The Maid and the Queen (3 page)

To have so strong and accomplished a parent is not always an undiluted blessing, and Yolande’s father evidently felt the weight of paternal expectations. Rebellion comes in many forms; John chose disengagement. He shunned territorial aggression and political intrigue in favor of the chivalric pursuits of hunting, dances, and banquets. John threw himself into romance, not war. When his first fiancée was fatally stricken by illness en route to the wedding, John rode furiously to be by her side in order to hold her hand on her deathbed even though he had never met her before. In a society that equated a monarch’s virility with military prowess, the kingdom of Aragon boasted a crown prince who displayed a keen interest in the ways of fashion, dabbled in music and literature (John could read and write in several languages), and had developed a distinct fondness, much to his countrymen’s disgust, for poetry.

He was also a devoted Francophile. John’s first two wives hailed from France, and when the second one died unexpectedly in 1378, he defied his father, who demanded that he marry a princess of Sicily, and instead wedded another Frenchwoman, Yolande of Bar.
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Theirs was a genuine love match, highly unusual for the period, a union based upon a harmony of interests and temperament rather than strategic or material gain. Like John, Yolande of Bar had been raised in an atmosphere of gentility, culture, and glamour, and she too was a direct descendant of royalty. Her mother, Marie of France, was the beloved sister of Charles V, the French king; her father, Robert I, duke of Bar.

The duchy of Bar was of immense strategic importance to the French. Because of its location at the extreme eastern perimeter of France, Bar was under constant threat from its neighbor, the duke of Lorraine, a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor. The resulting rivalry split Bar’s political identity in half. The majority of the inhabitants living to the west of the Meuse River,
which flowed down the center of the duchy, considered themselves French, while those to the east identified with the empire. To maintain the loyalty of Bar was vital; that was why Marie, a French princess, had been given in marriage to its duke.

Marie had two passions in life: hunting and books. She read voraciously and accumulated not only novels and romances, but also works of theology, history, and poetry. Even more significantly, Marie gave her progeny, the girls included, the same superior education that she herself, as a member of the French royal family, had received.

Yolande of Bar was the eldest of Marie’s eleven children. She too loved to hunt and especially to read. Yolande’s admiration for troubadours, songs, and poetry approached the reverential. By the time of her engagement to John of Aragon in October 1379 at the age of fourteen (he was twenty-nine), she had grown into a particularly charming and vivacious adolescent. She even won over her father-in-law, who had reluctantly given his permission in a glum letter in which he scolded John for having thrown away the opportunity for a glorious reign by jilting the Sicilian heiress.

Yolande of Aragon, the woman who would have such an effect on Joan of Arc’s life, was her parents’ firstborn and only surviving child. Her seven younger brothers and sisters all perished in infancy or early childhood. Perhaps to assuage the terrible grief over so many deaths, life at court was especially convivial. “But this was taken to such exaggerated lengths that all life was spent in dances and ladies’ assemblies,” wrote a disapproving chronicler of the period.

In 1387, when the princess Yolande was six years old, her grandfather finally died and her father, John, inherited the throne. To mark the occasion, a novel cultural initiative was launched: to render Aragon famous throughout Europe as the principal center for the study and practice of the art of the troubadour, known as “the Gay Science.” So many new public schools dedicated to the teaching of poetry were established that it seemed to the disapproving Aragonese baronial class that “what in bygone days had been a very respectable exercise, a relief from the travails of war in which many excellent knights… distinguished themselves, became debased to such a degree that all men appeared to be minstrels.” A grand festival was instituted annually, at which high government officials were solemnly appointed as judges, with precious jewels awarded for the best verses.

To grow up, as Yolande of Aragon did, in this peculiarly artistic atmosphere
was a unique experience in Christendom. Other European courts patronized troubadours and encouraged the literary arts, of course, but nothing like this. The point was not simply to learn to read, write, and perform verses, stories, or songs, but to incorporate the art into daily existence—to
live
poetry.

Not that there wasn’t precedent for this approach. During the Middle Ages, the stories of passion and chivalry found in songs and literature routinely inspired real-life mimicry. It was not at all unusual, for example, for a knight to try to impress a lady by embarking on a quest in her name. Courts of love, where women acted as judges, deliberating over quarrels between sweethearts and meting out rewards or punishments according to the verdict handed down, were commonplace.

The difference in Aragon during Princess Yolande’s childhood and adolescence was one of degree. Her parents’ notions of the poetic ideal trespassed not only into the reality of everyday life but into a spiritual realm more commonly associated with worship and theology. (“All earthly things are moved by her; she influences the heavenly bodies in their courses,” her father wrote of the Gay Science.) One result of this indoctrination was a predilection for literature that would accompany Yolande of Aragon into adulthood. She would spend her life surrounded by books, eventually compiling a substantial library. Upon the death of the old duke of Berry in 1416, Yolande purchased one of the most famous works in his collection, his
Belles Heures,
a magnificently illustrated manuscript made expressly for the duke during his lifetime.
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(In this transaction, Yolande demonstrated not only her love of beautiful volumes, but also her familiarity with the wily ways of booksellers. The executors for the duke of Berry’s estate set the value of the tome at 700 Parisian pounds, but “after having for a long time viewed and examined these Hours, [Yolande] kept them and paid to the executors the sum of only 300 Tours pounds.”) When the duke of Orléans was captured by the English during the battle of Agincourt in 1415, Yolande had his entire library transferred to her castle at Saumur so that it would not fall into the hands of the enemy.

But her fascination with fiction extended beyond her desire to read and own books. She once lost herself so thoroughly in a performance by minstrels
that it wasn’t until the act was over that she discovered she’d had her pocket picked by a particularly audacious thief who got away not only with her purse but also with her personal seal, bearing her name and coat of arms. Her tendency to view religion in terms of parables too survived childhood. This credulity was reflected in an episode made famous by the chronicler Jehan de Bourdigné. While she was out riding one day with a large entourage, including her ladies-in-waiting, other members of her household, and four or five spaniels, Yolande’s hunting dogs caught a scent and began barking and worrying at a group of bushes in front of her. Suddenly they flushed out a rabbit, which jumped for safety into her lap. Yolande immediately stopped the procession, called off the dogs, and, cradling the rabbit in her arms, asked her servants to explore the area. They discovered a large stone very close to the hare’s burrow, on which all agreed appeared an image of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus in her lap, just as the rabbit was then ensconced in Yolande’s. Convinced that the incident was miraculous in nature, Yolande had a chapel erected at the spot to commemorate the event.

But there was one book in particular that was destined to have such a profound effect on Yolande of Aragon that it would influence the future of France itself. The book was called
The Romance of Melusine,
and it was written by Jean of Arras in 1393, when Yolande was twelve years old. What was so interesting about
The Romance of Melusine
was that it was a work of fiction commissioned and written specifically to address a political controversy.

J
EAN OF
A
RRAS
was a secretary to the duke of Berry, brother of both Charles V, king of France, and Yolande’s grandmother, Marie, duchess of Bar, and one of the most powerful nobles in France. As a ranking member of the royal family, the duke of Berry had been given the task of administering that portion of southern France that included Poitou, whose capital city was Poitiers. He was known for being a rather grasping fellow, with a tendency to appropriate other people’s property for his own use. In the 1380s, the duke of Berry decided that he needed a more impressive residence at which to stay on those occasions when he left Paris to visit his southern territories, so he seized a particularly ancient and imposing castle that had long been in the possession of a local family by the name of Lusignan, had his soldiers throw out the current owners, and moved in.

The duke had failed to reckon, however, with the political strength of his
evictees. The Lusignans came from a leading clan of aristocrats, the counts of La Marche, who had persistently exercised power in the area. Their ancestry was extremely prestigious—a century earlier, a Lusignan had married a former queen of England, and another had ruled Cyprus—and they did not appreciate having their castle lifted from them as though they were no better than a pack of serfs. They mounted a vigorous opposition to the duke’s action, and such was the weight of their name and the esteem in which the family was held locally that the rebellion threatened to spread and undermine French authority generally in the region.

The duke of Berry was in a bind. To retreat from his initial position and return the castle to its rightful owners would be a demonstration of weakness that could set a precedent for further acts of insubordination. Besides, he liked the castle. It was the nicest one in the area, and he felt that since his pedigree and authority were superior to those of the Lusignans, who were after all his subjects, he should have it. On the other hand, he did not relish having to go to war over it. This meant he had to come up with a good reason for the appropriation. Luckily for the duke, the Lusignan family had something of a history of sedition, having occasionally conspired with En gland against France in the preceding centuries. If they could somehow be linked to the English in the present day, the summary acquisition of their castle would not appear as usurpation but as the rightful return of property to the French crown. In 1387, the duke of Berry charged his secretary, Jean of Arras, with undertaking this delicate task of propaganda, and
The Romance of Melusine
was the astonishing result.

Melusine,
set in the not too distant past, told the story of Raymondin, youngest son of the earl of the Forest. The earl was an impecunious aristocrat who had sired many children and was therefore receptive to his cousin Aimery’s suggestion that Aimery adopt Raymondin. Aimery, the count of Poitiers, was an extremely wealthy and learned man, who was schooled in civil and canon law, science, and especially astrology. He was also very fond of hunting.

Accordingly, Raymondin came to live with Aimery in Poitiers. He was very respectful and served his cousin to the best of his abilities, and in turn was treated as a beloved son. All went well until one day, five or six years later, when Aimery and a large retinue of knights, including Raymondin, went off to hunt in the forest.

Once in the wood, the hunters encountered a wild boar and the chase
was on. In the excitement of the pursuit, Aimery and Raymondin rode faster than the others and were soon separated from the group. The boar drew them deeper and deeper into the wilderness. As night fell, they realized they were lost.

As they were searching for a way out of the wood, Aimery studied the stars, which shone very brightly that night, and marveled at what they told him. He explained to Raymondin that the heavens augured a strange enterprise: “The adventure is this: that if, at this present hour, a subject were to kill his lord, he would become the richest, most powerful, and most honored of all his line, and from him would issue such a noble lineage that it would be spoken of and remembered until the end of the world.” Upset by this portent (with good reason, as it turned out), Aimery turned to Raymondin and exclaimed, “O Lord God! Why doth fortune make a man prosper by ill-doing?”

Instead of replying, Raymondin, to ease the earl’s distress, stopped his horse and built a small fire so they could rest in comfort. As they were warming themselves by the flames, the wild boar they had been chasing earlier suddenly burst out of the wood and attacked. Aimery bravely stepped forward to strike down the boar with his sword but missed his aim. Raymondin’s blow went similarly astray, but to disastrous results; glancing off the boar’s back, Raymondin’s sword instead pierced Aimery, who went down. The wild beast charged again, and to save himself Raymondin pulled his blade out of Aimery and struck down the creature. Safe at last, he turned back to the earl, only to find Aimery dead of the wounds inflicted by his sword.