Joan of Arc (19 page)

The Bastard knew no one more sober, just as d’Aulon had known no one more chaste. ‘Neither I nor others when with her ever thought of her as a woman to be desired: she seemed holy.’ Fifteen days after the Earl of Suffolk had been made prisoner at the taking of Jargeau, someone sent him four lines, in which it was said that a Maid should come from the oak-wood and ride on the backs of the archers and against them (this was the so-called prophecy of Merlin). If some of Joan’s prophecies did not come true, she was sure that she had been sent to raise the siege of Orléans and lead the king to Reims.

By the time these words of prophesy had been spoken, the Bastard had seen his cousin the king enter Paris, his half-brother the duke return to the city of Orléans, and the English driven from the mainland of France, with the exception of Calais.

An even more intimate insight into Joan’s public life comes from the witness Louis de Coutes. Louis was the brother-in-law of Beauharnais, a bourgeois of Orléans, and a son of Jean de Coutes, captain of Châteaudun and chamberlain to the Duke of Orléans. Louis met Joan when he was fourteen or fifteen years old and page to Sieur de Gaucourt, captain of the castle, during her visit to Chinon with two gentlemen, who took her to the king. He saw her many times going and coming to the king. She was housed throughout her stay there in the tower of Coudray, and he passed the whole days with her, until night, when she always was with women. ‘He [Louis] remembered well while she was living at Coudray many days high-ranking people came to visit her there. He did not know what they did or said, because when he saw them coming he retired, nor does he know who they were.’ While she lived in that keep he often saw her on her knees praying, without knowing what she said, and sometimes she was weeping.

Joan was taken to Poitiers, then to Tours, where she lived with a woman called Lapau. There the Duke of Alençon gave her a horse, which he saw at the home of the woman Lapau, and the king gave her a whole suit of armour and a military household. Louis became her page there, along with a boy called Raymond, and from then onwards he stayed with her ‘as her page, at Blois, at Orléans, and until she came to Paris’. From Tours she went with the army to Blois, where she remained for a while with them – how long he did not remember. Then she went to Orléans via the Sologne and set out fully armed, along with her men-at-arms, whom she constantly told to trust in Our Lord and confess their sins. Once she reached Orléans ‘he saw her receive the sacrament of the Eucharist’.

When she reached Orléans on the side of the Sologne, Joan, many others and Louis were taken across the Loire, to the side of the city of Orléans; and from there they entered the town. During the journey from Blois to Orléans, Joan got badly bruised, as she had slept fully armed. In Orléans she lived at the house of the town treasurer, Jacques Bouchier, facing the Banner Gate, and there she received the Sacrament. The day after her arrival she went to seek the Bastard of Orléans, with whom she had an interview, and when she came back, she was annoyed because the captains had decided not to attack the English that day. All the same she went to a boulevard occupied by the French, opposite one under English control, and urged them in God’s name to leave or else she would drive them away. In response the Bastard of Granville said insultingly: ‘Do you want us to surrender to a woman?’ Although at first she retired to her lodgings (when Louis thought she would go to bed), she soon got up again saying, ‘
Ha! sanglant garçon, vous ne me dyriez pas que le sanc de France feust repandu!
’ (‘Ha, bloody boy, you didn’t tell me French blood was being spilt!’) He was sent to get her horse while Joan was dressed in her armour with the help of the ladies of the house; and so the French took the fort of St-Loup. She saw to it that clerics in their robes were spared, but Louis heard that all other English were taken away and killed by the local French. Once it was all over Joan came back to eat and Louis was amazed that as so often she ate only a piece of bread, and that just twice a day. Every night when women were with her she changed out of her armour, but if she could not find any women she slept fully clothed.

Joan went on and on fighting until ‘the fort of the bridge’ fell, and once Orléans was relieved, she went after the English at Beaugency and Meung. She was distressed at the brutality evident at Beaugency – she was very humane – and when a Frenchman struck a prisoner and left him for dead, she got off her horse, had him make his confession and comforted him as best she could. She went with the army to Jargeau, which was taken by assault, along with many English (among them the Earl of Suffolk and John de la Pole, his brother), and then to Tours to join the king and to Châlons and Reims. Louis stated: ‘There our king was crowned and anointed in my presence for I was, as I have already said, page to Joan, and never left her. I stayed with her till she came to Paris.

‘She was a good, upright woman, living a good Catholic life, and, when possible, never missing Mass,’ de Coutes continued. Swearing in God’s name distressed her. If Alençon swore or blasphemed before her, ‘she told him off’. Soldiers dared not use bad language in front of her, for fear of being rebuked. She allowed no women in her army. ‘One day, near Chateau-Thierry, seeing the mistress of one of her followers riding on horseback, she pursued her with her sword, without striking her’ and gently and charitably told her she must no longer be . . . with the soldiers’, or she would be in trouble. ‘He know nothing else, not having seen her since Paris.’

The last of the intimates who were with Joan during her few months of glory was her chaplain and confessor, Jean Pasquerel. Like that much more famous cleric Martin Luther, Jean Pasquerel was an eremitical friar of the order of St Augustine. He was at the convent of Tours in 1429 and at the convent of Bayeux in 1456. He first heard of Joan when at Anche, a place whose exact location is unknown. One day he was invited by a group of people to join them in visiting her; they told him they would not leave him until he had seen her. So he went with them to Chinon, then to Tours, where ‘he was then a reader in a convent’; and there they found Joan staying with Jean Dupuy, a burgher of the town. His companions spoke to her: ‘Joan, we bring you this good father; if you knew him you would love him very much.’ She said that ‘she had already heard of me and would like to confess to me tomorrow’. On the following day he heard her confession and sung the Mass before her. ‘From that day on, I always followed her and was constantly with her, until Compiègne, where she was captured.’

At Chinon, Father Jean heard that she had been visited on two occasions by women, the Lady de Gaucourt and the Lady de Trèves. Like many other witnesses he recalled how she went away to be examined at Poitiers, where Maître Jourdin Morin, Maître Pierre de Versailles, later Bishop of Meaux, and many others decided that ‘in view of the necessity weighing on the kingdom’, the king could use her help. They found nothing in her ‘against the Catholic Faith’. She returned to Chinon and thought she would be allowed to speak to the king but had to wait for the council to agree:

On the day when she was to speak to the king, just as she was going into the castle, a man on horseback said, ‘Is that the Maid?’ and insulted her and swore. ‘In God’s Name,’ she said to him, ‘do you, who are so near your death, take God’s name in vain!’ And an hour later he fell in the water and was drowned. The friar said he heard this from Joan and many others who said they had witnessed it.

Father Jean then tells the familiar story, according to which she told the king he was the true heir to the kingdom and other things that only he could know. That at any rate is what Joan told him, but there was no witness to corroborate her version of events. What sounds typical of her is Father Jean’s assertion that she was angry at being cross-questioned so much, since it stopped her from acting. She told him she had asked ‘the Messengers of her Lord, that is of God, who appeared to her’, what she should do; and they told her to take her Lord’s banner. And so she had her banner made, with the image of Our Saviour in judgement on the clouds of heaven and an angel holding in his hand a fleur-de-lis which Christ blessed. Father Jean was with her at Tours when the banner was painted. His account ties in with the treasury note that twenty-five
livres tournois
were paid to one ‘Hauves Poulnois, painter, living at Tours, for painting and getting materials for a great standard, and a small one for the Maid’.

When she went to help Orléans, Father Jean went with her and did not leave her till the day she was captured at Compiègne. As her chaplain, he confessed her and sang Mass for her. She was, he said, full of piety to God and Our Lady, confessed almost daily and communicated often. If near a friary, she told him to remind her of the day when the children of the poor received the Eucharist, so she might receive it with them; and this she did often. When she made her confession she was in tears.

When she left Tours to go to Orléans, she begged him to stay on as her Confessor; and this he promised to do. At Blois she asked him to have her banner made, which he did, and once in the morning and once in the evening he was to bring priests together ‘to sing anthems and hymns to the Blessed Mary’. Joan was with them and allowed only the soldiers who had confessed that day join her; she told her people to confess if they wished to come to the meeting, and the priests were always at hand to hear confessions. On the march to Orléans the priests were placed at the front of the army and sang the
Veni Creator Spiritus
and other antiphons.

Father Jean’s version of how the supply boats got into Orléans differs slightly from that of the Bastard of Orléans. He says just that the water rose. Then he and the other priests went back to Blois, but some days later he got into the city by way of the River Beauce. Neither the priests nor their convoy were attacked by the English. He tells a familiar story about the capture of the fort of St-Loup on the eve of Ascension Day and about Joan’s distress at the sufferings of the wounded soldiers. She was worried particularly that so many English had died without having confessed. Making her own confession on the spot, she told him to invite the whole army to do so too and to thank God for the victory – and if they would not, she would give them no more help. That day she predicted that the siege would be raised within five days, and so things turned out. She would not fight on Ascension Day, but went to confession and received the host.

On that day too she dictated yet another letter to the English, telling them to leave France. She did not send it in the normal way, by means of a herald, since her herald Guyenne had not been sent back, so she attached it to an arrow and told an archer to shoot it at the English. The gesture merely provoked yet more insults, which reduced her to tears, but she soon recovered because she had received good news, she said, from God – and on the following day the Fort des Augustins fell. Although wounded by an arrow, she refused to let any of her soldiers use charms to heal the wound. She was hurt by yet more coarse language from the English commander Glasdale, but when soon after he fell into the Loire and was drowned, she wept for his soul.

Nothing about Joan’s life remained so vivid in Father Jean’s memory as the days that led up to the relief of Orléans. He may have put words in her mouth, for as late as May 1430 he wrote for her to warn the Hussites of Bohemia that if they persisted in their heresy, she might well come to sort them out when she had finished with the English; such sentiments confirmed her orthodoxy. He was content to make general comments, and his testimony omitted many details of her later story.

He believed firmly that she was sent by God because of her good works and her many virtues. So much did she fear God, that not for anything in the world would she displease Him. He then repeats himself. When wounded in the shoulder by an arrow, which went through from one side to the other, and some spoke of charming her, promising in this way to cure her on the spot, she answered that it would be ‘a sin’, and said she would rather die than offend God ‘by such enchantments’.

His final remarks were bolder. He was amazed that clerics as distinguished as those who caused her death at Rouen should have dared to commit such a crime as to put to death so poor and simple a Christian, cruelly and without a cause, or at least not one grave enough for capital punishment; they might have kept her in prison or elsewhere, but she had annoyed them so much that they had become her mortal enemies; and so, it seems, they were responsible for an unjust sentence. He stated that her actions and deeds were all perfectly known to the king and the Duke of Alençon, who held certain secrets they could tell if they wanted to. As for himself he had nothing more to say, ‘unless it be that many times Joan expressed to me a desire that, if she died, the king would build a chapel, where men could pray for the souls of those killed in defence of the kingdom’.

Nobody else who came across Joan from the day she arrived in Chinon to the day she was captured at Compiègne knew her as well as d’Aulon, Alençon, the Bastard, Louis de Coutes and Father Jean, but others had encounters with her they still liked to recall twenty-five years after they had occurred. Many such comments repeat tales that other witnesses had given. For example, she was a ‘simple shepherd-maiden’, who often went to confession and took communion, who ate and drank moderately, who tried to be rid of all women camp followers unless soldiers would marry them and that she was ‘good not only to the French, but also to the enemy’. Those who had examined her at Poitiers had found ‘nothing but good in her’, and discovered nothing against the Catholic faith. Joan had a great horror of dice, was generous in giving money away and astonished soldiers for the way she handled a lance or a horse. Thibauld d’Armagnac said she was like ‘the most skilled captain in the world who all his life had been trained in the art of war’.

Some witnesses are valuable because their evidence fills in gaps in the standard accounts. Maître Reginald Thierry, dean of the church of Meung-sur-Yèvre and surgeon to the king, told how when St-Pierre-le-Moûtier was captured, Joan stopped the soldiers from ransacking the church so that nothing should be removed. Pierre Milet, clerk to the Electors of Paris, captures precisely the tone of her voice when he transcribed part of the letter to the English in her own French dialect: ‘
Messire vous mande que vous en aliez en vostre pays, car c’est son plaisir, ou sinon je vous feray ung tel hahay
’ (‘Our Lord wants you to go to your own country, as it’s his pleasure, or if not I’ll give you what for’). There is a more precise witness to her idiom: Seguin Seguin, Dominican Professor of Theology and Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Poitiers.