Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (30 page)

Joan the Maid commands and informs you in the name of the King of heaven, her rightful and sovereign Lord, in whose service she is each day, that you should render true obedience and recognition to the gentle King of France … And if you do not I promise you and certify upon your lives that we will enter, with God’s help, all the towns that should belong to the holy kingdom and establish a good firm peace there, whoever comes
against us. I commend you to God, may He watch over you if it pleases him.

Reply soon.

As did every crisis or impasse, the obduracy of the people of Troyes fractured the dauphin’s council. Archbishop Regnault de Chartres, who would perform the coronation, felt the king’s forces had wasted enough time on Troyes and ought to proceed directly to Reims before Joan seized the opportunity to make another stop on her bloody road show, picking up that many more fanatical hangers-on. The Lord of Treves, Robert le Maçon, accorded the wisdom of his years, said Joan should be summoned for her advice, as they owed the past months’ victories to her aid.

“In God’s name,” Dunois remembered Joan telling Charles, “within three days I will lead you into the city of Troyes, by love, force, or courage, and that false Burgundy will be quite thunderstruck.” No amount of gallantry could seduce La Trémoille and his fellow leeches, but Charles granted Joan’s request to answer the Troyens’ resistance with military action. Her troops at the ready, she did indeed amaze the enemy, who watched her forces immediately
“set up all of the French gunpowder artillery against the walls and prepared for its use,” moving at what looked like unnatural speed. Beyond the walls, hundreds of other soldiers were making a production of bundling sticks into a rising mountain of fagots to cast into the city’s moat, inviting Joan and all her mortal army to walk over water and position themselves for attack. Recognizing the folly of continuing to hold out against what Joan was advertising as the imminence of one of her infamous massacres, the Troyens delayed capitulating for a single day before sending an envoy to negotiate surrender. Charles entered the city with Joan not behind but next to him, carrying her standard, as they headed up the victory procession, after which
“the dauphin dealt mercifully and without punishment with the Troyens, who quickly resupplied his army.”

According to Alençon’s master of the horse, Perceval de Cagny, the towns between the cities of Troyes and Reims fell with providential ease. Joan sent her standard ahead of her as the premature
announcement of what was an assured victory for the French, followed by Charles’s offer of amnesty to those who submitted to his rule. One of these towns was Châlons-sur-Marne, as near to Domrémy as Joan had drawn since undertaking her quest, and a few of her old neighbors and friends made the ninety-mile journey to see their famous daughter. Among them were her godfather Jean Moreau and Gérardin of Épinal, the Burgundian whose decapitation Joan had nonchalantly suggested as a gesture of leave-taking. One of the citizens of Domrémy who made the effort required to testify on her behalf at her nullification trial, he recounted her warm reception of him and his traveling companions and remembered what in retrospect he considered a prophecy. But it didn’t require clairvoyance to see that no matter how great her volunteer army, Joan had enemies at court; or that Charles was as devious as the courtiers who curried his favor. She feared but one thing, she told Gérardin, and that was treachery.

Schiller gives Joan’s presentiment the form of a sinister Black Knight, who, she says, “enticed me from the battlefield.”

“Look over there!” the Black Knight says, his face hidden behind his visor. “There rise the towers of Reims, the goal you fought for and your journey’s end. The vast cathedral glitters in the light, which you will enter in triumph, and where you will crown your King, and so fulfill your vow. Do not go in there! Turn back! Hear my warning!”

From Châlons-sur-Marne, Joan set out with Charles and his cortege for Sept-Saulx, the château of Archbishop Regnault de Chartres, just fourteen miles southeast of Reims, as close as the archbishop had drawn to the city since its occupation by the Burgundians and his subsequent attachment to Charles’s court, where he found an ally in La Trémoille.
Regnault’s flock hadn’t seen him for twenty years when, on Saturday, July 16, they opened the gates of Reims for him, along with Charles, Joan, and an army in want of food and lodging. Upon entering the city to the frenzy of curiosity and welcome she’d come to expect, Joan discovered that the Burgundians, foreseeing the unavoidable, had done their best to strip the cathedral of its sacred objects. Joyeuse, the legendary sword of Charlemagne, identified by
The Song of Roland
as the
“lance, which wounded Our Lord on the cross,” a relic of inestimable value traditionally present at a coronation, was missing. From vestments to chalices and candlesticks, anything of value that wasn’t nailed down or too heavy to carry had been snatched as spoils of war. But,
“secreted away by monks loyal to the dauphin,” the single artifact essential to the transfer of divine right had been hidden and preserved. The Sainte Ampoule had descended from heaven, on Christmas Day 496, transferred from the hands of angels to those of Saint Rémy, bishop of Reims and patron saint of Joan’s parish church: Domrémy. With it, he baptized Clovis the first Christian ruler of the Franks, redefining the crime of Christianity as the mandatory state religion. In the miraculously multiplying manner of loaves and fishes—or the Brothers Grimm’s
“Magic Porridge Pot”—the Sainte Ampoule had never run dry, the vial’s contents having hallowed nearly a thousand years’ worth of coronations thus far.

A full midsummer moon gave the citizens of Reims that much more time to prepare for an occasion usually months in the planning, and
“all night long the city resounded to the blows of hammers and mallets.” If it wasn’t the pomp of a time of plenty, there was more than enough sparkle and heraldry to gratify Joan and dazzle her parents, who had come to bear witness to their daughter’s transformation from disgraced runaway to exalted virgin and
chef de guerre
of all France. At nine in the morning, the exuberant celebrants poured into the cathedral after the dauphin, himself under a guard of eight hundred soldiers. No report includes a description of the day’s weather, but it was almost certainly a fine day, bright and clear, as any among Joan’s detractors would have pounced on so obvious an indication of heavenly displeasure as lowering, storm-laden clouds. So the sun shone through the great rose window, spraying coins of colored light over the hushed congregants, whose state costumes were typically
“ornamented by hundreds of precious stones” and other furbelows. Perhaps La Hire wore the red velvet cape that impressed itself on his comrades’ memories: it was covered all over with tiny silver bells. Immediately behind Joan and Charles walked the four appointed guardians of the chrism—the admiral of France, the Lord of Graville, the marshal de Boussac, and Gilles de Rais—followed by Dunois and Alençon, carrying crown and scepter. Joan had petitioned Charles to relax his exile
of Arthur de Richemont, who as constable should have been present to bear the ceremonial sword that stood as a surrogate for Joyeuse, but Charles refused, suggesting how tenacious was La Trémoille’s hold over him.

Upon reaching the altar, Charles prostrated himself on the floor, and the archbishop did as well, and then the archbishop rose from the dauphin’s side to dab the holy oil on his head, chest, shoulders, elbows, and wrists—points of intelligence, passion, and command.
“I anoint you for the realm with holy oil,” Regnault said, “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” and the congregants cried, “Long live the king for eternity!” The archbishop prayed that Charles prove himself worthy of the power with which he had been entrusted, and the consecrated king replaced the simple shift he had worn for his anointment with regalia befitting his role as earthly representative of God’s rule. “Three gentlemen from Anjou … were charged with reporting the ceremony to the Queen, Marie of Anjou, and her mother,” Yolande, as Charles had sent his wife instructions from Gien “to return to Bourges since the operation he was launching was a dangerous one.” Too,
“the royal entourage judged that it was the king alone whose coronation then mattered.” Marie would be crowned later in Paris, as were all French queens, in a ceremony to which far less importance was attached. After the crown was placed on the new king’s head,
“Everyone cried ‘
Noel!
’ ” the unnamed trio wrote, “and the trumpets sounded in such a manner so that it seemed as though the vaulting of the roof would be rent.”

“When the Maid saw that the king had been consecrated and crowned,” the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
recorded, “she knelt before him in front of all the lords standing around them, and she embraced his legs, saying as she cried warm tears, ‘Gentle king, the pleasure of God has been executed. He Who wished that I relieve the siege of Orléans and Who brought you into this city of Reims to receive your holy consecration, demonstrated that you are the true king and the one to whom the kingdom should belong.’ And there was a great pity from all who saw this.” It was a friendly account and ignored expressions inspired by feelings other than sympathy, feelings of those for whom
“questions of precedence and etiquette” assumed a “religious significance.”

“Was your standard not made to wave above the king’s head when he was crowned at Reims?” the examiner demanded.

“No,” Joan said. “Not so far as I know.”

“Why then was your standard carried into the church at Reims at the consecration? Why yours rather than those of the other captains?”

“It had been present in the perils,” Joan said. “That was reason enough for it to be honored.”

Called a commoner by men, Joan bore divine heraldry, advertising a status beyond the highest of mortal honors. The spot she claimed was an unprecedented disruption in what was, to the medieval mind, the crucial order upon which human existence depended: an inalterable hierarchy decreed by God. The
scala naturae
, a Neoplatonic concept of a great chain of being, ranked all of creation down
“from the infinite Creator to the smallest of his Productions” by way of angels and demons, mortal princes, both lay and ecclesiastical, nobles, and commoners. Below them fell animals, plants, and minerals in order of their ability to answer human needs and desires. The rite of anointing was symbolism choreographed to amplify and make manifest the sacred transaction that cemented a king in his rightful place in the great chain, as most exalted among mortals.
Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII at Reims
by Jules Eugène Lenepveu (
Fig. 22
), an academic painter of the same era as Jean-Jacques Scherrer, illustrates how radical a breach Joan had effected. Lenepveu elevates Regnault, Charles, and Joan above the mass of lesser knights and nobles, all three on a blue dais decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis. To the left of the canvas’s center, the archbishop places the crown on Charles’s head, his eyes cast down on the kneeling king and the king’s eyes fixed on the floor below his knees. Joan, armored and wearing a rich red and gold surcoat, stands slightly to the right of the canvas’s center, which is claimed by the sword in her right hand, the weapon tilted at the familiar suggestive angle and sanctified by a hilt that transforms its shaft into a cross. She is a solitary figure in the packed cathedral. Her placement on the dais separates her from archbishop and king, removes her from the company of all mortals, and lifts her toward the ranks of stained-glass saints overhead. Her eyes are fixed on three beams of light from a source outside the canvas, a symbol of the trinity,
and her surcoat falls aside to expose a perfectly round and seemingly nippled plate of armor—like a single, Amazonian left breast. The standard whose staff she grasps with her left hand reaches above all the earthly regalia, and the drape of its white fabric falls behind her shoulders, its outline suggesting a pair of great white-feathered wings. Before all of Europe, a virgin dressed as a man and armored as a knight stepped into the most sacred ritual of her people, fracturing the patriarchal triumvirate of mortal king, divine king, and the high priest who provided the liaison between them, a performance that on a popular level invited the awe reserved for a Demiurge, while igniting fury in Joan’s multiplying enemies among the aristocracy.

“My lord,” La Trémoille warns Charles in Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine.
“This girl is ambitious and unscrupulous. She intends to rule France. In your place.” He reminds Charles that her victories on the battlefield have nothing to do with “tactics, relying entirely on her personal prestige, the fanatic enthusiasm of her followers.”