July 17, 1429
Consilio firmata Dei
(Motto upon the Coronation Medal struck for Jeanne d’Arc)
JEANNE’s greatest difficulties came always by way, not of open foes, but of her pretended friends. It had been comparatively easy to chase the English headlong from the cities of the Loire; but it was no light matter to get the Dauphin to follow up the advantage she had won for him and to march to Rheims for his coronation.
Hastening to him after the battle of Pathay, she was received by him with the utmost courtesy and kindness. “I pity you because of the sufferings you have endured,” he said, and with smooth words urged her to rest, to take things more calmly henceforth—in short, to take a leaf out of the royal book, and laissez-faire!
No wonder the impetuous Maid wept tears of sheer vexation at such conduct; and then, bethinking herself with that sound common sense of hers that the King’s hesitation could only be due to want of confidence in her success, she set to work to cheer him.
“Have no doubt! you shall receive the whole of your kingdom and shall shortly be crowned.”
Then she tried her best to effect a reconciliation between her royal master and the Constable, who had certainly earned some recognition for his good aid. Here, too, she failed. La Trémouille, the King’s fatal genius, was at his elbow, and de Richemont, his ancient foe, was dismissed with ignominy. It is much to his credit that, instead of abandoning the cause of his ungrateful King, the Constable proceeded to carry on an energetic campaign in Normandy.
Meantime the Dauphin, now at Gien, held a long ten days’ Council as to whether it was safe, or even expedient, to undertake the march to Rheims. At this Jeanne became really restive. When they pointed out the dangers on the road, she replied shortly, “I know all that!” and, with pardonable temper, “left the town in sheer vexation, and bivouacked in the field two days before the departure of the King.”
At length, on the 29th of June, the army set out for Rheims and met its first important check five days later at the gates of the city of Troyes, held, and strongly held, by a hostile Burgundian garrison. This was a serious matter of debate for a King who loved to talk rather than to act. Should they push on, leaving a dangerous enemy at their back? Or should they attack a well-fortified and well-provisioned town?
So the councillors and captains talked on, revolving one plan after another, some of them wild enough, none of them practically convincing; and it was left to the Seigneur de Treves, no friend of Jeanne’s in former days, to point out that the one great essential to these Councils had been carefully excluded.
“The King’s expedition had not been undertaken because of the strength of his army, nor yet because of the probability of his success; but it had been set on foot at the urgent moving of Jeanne, who told him that he should be crowned at Rheims, and should find little resistance, since such was the will of God.
“If, therefore, Jeanne is not to be allowed to give her advice at the present crisis, it is my opinion that we should turn back.”
So to the perplexed assembly presently enters the Maid, with her quick boyish knock and fearless gaze; and when the Archbishop of Rheims, as spokesman, points out the difficulties that face them and the advantage of retreat—
“Shall I be believed if I speak?” says Jeanne, with scarcely curbed impatience, turning to the King.
“If you have anything profitable and reasonable to tell us, you will be trusted.”
“Gentle Dauphin, if you will wait for two days, Troyes shall be yours.”
Cried the Archbishop in amazement, “Jeanne, we would gladly wait for six days if we were sure to get the town. But are we sure?”
“Doubt it not!” replied the Maid.
All that night Jeanne, having obtained a reluctant permission to act, toiled and organized and issued her commands. In the dusk of the morning her shrill girlish voice was heard by the citizens of Troyes, trembling within their walls, ringing out in the cry, “To the Assault!”
It was enough; the townsfolk, headed by their Bishop, issued from their gates and proffered their submission to the King; the city of Troyes was won.
Terror of the innocent Maid, whom they thought a fiend come straight from hell, seems to have brought the men of Troyes to their knees; for they proceeded to send to her a certain Brother Richard, a noted preacher of the place, in the hope that he would exorcise the Evil One.
It must have been a strange and almost ludicrous scene: the friar, in his rough brown habit, advancing with doubtful gaze and lagging steps upon the White Maid, whose bright young face, framed by the short straight hair, shone above her glittering armour. The rough crowd surges around, breathless with excitement; the friar advances closer, and suddenly flings a handful of holy water over her, to drive away the fiend. Jeanne’s merry laugh rings out. “Come on and fear nothing! I shall not fly away!” she cries.
And immediately Brother Richard and the timorous citizens accept her, and soon are her warmest friends and admirers.
On she led the army, growing larger day by day, to Châlons, where the keys of the town were at once delivered up. Here she met a Domrémy man, and from their conversation we get a hint of the gnawing anxiety that she hid so well under her appearance of gay confidence.
“Do you not fear these battles, these sieges?” he asked. And she answered very gravely, “I fear naught but treason.”
On July 16th she rode with the Dauphin in triumph into Rheims; and early the next day the coronation took place. An eyewitness tells in a letter how it was “a right fair thing to see that fair mystery, for it was as solemn and as well-adorned with all things thereto pertaining as if it had been ordered a year before.” First, all in armour and with banners displayed, the marshal and the admiral, with a great company, rode to meet the Abbot who brought the vessel containing the sacred oil. They rode into the minster and alighted at the entrance to the choir. The Archbishop of Rheims administered the Coronation Oath; he crowned and anointed the King; while all the people cried, “Noël!” “The trumpets sounded so that you might think the roofs would be rent. And always during that Mystery, the Maid stood next the King, her standard in her hand. A right fair thing it was to see the goodly manners of the King and the Maid.”
When the Dauphin had been crowned and consecrated, the Maid bent and embraced his knees, weeping for joy and saying these words: “Gentle King, now is accomplished the Will of God, who decreed that I should raise the siege of Orleans, and bring you to this city of Rheims to receive your solemn sacring, thereby showing that you are true King, and that France should be yours.”
“And right great pity came upon all those who saw her, and many wept.”6
The task of Jeanne d’Arc, as given her by her Voices, had been accomplished, and up to that moment nothing but the most extraordinary success had been hers.
She had first seen the Dauphin in the early days of March, when, from the most sanguine point of view, the fact of his coronation seemed utterly remote. By the middle of July, in spite of the most wearisome and unnecessary delay and waste of time on his part, the road to Rheims had been cleared, France south of the Loire was saved, and the Dauphin was crowned King.
And now that her special work was done, Jeanne pleaded that she might go back to her mother in Domrémy. Her father she had recently seen, for he had come to Rheims, with her “uncle,” and some other peasants from her native place, to see for himself the truth of the reports which must have seemed to him truly amazing.
He sees his little Jeanne, the girl he had threatened to drown rather than see her ride among men-at-arms, the chosen companion, not of the rough soldiers indeed, but of a King, of princes, dukes and noble captains. The present of money given him by Charles impressed him, but his slow peasant mind probably never quite realized the great work that his daughter had already accomplished. No doubt he told her, in answer to her eager questions, of her mother’s longings and fears for her absent child; and that is why the tender-hearted Maid wept and besought the King that she might return to help with the sheep in the old home at Domrémy.
But Jeanne was by this time far too precious to be spared from active duty; and although she apparently realized that she was no longer fulfilling an actual divine behest, she was far too loyal, too enthusiastic, possibly also, too doubtful of the King’s conduct unless she were there to incite to action, to shrink from continuing her work of delivering her country from the English. Certainly it was no worldly ambition that urged her on, for again and again she echoes, the same mournful little cry, “Make the most of me, for I shall last but a year!”
Yet, strangely enough, it seemed as though the fulfilment of the actual letter of her task showed the highwater mark of her success. From the moment of that consecration at Rheims, with its bright colours and flashing banners and clash of sword, with the sunshine lighting up the jewels of the crown and touching the head of the Maid as she stood with flushed cheeks and eyes bright with tears at the side of her King, a cloud began to creep over her young life, a cloud that was to grow darker as the months passed by, till it burst in thunder over a scaffold and a stake.