Joan of Arc (2 page)

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.”

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 salvation 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

There was a medieval term for adolescence,
adolescentia,
but its boundaries were unfixed. Dante put its end point at forty-five. Following Roman law, in many medieval societies young men under twenty-five were not allowed to carry out certain actions without a guardian and before this point were not permitted to exercise their full civil rights. Girls of the nobility were often married quite early, but this was because they had virtually no access to the arena of public action, where proper judgment would be crucial. Perhaps a better way of looking at Joan's youth is that in all her major battles she was younger than anyone she rode beside, and in all the important rooms of her life she was alone among her elders.

We would like to believe that youth, ardor, audacity, courage, and natural intelligence will prevail against bureaucratic power and corruption. In Joan's case, there is an important sense in which they did not. She died, after all, at her enemies' hands. But she stands for the triumph of the invisible over the visible, of the potency of pure intention, of acts that shimmer and endure beyond the life of the actor or the efficacy of the acts.

We have always needed someone like her, someone who can disinfect us of our disreputable or petty tendencies. If we can love her, then we are not a people who hate women. If we can call her death a triumph, we are not time servers, pension collectors who measure success only by what seems to work. If we devote ourselves to her, we are higher creatures than the way we live our lives suggests. We need her as the heroine of our better selves.

But she is much more interesting as herself than as the hero of our need of her. My Joan, who is just as much a mirror of my own desires as anyone else's, is, above all, a young girl. She has a young girl's heedlessness, sureness, readiness for utter self-surrender. She loves life; she is afraid of dying. This cocky, pure, maddening, unwise girl forgot herself in a cause greater than herself. She was talky and self-contradictory; she died in silence. But even in death she refuses singleness. So everyone who uses words to describe her must understand that her project is impossible, one or another kind of failure, one or another partial shot.

If I could, I would begin this study in a way that would defy the limits of space and time. I call it a study, or a meditation, hesitating over the honorable term
biography,
with its promise of authority, of scholarship, of scope and sweep. Ideally, I would present you not with pages, but with an envelope of paper strips, each with some words written on it, and a series of snapshots. I would have you open the envelope, drop the strips and photographs onto the floor, then pick them up and read them in whatever order they had arranged themselves in your hand. I would require, then, that you replace the strips in the envelope and empty them again. And pick them up again. And read and look again. And again, and again, giving pride of place to no one order. Until you had felt that you had understood something in a way that refused finality. That you could tolerate an understanding that allows that the fragments can be endlessly reordered, must be, and that the sense of knowing is always temporary, subject to revision, reversal, recombination, and a relaxation of the compulsion to know what is unknowable.

In writing what I think of as a biographical meditation, I do homage to her instability. I involve myself in the task, unfinishable, of contemplating the mystery of a girl who came from nowhere, supported an equivocal cause, triumphed for a few months only, failed as a soldier, saw visions, abjured the primacy of her vision, then recanted her abjuration, died in agony, a saint whom the Church refused canonization for five hundred years, yet who stands in our imagination for the single-minded triumph of the she— and it must be a she—who feared nothing, knew herself right and fully able and the chosen of the Lord.

CHAPTER I

OF HER TIME AND PLACE

THE FIRST DREAM of Joan of Arc was dreamed by her father. He saw his daughter traveling with an army: a camp follower.

When he awoke, he told her brothers that if this ever happened, he would ask them to drown her, and if they refused, he would do it himself. He communicated nothing of this to his daughter directly; her mother relayed it to her. Father fears for daughter's virtue and tells sons and mother: mother tells daughter. No surprises here.

It is profitless for us to look at Joan's family background for clues about her history. She was probably born on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, in the year 1412, the daughter of Jacques d'Arc, or Tart, and Isabelle, called Romée. Jacques d'Arc was a peasant in the village of Domrémy, on the border between the provinces of Champagne and Lorraine, distinguished only because he seems to have been a person of some local consequence; he was appointed the representative of the villagers in a suit that had been brought against Robert de Baudricourt, the lord of neighboring Vaucouleurs. Later, Baudricourt would give Joan her first official support.

Isabelle was given the name Romée because that was a sobriquet given to one who had participated in a long pilgrimage; this would indicate an unusual piety, and probably, as well, a somewhat unusual, though not unheard of, initiative in a young woman. Joan tells us that from her mother she learned her prayers, and the ordinary household tasks that would be taught to a young woman. With her characteristic boastfulness, she asserts that there was no one superior to her in sewing and spinning. She probably had charge of the sheep, although this was not so much a part of her daily life as iconography about her would indicate, and she probably drove the cattle from time to time, although she denied the importance of it at the trial, as if it suggested a lowness of occupation with which she was unwilling to associate herself. She had a sister and two brothers, the younger of whom accompanied her until her capture. After Joan's death, her brothers participated in a scheme to pass off an imposter as the real Joan, a kind of sideshow. They did it for the money.

But Joan's family does not seem to have been of much consequence to her. When she decided to obey her voices and go off to crown the king of France, she left home with a cousin, who was her godfather, employing an ordinary, adolescent lie. She told her parents she was going to help out with the cousin's wife's labor, and then with the new child. She never spoke to her parents again, and when she was asked during her trial if she felt guilty about what could only be construed as a sin of disobedience, she said, “Since God commanded it, had I had a hundred fathers and a hundred mothers, had I been born a king's daughter, I should have departed.”
¹

So we would do well not to linger over Joan's family for explanations of anything. Like any genius, Joan resists attempts to trace the nature of her history in clues from antecedents. She is an impossibility, a puzzlement, and yet she did come from somewhere. It is probably more useful to look at the larger context of her early life than at the narrow sphere of the domestic, which she could hardly wait to leave.