Joan of Arc (26 page)

None of the early histories that mention Joan get to the root of her personality; and it was too early to write about her spirituality. The Church was not yet ready to understand her, kings of France may have been content just that their title to the throne was not invalid because she had encouraged Charles VII to believe in it; and English kings were too embroiled in their own dynastic quarrels to reassert their ancestral claim to France. What kept Joan in people’s minds was chiefly popular devotion. Nobody, not even the most pedantic of scholars or the dullest of poets would be concerned about the legends or the myths if they were not reminded that Joan has remained famous. Her name was preserved by popular piety, especially as demonstrated at Orléans.

One of the first notable attempts to make sense of Joan came from England and dates from the 1590s. Whoever started the fashion, whether Shakespeare himself, Marlowe or a lesser playwright, one way to fill theatres in Southwark was to dramatise recent English history. At the time, England was fighting Spain: in the past England had fought France. For audiences, tales of derring-do on land against the French resonated with overtones of the battles against the Spaniards at sea. In any case, it was still easier for English writers to think of England’s occasional ally, France, as the country’s traditional foe.

The immediate narrative source of Shakespeare’s (or, as some believe, Shakespeare and friends’)
Henry VI
Part I, was Holinshed’s chronicle (1587), but that in turn was indebted to Hall’s ‘Union of (the) Families of York and Lancaster’ (1548). Holinshed has the more favourable view of Joan, mentioning her physical dexterity, her apparent chastity and her devotion, and describes her as a ‘person raised up by power divine, only for to succour to the French estate then deeply in distress’.
¹
Hall was much more severe. She rode horses in an unmaidenly way and kept her virginity because she was ugly.
²
‘I marvel much that wise men did believe her . . .’
³
Hall gives Joan little credit for the raising of the siege of Orléans or the crowning of Charles VII at Reims, and after recounting how at ‘Roan’, after a long inquest, ‘she was brent to ashes’, he comments condescendingly, ‘this witch or manly woman (called the maid of GOD) the Frenchmen greatly glorified and highly extolled . . . this woman was not inspired by the Holy Ghost, nor sent from God (as the Frenchmen believe) but an enchantress, an organ of the devil, sent from Satan, to blind the people and bring them to unbelief.’
⁴
To this version Holinshed adds a detail of his own, that she had lovers, while admitting that at her trial she was found to be a virgin. With such accounts before his eyes, an English playwright was bound to treat Joan as a deceiver. Besides, no such man then was going to admit that the Hundred Years War had ended in decisive French victory.

The play’s structure turns on a struggle between England (represented by Talbot) and France (represented by Joan Puzel), so it has to ignore the actual sequence of events, for Talbot’s career lasted from 1419 to 1453, whereas hers occupies only just over two years (1429–31). Besides, the playwright is uncertain what to make of Joan ‘Puzel’ (the Elizabethan term for ‘
pucelle
’). She starts off as a holy woman, turns into a witch and ends as a character from farce as she tries to save her skin by claiming to be pregnant.

Shakespeare’s plays were initially ephemeral, played today, forgotten tomorrow. Any writer who wished lasting stories wrote narrative poems. Elizabeth I may have laughed at Falstaff so much that she asked Shakespeare to write her a play about Falstaff in love, but she was presented with a copy of the first part of Spenser’s
Faery Queene
, a poem whose central theme was the love between Gloriana, representing Elizabeth herself, and Arthur, who stood for Britain. Spenser’s heroic romance used a hybrid literary form, combining something of the medieval romances of chivalry with the spirit of classical epic. Unluckily for Spenser, Elizabeth, in spite of her literary skills, took more pleasure from the music written to celebrate her everlasting virginity than his poem.

Of the countries in Europe with a noble literary tradition, only France lacked poets who had developed heroic romance to a fine art. Jean Chapelain wanted to make up for French neglect of the genre. In Joan of Arc he found a subject as worthy of patriotic fervour as the subject chosen by Spenser. Born in 1595, Chapelain grew up while the late sixteenth-century civil wars were coming to an end. In 1656, when he published the first part of
La Pucelle, ou La France delivrée,
France had virtually won its conflict with Spain. It was a moment that a proud Frenchman could savour: France was rescued from a foe as formidable as the English had been when Joan was a child. Chapelain had his chance, but without the ability to create a masterpiece he became the butt of the tragedian Racine and the satirist Boileau. An anonymous member of their circle mocked him in a spoof play,
Chapelain Décoiffé
(‘Chapelain dewigged’), in which ‘Chapelain’ even offers to make the supreme sacrifice: to give up his
Pucelle
in return for his wig. Boileau mocked him over and over again.

Boileau also parodied him in one of his
Epigrams
:

(‘Cursed be the hard author, whose harsh, unpolished effort,/mastering his brain, rhymed in spite of Wisdom,/and with his heavy hammer hammering good sense,/has made of nasty verses twelve times twelve hundred.’)

Unknown to his tormentor, Chapelain had written twice as many lines, but then Chapelain was a courtier, whose poem was meant for His Highness Henri d’Orléans Duc de Longueville et d’Estouteville, Peer of France, Sovereign Prince of Neuchâtel, Comte de Dunois, de Saint-Pol, de Chaumont, etc., etc., etc., Governor on behalf of the King and Hereditary Constable of Normandy, who just happened to be descended from Joan’s Bastard of Orléans (and was also a collateral relation of the Estoutevilles of the nullification process). Indeed, Chapelain confessed that his real hero was the Bastard, who was later given the title of Count of Dunois, and that Joan was to Dunois as Pallas to Ulysses, a ‘divine’ guide to the person at the centre of the epic. Although his recurrent epithet for Joan was ‘saint’,
⁷
Chapelain failed to win converts to her cause. In de luxe editions of his book there were fine illustrations by Vignon engraved by Abraham Bosse, in which Joan was depicted in an appropriately heroic style, with gleaming armour, flowing locks and a helmet bedecked with plumes – this Joan looked the part for an operatic heroine, but the thump of Chapelain’s six-foot lines muffled in tedium all sound of her greatness.

Some scholars, especially in Lorraine, published their research into Joan’s story, but their enthusiasm was exceptional. Until the final years of Louis XIV it seemed self-evident that stability in French life came from its absolute monarchy; official historians lauded Charles VII the Victorious. Joan came into her own only in a more individualistic age, when a new type of historian began to write for the general reader.

One of the first to discuss her story was a Huguenot or French Protestant. Paul Rapin de Thoyras had lost the right to practise his religion in France when Louis XIV prohibited Protestant religious practice. Most Huguenots left for Holland, Prussia or England. In Holland Rapin wrote the lengthy
History of England
that in 1728–32 was translated into English in twelve volumes. Volume five, on the reigns of the three Lancastrian Kings, concludes with a section called ‘A dissertation on the Maid of Orleans’.

Rapin had read Monstrelet and repeats some of Monstrelet’s mistakes. Joan was ‘a good while servant in an inn, and had the courage to ride the horses to water, and likewise to perform other feats which young girls are not wont to do’.
⁸
She was twenty when ‘she hired herself at Neufchatel to a woman that kept an inn called Larousse’, and twenty-nine at the time of her public career, so becoming a fifteenth-century Annie Oakley. Rapin also takes a ‘Burgundian’ line on Joan’s supposed subtlety: ‘I conclude from the examination I have made, that a man may reasonably suppose that Joan’s pretended inspiration was all a contrivance to revise the courage of the dismayed Frenchmen.’ But Rapin also takes a sympathetic view of Joan’s fate and fame. He is indignant: ‘I cannot but help reflecting on the barbarous usage Joan met with’; he himself knew all about religious persecution. He is also shrewd on the sentences of the two trials, the one that condemned her and the one that set aside the condemnation. ‘The former was passed by her enemies, whose interest it was to defame her; and the latter by her Friends, to whose Glory and Advantage it turned to make her innocent.’
⁹
He anticipates a view common among modern historians who are sceptical about Joan.

Not until the mid-eighteenth century was there a British version of English history to rival Rapin’s. David Hume is now considered the leading sceptical philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, but he made his name and his money as a popular historian. His fluent style, which contemporaries thought slightly French, makes him so pleasant to read that his ideological message is almost concealed. But the man who thought miracles impossible was sure that he knew what could not happen. Joan’s ‘unexperienced mind, working night and day, on this favourite subject’, how to save her king, ‘mistook the impulsions of her passion for heavenly inspiration; and she fancied that she saw visions and heard voices, exhorting her to re-establish the throne of France, and to expel the foreign invaders’.
¹⁰
He continues, ‘It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and the marvellous, to reject the former in all narrations merely profane and human, to sample the second . . . and to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances.’ Hume was able to say confidently that it cannot have been true that Joan recognised Charles at Chinon, that she told him she was sent to raise the siege of Orléans, to take him to Reims to be crowned and anointed, to ask for a particular sword (he means the sword at Ste-Catherine-de-Fierbois) – he knows better than anyone there at the time that none of these stories could have been true. He also pours scorn on those who made Joan out to be a shepherdess in her late teens, for it was ridiculous not to believe that she had worked in an inn and there learnt to ride a horse and that she was in her late twenties when she came into prominence. Hume relies on Hall, Holinshed and Monstrelet, but he is not above a sly dig at medieval piety to reinforce his credentials as a doubter. ‘The ceremony of coronation was here performed with the holy oil, which a pigeon had brought to King Clovis, on the first establishment of the French monarchy.’ Hume’s pigeon was other people’s dove, but then a dove was a symbol of the Holy Spirit and symbolism was alien to Hume. What he could understand was common humanity, and he ends his account of Joan with a moving peroration. ‘This admirable heroine, to whom the most generous of the antients would have erected altars, was, on pretence of heresy and magic, delivered over alive to the flames, and expiated by that dreadful punishment the signal services, which she had rendered to her prince and to her native country.’
¹¹

Among the group of ‘philosophical historians’ to which Hume belonged, none was so prolific, amusing or admired as Voltaire. Inevitably, a man who waxed eloquent on credulity and cruelty was drawn to the topic of Joan. Voltaire already knew of Joan when he praised her in his epic on Henry IV as

. . . brave amazone,

La honte des anglais, et le soutien du trône
.
¹²

(‘brave amazon,

the shame of the English and the support of the throne’.)

His view of the achievement of Charles VII, elaborated in his
Essai sur les moeurs
(‘Essay on customs’), which despite its title deals largely with French history, depended on Monstrelet. He seems to endorse Joan’s view of her role when he writes ‘she talks to the soldiers from the point of view of God’,
¹³
but he makes clear his own view when of her unjust trial he writes that this ‘heroine’ was ‘worthy of the miracle that she had feigned’.
¹⁴
He admired her but did not believe in her. Eventually he lost patience with the exalted emotions her coming inspired. Joan became an excuse to have fun.

Voltaire’s sense of humour often let him down. In 1730 the topic of the now forgotten epic by Chapelain came up in conversation with friends and by 1735 Voltaire had finished ten cantos of his riposte; over the years he added and amended the poem, he endured the arrival of a series of pirated editions until at last, in 1762, an approved edition was published. He went on revising the text throughout the rest of his life. It amused the immense circle of his correspondents and a generation after his death it gave his Romantic enemies a reason to detest him.

Chapelain annoyed Voltaire for choosing a ‘saint’ as his protagonist. Voltaire’s Joan was more worldly. She was

a servant at an inn, born in the village of Domremy on the Meuse, who, finding a strength in her body and a temerity beyond her sex, was used by the Comte de Dunois to restore the situation of Charles VII. She was taken in a sortie from Compiègne in 1430, taken to Rouen, judged to be a sorceress by an ecclesiastical court that was equally ignorant and barbarous and burnt by the English who should have honoured her for her courage.
¹⁵

Not altogether accurate nor altogether adequate, this account is different enough from what is in his poem to make it clear that, had he wanted to do so, he could have been reliable. He preferred to enjoy himself. He joked that, unlike Chapelain, he was not meant to write hagiography: