Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (35 page)

“If it should so happen that I do not encounter them coming to you, shut your gates, because I will be with you shortly. And if they are there I shall make them put on their spurs in such haste that they will not know where to put them.”

A week later, on March 23, Jean Pasquerel sent a letter on Joan’s behalf to the Hussites of Bohemia, the predominantly Czech followers of Jan Hus, a priest and university master in Prague whose theology reprised that of the English heretic John Wycliffe. From the pulpit the Church had awarded him, Hus was so brazen as to attack what he called the corrupt clergy, and he made a point of taking no side in the schism as he considered one pope as depraved as the other. Hus was condemned for his social consciousness, which not only allowed women to assume priestly roles, including teaching, but also denounced the practice of selling indulgences, by which only the moneyed could purchase sacred power; this was no different from Jesus’s reviling those who sold sacrificial doves in the temple, and its
outcome was as fatal. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, galvanizing his followers to take up his campaign to separate church and state and inspiring the Church to make bounty hunters of crusaders willing to capture or kill its detractors. The Hussite Wars, as they were later called, continued from 1419 until 1434, bracketing Joan’s career and in their viciousness betraying how serious a threat Hus’s teachings presented to the Church. Panegyrics like Christine de Pizan’s, published only two weeks after Charles’s anointing, not only congratulated Joan for fulfilling her original vocation but also suggested future ones. Both loud and respected, Christine’s voice was unavoidable by anyone, like Joan, who moved among the knights and courtiers who were the paean’s intended audience.
“She will restore harmony in Christendom … She will destroy the Saracens, by conquering the Holy Land.” Probably, Joan’s impatience to engage in active combat had inspired fantasies of setting off on what was unambiguously a pilgrimage, with an objective that seemed from her remove to be purely divine, beyond the reach of mortal politics, and firmly within the mandate of the Church.

“For some time now,” Joan dictated to Pasquerel, “rumor and public comment has reported to me, Joan the Pucelle, that from true Christians you have become heretics. Like the Saracens you have blighted the true religion and worship, embracing a disgraceful and criminal superstition … What rage or madness consumes you?” she demanded of the Hussites. “Do you believe that you will remain unpunished for it?… To tell you frankly, If I was not occupied with these English wars, I would have come to see you a long time ago.” If the Hussites did not reform, she promised to “set off against you so that, by the sword if I cannot do it any other way, I may eliminate your mad and obscene superstition and remove either your heresy or your lives.” Because this letter was unique for having been written in Latin, its style different from Joan’s other communications, its authorship has been questioned. But a cleric would naturally compose an ecclesiastical communication in the language of the Church, especially if he couldn’t assume its Czech recipients would be literate in French. Too, any translation of Joan’s spirited vernacular into Latin’s formal confines would necessarily sacrifice its distinctive cadence.

In
Saint Joan
, Shaw gives Joan of Arc credit for what was in truth
John Wycliffe and Jan Hus’s challenge to ecclesiastical authority, using one of his characters to identify Joan’s defiance as
“the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God. I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it.” But Shaw’s characterizing Joan as a Church reformer is a flight of imaginative projection, as she hotly defended all that Wycliffe, Hus, and their intellectual heir Martin Luther abhorred: veneration of the saints and holy images, confession to and absolution by clerics, intercession for the dead, anointing the sick, the sale of indulgences, and the conferring of last rites, none of which, they argued, had scriptural basis.

The Hussites presented a safety risk and international scandal serious enough that in July, Beaufort, the bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Bedford’s uncle, had little trouble financing an army of 350 mounted archers to set on the distant heretics, and less trouble still marching them from the docks of Calais straight to Paris, with no thought of saving Bohemia—uncle and nephew being
of like mind and scruples.

It’s not only Shaw who imagined Joan as a social reformer or retroactively credited her with ideas she would have found foreign. Brecht gave his Joan, not of Arc, but of the Stockyards, a socialist agenda and magnified the populism she borrowed from Jesus until it eclipsed the far greater part of the historical Joan’s vision.
“Slums breed immorality, and immorality breeds revolution,” she preaches to the stockbreeders who are driving up the price of meat, appealing to their self-interest with a bleeding heart’s naïveté. It is another three scenes before she understands.
“I know their money, like a cancerous growth, has eaten away their ears and human face.” The judgment would have more likely issued from Hus than from the girl who couldn’t resist velvet tunics and cloth of gold.

No matter what topics Joan fulminated about in her correspondence, her focus hadn’t wavered from recapturing Paris, where in March bourgeois factions within the city’s walls, including
“clerks, artisans, and merchants,” had organized under the leadership of Carmelite
monks and were planning a revolt. But when one of them was arrested and tortured until he gave up the others, she retrained her attention on Compiègne, for whose people she said she “always prayed with her counsel.” Having been squabbled over by Armagnacs, Burgundians, and English, the citizens of Compiègne had been besieged eight times in the previous fifteen years. Joan’s was the single command they followed. For the Maid they had pledged their allegiance to Charles and sent him the city’s keys before his coronation, and for her they refused to obey Charles’s subsequent order that they surrender to the Duke of Burgundy,
“resolute to undergo every risk for themselves, their children, and their infants, rather than be exposed to the mercy of the duke.” The citizens of Compiègne reflected Joan’s own stubborn courage back at her and reignited her determination to prevail over the enemy or die trying.

To expire in battle was to enter eternal glory, and after writing one final letter to the people of Reims, Joan marshaled her troops. It was the last letter she would ever send; in it she warned the people of Reims of a traitorous alliance within its walls, its purpose
“to betray the city and let the Burgundians inside.” Promising Charles’s aid were the city besieged, Joan left Sully “without the knowledge of the king, and not taking leave from him,” as Perceval de Cagny wrote.
“She went to the town of Lagny-sur-Marne because those of that place were making good war against the English in Paris and elsewhere,” a battle half won even before Joan arrived. Her movements were not covert; once she and her small army of zealots reached Lagny, she sent word to Charles, requesting reinforcements. Of the exultant tide of twelve thousand soldiers that accompanied her to Reims the previous July, only five hundred men remained; the rest had ebbed and vanished, her army so reduced she couldn’t maintain even a rudimentary military household and had no page or herald, upon which communication depended. Still, far better to take on a small battle with a small army than to forgo fighting.

Joan spent three weeks in Lagny and from there made war on Anglo-Burgundian troops under the command of Franquet d’Arras, easily chasing off the infamous mercenary. With or without a sizable army or adequate entourage, she retained the reputation of a sorceress who bent the odds of battle, and Lagny was just twenty miles outside
Paris, the hub of medieval media. The witch was drawing closer and had recovered whatever she had lost back at the Saint-Honoré Gate. Recruiting was a problem for the English, desertions so common that the Duke of Bedford was forced to issue an edict on May 3, 1430, against captains and soldiers who refused to embark for France.
“Each and every captain and soldier in the city of whatever rank or condition who has been retained to make the voyage” to France, he announced in the name of the boy king Henry VI, “who are found delaying in London will be seized immediately and arrested with their horses and armor kept as surety and they shall be imprisoned,” a penalty that stopped just short of death.

By this time Charles had yet to admit having been duped by Bedford, and Joan took Franquet prisoner and held him hostage in hopes of trading him for Jacquet Guillaume, who had been captured in the
plot recently uncovered in Paris and whom Joan hoped to use as a means of mustering forces within the city. Once she learned Guillaume had been executed along with all the others who had been arrested for treason, she surrendered the now worthless Franquet to the jurisdiction of the bailiff of Senlis. “As the man I wanted is dead, do with this fellow as justice demands,” she told the bailiff. Such exchanges and negotiations were routine, and in this case the public was satisfied by what was regarded as the just execution of a known rapist who, she said, also “confessed himself a murderer, a thief, and a traitor.” Still, Joan’s examiners presented Franquet’s execution as evidence of a bloodthirsty vengefulness outside the confines of battle, and they accused her of bribery.

“Did you not send money, or have money sent, to him who had taken the said Franquet?”

“What am I, Master of the Mint or Treasurer of France,” Joan said, “that I should pay out money?” Had she had any, it would have been spent on provisioning her army.

The victory at Lagny returned luster to Joan’s trajectory, and she was embraced by the fervid crowds she’d grown to expect, and perhaps even need, as they demonstrated a confidence in her prowess that official sources now withheld. Excited at their having joined those citizens of France lucky enough to be rescued by the Maid, the people of Lagny mustered all they could for public celebrations in Joan’s honor,
enough that anyone who wanted to see or touch her would have had the chance. During the three weeks she remained in town, a bereaved family approached her for intercession on behalf of a child who died at birth and, having not been baptized, was doomed to suffer purgatory.

“How old was this infant?” the examiner asked Joan.

“Three days old. They told me three days had passed with no sign of life in the child, which was as black as my coat of mail.”

She was in church, kneeling before an image of the Virgin, when the boy’s mother and sisters came to her with his corpse, and she prayed with them, and, as she testified, “at last life appeared in the child, which yawned thrice, and was afterwards baptized, and immediately it died and was buried in consecrated ground. But when it yawned, the color began to return.”

“Was it said in the town that the resuscitation was due to your prayers?”

“I did not inquire about it,” Joan said, although she knew better than any that
“the incident was trumpeted as a miracle.”

If Joan, like others present at the baby’s fleeting return to life, believed she had raised him from the dead, she knew better than to admit such a thing. She was praying with the baby’s family when “life appeared in the child.” That was all. Her judges could make what they would of it.

Fixed as it was on the ever-looming torment of death, the medieval imagination was possessed by the story of Lazarus of Bethany. John is the only Evangelist to tell the story, characterized by the single instance of Jesus’s use of the word “dead” to describe the person he subsequently raised, a miracle he orchestrated to prove his divinity.
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“But if I do them [perform miracles],” Jesus said of his plan for a spectacle,
“even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

“I know,” Lazarus’s sister Martha said to Jesus,
“that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” By then, Lazarus had been entombed for four days. Before a great crowd of mourners and onlookers, Jesus called upon God for help.

“ ‘I have said this on account of the people standing by,’ he said aloud, ‘that they may believe that thou dist send me.’ When he had said this he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’ ”

The miracle prefigured Jesus’s resurrection and caused so much public unrest that, according to John,
“the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said ‘What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation,’ ” and it was
“from that day on that they took counsel how to put him to death.”

“Never,” Péguy’s Joan says of Jesus, “had a man stirred up so much hate in a man.”

Historians generally finesse Joan’s revival of the infant in Lagny as that of
“a newborn baby on point of death” or dismiss it as
“a curious incident” that “demonstrated Joan’s growing cult.” Joan didn’t equivocate; the baby she saw was as black as her coat of mail—not her “white armor,” but chain with a dark, bluish cast—and had been described by family members as lifeless for three days.