Joan of Arc before the Dauphin at Chinon (from a Flemish late fifteenth-century manuscript MS.Roy.20D.viii)
“He who is near me is near the fire.”
The Gospel of Thomas, saying 82
“I was born under a star. No one has ever done, nor will ever be able to do what I have done.”
Gilles de Rais
Joan lived with her parents and brothers and sister in a small village called Domrémy.
The village girls liked to go to the Lady’s Tree. There were stories about fairies appearing near this large and ancient beech and Joan’s godmother said she had seen a fairy woman there. Joan would go with the other girls and hang garlands of flowers and herbs on the tree in May and dance around it. Next to the tree was a fountain that the villagers believed had healing powers.
As she grew older, Joan didn’t play with the other girls so often. “When I was thirteen I heard a Voice from God. I was petrified at first. It was nearly midday when the Voice came to me. It was summer and I was in my father’s garden next to the graveyard.”
After that, voices came to her perhaps two or three times per week. Sometimes she heard them in the ringing of the church bells. Sometimes a particular voice spoke out of a dazzling cloud of mist, and after a while she recognized the form of the Archangel Michael within this mist. He told Joan she would have to leave home, that she had a mission.
He told her, too, that she should be guided by St. Catherine and St. Margaret, and soon they too appeared to her by the Lady’s Tree. She would say later that she could see them as clearly as if they were made of flesh and blood.
Joan promised she would keep her virginity—or at least until she had completed her mission—but now her father was urging her to marry a local man.
There was once a girl whose father wanted her to marry a fine local gentleman. He was rich and wore dazzling clothes embroidered with gold, but he had a bristling bestial black beard—so black that it looked blue. The girl was frightened of the man they called Bluebeard, and when she saw him in the woods, she shrank from him and hid.
When Michael, Catherine and Margaret told Joan she must go to fight for the Dauphin and help him reclaim his kingdom from the English, she resisted. She didn’t know how to ride a horse, let alone fight a war. But her heavenly guides persisted, giving her precise instructions. They said she must go to the nearby town of Vaucouleurs and there meet a certain Captain Baudricourt. He would give her the help and guidance she needed to reach the Dauphin. So, at the age of sixteen she deserted her family and left behind the young suitor her father favored.
But when one of Captain Baudricourt’s soldiers took her to see him, he said, “Take her back to her father for a bloody good spanking!”
All the soldiers laughed, but Joan stood her ground and reminded him of a prophecy of Merlin’s: a maid from their region would come to “throw down citadels” and confound the British.
The captain had second thoughts, and after a while Joan arrived at the castle at Chinon. The Dauphin was holed up there, indecisive and ineffectual.
As Joan was led across a courtyard a horseman pulled up beside her and said, “So this is the maid! Let me spend a night with her alone and she won’t stay a maid for long!”
Joan of Arc before the Dauphin at Chinon (from a Flemish late fifteenth-century manuscript MS.Roy.20D.viii)
Then, in the hall, the Dauphin tried to play a trick on her. He dressed one of the courtiers as a king, hoping Joan would be fooled, but, guided by the light of her guides, she went straight to the Dauphin and fell at his feet.
Behind the Dauphin stood Gilles de Rais, his right-hand man, the richest man in the kingdom and Marshal of France, in command of its military might. He was eight years older than Joan, strikingly dark and handsome, with glittering black eyes and a bushy black beard. He also had an insatiable desire for knowledge. He wanted to know the secret of life and was prepared to do anything to find it.
Joan told the Dauphin that God had told her to lay siege to the English stronghold at Orléans and then to lead the Dauphin to Reims, where he was to be crowned king. She was able to convince him that she was divinely inspired, amazing him by telling him what he had said alone in silent prayer, and she reassured him about his deepest, darkest secret, which he had never told anyone: that he was illegitimate.
So the Dauphin had a suit of armor and a banner made for Joan and presented her with a white horse.
Joan’s voices meanwhile told her about an ancient sword, the sword of the great French champion Charles Martel, who had defended France against Moslem invasion. The voices told her it was marked with five crosses and was hidden beneath the altar of the nearby church of St. Catherine. The Dauphin sent his armorers to the church. The stone slabs were removed and they found the sword with five crosses where Joan had said it would be. As they pulled it out of its dark hiding-place, its rust seemed to melt like snow in the sun.
Not himself a fighting man, the Dauphin entrusted Joan to the protection of Gilles de Rais. She rode out with Gilles at her side.
A depiction of heavenly help in battle (probably sixteenth century, collected by Conrad Lycosthenes in The Book of Prodigies, 1557)
Bluebeard turned out to be far richer than anyone had imagined. He was very generous and charming, and soon the girl was persuaded to marry him.
Joan and Gilles led a small French army and, guided by Joan’s voices, they turned back the English at Orléans and Les Tourelles. Nearly 1,200 Englishmen died at Jargeau, where the French lost only 20. Against odds that should have been overwhelming, Joan’s banner and sword carried all before them.
The English believed Joan’s invincibility could only be witchcraft. Gilles de Rais, meanwhile, was in as good a position as anyone has ever been to observe at first hand how miraculous spiritual power can change the course of history.
And twice Joan was wounded in battle and twice Gilles acted heroically to protect her.
Gilles was there when a Constable Richemont, meeting her for the first time, said, “I don’t know if you come from God or from the Devil” and made the sign of the cross.
“Whenever I am sad,” said Joan, “when people will not believe that God tells me to say these things, I go off by myself and pray. And he says to me, ‘Child of God, go, go, go! I shall be there to help you!’ When I hear Messire speak, I am happy.”
Joan continued to urge the hesitant Dauphin onwards to his coronation at Reims.
At the fulfilment of the mission that St. Michael had given Joan just eighteen months previously, it was Gilles de Rais, in magnificent gold and bejeweled livery, who headed the procession to the cathedral, carrying a reliquary shaped like a golden dove. It contained holy oil that had been used to anoint the kings of France since ancient times.
Joan stood waiting by the altar, her banner in her hand. “Now at last,” she said, “the will of Messire is fulfilled.”
She saw an angel place a crown on the new king’s head.
She had completed her mission, but she was determined to build on her victories, to drive the English out of France completely.
But now she found that her voices no longer gave her such precise instructions on how to lead her troops.