Joan of Arc Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  CHAPTER I - OF HER TIME AND PLACE

  CHAPTER II - APPROACHING THE THRONE

  CHAPTER III - TRIUMPHANT IN BATTLE, THE KING’S ANOINTER

  CHAPTER IV - WHAT KIND OF WARRIOR, WHAT KIND OF DEFEAT?

  CHAPTER V - ACCUSED

  CHAPTER VI - VIRGIN BODY

  CHAPTER VII - FOOD FOR THE FEAST

  CHAPTER VIII - SAINT JOAN

  Notes

  Backad TK

  Praise for Joan of Arc

  “Gordon writes not as a professional biographer, or as a historian, but as a master of the story form, as a careful reader, as a woman attuned to power and longing and as a believer for whom God is a mystery but not a stranger. Gordon is perfectly matched with Joan of Arc, and the book she has written is both a compelling life story and a shrewd analysis of the mythical uses to which it has been put.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Agree or disagree with Gordon’s numerous insights and interpretations, she gives us Joan as she was, letting us fully appreciate why the Maid will grip our attention for all time.” —Forbes

  “Gordon’s biographical meditation is a readable and substantive introduction to the life and meaning of this medieval heroine.”

  —Christian Century

  “A bold ‘biographical meditation’ that persuades the skeptic to meditate on the inexplicable something Joan made happen, and keeps on happening, to this day.” —Kirkus Reviews

  "Gordon avoids the dramatic and approaches her brassy, devout and defiant subject with a thoughtful air. Joan of Arc is an engaging meditation on one of the West’s most memorable figures.”

  —Star-Telegram (Fort Worth)

  “A large part of the enjoyment here is the highly personal intelligence of Gordon’s prose style, laying out the facts of Joan’s career and her martyrdom, and considering their ramifications.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary Gordon, McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College, is the bestselling author of six novels, three collections of short stories, and two memoirs. She lives in New York City.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2008

  Copyright © Mary Gordon, 2000

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Horae Canonicae”

  from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson.

  Copyright © 1955 by W. H. Auden. .

  eISBN : 978-0-143-11397-3

  1. Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431. 2. Christian women saints—

  France—Biography. 3. France—History—Charles VII, 1422-1461.

  4. Charles VII, King of France, 1403-1461—Coronation. I. Title.

  DC103.G68 2000

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  TO ANTOINETTE O’CEALLAIGH

  who also grew up

  thinking of Joan

  Acknowledgments

  THERE ARE over twenty thousand books about Joan of Arc in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. This figure suggests the impossibility of reading even a substantial portion of what has been written about her. I am particularly indebted, therefore, to two excellent studies on Joan, Edward Lucie-Smith’s and Marina Warner’s, both entitled Joan of Arc.

  Posterity has been fortunate that the records of Joan’s trial have been preserved. The translation of the trial record I used is by W. S. Scott. The text was taken from an original known as the Orléans Manuscript.

  I am greatly indebted to the generosity of two of my colleagues at Barnard College: Joel Kaye of the Department of History and Christopher Baswell of the Department of English. I also wish to thank Joanne MacNamara, Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College.

  For his heroic patience and help, my thanks go to my husband, Arthur Cash, frustrated military historian and footnote fetishist extraordinaire, whose distinction as a biographer humbles me as a would-be colleague, but fills me with pride as an actual wife.

  Chronological Table

  1337 The Hundred Years’ War begins

  1412 Jan. 6 probably Birth of Joan of Arc

  1420 The Treaty of Troyes

  1424 Midsummer probably Joan first hears the voices

  1428 July Flight to Neufchâtel

  1429 Jan.-Feb. Visit to Vaucouleurs

  Feb. 23 Joan leaves Vaucouleurs for Chinon

  March 6 Arrival at Chinon

  March 9 (approx.) Received by the dauphin

  March -April At Chinon, Poitiers, Tours, and Blois

  April 28 Arrival before Orléans

  April 29 Enters Orléans

  April 29-May 10 At Orléans

  May 7 Journée des Tourelles

  May 8 The siege raised

  May 10 Departure from Orléans

  June 11-12 Capture of Jargeau

  June 15 At Meung-sur-Loire

  June 16-17 Capture of Beauregency

  June 18 Battle of Patay

  July 17 Charles VII crowned

  July 21 Charles VII and Joan leave Rheims

  1429 Aug. 12 At Lagby-le-Sec

  Aug. 18-23 At Compiègne

  Aug. 26-Sept. 8 At St.-Denis and La Chapelle

  Sept. 8 Attack on Paris (Joan wounded)

  Sept. 9 La Chapelle and St.-Denis

  Sept. 10 and 13 At St.-Denis

  Sept. 13 Departure from St.-Denis for the Loire

  Nov. 24 Attack on La Charité

  1430 April Battle of Lagny

  May 23 Compiègne and assault on Margny; Joan taken prisoner

  ? May, June, July At Beaulieu, a prisoner

  Dec. 25-May 30 Prisoner in a tower of castle of Phillipe Auguste, Rouen

  1431 Jan. 3 Delivered to the Inquisition and the Church by the English

  Jan. 9 Trial begins

  May 24 The recantation

  May 30 Burned at the stake

  1450 Examination of witnesses for the rehabilitation begins, under the direc
tion of Guillaume Bouillé

  1452 Resumes under Cardinal d’Estouteville, bishop of Digne, and Jean Brehal, inquisitor of France

  1455-1456 Continued by order of Pope Calixtus III

  1456 July The sentence revoked by Pope Calixtus III

  Introduction

  She is one of the few figures in history who cannot be anything but protagonists, who are never subordinate, always an end and never a means.

  —JOHAN HUIZINGA

  Charisma . . . bursts the bonds of rules and tradition and overturns all ideas of the sacred. It enforces a subjection to something which has never before existed.

  —MAX WEBER

  Youth forgets itself in its own ardor. . . . When youth has once grasped where beauty dwells, its self-surrender is absolute.

  —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

  MARCH 14, 1999. The city of Rouen, the province of Normandy, the country of France, the continent of Europe. It is 5 P.M. on an unseasonably warm spring day. People have flung their jackets over their shoulders. They are sitting outside in cafés, reckless from the sunlight, which seems miraculous, unearned, suggestive of improvidence. We are in the marketplace, the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. An attempt has been made to make this a viable city center; there is an open space for a market and, next to it, a cathedral. It is one of those good ideas that didn’t work; it might have worked had there been a genius to design it, but it was not designed by a genius. The church is in the shape of an overturned boat, and the motif is meant to be nautical: Rouen is a seafaring city. But the idea fails; it provides us only with the always dispiriting spectacle of overstrained originality. The church has the sad, earnest quality of mediocre modern architecture, and we are left with a sense of betrayal, because we think that plain materials and an abundance of light ought to equal beauty, and when they don’t, not only art, but nature as well, has let us down.

  It is a Sunday, late afternoon. A ruddy light hangs low over the pavement. In the way of failed modern spaces, this one has become a haven for the underemployed, unprosperous young. Boys with greasy hair and tattoos throw their cigarette butts onto the ground. Two other, younger boys are throwing a soccer ball, with a disturbing violence, against the wall of the marketplace. They throw it against the words André Malraux wrote in 1964 when he dedicated this complex: “Jean d’Arc, sans sepulchre et sans portrait, toi qui savais que le tombeau des heros est le coeur des vivants.” (“Joan of Arc, without tomb and without portrait, you who knew that the grave of heroes is the heart of the living.”) I try to read the words between the blows of the soccer ball—blam, blam, goes the leather against the concrete, leaving only narrow windows of legibility.

  A little to the left of the wall is a public toilet out of which boys skulk. Suddenly, there is the sound of girls shouting. Everyone in the area stands still. The two girls, both wearing jeans and boots and sleeveless shirts, are punching each other. One throws the other to the ground and straddles her, hitting her face. A boy stands in the background, ineffectually urging them to stop. No one from the watching crowd moves to stop them. Then the police come, and everyone scatters. There is one small patch of blood on the concrete slope that leads from the church to the surrounding street.

  In this spot, over five hundred years ago, a girl the same age as the two fighting girls gave up her life. This shocks us still, as we were shocked by the violence of the two fighting girls—far more than we would have been by fighting boys. Girls are not supposed to be violent. But girls are not supposed to be warriors, whose métier is, after all, violence. They are not supposed to be burned alive. It is precisely the disjunction between our expectations of what girls should do and the shape of Joan of Arc’s life that has been, for half a millennium, a source of fascination.

  She must be thought of as a girl. Our understanding of her must always be enclosed in the envelope of her age and gender. She was young and female, and the interpretation of her acts is inevitably colored at each moment by these two facts.

  She referred to herself as “La Pucelle.” The Maid. Included in her self-description, in the almost heraldic tag by which she wished herself to be known, is a statement about her sexual state: She is a young virgin. But one tinged by romance. So before we look at the facts, we have to pass through our associations with girlhood: desirability, charm, innocence, a kind of claustral protectedness suggested by Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter.”May she become a flourishing hidden tree

  That all her thoughts may like the linnet be . . .

  Nor but in merriment begin a chase,

  Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

  Oh may she live like some green laurel

  Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

  But this girl was a soldier, and the word soldier forces us to put on a very different pair of spectacles from the one we use to watch a girl. Soldiers must be in the thick of things. They protect us; they are not protected. Innocence is a luxury they indulge in to our peril, and their own. God help us all, and them, if they only begin a chase or a quarrel in merriment or if they root themselves in one place alone.

  Joan, the girl/soldier, forces us to bathe in two waters of vastly different qualities and temperatures, as if we were swimming simultaneously in a raging ocean and a warm, enclosed lake. The demand for an equilibrium that can tolerate such contradictory elements is a difficult one. Few have endured it. She doesn’t make it easy for us, and most have settled for a Joan whose contradictions have been air-brushed away in favor of a single, static portrait that is primarily a mirror of their own desires.

  There is no one like her.

  There is no one like her.

  We pretend to believe that about all human beings. We cannot know ourselves to be ourselves without believing that we would cry out—knife to our throats, gun to our heads—our convictions about the uniquenesses, the non-interchangeability, of each human life. But we don’t live that way; we can’t. We put our faith in correspondences. We test for DNA; we say, “What can you expect from that neighborhood,” or, “Boys will be boys.” We speak of Renaissance man, founding fathers.

  But Joan stands on a bare plain, unresembled. She has neither forebears nor descendants. She may be the one person born before 1800, with the exception of Jesus Christ, that the average Westerner can name. The man on the street can even create an image of her: the girl in armor. He can say that she is French, that she died young. He knows she wore men’s clothing. Try to name anyone else in history about whom the popular imagination calls up three facts. Nero? Napoleon? There are local gods—Lincoln, Garibaldi—but could a Spanish child, or a Danish one, identify their faces in a lineup? An Indian friend has told me that as a child, Indira Gandhi played at being Joan of Arc. What other historical character creates a force field so extensive and so wide?

  Her rivals are the characters of myth. Robin Hood, King Arthur. But Joan lived in history, and most of what the popular mind knows about her can be verified in trial testimony. Unlike other historical figures, we need not invent stories to flesh her out (there is no chopped-down cherry tree). We need to create nothing; our need is, rather, to suppress.

  For we need in her an image of singularity and single-mindedness. A girl, her foot shod in metal ending in a sharp point, digging its way forever into one piece of earth. In fact, she was erratic and self-contradictory, and her real fascination lies in the way that these contradictions did not end in the stillness and silence of her death.

  The facts can be quickly related. She was born in Domrémy in the current province of Lorraine, in January 1412. Her land was devastated by the Hundred Years’ War, a dynastic conflict with England that began in 1337.

  Her father was a peasant with some local standing: He represented the town in the local assizes. She had three brothers. She was trained in the traditional female skills and sometimes tended sheep. Sometime around her twelfth birthday, she began hearing sacred voices that spoke to her first about the need for her to preserve her virginity for the salvat
ion of her soul. Later, their message became more specific: She must crown the dauphin king and save France from the English.

  She convinced the local lord to give her entrée to the king, whom she convinced to outfit her so that she could participate in lifting the siege of Orléans. Her presence at the siege turned the tide so that the French were, for the first time in a long time, victorious. She crowned the dauphin in the city of Rheims. But soon her military fortunes turned, and she engaged in a series of failed battles that ended in her capture by the Burgundians, whose duke, a relative of the French king, had allied himself with the English. She was sold to the English, tried by French ecclesiastics, and sentenced to death by burning.

  The most important character in this story, aside, that is, from Joan herself, is faceless. This character is time. The element of time gives Joan’s history a special poignance. First, it is the creator and the warden of her youth. She was seventeen when she left her village to head an army. This is rather well known. What is not well known is the brevity of her career, particularly its successful aspects. She was successful militarily for less than six months. She was an active soldier for a little more than a year. She was a prisoner longer than she was a warrior. She died at nineteen.

  A brief career, and by ordinary standards an unsuccessful one. At the time of her death, her cause was losing. It would win, eventually, but only thirty years after her burning,and her role in the ultimate success of France is vexed; it has occupied scholars for pages and years. Why, then, do we remember her?

  We do not call her up as a type of victim. We call her up as one who held back nothing—we don’t examine too closely the justice of the cause. She came from nowhere and gave everything. She pitted herself against those who were far better endowed than she. She was illiterate, and female. She was always very, very young.

  But would she have been considered young by her contemporaries? Doubts arise when we think even as far back as our own grandparents, who seemed to take on extraordinary responsibilities in the years when we were still in our dorm rooms, waking at noon from the overlong sleeps of adolescence. We think of Romeo and Juliet and royal marriages consummated at fifteen. Yet even for her time and place Joan, at seventeen, was extraordinary. If she had stayed at Domrémy and lived as a peasant, she might, by seventeen, have been a wife and mother and laboring fully in the life of the community. But she left the life of the peasant for the life of a knight, and a knight, at her age, having started his training more than ten years earlier, would at seventeen have only been beginning his career. He would not have been put at the head of anything. At eighteen, Lancelot was joining Arthur’s men for the first time.1