Joan of Arc (6 page)

In 1392, Charles became so insane that he couldn't rule at all; his brother Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, was made regent. Philip had married the heiress of Flanders and acquired her land, so he had aggregated an enormous amount of territory; this, in addition to his role as regent, made him immensely powerful. But when Charles was sane, he followed the advice, not of Philip, but of his other brother, Louis of Orléans. Both Burgundy and Orléans used their periods of power for their own ends; for example, each, when he was in favor, exempted his own lands from taxation. As a result of the king's mental illness, the French court was in a state of utter disarray.

Charles's mother, Isabeau, provided no countervailing force of stability. She was terrified of thunder and had a special conveyance built to protect her from it; she was phobic about disease and agoraphobic. She was frightened of crossing bridges and would cross none without a balustrade. At the end of her life, she was grotesquely fat, to the point that her obesity made it doubtful that she could act as regent of the kingdom. She suffered from gout, and by 1425 she had to get around in a wheelchair. Pilgrimages were made in her name for her menstrual troubles.

Despite her weight, her shortness of leg and stature, and her ill health, she was infamous for her promiscuity. She was probably the lover of Louis of Orléans, her husband's younger brother. Her flagrant infidelities gave credence to the belief that her son Charles was illegitimate. In the Treaty of Troyes, which she signed in 1420, she suggested that he was not the lawful heir to the French throne.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the uncertainty about Charles's legitimacy, both to him and to the state. The sacred power of the king was his, literally, by blood, and if the blood could not be traced to his father, he was on the throne, not by the will of God, but by a subterfuge. Questions of authority are always interpretive, and Charles's uncertain antecedents shook even the grounds upon which such an interpretation could be made.

In signing the Treaty of Troyes Isabeau agreed to an arrangement that disinherited her son and made Henry V of England heir to the French throne on the grounds that he had married Isabeau's daughter, Charles's sister Catherine. But the problems between Isabeau and Charles began with the death of Louis of Orléans. The rivalry between Louis, who was ruthless and brilliant, and his nephew John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, had been a feature of Charles's life since his childhood. Louis had, in his own financial interest, cut off the flow of money from the French court to the dukedom of Burgundy. To pay him back, John had Louis murdered in 1407, and power vacillated between the Burgundians, led by John, and the Armagnacs, led by Bernard VII, count of Armagnac.

As a result of his marriage, Charles was in the camp of the anti-Burgundians. When he was fourteen but already married, Charles's last older brother died, and he became dauphin. Almost immediately, he quarreled with his mother, who sided with the Burgundians and lived under the protection of the duke of Burgundy (the murderer of her lover) at a dissolute but luxurious court. The duke's enemy, the count of Armagnac, who had possession of Paris and the loyalty of the dauphin, had Isabeau arrested and stripped of her wealth. She blamed her son for this.

In September 1419, Charles involved himself in the murder of John the Fearless, an act of vengeance for the assassination of Louis of Orléans. Although the actual murderer of John was never named, it was known that Charles was present on the bridge where an ax was buried in John's skull. For some reason, probably to safeguard her wealth and her place in the Burgundian court, Isabeau took sides against her son and in favor of the murderer of her former lover. The complications of Isabeau's relationship with Charles, her disloyalty to her son and the kingdom of France, are perplexing to the point of incomprehensibility. Certainly the Treaty of Troyes is a historical anomaly: a mother explicitly supporting her son's enemies and implicitly casting doubts not only on his legitimacy but on her own sexual probity.

Charles inherited his mother's shortness of leg and was knock-kneed as well. His face was unprepossessing; his eyes were small and squinty, and his chin was weak. Although contemporary chroniclers praised his love of learning, everyone agreed that he was changeable and fickle in his loyalties. He had a habit of attaching himself to stronger, older men, most notably the duke de la Trémoille, who would never be a friend of Joan's.

De la Trémoille was a fat man of enormous height; he had the deepest pockets in France. His ready cash was responsible for his enormous influence, but probably his dominating physical presence had a humbling effect on weak, puny Charles. His policy was always one of diplomatic negotiation with the Burgundians rather than military confrontation with them and their British allies. In this, he was utterly opposed to Joan, who despised truces and felt that the Burgundians could only be spoken to “at the end of a lance.”

De la Trémoille was famous as much for his girth as for his wealth; he was kept alive when an assassin's sword couldn't pierce his flesh. Iconically, this obese, wealthy, well-born courtier was exactly the opposite of the fleet, abstemious girl who came from nowhere, itching for a fight.

The first step in Joan's remarkable journey is the most inexplicable, for it was the one she took unaccompanied by any sign of authority of gender or of class. She approached Robert de Baudricourt, the lord of her local bailiwick, escorted only by her godfather. She was seventeen years old and an illiterate peasant. She was asking for an army.

Myth has created Robert de Baudricourt as a doughty old soldier, gruff but good-hearted, reluctantly taken in by a brave girl. Even Shaw recycles a legend that when Joan appeared at Baudricourt's keep in Vaucouleurs, the hens stopped laying and the cows ceased giving milk, returning to normal only when Baudricourt agreed to speak to Joan. In fact, Baudricourt was a notorious plunderer and womanizer, and many people were surprised that Joan escaped a meeting with him with her virginity intact.

When Joan finally got to see Baudricourt, she approached him with a straightforward lack of deference, an assumption of equality (she was, after all, sent by her voices) that must have stunned him. At their first meeting, she told him:

Perhaps the most remarkable word in this extraordinary address is the strongly inflected pronoun “I.” So certain was she of the crucial nature of her mission and her fitness to accomplish it that she did not hesitate to predict the success of its outcome. It is this kind of specific and definite prediction that got Joan into trouble when events did not bear out her words.

Baudricourt did not immediately fall into line and grant Joan's requests. At first, he may have thought of keeping her around because she would make good sport for his soldiers. But as a result of her time among his men, more and more of them were drawn to her and pledged their loyalty. So even before she was given the local lord's official sanction, she was beginning to cluster around her men who believed in her because of what must have been the irresistible power of her presence. Jean de Metz, one of the first to join her in Vaucouleurs, said of her: “I had a great trust in what the maid said, and I was on fire with what she said and with a love for her which was, as I believe, a divine love. I believe that she was sent by God.”
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Margaret La Touroulde, widow of the king's receiver general, says of Joan's magnetism: “I heard those who took her to the king say that . . . they thought her presumptuous and their intention was to put her to the proof. But when they had set out to take her, they were ready to do whatever Joan pleased and were as eager to present her to the King as herself, and that they could not have resisted Joan's will.”
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Even while she was waiting for Baudricourt, she had begun to have a reputation as a powerful, even magical person. While Baudricourt was dithering, Joan was summoned by Duke Charles of Lorraine, who was in poor health and wanted Joan to cure him. He was hardly an admirable character; he had separated from his wife and kept a mistress by whom he had five bastard children.

Joan told him she could do nothing for his health but that he ought to mend his ways, get rid of his mistress, and take back his wife. Astonishingly, the duke responded to her advice with grateful humility. He gave her four francs and a black horse. Then she asked him to give her his son, the duke of Anjou, and men to take into France, saying that if he did this she would pray for his recovery. The duke agreed.

So Joan returned to Baudricourt with four francs, a black horse, and a noble companion. This moved Baudricourt to meet with her at her lodgings and to bring the curé with him in order to certify that she was not an agent of the devil. It is likely that he was influenced by the growing enthusiasm of the local people, who invoked the prophecies that had prepared Joan's way.

On the first Sunday of Lent, February 13, 1429, Joan set out from Baudricourt's seat at Vaucouleurs to Chinon, the king's headquarters, accompanied by the duke of Anjou, the knights who had attached themselves to her while she was waiting for Baudricourt's support, and the soldiers she had finally been given by him. The 350-mile trip took a remarkably quick eleven days. Joan and her men crossed no fewer than six rivers. They took chances by riding into Burgundian territory and even hearing mass publicly at Auxerre, which was firmly in Burgundian hands. Rumors were already following them. The Bastard of Orléans had sent representatives ahead to the court to discover the truth about them. De la Trémoille may have sent scouts out to ambush Joan and her companions; they were frustrated, and Joan slipped through, in record time, without difficulties arising either from the king's supporters or the enemy she had sworn to save him from.

The story of how Joan first got an audience with the king and then, almost immediately, galvanized him and talked him into sending her to the besieged city of Orléans with an army is a tale that has gained credence not in small part because it is so susceptible to verbal and visual representation.

Joan got into the castle at Chinon relatively easily, and this is in itself extraordinary: It's as if Dorothy got to Oz with no interference from the wicked witch. As if a girl from the boondocks decided to see the president and made her way to the Oval Office without passing through metal detectors. Once she was in the castle, she encountered her first obstacle. Or perhaps, better, her first test.

News of Joan had reached the court, but the king and his council were ambivalent about receiving her. Baudricourt'ssponsorship induced the council to abandon their misgivings and allow her to see the king, but not before two days of wrangling about it. When she was given permission to cross the drawbridge, she was insulted by a guard, who said to her: “Isn't that the maid? Jarnidieu (I deny God). If I had her for the night, she wouldn't remain a maid.” She later told her confessor that she had answered: “Ha! In God's name, you deny Him when you are so near to death.” Within an hour, he had fallen into the water and was drowned.
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Having agreed to admit Joan, the council—with or without the king's connivance—decided that the king should disguise himself to see if Joan could see through the ruse and pick him out in a crowd. As befitted the overelaborate protocol of the time, at least three hundred courtiers were assembled in the hall, which was lit by torches. Joan was ushered in and greeted with great ceremony. One of the courtiers—in Shaw's play he is Gilles de Rais, the infamous Bluebeard—was presented to her as the king. But she denied that he was the king and made her way through the crowd to Charles, who was cowering among the courtiers, dressed with purposeful simplicity to conceal his royal identity. Joan fell to her knees before him, saying, according to a witness, “Very noble Lord dauphin, I am come and sent by God to bring succor to you and your kingdom.”
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This event has been illustrated in such diverse media as the stained glass of Orléans Cathedral, the illustrated children's books by which many of us got our first glimpse of Joan, and the comedy of Shaw. In it are elements of both ritual and child's play. It involves the kind of testing that depends on proofs irrationally gathered. This may be foreign to the modern juridical mind, but to the essential part of human beings that loves stories, it is not foreign at all, in no small measure because it contains irresistible plot devices. The stranger, the outsider, the innocent, arrives in a milieu for which she is underprepared. The sophisticated city slickers try to trick her, but her native wit defeats them. Abashed and awed, they fall to their knees in front of her.

After this charade, Joan and the dauphin withdrew to a private area. What happened between them is unknowable, but whatever it was seems to have had a transforming effect on Charles, at least temporarily. The depressed and listless young man seemed to become illumined, and new energy was visible in his words and gestures.

The content of Joan and Charles's private conversation has been the subject of an enormous amount of speculation. What did Joan say that had such a galvanizing effect? Most accounts agree that, at minimum, Joan relieved Charles's anxieties about his illegitimacy. Some accounts say that she informed him of the exact words of a prayer he had made in private and in silence, words that were known to no other living soul. Later, under great psychic pressure during her trial, she would claim that an angel had brought Charles a crown from Rheims, but before her death she admitted that she had invented the angel.