Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint Read online

  Traveling as cautiously and covertly as possible, the group arrived without incident at Chinon about midday on Friday, March 4—a day or two ahead of their estimate, thanks to their high energy and the favorable weather. The journey had been without misadventure; now Joan only had to await her introduction to the man she referred to as “my king.” Meantime, she and her escorts lodged at an inn, and two royal counselors were sent to evaluate Joan and report back to the court.

  “They put a lot of questions to her,” recalled Jean de Metz. One of the king’s men thought she was quite deranged; the other, touched by the sincerity of Joan’s claim that she had been sent by God, advised Charles to grant her an audience. At the same time, the king received another message from Robert de Baudricourt, which, while not exactly endorsing Joan, stated plainly that she had seemed to everyone in Vaucouleurs a pious and brave Maid. This letter was perhaps intended to protect himself in case the king was disappointed in Joan—as if he were writing, “This isn’t my opinion, of course, but people seemed to like her….”

  Finally, on Sunday, March 6, Joan was invited to court. But a group of cavaliers, wary of anyone who might supplant their own influence with Charles, told him that she had claimed supernatural powers as a wonder-worker. To prove it, the courtiers said, Joan ought to do something quite remarkable. Hence an elaborate experiment was devised.

  Armor and a Household

  (March–April 1429)

  In 1429 the three massive sections of the castle of Chinon—300,000 square feet of thick-walled fortress—still towered over the ancient town and the forests and vineyards of Touraine. Built over several centuries on the site of an ancient Roman camp, the chateau also dominated the riverbanks of the Vienne, a tributary of the Loire.

  Within its walls the uncrowned and dispirited young king had taken refuge with a court that was clutching at straws. The English commanded Paris, Reims, and most of the country north of the Loire; Orléans was about to collapse. A cadre of devious advisers did Charles no good, and his war treasury was virtually empty. But most worrisome of all was the rumor that Charles’s mother had said he might be illegitimate—a slur that, if she uttered it, she knew was untrue; it was, however, enough to make both Charles and some powerful ducal allies doubt the legitimacy of his claim to the crown. And although a significant number of the people supported him, the king had little help from the wealthy nobility, from whom he always needed financial support.

  Often indifferent, sometimes sad, and always indecisive, the young Charles was in private a temperate and pious man, but he had to provide luxuries for his hedonistic courtiers and self-indulgent aristocrats. Discerning witnesses, however, recognized his weariness and disgust with both the war and himself. In 1429 Charles VII was only twenty-six, but he was remarkably spiritless. Jean Fouquet’s picture of him, completed during Charles’s lifetime, shows a homely, sad, and distracted man of no great appeal, but that is how Fouquet represented all his subjects, male and female. By contrast, almost all contemporary writers remarked on Charles’s agreeable, even handsome, appearance.

  Charles was as ill served by many contemporary chroniclers as he was by portraitists. The historical record shows that he was certainly not the ineffective character of English record. He hated war and he was often lacking self-confidence, but he was eventually one of the most effective sovereigns of the late Middle Ages.

  For several reasons he did not expect to inherit the throne of France. Born in 1403, he was the eleventh child and fifth son of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria. Surrounded in his early years by the madness of his father and the deaths of siblings, he was then raised by the mother of Marie d’Anjou, a nine-year-old girl to whom, by arrangement, he was engaged when he was only ten; this alliance later provided him with the enormous political influence of the house of Anjou. Subsequently, his older brothers died, and he found himself in direct line to wear the crown. Thin, physically weak, suspicious, and insecure, Charles seemed at first an unlikely monarch.

  Much of his anxiety derived from the event that had occurred when he was sixteen—when Jean, Duke of Burgundy, was assassinated by Charles’s partisans (almost certainly with at least his tacit consent), and the Treaty of Troyes turned the throne of France over to the descendants of Henry V, thus denying it to young Charles. By the time the mad Charles VI died in 1422, he had officially disinherited his surviving son, who nevertheless continued to insist on his legacy, only to see it disputed both by the English and by many French.

  Less than two months after his father’s death, the dauphin married Marie d’Anjou. At the same time he inherited a country that was, as the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain lamented, “turned upside down, a footstool for mankind, the winepress of the English, and a doormat for brigands.” A peacemaker at heart, Charles wanted to pursue concord at home and abroad: he had an intense dislike for hostility, much less violent warfare. Cultivated, multilingual, and intellectually sophisticated, he was a fascinating combination of piety, learning, and compassion counterpoised by anxiety, vacillation, and a deep desire for solitude. In his early years as king he seemed, in fact, to regret his ancestry and what it had forced on him.

  Making matters worse for Charles was his financial dilemma: taxes were insufficient for him to wage war successfully, and he had to borrow prodigiously from nobles and financiers. Unfortunately, he had only a motley band of ragtag, undisciplined mercenaries for an army, and for the most part the king could afford to pay them only about a third of their contracted allowance. Additionally, the royal military commanders were little better than bandits, and many of them were hired from Italy, Spain, and Scotland. The English militia found it almost easy to defeat them in battle after battle, from 1423 up to the siege of Orléans in 1429, and Charles’s constant attempts to end the war by seeking reconciliation with Burgundy were stymied by the memory of the old duke’s murder. By the time Joan arrived on the scene, according to one source, he was discouraged and disgusted; he considered giving everything up to the English and retiring to Spain. Just such a confused and confusing man awaited Joan that day.

  EARLY DURING THE evening of Sunday, March 6, the Maid and her companions rode up the steep approach and across a drawbridge to the castle, which was comprised of three fortresses linked by bridges. At that moment a widely reported incident occurred. As Joan was about to dismount, a man, also on horseback, reined in her steed. “Isn’t this the famous maid from Vaucouleurs?” he asked, adding with a lascivious sneer: “If I could have you for one night, you wouldn’t be a maiden any more!” The anecdote concludes with Joan scolding him for such conduct and warning him that he was near death—an event that apparently occurred within the hour.

  Joan was escorted into the Great Hall; seventy feet long and thirty-three feet wide, it was packed with more than three hundred courtiers, friends, and supporters of the dauphin. And then the carefully planned ruse was set in motion. Charles had put off his royal finery and was dressed like an ordinary citizen, surrounded by others, with nothing to suggest his identity. If Joan was all that she was rumored to be, then her purity of heart should enable her to detect the king of France amid a vast throng. This was a standard test of spiritual discernment.

  Joan approached Charles straightaway, not at all intimidated by the august gathering. Many of Joan’s partisans then and later took this as another miracle, but that may be an unnecessary interpretation. She may well have been told about the ruse in advance, or someone may have described the king to her. In any case, her discovery of him is not as critical as what then occurred.

  By their side that evening was a chamberlain and knight of the dauphin named Raoul de Gaucourt, who was also governor of Orléans and thus responsible for shoring up its defenses. Years later he clearly recalled Joan’s words: “My most eminent lord Dauphin, I have come, sent by God, to bring help to you and to the kingdom.”* It was as direct and unadorned a summary as the dauphin—and anyone else before or since—could ask. Help for him and for France: that was
her message and her vocation.

  Joan spoke with such quiet conviction, and so undramatic and unadorned was her reference to being “sent by God” that she was difficult to ignore. At that time, claims to bear a mandate from God were not rejected out of hand: they were tested, doubted, challenged—but not forthwith dismissed as inauthentic. The medieval mind took for granted that just as God had done in the great events of revelation from Abraham through Jesus, so He continued to act in the world through human agency. From that moment in the Great Hall, Charles was fascinated by the seventeen-year-old girl who stood calmly and confidently before him.

  He then took Joan aside for a few moments, and after a brief but apparently intense private conversation, he seemed to one member of his court to be “radiant.” At Joan’s trial—and in countless works since then—many speculated about the content of that discussion, which neither she nor the dauphin ever disclosed. Did Joan impart a specific revelation from her voices? Perhaps, for at her trial she insisted that she shared the nature of her mystical experiences only with Baudricourt and the king. But precisely what was the content of the revelation she shared? Moments before, she had told Charles the reason for her presence in Chinon, and that did not make him “radiant.”

  Or did Joan perhaps reveal something about Charles himself that only he could have known, thus demonstrating that she was God’s good servant, a girl with exceptional spiritual insight? That is possible too, and many endorse this—except that Joan (and the God she served) seems not to have gone for mere sideshow tricks. Scholars and hagiographers have wondered and placed their bets about this episode, and they continue to do so. But every opinion is mere hypothesis. Perhaps it is best to accept that in their chat, Joan’s faith and determination infused new hope and confidence into this hitherto indecisive, fearful young man.

  WHATEVER THEY DISCUSSED in private, Charles acted at once. First, he asked that Joan be transferred from the local inn and reside as his guest, in a part of the chateau called the tower of Couldray (or Coudray), which had a chapel nearby. The dauphin also assigned a page, a personal aide, to be taken from Gaucourt’s retinue and charged with her security. His name was Louis de Coutes, he was about fifteen years old and he became a loyal and respectful presence in the months to come.* Of Joan’s time at the castle, Louis later said, “I was continuously with her during the day. At night she had women with her [for protection]. And I recall that while she was there, men of high rank came to see her several times.”

  Among them, none was more prestigious or sympathetic than Jean, Duke of Alençon, a duchy in northwestern France. Then twenty-three, he was a handsome, intelligent and courteous man, a close friend of the king and godfather to his son. Jean had been a prisoner of the English for five years, since his capture at the battle of Verneuil in 1424, when he was seventeen. He had been set free only two weeks before he met Joan, when at last the ransom offered by his wife, Jeanne, was accepted by his captors; she pawned all her jewelry to gain his release.

  Jean was enjoying his emancipation by hunting quail when Charles sent word to him about Joan. At once the duke rode to Chinon, where he found her talking with Charles. “She asked me who I was,” Alençon recalled, “and then she said to me, ‘You are very welcome. The more people we have who share the blood of France, the better it will be.’” This meeting, on Monday, March 7, began a lifelong friendship between Joan and the man she always called “my fair Duke.”

  Next day Joan, Jean and the king dined together, and afterward the duke and the Maid jousted for sport. “Seeing her manage her lance so well, I gave her a horse,” Alençon recalled. This steed replaced the one she had ridden from Vaucouleurs.

  Over the next two days Charles asked for the impressions of several bishops and priests. “They interrogated her in my presence,” according to Alençon, “asking why she had come. She replied that she had come from the King of Heaven, that she heard voices and counsel that told her what she was to do. Later she told me that she could do much more than she had told them.” Joan replied to the queries as briefly as possible and without elaborating on her spiritual experience; for her, the focus was France, not Joan.

  But patience was not among her virtues. Eager for the liberation of Orléans, she reminded her interrogators that the blockade was causing enormous suffering and augured the most critical time for the dauphin’s survival; and the English were making daily advances even as the French were losing ground. In the spirit of Baudricourt, however, her examiners considered Joan naive and impractical, but they found nothing offensive or irreligious in her words or claims; to the contrary, they found admirable her devotion to the cause of France.

  The questions continued from Tuesday through Thursday, March 8 to 10. Alençon saw that Joan was becoming annoyed by this delay and growing intolerant of the clergymen’s repetitious discourse. The dauphin too noticed her slight edginess: she gave the impression that she had not come all the way from Domrémy and Vaucouleurs to submit to a theological examination. But rather than taking offense at her ardor, Charles had to admire both her poise and her urgency in the presence of these robed and learned men.

  At this point something quite remarkable emerges about Joan of Arc.

  In her time, clergymen in general and bishops in particular were held in almost mystic regard by ordinary people and by kings and princes. This was not always a sign of piety or even superstition: such obvious reverence was required if one were to obtain the political support of the Church. As in the presence of secular princes, people knelt and kissed the hands and rings of bishops. In England bishops and noblemen were called “my lord,” the same address as in France, where each was “mon seigneur.” An attack on a priest was cause for excommunication, and the murder of any cleric brought swift execution. More to the point, the clergy often received a degree of deference that was nearly idolatrous and certainly theologically indefensible.

  Joan was no young rebel, nor did she set herself against the authority or expertise of prelates. But she knew what she knew, and no ecclesiastical orator ever bullied or overawed her. In this regard she always pointed to the unassailable truth of her voices and visions—to the primacy of her conscience, although she never would have used those modern words.

  Joan believed that God had addressed her and entrusted her with the task of liberating Orléans, and she could neither deny nor suppress that experience any more than she could read a letter or translate a document from one language to another. Even had she been able, Joan felt no compulsion to answer the convoluted questions of prelates with clever or high-toned academic replies. With the apostle Paul, she could have insisted, “I am not ashamed—I know the One in whom I believe.” Indeed, her actions spoke for her.

  THERE REMAINED A final delay—a much longer one, as it happened, although (like her interrogators at Chinon) the questioners, all of them loyal to Charles, were neither hostile nor contemptuous. On Friday, March 11, she was sent on a thirty-mile journey south to Poitiers; there Joan was further examined by a board of theologians charged to confirm her probity and to assure that her views were congruent with (or at least not contradictory to) Church teaching. In addition, her claims to divine inspiration had to be supported by an honorable life and a miraculous sign—which of course was to be the liberation of Orléans, still a future event.

  Friar Séguin, a Dominican professor, was among the benevolent examiners. “She spoke in a most dignified manner,” he recalled, and she said “that a voice told her that God had great pity on the people of France, and that she must go to Vaucouleurs, where she would find a captain who would enable her to go to the king.” Séguin’s impression coincided with that of Albert d’Ourches, a local seigneur, who had said, “I would have been very pleased to have so good a daughter as she.”

  Something of Joan’s humor and spirit comes through in Séguin’s recollections about the examination at Poitiers that March. When he asked her what language her voices spoke, she referred to his native dialect (actually quite distinct f
rom French) and replied, “Better than yours!” Séguin then asked if Joan believed in God: “Better than you!” was her lively riposte. Her impatience made her feisty, and the professors found her mettle refreshing. Asked for a sign—a miracle or a dramatic proof of her godliness—she replied, “In the name of God: I did not come to Poitiers to produce signs.” She paused and then stared at them gravely: “Lead me to Orléans, and I will show you the sign.” The miracle would be the liberation, which she was certain God would provide.

  The record of the two-week interrogation does not survive but for the recollections of a few people almost thirty years later. But the conclusion of the examiners does, and its recommendation to the king is rather muted:

  The king should not reject the maid who says that God has sent her to bring him help, even though those promises and their fulfillment may lie in a completely natural realm. On the other hand, the king should not be too credulous about the maid, either…. [However,] no evil has been found in her, only goodness, humility, virginity and devotion, honesty and simplicity. Now seeing that the king finds no evil in her either, and aware of her urgent request to be sent to Orléans—to show that indeed she is the bearer of divine aid—the king should not hinder her from going to Orléans with soldiers. Rather, he should send her there forthwith, trusting God. To fear or reject her would be to rebel against the Holy Spirit and to render oneself unworthy of divine aid.

  In this report no mention is made of what has been presumed to be the further reason for Joan’s campaign—to see that Charles would be duly anointed king at Reims. In fact, at this point in her life Joan seems to have had only the liberation of Orléans in mind, and just so much may have been revealed to her. If this is so, then only in light of her subsequent success at Orléans was she encouraged (by her voices and perhaps by the king’s council) to escort Charles to his coronation. God addressed her progressively, in other words, through her voices and through events—and these had spoken to her only gradually; after all, how much could she be expected to absorb all at once? The revelations, like the history of salvation in the Scriptures, were progressive, and her spiritual life was a process. In fact, it may be difficult to accept otherwise: surely God’s plan could be disclosed to her (as to anyone) only in stages.