Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (32 page)

While Charles lay prone on the floor of Reims Cathedral, the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Bedford were conferring in Paris on how best to respond to the most recent stunt by the French, especially given its having been accomplished by so dangerous a means as sorcery. Reims was less than a hundred miles from Paris, whose citizens were growing increasingly restless at the approach of the virgin witch and her fatal spells, a topic that summoned less hilarity and more hysteria with each mile she drew closer to their walls. It had been six weeks since Jargeau fell
“in a frenzied and gory assault,” and rumors had traveled as they do, more sensational with each retelling, alleging atrocities that much more atrocious.

As the English had installed their bureaucracy in Rouen, an attack on France’s former capital wouldn’t compromise the administrative arm of the occupation, but even so, to lose Paris, the uncontested jewel of Europe, would be a morale-destroying reversal. To lose it to a witch would be an unprecedented abomination, a manifestation of the devil’s might. English-occupied Paris was preparing for a battle it couldn’t afford to lose, Joan’s plan to immediately take the city stymied first by the newly crowned king’s obligatory round of fetes and then by his departure on Thursday, July 21, for Corbeny. Seventeen miles northwest of Reims, Corbeny was the site of the abbey of Saint Marcouf, patron saint of the scrofulous. The king and his retinue remained there through July 23, when Charles fulfilled his duty in “touching for scrofula,” known during the Middle Ages as the King’s Evil because the power invested in a new sovereign’s freshly anointed hand was believed to cure the unsightly tubercular infection of the lymph nodes in the neck. Inevitably, hundreds of other ailing pilgrims came as well, bearing other diseases. All received a “touch piece” as a souvenir of Charles’s ministration and were directed to
keep the medals hung where they’d been placed, around their necks. The implicit message was that to remove them was to sever contact with the life-sustaining divine, even when that contact was a degree removed, as more than a few post-plague monarchs avoided communing with an unwashed populace and chose instead to touch the coins to be distributed or pass a jeweled hand and mumbled prayer over a sack of the things. Typically stamped with an image of Saint Michael slaying Satan in the form of a dragon, touch pieces were in essence amulets to ward off disease, their origin in what James Frazer called
“sympathetic magic,” a system of superstitions whose “law of contagion” assures those who practice it that holy properties are transferred by touch. The misapprehension is so primitive as to predate logic—a limbic wish universal to the species. Though the Church would have objected to the analogy, aboriginal peoples in Polynesia and elsewhere practiced the converse of the Christian rite, believing that were a tribesman to accidentally brush against a sacred chief and fail to perform a subscribed ceremony
“for the purpose of removing this sacred contagion,” he would “swell up and die, or at least be afflicted with scrofula or some other disease.”

Touching for the King’s Evil guaranteed a long day, not so much for Charles, inclined to linger wherever he was the center of attention, as for Joan, restless whether in or out of the public eye. Increasingly desperate to embark on the remainder of a vocation she now saw, and presented, as unfulfilled, she told Alençon she’d “had four missions: to expel the English; to have the King crowned and anointed at Reims; to free the Duke of Orléans from English hands; and to raise the siege the English had laid to Orléans town.” The duke remained in England; the English remained in France: she had much to accomplish in a year Charles was forcing her to fritter away. Alençon’s testimony was given from a remove of twenty-seven years, by a man overwhelmed by his first sight of the Maid, under whose command he remained until forcibly removed by the king, a man who had heard Joan say innumerable things for months on end. With respect to Joan’s stated vocation, he is a less reliable source than Seguin Seguin, the consistently clear witness from Poitiers, whose firsthand experience of Joan was limited to the beginning of her public career. Seguin identified only “two reasons, for which she had been sent by the King of Heaven: one was to
raise the siege of Orléans, the other to lead the King to Reims for his anointing and coronation.” When she was examined at Poitiers—only four months earlier—Joan had yet to raise the siege or escort Charles to Reims. She hadn’t looked beyond the two mortally impossible challenges that lay before her. Now, having accomplished what God asked, she had no defined quest on which to fix her purpose, and she was not only uncomfortable without a concrete goal but also unmoored at the apex of her fame. Joan’s voices had banished the girl who’d lived the simple, anonymous life of a farmer’s daughter. That girl had been thoroughly and irretrievably eclipsed by the identity Joan forged to answer God’s call: the Maid, a virgin heroine whose narrative hinged on making holy war on France’s enemies and winning with the force of heaven on her side. She still had France’s enemies to fight, but the path to victory wasn’t illuminated by the bird’s-eye view of angels. Saints Catherine and Margaret no longer came to her with names of people who would aid her cause or places where sacred swords were hidden. An intimate of the king’s, she’d outgrown such help, and the discourse between Joan and her voices had changed. What began as her responding to their direction had become her appealing to them for advice and for permission the king withheld.

“If my Voices do not answer, if no injunction is laid on me, then I cannot stay here. I must arm again, and find the enemy, and fight as before,” Joan says to God in Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine.
“I have courage to die, but not to die thus, in small, sick ways, daily.” Shaw portrays her as an addict of war, seeking its thrills.
“Oh, dear Dunois, how I wish it were the bridge at Orléans again! We lived at that bridge … it is so dull afterward when there is no danger: oh, so dull, dull, dull!”

“You will miss the fighting,” La Hire agrees. “It’s a bad habit but a grand one, and the hardest of all to break yourself of.”

As
“the medieval Western European conception of the ideal military commander placed far greater stress on the commander’s moral qualities than on his technical competence in planning and fighting battles,” Joan’s rectitude afforded her the deference of the majority of the French captains. In the case of Paris, there wasn’t one captain who didn’t share her conviction: retaking Paris was key to cementing Charles’s rule. Once France’s rightful capital, Paris, had been restored, the English would be forced to retreat across the Channel. The key
was to mobilize and attack swiftly, before the English had time to pack a few thousand more longbowmen within its city walls, recognized throughout Europe as the largest and strongest—almost thirty feet high, topped with wall walks, and punctuated by rectangular towers that rose high above the walks. A population of 200,000 made Paris an enormous city, with six points of entry protected by
“massive gate houses … with angular towers, arrow slits, gun-ports, murder-holes, portcullises and drawbridges built into them” and enough room to accommodate hundreds of soldiers within them. France had but one advantage to seize—time.

“What voices do you need to tell you what the blacksmith can tell you,” Shaw’s Joan demands of the feeble sybarite the playwright makes of Charles, “that you must strike while the iron is hot?”

From the abbey at Laon, king and courtiers decamped to Soissons, where they lingered, twenty-five miles closer to Paris, until July 28. Unable to wait even a day longer before underscoring Charles’s arrival at legitimate rule with a show of force, on the twenty-ninth Joan secured permission from the king to line up her soldiers,
as many as six or seven thousand, at Château-Thierry, about halfway along the sixty-mile route from Reims to Paris, where she kept them at the ready all day, in battle formation, in hopes that
“the duke of Bedford would come to do battle.” He never did, as the king, who had gone on to Provins, must have known he would not. La Trémoille had been negotiating an armistice, if not the indefinite peace that would require Charles’s capitulation, since June 30—two and a half weeks before the coronation. On that day, well in advance of Joan’s bellicose letter to the Duke of Burgundy, La Trémoille had arrived at the duke’s court in Dijon to begin talks that resulted in the duke’s dispatching an envoy to the coronation with a letter intended for Marie and Yolande
“expressing optimism that the King would conclude a treaty.” Had Joan, who understood the cost of even a day’s inaction, any presentiment that she’d embarked on
“eight months of drifting about with the King and his council, and,” as Twain called it, Charles’s “gay and showy and dancing and flirting and hawking and frolicking and
serenading and dissipating court—drifting from town to town and from castle to castle,” she would have been that much more impatient with the fairy-tale procession described by Michelet:
“The expedition seemed but a peaceful affirmation of ownership, a triumphal journey, a prolongation of the celebration at Reims.” With magical ease, “the paths were made smooth before the king, the cities opened their gates and lowered their drawbridges,” and Joan complained.

While La Trémoille finagled offstage, composing ententes in anticipation of forthcoming signatures, the king did his diplomatic best to avoid conflict with Joan by means of conciliatory gestures intended to distract her from warmongering. On July 31, Charles forever exempted the citizens of Domrémy and Greux from taxation, an entitlement they enjoyed until the French Revolution swept away all such indulgences, and in early August, after following the wide berth Charles made around Paris to Provins, still fulminating over a putative truce about which she,
chef de guerre
, was not consulted, Joan received the much better consolation of René of Anjou, Yolande’s son, at last joining the French army. Whatever small internecine coup had delivered René to Joan suggests Charles’s mother-in-law had not withdrawn her support of the Maid in response to the unwelcome communication she received from the duke.

Having received René’s arrival as a portent that God remained with her army, Joan couldn’t resist letting off a war whoop in the form of an open letter to the people of Reims.
“Joan the Pucelle sends you her news and prays and requests that you do not have any doubt about the merit of her cause that she is waging for the blood royal. And I promise and certify that I shall never abandon you so long as I live. And it is true the king has made truces with the duke of Burgundy,” she wrote, but “no matter how many truces are made like this, I am not at all happy, and I do not know if I will keep them. But if I do it will only be to protect the honor of the king, and also that they do not take advantage of the blood royal.” Whether or not an accord had been signed—and there was every reason to keep Joan in the dark with respect to statecraft—for as long as she was kept from active
military engagement, the unofficial truth was as good as a truce. After reassuring the citizens of Reims that her first allegiance was to the blood royal—albeit a qualified fealty that allowed her to ignore the court’s political efforts—Joan closed by asking them to “let me know if there are any traitors who wish to harm you, and as soon as I can I will drive them out … Written this Friday, 5th day of August, near Provins, in a camp in the fields on the way to Paris.”