Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (37 page)

“Did your voices order you to make this attack from Compiègne?” the examiner asked Joan.

“I had no order to go forth. With my company I crossed over the bridge of Compiègne and through the boulevard. I attacked the forces of lord Jean de Luxembourg, and twice drove them as far as the camp of the Burgundians, and the third time to the middle of the highway.”

Behind her were Guillaume de Flavy and ranks of
“archers and
men with crossbows and culverins at the gate of Compiègne, and more archers and crossbow men in little boats bobbing on the river.” As Joan wasn’t known to deviate from her characteristic forward-in-the-name-of-God approach, the Duke of Burgundy was waiting for her arrival, and the third time she
“charged forward strongly into the Burgundian army,” she was ambushed.

“The English who were there [in the middle of the highway] cut off the road from me and my company,” Joan testified. “I retreated to the fields, on the Picardy side near the boulevard. And there was nothing but the river and the boulevard with its ditch.” The enemy “turned toward the Maid in such a great number that those of her company could not hope to save her” and, frightened for her safety, begged her to hasten back within the walls of Compiègne. “But,” Anatole France explained, “her eyes were dazzled by the splendor of angels and archangels.”

She spoke to her men furiously, Perceval de Cagny reported. “ ‘You be quiet!’ she told them. ‘Their defeat depends on you. Think only of striking at them.’ Even though she said this, her men did not want to believe it and by force they made her return directly to the bridge,” where she didn’t hasten back to safety but remained, a target toward which every soldier came running, so that “there was a great clash of arms.” “The situation,” according to Sackville-West,
“was really beyond redemption.” Joan’s men in flight came “pouring back across the bridge into the town” as she “went after the fugitives, fighting desperately to defend their rear … Her last moments under arms were worthy of her gallantry.” At the sight of a stampede of Burgundians and English tearing across the river after the French, Guillaume de Flavy ordered the bridge raised and the gate shut, leaving Joan and a few of her men locked outside the city walls, outnumbered and soon surrounded. In a field just a short gallop from safety, “an archer,” Chastellain wrote,
“a rough and very sour man, full of much spite because a woman, who so much had been spoken about, should have defeated so many brave men, as she had done, grabbed the edge of her cloth of gold doublet, and threw her from her horse flat to the ground. Never was she able to find refuge nor to receive help from her soldiers, though they tried to assist her to become remounted.” It was six thirty in the evening and bright, as the sun wouldn’t set until
nine. Captured with Joan were her brother Pierre, Jean d’Aulon, and Jean’s brother.

Perceval de Cagny was not one of the chroniclers who suggested Guillaume de Flavy had, in closing the gate, carried out an order intended to deliver Joan into the hands of her enemies, but Compiègne’s main gates had remained closed all along, and there was no reason for the captain to imagine the city might be in enough danger to merit closing a small, auxiliary gate on Joan, whose purpose was to save his city and garrison. As documents prove the Duke of Burgundy used what Kelly DeVries calls
“bribery to achieve the surrender of towns in 1430, the case of Guichard Bournel and Soissons being the perfect example,” it’s quite likely Compiègne would have been included among those towns. Joan, who provided what turned out to be the sole eyewitness account of her capture, didn’t mention any of the gates of Compiègne at all.

“If your voices had ordered you to make this attack from Compiègne, and had signified that you would be captured, would you have gone?”

“If I had known when I was to be taken, I would not have willingly gone. Nevertheless, I would have done their bidding in the end, whatever it cost me.” The standard of faith to which she held herself was that of Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, after his disciples had fallen asleep and left him to contemplate his fate,
“fell on his face and prayed, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt.’ ”

“When you made this attack from Compiègne, did you have any voice or revelation to go forth and make it?”

“I did not know I was to be captured that day, and I had no other order to go forth. But I had always been told that I must be taken prisoner.”

“Why didn’t you take special precautions on the day when you were captured,” the lieutenant to the bailiff at Rouen asked her, “since you suspected this would happen?”

“I knew neither the day nor the hour,” Joan said, as she had to the archbishop of Reims when he asked where she expected to die, again borrowing from Jesus’s parable about the imminence of death and salvation,
which the Gospels characterize as a consummation between Christ, the holy “bridegroom,” and the faithful, who wait in expectation of his coming to “bear them away to the marriage feast.”

“Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only,” Jesus said, and Joan focused less on her mortality than on the eternal salvation she expected in reward for her service, hedging the bet by traveling in the company of a priest to whom she turned whenever she found a sin to confess, which, under the commandment-bending contingencies of war, was frequently.

In Luc Besson’s mystical interpretation of Joan’s capture, the violent, dirty clamor of battle vanishes as Joan is pulled backward from off her high horse, her right arm holding her cruciform sword aloft. The ground on which she falls isn’t the blood-laced mud of a battlefield but the lush, otherworldly meadow where she first received the sword of her vocation and where the breath of God now tears over Joan like
“the rush of a violent wind,” as the apostles described the descent of the Holy Spirit, ravishing her.
“My Lord,” she whispers to a vision of a white-robed Jesus. “My Lord” (
Fig. 28
).

Victor Fleming is guided by a similar impulse to sanctify what he, too, reveals as the fulfillment of vocation rather than a tumble from grace; his, however, is chaste. Costumed in a priestly black tunic, complete with white collar, Joan places her armor on the altar at Saint-Denis (
Fig. 27
) and is delivered into captivity immediately, in the very next scene, the Battle of Compiègne excised from Anderson’s script, as it is from Shaw’s.

Every telling of Joan’s life pauses, as it must, at this threshold between her freedom and her captivity, the point at which her trajectory as a crusading knight shifts toward the passion of Christ.
“We will draw down the curtain, now,” Twain writes, “upon the most strange, and pathetic, and wonderful military drama that has been played upon the stage of the world. Joan of Arc will march no more.”

“Holy and terrible one, hard is your hand,” Schiller’s Joan cries as she is taken. “Am I cast out forever from your grace? No angel comes, and miracles have an end: Heaven’s gates are shut; God turns away His face.” A century later, her lament assumes, in Péguy’s voice, a
chill, nihilistic cast. What happens, she says,
“when you see that your prayers are useless” and “the whole of Christendom is plunging purposely, plunging steadily to the losing of all souls”?

In the days following Joan’s fall into enemy hands, rumor amplified the role her rich cloak—or doublet, depending on the source—had played in her capture. It was a detail that Perceval de Cagny didn’t include in his description of how five or six foot soldiers unseated Joan,
“the one putting his hand on her and the others on her horse,” and that Georges Chastellain might have been tempted to invent as a glamorous accessory to a scene he hadn’t witnessed. From the moment Joan assumed the attire of an aristocratic male, her every lace and seam had been the object of scrutiny and gossip; her extravagant taste was common knowledge, the cloak too irresistible a symbol to discard.

Joan had been defeated, the archbishop of Reims announced to his flock, because
“she did not wish to pay attention to any counsel and did everything at her own [authority]… full of pride due to the rich garments she had begun to wear.”
He hadn’t the courage to admit the observation was his own, attributing it instead to Le Berger, the shepherd who had yet to have been drowned in a sack, to suggest the words had been pronounced by a mystical cognoscente. “She often dressed in rich and sumptuous habits, precious stuffs and cloth of gold and furs,” reads the thirteenth article of accusation Regnault’s cronies drew up preparatory to Joan’s trial. “It is notorious that when she was captured she was wearing a loose cloak of cloth of gold.”

Like the shepherdess’s crook, the golden cloak proved impossible to strip away from the account.
“Have I not been punished for my vanity?” Shaw’s Joan asks the inquisitor. “If I had not worn my cloth of gold surcoat in battle like a fool, that Burgundian soldier would never have pulled me backwards off my horse; and I should not have been here.”

The
“tremendous and immediate excitement” occasioned by her capture was enough to remind anyone who might have forgotten the degree to which Joan possessed the imagination of all Europe. The English exulted; the French worried that so unambiguous a defeat cast doubt on Joan’s claim of a divine vocation; the rest of the world watched to see what would happen next.

The archer who pulled Joan down from her horse was in the service of the Bastard of Vendôme, a vassal of Jean II of Luxembourg, who was himself a liege of the Duke of Burgundy. Vendôme,
“more joyous than if he had a king in his hands,” escorted her immediately across the Oise River to Margny, just at the end of the bridge that connected the town to Compiègne. There, in the manner of a noble—and thus announcing her noble status—Joan formally surrendered to Jean of Luxembourg, as she had refused to do to the Bastard of Vendôme. Luxembourg was not only a vassal of the Duke of Burgundy’s but also, as demonstrated by
England’s royal account books, in the service of King Henry VI and had carried out a number of
chevauchées
against the French—raids like those that had blighted Joan’s childhood. Immediately upon gaining a prize of such magnitude, the impoverished count found himself pulled into a glare he hadn’t known before. Joan wasn’t in captivity for more than a few hours when the Duke of Burgundy came calling, accompanied by Monstrelet. Though present at a meeting that was by any standard historic, the great Burgundian chronicler reported only that
“the Burgundian and English partisans were very joyous, more than if they had taken five hundred combatants, for they did not fear or dread either captains or any other war chief as much as they had up until that day this Maid,” and he conveniently forgets what the Maid and Philip the Good said to each other—“some words that I do not remember very well.” Whatever transpired had evidently shown either Joan in too flattering a light or the duke in too unflattering a one. In any case, the duke left in a state of elation and went immediately to where he was quartered to compose an exultant circular, preserved among the records of the town of Saint-Quentin.

“The woman called the Maid has been taken,” he crowed, “and from her capture will be recognized the error and mad belief of all
those who became sympathetic and favorable to the deeds of this woman.”

Under heavy guard, Jean of Luxembourg transported Joan, her brother Pierre, her squire, Jean d’Aulon, and his brother some two miles upriver from Margny to the fortress of Clairoix, where they remained until Sunday, May 28, by which time the Duke of Burgundy had already received a letter from Jean Graverent, the pro-Burgundian vice-inquisitor of France. On behalf of the University of Paris, Graverent demanded that Joan be turned over to his jurisdiction
“as soon as it can be done safely and conveniently … since she is strongly suspected of various crimes smacking of heresy.” The letter was dated May 26, and as Paris’s street criers could not have broadcast the news of Joan’s capture before the previous evening, he’d responded so immediately as to suggest he was poised to pounce—not for himself, but for the man who would act as his deputy, Pierre Cauchon. Graverent was conducting another inquisition and would arrive in Rouen only in time to observe the trial’s second, private phase of interrogation, limiting his involvement in what he wasn’t as confident would be the certain success Cauchon anticipated.