilles, and return to your own land, for if you do not, I shall make such a hahay for you that it will never be forgotten: so I write to you—and I shall not write again. Signed: Jhesu-Maria. Joan the Maid.”

Upon receiving it, an Englishman shouted, “Here is the latest news from the whore of Armagnac.” Hearing this, Joan burst into tears. Here we see an instance of a surprising conjunction: Often, like an overtired child, Joan's boastfulness collapses into tears. This collapse is some indication of her equivocal relationship to being a warrior: She challenges her enemies aggressively, then weeps when they are less than polite. Often the sight of her enemies suffering makes her cry. These two tendencies—boastfulnessand tearfulness—come together in a story about Joan and the English captain Glasdale.

Glasdale was one of the Englishmen who had responded to Joan's challenges by calling her a whore. When he was trying to escape from Joan's attack of Les Tourelles, she screamed after him, “Clasdas, Clasdas, surrender to the king of heaven! You called me a whore, but I am sorry for your soul and your men's.”
¹⁰
Echoing the incident with the guard at Chinon, the drawbridge over which Glasdale and his men were escaping collapsed, and they fell into the river and drowned. Joan's chaplain reported that she wept.

Joan's tears, rather than weakening her, as they have done modern women, seem to underscore her innocence; they become the objective correlative of her virginity; they are a physical manifestation of her specialness. They prove she's still a girl. Perhaps they cleanse the stain of her boastfulness. Girls aren't supposed to brag; they are supposed to cry. Joan's boastfulness and tears, like the outline of her breasts beneath her armor, serve to mark the inescapable duality of her position.

From the beginning, despite the outrageousness of her plans, Joan was good at finding men to help her. First there was her godfather, Durand Laxault, then Baudricourt, and the two who joined her at Vaucouleurs, Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Pouligny. There is her mysterious connection with Gilles de Rais, Bluebeard, who joined her at Chinon but dropped out of her life after the coronation. But it was with three soldiers that she made the most satisfying of her friendships. All three—La Hire, Alençon, and Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans—shared her qualities of physical courage, daring, and rashness.

We have seen how Dunois treated Joan with a mix of tact and awe. But their relationship remained professional. Joan's feelings for Alençon were much warmer.

Jean, duke of Alençon, was one of Joan's earliest supporters at Chinon. Joan seems to have been drawn to him from the first. He elicited in her what Edward Lucie-Smith calls her strain of “boastful graciousness.” Soon after meeting him, she began showing off for him; she wanted him to know how good she was on horseback and with a lance. He was impressed, like an athletic boy finding out that the girl next door has a good curveball. Like Joan, he had an appetite for war and for adventure, and he allied himself with her very soon after meeting her.

She enjoyed his company, and that of his wife, who was the daughter of her great hero Charles, duke of Orléans. The duchess was worried that her husband would be in danger, having just been released from five years in an English prison. Joan promised the pretty royal wife that her pretty royal husband—Joan always called him her
“beau duc”
—would be kept safe. And indeed she did, in a way that had aspects of magic to it, later save his life.

Joan had no hesitation or unease at being in the company of this young royal couple. And they, it seems, had no hesitation in accepting her. It is pleasant to imagine this healthy young threesome, eating, walking, joking; with Alençon and his wife, we get a rare glimpse of Joan at ease, a pal, with nothing at stake, relaxing with people who like her.

Her relationship with the soldier of fortune La Hire evokes another kind of glamour. La Hire was given his name either because of his legendary anger (as in Ire) or because he was lamed by a chimneypiece that fell upon him when he was sleeping. He was well known for his ruthless ferocity, his violent temper, his foul mouth, and his laxity in religious observation.

Joan and La Hire were together at Orléans, and in her company he never swore. Once, before he met Joan, when told he had to confess before a battle, he said there was no time, it was essential to attack the enemy promptly. He was prepared to confess simply that he had done “all that men of war were accustomed to do.” The chaplain was forced to accept this and gave the absolution required. His penitent thereupon prayed: “God I pray thee that thou wilt do for La Hire as much as thou would wish La Hire to do for thee, if he were God, and thou werst La Hire.”
¹¹
When he returned to Chinon after the disastrous Battle of the Herrings (shortly before Joan's entry onto the scene), he found Charles trying to relieve his depression with feasts and leisure. He said to the king, “Sire, I never saw a prince who more joyously lost what was his than you.” Although he was a tough campaigner, he was also a dandy; he had made for himself a scarlet cloak covered over with little silver bells, which would announce his movements with their music.
¹²

Joan's connection with La Hire put her on the side of war-loving soldiers; the one with Alençon and Orléans tied her to the party of the princes of the blood. This put her in radical opposition to the king's cash cow and chief adviser, de la Trémoille, and weakened her bond with Charles and with the group pressing for a diplomatic, rather than a military, solution to the conflicts with both England and Burgundy. She paid a price for her friendship with her three comrades: What did their friendship with her cost them?

It is tempting, and the unsuccessful renderings of Joan on film do it again and again, to paint these friendships in the romantic tonality of boy and girl pals. The appeal is obvious: males and females in harmony, with none of the anxieties or complications of sexual desire. Brother and sister, arm in arm, forgetful of the two-backed beast.

All three of the men were proud of their lack of sexual desire for Joan, although Alençon speaks of the beauty of her body. This is typical of this kind of relationship, in which the girl has no possibility of ever becoming a woman; she is allowed to inhabit the world of action without danger to her chastity; she becomes one of the boys. And the boys, in their turn, stop whorin' and cursin' and drinkin' in her presence. Their wives try to feminize her, but she won't be one of the girls. Not even for a minute. She likes their attention, but she's eager to be off and running, and the wife's job is to stay at home and wait.

The biographies of Joan's three associates are darker than the romance would allow. La Hire was, like many professionalsoldiers, one of the
écorcheurs,
or fleecers, who had tormented Joan's childhood. Marina Warner describes him as spending a lifetime “marauding on either side of the narrow path between brigandry and soldiering.” She recounts a story of his returning the hospitality of a Burgundian duke by throwing him in a dungeon and holding him there until a ransom, a horse, and a quantity of wine had been made over to him.

Even her
“beau duc”
Alençon has some shady moments. Two months after testifying on Joan's behalf at her rehabilitation trial in 1456, he was put in prison for treachery, having supported Louis the dauphin against his father, Charles VII. There was no reason to do this except for the grossest immediate personal gain. The person who arrested him and put him in prison was none other than the Bastard of Orléans, called Bastard no longer but now the lord of Dunois.

Two myths are shattered by the realities of the behavior of Joan's companions. The first is the myth of ennobling influence. Their contact with Joan did nothing to stop Bluebeard from being a murderer of women and children, or La Hire from being a marauder. In addition, there is the myth of soldierly devotion. If it were to have crossed over into life, Joan's friends would have rescued her, or she would have died surrounded by them, beatifically smiling up at their weather-beaten faces, now softened by tears. But they didn't rescue her. They didn't even try to ransom her. When she died, she was alone; her gallant companions-at-arms were nowhere to be found.

CHAPTER V

ACCUSED

WHEN JOAN ENTERED the courtroom at Rouen for the first time in November 1430, she was still young. Six months later, when she was taken from the tower to the stake, she knew she was about to lose her life. But she had already lost something else: her youth.

She entered the trial full of confidence that, accompanied by her voices and the righteousness of her cause, she would prevail. The trial taught her that there were forces stronger than she. The French word for trial is
procès
, and Joan's was, indeed, a process, a process of maturity and loss. In the course of it, she learned her limits. When the nineteen-year-old Joan was led in fetters to the marketplace, surrounded by the jeers of a taunting crowd, she was no longer a girl.

Joan had hardly arrived at the fortress of Beaulieu, where she was brought by John, the duke of Luxembourg, before she made her first attempt to escape, prizing up the wooden boards of the floor. In doing this, she raised an important chivalric question and exposed once again her imperfect and uneven relationship to the chivalric code. She claimed not to have given her
parole,
or her word, when she was captured. If she had, it would have meant that she was on her honor not to escape. She said that she refused to surrender on the grounds that she had “sworn and given her oath to someone other than you, and I will keep my word.”
¹
This is the first instance of Joan's vexed relationship to the issue of oath-taking, her insistence on the primacy of her private relationship to God that took precedence over her responsibility as a citizen or a member of the civil community. In addition to her notion of herself as a visionary, or one in communication with the divine, she was formed importantly by her peasant identity. When accused of bad faith in trying to escape, she replied with the commonsense proverb “God helps those who help themselves.” Once again, she was inspired by one part of the knight's identity—the man of action, the man of battle, the man who relieves suffering and creates change; but she was impatient with the parts of the identity that interfered with action and change. After having denied that she had given her
parole,
she brushed off its importance by saying she “forgot” whether she gave it or not and that it was the right of all prisoners to escape and if she had another chance she'd do it again. Simply, she would rather die than be imprisoned. No abstract ideal softened the clarity of that understanding.

Joan's determination to escape wasn't deterred by having been caught. After she was moved to another of the duke of Luxembourg's strongholds, the château of Beaurevoir,she performed one of the most rash and desperate acts of her rash career. She leaped from the window of the castle, a drop of sixty or seventy feet. She was knocked unconscious but sustained only bruises. This is another proof of Joan's incredible health, strength, and powers of recuperation. It could also be another instance of her youthful belief that she could take great risks and not be hurt by them.

Much was made of this leap in the trial that followed, for good reason. Most obviously, it could have been interpreted as a suicide attempt, a serious mortal sin, an automatic guarantee of the soul's damnation, an act that required the witness of the community in forbidding the suicide burial in consecrated ground.

In terms of heroic definition, or self-definition, the leap from the tower is at best an equivocal gesture. The straightforward chivalric hero would not try to escape in this way; he would endure, or he would be rescued, gallantly. Joan's leap is the stuff of peasant comedy: the miscalculation, the stunned rise from the ground. It is cartoonish rather than grand. You can almost see the stars around her head, the tweeting birds representing her concussion. There is something ignominious about her having to be helped up and carried back to the tower; there is something foolish in the image of her bandaged head, the fettered prisoner who might look as if she had just come from the dentist or a barroom brawl.

Joan acknowledged that she did wrong in her leap, but she did it with her usual “That was then and this is now” matter-of-factness. The judges returned to it repeatedly during her trial, and of course they were right to. It was importantly connected to their dual task: determining her guilt and tarnishing her reputation. Part of her defense, or explanation (for she didn't really defend herself, admitting always that the jump was a mistake), was that she tried to escape because she was desperate to be at the side of the people of Compiègne, to protect them in their dangerous hour. “She had heard it said that the people of Compiègne, all up to the age of seven years, were to be put to fire and sword; and that she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good people. . . . She knew she had been sold to the English and she would rather die than be in the hands of the English.”
²
Thus, to her mind her leap was a chivalric act; she ignored the risk to herself in the service of aiding the weak who needed her.