September 1429
Renty! Renty! to the King of Heaven!
(Jeanne’s war-cry before Paris)
THE blaze of light that shone upon the coronation scene had faded away. Jeanne, with many tears, had said farewell to her father and uncle, and left the former to return to Domrémy, his unaccustomed mind still ruffled and aghast at the strange sights he had seen in Rheims, but his toil-worn hand grasping very tightly the two tangible proofs, as far as he was concerned, of his daughter’s success. For one was the purse of money that had been given him; and the other was a patent of exemption from all kinds of tax and tribute for the villages of Domrémy and Greuse.
He had seen his young daughter for the last time. When he next heard news of her, news of imprisonment and of trial, Jacques d’Arc remembered his former doubts and fears, and after sullen pondering forbade his weeping wife to name the girl to him from that time forth. The news of her execution seems to have broken his heart, for he died very shortly afterwards.
Meantime, Jeanne had before her the supremely difficult task of rousing a helpless, inert King to follow up the advantage she had won for him, and to advance upon Paris and the cities of the north.
Much time was wasted, and the Maid, in her young impatience, always hated delay. There was a fatal theory in the mind of Charles that if he could but secure the alliance of the Duke of Burgundy all would be well; and Burgundy, probably in contempt of his weakness, was ready enough to dupe him, to make a false truce, to encourage him to delay, that he might the more easily crush him in the end.
Even the Maid, though wary and on her guard against him, was inclined to strain a point to gain the allegiance of the Duke, and the more because, from this time forth, the directions she had received from her Voices began to grow vague and indistinct.
“Fear not, for God will aid you,” was the tenor of their message in these days, which pointed to the presence of some danger, more or less definite, but gave no clear command as to what course to pursue.
On the very day of the Coronation she had written one of her simple, almost boyish, letters to Burgundy. “Jeanne the Maid desires you, in the name of the King of Heaven, her true Lord, to make a long, good, and assured peace with the King of France.... All those who fight against his holy kingdom, fight against the Lord Jesus, King of Heaven, and of the whole world. I pray and beseech you with joined hands, fight not against us any more.”
But it was not the letter of the Maid that brought envoys from the Duke to Rheims, envoys who were laughing in their sleeves as they laid their master’s pretended proposals of peace before the King, and thus gained time to allow Bedford to enter Paris with his army, and Burgundy to pitch his camp in the neighbourhood of Amiens. A quick and decided march upon the capital, then undefended, would have brought it into Charles’s hands. As it was he had lost his chance. The citizens had been inflamed against him by a report that he meant to order a general massacre; they turned to Bedford as their saviour, and fortified themselves against their King.
Meantime the persuasions of Jeanne had at length brought about a move. “The Maid,” says a writer of the time, “caused the King to advance on Paris.”
But at the first hint of opposition, without even approaching the important town of Compiègne, prepared as it was to surrender, the coward Charles “turned his flank and then the rear of his army towards Paris, and dragging with him the reluctant Maid, headed for the Loire.”
His excuse was the chance of Burgundy’s alliance, in which case he might surrender Paris to the King. Charles must have known the utter improbability of this; and Jeanne’s feelings on the subject may best be gathered from a letter written, “on the Paris road,” to her friends at Rheims.
“Dear and good friends, good and loyal Frenchmen, the Maid sends you news of her. Never will I abandon you while I live. True it is that the King has made him a fifteen days’ truce with the Duke of Burgundy, who is to give up to him the town of Paris on the fifteenth day.
“Although the truce is made, I am not content and am not certain that I will keep it. If I do, it will be merely for sake of the King’s honour, and in case they do not deceive the blood royal, for I will keep the King’s army together and in readiness, at the end of the fifteen days, if peace is not made.”
Her keen mind had grasped the hollowness of such truces: and she was one of those who most rejoiced when the retreat to the Loire was suddenly cut off by a combined army of English and Burgundian allies, so that they were forced to march back toward Paris.
It was while Jeanne was riding between Dunois and the Archbishop of Rheims on this road that we catch a remark of the Maid’s that shows how far she was from merely seeking glory for its own sake. She had been joyfully pointing out to her companions the loyal nature of the peasants of the surrounding country. “Here is a good people! Never have I seen any so glad of the coming of the noble King. Would that I, when my time comes, were so fortunate as to be buried in their country!”
“In what place do you expect to die, Jeanne?” asked the Archbishop with curiosity.
“Where God pleases,” she said very simply. “I know not the hour nor the place any more than you. And would it were God’s pleasure that I might now lay down my arms and go back to serve my father and my mother in keeping their sheep; they would be right glad to see me.”
White as snow, pure as a spring flower in her sweet simplicity as she rides between the hardened soldier and the worldly ecclesiastic, it is no wonder that the rough men-at-arms worshipped her, that the chivalrous young knights were proud to serve her.
But what was the English idea of the Maid who had already so effectively weakened their hold on France?
A letter to the King from Bedford at this time taunts him with leading about with him “a disorderly woman dressed as a man.” In later days he speaks of the cause of the English defeats as being the “unlawful doubt the soldiers had of a disciple of the Fiend, called the Pucelle, that used false enchantment and sorcery. A woman of ill-character and a witch!”
It is seldom indeed that the eyes of the hostile world can pierce the disguise of outward things and discern the hidden saint; but in Jeanne’s case the transformation of both appearance and character is almost grotesque, even in the eyes of one whose sight was dimmed by malice and resentment.
In the days that followed it was the great aim of the Maid to bring about an engagement in the open field; but the English kept fast within their earthworks and walled cities and would not risk an action.
“When the Maid saw,” we read, “that the English would not sally forth, she rode standard in hand to the front and smote the English palisade.”
But this had no effect, and, beyond some slight skirmishes, nothing was done until Bedford’s army moved north into Normandy, when Compiègne was at once taken by Jeanne’s host. This town, situated on the left bank of the Oise, and on the road to Paris, was in a very important position, and its surrender was followed by that of several others in that district. If only the King would have bestirred himself, it would have been an excellent base from which to have marched on Paris; but this seemed such a hopeless matter that, as usual, Jeanne determined to act on her own initiative. “Good Duke,” she cried to her friend d’Alençon, “prepare your troops and those of the other captains. By my staff, if God wills it, I will see Paris nearer than I have seen it yet.”
So these two, with their troops at their back, set forth on the long straight road, riding recklessly in their high spirits and hopes, and so reached St. Denys, the cathedral of which was held especially sacred by Jeanne, since it held the tombs of all the kings and queens of France.
Here they waited for a fortnight for the laggard Charles, whose tardy appearance was hailed with joy by the soldiers. “She will lead the King into Paris if he will let her,” they cried.
At first there seemed small chance of it, and we hear that “the Maid was in sorrow for the King’s long tarrying at Compiègne; and it seemed that he was content, in his usual way, with the grace that God had done him, and would make no further enterprise.”
It was only, indeed, after the Parisians had been given ample time to strengthen their fortifications, and the patience and courage of his own army were fast ebbing away, that he gave permission to Jeanne to lead the forces that were under her special direction to attack the city. He himself, meantime, retired to Senlis with the main body of the troops, and refused to show himself before the walls, in spite of the urgent entreaty of d’Alençon and the Maid.
The attack upon Paris was made between the gates of St. Honoré and St. Denys, about two o’clock in the afternoon.
It was a hopeless matter from the first. The Maid knew that the nobles who pretended to support her were less than half-hearted in the fight. “She herself,” she said, “was determined to go further and pass the fosses.” But she had no divine directions on the matter to encourage her brave heart; she could but do her best.
The walls were protected by two moats, the inner one full of water, the outer dry. For all that long afternoon the Maid stood on the ridge between the two, under a hail of arrows, waving her tattered banner and crying her favourite war-cry to the foemen on the walls, “Renty! Renty! to the King of Heaven!”
Her own men seemed to have kept for the most part well out of range of the firing, and so escaped with scarcely any loss; but a despairing note must have entered into that girlish voice as the hours went by, and still they held back from the attack. “She called out that the place was theirs for the winning”; and they preferred an inglorious post of safety.
Still, however, the Maid stood there alone with her standard-bearer, in her worn and dinted armour, until, as dusk drew on, she was wounded in the leg by a Burgundian arrow, almost at the moment that the ensign fell dead at her side. They tried to carry her away, but she would not go farther than a place of cover beside the moat, from whence, through the gathering darkness, she still gave forth her pathetic appeal to her men to charge and “take the place that was theirs for the winning.” They would not hear her, and a blackness of discouragement darker than the night fell upon Maid and men alike. Some say the latter “cursed their Pucelle who had told them that certainly they would storm Paris, and that all who resisted would be put to the sword or burned in their houses.”
This is the report of one of those within the city who could only have heard it from those outside, as he was engaged on the following day in helping to carry off the dead Burgundians for burial; but one can see in it a sign of the growing jubilation of the foes, and the increasing disloyalty among the forces of the Maid. Yet it was no fault of Jeanne’s that the attack had not been pressed to the point of success.
“What a pity! What a pity!” is her repeated sigh, as against her will she lets herself be carried back to the camp. “If they had but gone on till morning, the inhabitants would have known.”
Next morning, in spite of her wound, which was but slight, she was up and ready once more for the fray. “I shall not stir from here till Paris be taken!” she announced. The downcast spirits of the men-at-arms were stirred as much by her brave words as by the sight of a small reinforcement under the Sieur de Montmorency, come to “take service under the banner of the Maid.”
Preparations were made, and the march begun to the walls, when suddenly another little band of riders appeared at their side. The cheers of the soldiers were checked; these were no new allies but messengers from the King, bearing peremptory orders that the siege be stopped at once. “The Maid must return to St. Denys.”
The disappointment was heart-breaking. For a moment d’Alençon encouraged her by the reminder that he had constructed a bridge across the Seine, near St. Denys, from which a most advantageous position for fresh attack was gained. Alas! they were to find that Charles, in his determination not to fight, had ordered the bridge to be destroyed during the night.
It was a fatal policy, for not only was Paris hopelessly lost, but the main body of the army, not able to realize the criminal weakness and cowardice of their King, saw in this ignominious retreat nothing but a proof of the failure of the Maid to keep her promises.
And since we have the testimony of the English Bedford himself to the fact that hitherto the disasters of the English had been due “in great part, I trow, to the Pucelle, who withdrew their courage in a marvellous wise, and encouraged your adverse party and enemy to assemble themselves forthwith in greater number,” it is clear that anything that belittled Jeanne in the eyes of the army was a fatal blow struck at the success of France.
When the retreat began in earnest, the Maid begged to be allowed to stay behind, probably in the hope of renewing the attack by means of the free lances she might attract to her side. In this she had divine authority. “My Voices bade me remain at St. Denys and I desired to remain; but the seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If I had not been wounded, I should never have left.”
Before she left the place, she one day slipped quietly into the Cathedral and laid her suit of white armour, now all dinted and tarnished by warfare, upon the altar of Our Lady. Was it, as some think, a sign that she had done her work and could hope no longer for success? Yet soon we find her once more in the front of the battle, cheering on her men as usual; and hopefulness was ever her strongest characteristic.
It is more likely that in her talks with her divine companions she had learnt the true secret of inward peace, and after offering up, under the emblem of her tarnished armour, her disappointments and discouragements, came forth again, strong in spiritual might, to do her duty whatever might befall.