Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (6 page)

Like most villages throughout Europe, Domrémy retained folk customs to which the Church had applied an inadequate gloss of Christian piety. Each spring, along the short road from Domrémy to Greux, an ancient beech known as the Fairies’ Tree gathered the village young people under its wide canopy and provided a good example of the kind of “evidence” spies dispatched to Joan’s hometown brought back to her inquisitors, who shaped it into what the Joan of Arc specialist Régine Pernoud calls
“mendacious propositions that misrepresented Joan’s thoughts,” in this case implicating her in pagan rites that suggested sorcery.
“Ladies who cast spells—
fairies
they used to call them—
used
to come in the old days and dance under that tree,” Joan’s godfather Jean Moreau remembered, and one of her godmothers, Jeanne, the wife of Mayor Aubery, claimed she had seen the fairies. Whether or not this was true, Joan didn’t know. She herself “never saw the fairies at the tree” and knew nothing about such creatures. In her lifetime, all that remained of such revels had been recast as a celebration of Laetare (from the Latin for “joyful”) Sunday, on which it was permitted to break the Lenten fast and heap the altar with flowers.
Girls played with boys under
“leaves and branches come down to the ground,” as a local farmer, Gérardin of Épinal, described it. “Their mothers bake them loaves, and the young people … sing and dance there, and then they go to the Fontaine aux Raines”—a reputedly medicinal aquifer that welled up but a stone’s throw away—“and eat their bread and drink its waters.”

Everyone who spoke of the tree remembered its beauty. Far enough from the village that only its outline could be discerned, the tree’s green envelope held one of youth’s enchanted realms, sunlight blowing through the leaves.

“Were you not also inclined to go to the Fairies’ Tree?” the examiner asked Joan.

“Sometimes I would make garlands for Our Lady of Domrémy.”

“What did you do with the garlands?”

“We put them on the branches of the tree. I sometimes hung them there with the other girls. Sometimes we took them away, and sometimes we left them there.”

Though Joan had “heard that people sick of the fever drink of this fountain and seek its water to restore their health,” she did “not know whether they are cured or not.” Nor did she “know whether she had danced near the tree since she had grown to understanding.” The Fairies’ Tree represented but one of the carefree pleasures Joan gave up once she perceived the gravity of her mission.

The same year that Jacques d’Arc was made dean, the Burgundian governor-general of Barrois attacked and laid siege to Sermaize, where Joan’s mother’s uncle, the prior, lived. A skirmish of little political consequence, it is remembered for the death of a single soldier, Collot Turlot, whose young widow, Mengette, was Joan’s first cousin. Of dire consequence was the Battle of Verneuil, fought on August 17, 1424, a second Agincourt, it was called. Again, French losses were insupportable. Normandy had fallen, as had five French troops to every one enemy soldier, 7,262 in all, more than half of them from Scotland, with which the French were allied. The outcome of Verneuil has been
cited as the moment when the dauphin lost hope in God’s favor and resigned himself to unrelieved punishment.

Closer to home, in 1425, a local outlaw, notorious in his alliance with the Burgundians, was scapegoated for the theft of livestock from Domrémy and Greux, its sister town immediately to the north. Residents of both villages—if not Joan’s father or brothers, then her neighbors—took their vengeance outside the law and murdered the Burgundian sympathizer, who was
posthumously acquitted of the crime. The lynching demonstrated how entrenched and reflexive was the enmity of civil war, penetrating the whole of the country even as it reached backward and forward in time, the lives of generations entirely circumscribed by betrayal, destruction, and injustice—
“a whole century,” history has judged, saturated with “a sombre tone of hatred.” Even for those who didn’t do battle, war brought hardship and injury, and division colored every aspect of life. The games of children imitated battle, segregating them into factions and providing the younger inhabitants of Domrémy with an excuse to engage in skirmishes with those of Maxey, less than a mile northeast and under Burgundian control. Asked under oath if she had joined in what sounds like the medieval antecedent of cowboys and Indians—with sticks and stones in lieu of cap guns and blunt arrows—Joan said she never did, “as far as I remember.” The reply might sound evasive, especially coming from a girl as preoccupied with warmongering as Joan, who did recall other children returning home to Domrémy “much wounded and bleeding,” had Joan not consistently distinguished herself from other children.

Soon after the lynching, Joan’s village came under attack yet again, by Burgundians, and was raided and burned, this time forcing its inhabitants to flee south to Neufchâteau. Towns like Domrémy that lay on the border between Burgundian- and Armagnac-held territories “belonged to no one, were supported by no one, were spared by no one,” as the nineteenth-century French medievalist Jules Michelet characterized them.
“Their only liege, their only protector, was God.” When she came home, Joan discovered her parish church, Saint-Rémy, had been badly damaged, an affront she would have had to face every time she looked out her window or walked out her own
front door, as the church was the family’s immediate neighbor. When would she come, the prophesied virgin? When would God forgive France and send a savior?

In the summer of her thirteenth year, Joan received what she described as “a voice from God to help and guide me.” The voice came at midday, when Joan was in her father’s garden, adjacent to the parish cemetery. If it was a kitchen garden typical of its time and place, it included a row or two of cabbage, as well as onions, garlic, leeks, pole beans, parsnips, beetroots, and medicinal herbs. Every medieval housewife with a patch of dirt to hoe cultivated lovage and rue for everything from catarrh and pinworms to plague. Perhaps Joan was on her knees, the sun on her back, the earth warm to her touch. She might have been weeding or digging up an onion her mother sent her to fetch. At noon the church bell began to ring overhead, and Joan stopped what she was doing and, if she were not already on the ground, fell to her knees. Apart from the sun’s transit across the sky, church bells, whether calling farmers home from the fields or summoning Joan to prayer, provided residents of villages like Domrémy their only means of marking time. The sound soared above the clamor of daily life, directing the ear, as a steeple did the eye, toward a realm of beauty and order. When they rang unexpectedly, it was in alarm, warning of fire, wolves, or the approach of human enemies. As it was Joan’s father who oversaw the town watch, she lived at the focal point of what little defensive apparatus Domrémy maintained. Literally, there was no one for whom church bells rang more loudly, and the
“near continuous incursions and pillaging by outsiders of all sorts” made Joan into a child unusually fixed on the sound of bells, which spoke of God and time and danger.

The local sacristan, Perrin Drappier, remembered that Joan scolded him when he failed to ring the bell for Mass or evening prayers, and when that didn’t work, she bribed him, promising him the reward of “galettes,” or cakes—the kind Little Red Cap carried in her basket—if he would only fulfill his duties dependably. Jean Waterin, a childhood friend with whom Joan drove her father’s plow,
remarked that she
“used to go down on her knees every time she heard the bell tolled” and often slipped away to “speak with God.” A different Jean, the Count of Dunois, who would become one of Joan’s closest comrades-in-arms, remarked that even at the frantic height of her military career
“it was her habit every day, at Vesper time or at dusk, to retire into a church and have the bells rung for almost half an hour.” Watching her pray, Dunois saw a woman
“seized with a marvelous rapture,” a description far more revealing than any Joan would give.

On this first visitation, noon on a summer day, she had barely crossed herself at the bell’s call before the garden vanished, and the sky and the earth as well. No church, no river, no patchwork of green. There was nothing but light, “a great deal of light on all sides, as was most fitting,” Joan told the examiner, reminding him tartly, “Not all the light comes to you alone!”

The voice’s arrival was of consuming interest to Joan’s examiners. How could it not have been? Over and over they questioned her in the attempt to access, or construct, evidence that might be used to prove its source demonic. But all the voice had given Joan on that first afternoon was the kind of mild and perfunctory direction a clergyman might extend to any child. “Be good,” it had said, and “go to church often.” After it had fallen silent and the garden emerged from the flood of light, Joan found herself “much afraid.” Even so, the departure of the voice left her bereft. “I wept,” she said. “I fain would have had them take me with them too.”

“There was more than a single voice?” the examiner asked.

“It was St. Michael,” Joan said, “and he was not alone, but accompanied by many angels from heaven, a great host of angels. St. Gabriel was among them.”

Michael: archangel and patron saint of the crusaders, whose slaying the dragon,
as Satan is called in the book of Revelation, was considered
“the primordial feat of arms” from which knighthood sprang.

Gabriel: the bearer of annunciation to the Virgin Mary.

The judges to whom we commend Joan today are doctors of medicine rather than of the Church. Her voices have inspired retroactive
diagnoses of hysteria, schizophrenia, epilepsy, even tuberculosis. Academics don’t judge; they interpret. Feminist scholars posit a Joan calculating enough to costume herself as a visionary, like Catherine of Siena or Bridget of Sweden; this was an era when mystical revelation was one of the few routes a woman might take to political power. Cultural anthropology reminds us that it is at times of overwhelming social crises—like those of fifteenth-century France, staggering in the wake of war and plague and famine, and first-century Israel, caught under Rome’s heavy heel, its people starving—that visionaries arise. When Jesus delivered the apocalyptic word of God to the Israelites, he spoke to a nation whose land was occupied, its people decimated by famine and disease, its surviving citizens subject to punitive taxation and violent injustice. It was the only mortal world he knew. The Lord’s Prayer—“Give us this day our daily bread”—was conceived by a messiah whose parables focused on germination and failed crops and whose impossible multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed hungry masses is held among his greatest miracles.