But maybe that was the only way it could have been. If Joan of Arc had known anything, she wondered if she’d ever have left her father’s house.
Wouldn’t she have run from her saints, when she first heard them? Called them witches, or fairies, or the wind? Run down from the hills, inside to her mother? Or turned, at least, to other children, whose voices might have stopped her from hearing, even once, Daughter of God, you were born to save France.
For, once she heard it, everything else fell away. Everything she knew, that is, all the cautionary tales, the stories, the sayings. The whole canon of common knowledge that advised “slow and steady,” and kept most French peasants from lives of art and danger—“the Grasshopper and the Ant,” “the Crow and the Cheese.” All this safe-and-sound advice gave way to, Go, daughter of God, to the king.
If Joan of Arc had been wiser, Girl X realized, she wouldn’t have listened. Wouldn’t have even been able to hear her saints in the first place, but she did hear them, from the time she was twelve. The cautious voices of the village wise women were replaced by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, the same two who stood carved in stone beside the altar of her church in Domrémy. At first they spoke to her in general terms of her destiny. You were born to save France. Joan of Arc would lean against the trees, standing among the fields, listening, dreaming.
But when she was sixteen, the situation in France worsened. The English laid siege to Orléans. It was the last stronghold of the Dauphin, the uncrowned French heir to the throne; if the English took Orléans, they would have France.
At that point, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret became specific. Go to the Dauphin, and tell him to give you an army. You will raise the siege of Orléans, and then crown him king. We are with you.
She heard this, and went. How? Girl X marveled. With not the first preparation, not a thought of the near future, or even of where she’d sleep that night, Joan of Arc placed herself in her saints’ hands, and set out.
Lightheartedly, you might even say, in the coarse red skirt and long braids of the Lorraine countryside. Thus she slipped away from home, from parents and chores and sheep, with no farewells; walked, trekked, scrambled, the ten miles to the French garrison at Vaucouleurs; and presented herself, as she thought her saints had commanded, to the captain there, Robert de Baudricourt. Who took one look, and sent her home for a beating.
She was mortified, and, worse, confused. Her saints had said, Baudricourt will help you. Were they lying? Was it all a deceit? Was she a fool, or, worse, mad? Overreaching? Some of the stories came back: Was she the girl who comes to a very bad end, out chasing visions while her sheep were left to the wolves?
Her heart was heavy and her mind clouded, and she returned home to worse than a beating. She found herself betrothed.
News had traveled from Vaucouleurs to Domrémy: Jacques d’Arc’s daughter had run away to join the French army. A girl, the army—a camp-follower, then? A prostitute? What else could there be? Everyone was shocked. Her father went shouting through the village that he’d “rather see her drowned,” he’d drown her himself!
Though by the time she got back, he’d turned from homicide to the standard remedy for wayward young women: he found a young man, and arranged a marriage.
“I’d rather die!” cried Joan of Arc. She refused the marriage in terms that left neither doubt nor hope. But to her dismay, her suitor sued her.
“Breach of promise,” he claimed, in the ecclesiastical court at Toul. Not only was she betrothed to him now, he told the court, but she’d sworn to marry him when they were children, under the ancient beech tree where the fairies danced in May.
Even her father testified against her, agreeing that this might have been so.
No one expected her to plead her own defense. Girls in these cases mostly didn’t. What they did was cry at their own weddings and then settle down to real life, dreams of the king of France, or convents, or poetry in the streets of Paris giving way to swaddling cloth and mutton stew.
Joan of Arc, however, trudged to Toul, where the records noted only that a local peasant girl, Jeannot, “little Joan,” daughter of Jacques of Arc, appeared before the court, defended herself with vigor, and was not, in the end, sentenced to marry.
Thank God!
Or not?
Still, the point was that Joan of Arc didn’t hold back after that. It had been too close for comfort, this brush with the fortune of all womankind.
Her saints were in a hurry now, too. Go before mid-Lent, they whispered. It was February. She had turned seventeen. It had been hard, saying goodbye to her mother, who must have sensed something. She’d held her close to her breast and wept over her head. She’d had to lie to her, tell her she was going off to assist with the birth of a girl cousin’s baby, when in fact she went to a boy cousin in a neighboring village, whom she got to cut off her hair.
Straight around, with a bowl, definitive. No one could look at her now and think marriage. But then it was done. Her hair was off. She’d explained to this boy cousin that he had to give her his pants as well, and when she went to Captain Baudricourt this time, it was in pants and a black cap, hair cut short. No longer an errant shepherdess, but Joan of Arc.
On her way to the Dauphin. Baudricourt didn’t laugh at her this time. “When?” he asked her.
“Better today than tomorrow,” she told him. “Better tomorrow than the next day.”
Mid-Lent, the saints had said. Baudricourt sent a letter to the Dauphin, and refused to let her go until he got word back. She felt the loss of every day. Just the fact that he was willing to send to the court should have cheered her; but she was visualizing big victories, and didn’t notice the small ones.
Meanwhile, excitement was rising around her in the town. There was a prophecy going through the countryside then: “France, destroyed by a woman, will be saved by a virgin.”
Everyone knew who the woman was—the Dauphin’s mother, Queen Isabeau, wife of the late king of France, Charles VI the Mad. She had declared her own son, the French Dauphin, the heir, “illegitimate” in favor of her daughter’s English son. This essentially gave the throne of France to England.
“I am,” Joan of Arc told the people of Vaucouleurs. They started gathering in the evenings at the wheelwright’s, where she was lodged, to listen to her tales of saints and angels. She told them that she would set out any day now, from their town, to save France.
Their town! They wanted to help, but first were obliged to confirm her holiness. They called on the priest, who waved his stole in front of her, and commanded her to fly off if she was from the devil.
But she stood firm, and then the people of Vaucouleurs started raising money to buy her a horse.
The powerful young Duke of Alençon heard the talk and came to meet her one evening. “Well, sweet friend,” he said to her, “it looks as if our king will be chased away, and we turned to Englishmen.”
“No!” she cried. She would get to the Dauphin before mid-Lent, “even if I have to wear my legs down to the knees! For no one, no king, no duke, no daughter of the king of Scotland can save France. Only me!”
Finally, word came from the court. Let her come, why not? The Dauphin had just lost another skirmish with the English, called the Battle of the Herrings, for the Lenten provisions that had been among the spoils. A bit of a joke, if it hadn’t been his last stand. He had no possibility of raising another army. He was so broke that his shoemaker had refused him credit for a pair of stockings.
And then came the news of this girl. A virgin sent by God to save France? Well, why not? Everyone knew that virgins had special powers. Unalloyed. Concentrated. As for heaven’s personal concern with the state of the realm, France had always been God’s “eldest daughter,” so no one was surprised. On top of that, Marie d’Avignon, a celebrated mystic at the Dauphin’s court, had recently reported a vision of a virgin and much armor. It was agreed that the Dauphin should send for the girl.
The word came in February, a bad time for traveling, Baudricourt pointed out to Joan of Arc. The roads were in ruins, the bridges all down, the land either “deserted or infested with soldiers.”
“Better today than tomorrow,” repeated Joan of Arc. The Duke of Alençon, who stood to recover his own lands should she prove successful, decided to seize the adventure and accompany her. He contributed a group of fighting men. The whole town gathered to see them off. The people presented her with the horse, and Baudricourt gave her his sword.
“Go,” he said, “go, and come what may.”
Actually, she told him exactly what would come. She would cross France safely, despite the civil war and all the raiding parties that made travel so perilous; she would enter the little town of Chinon, where the Dauphin had taken refuge; she would have an immediate and successful audience with him; he would give her his army, with which she would hand the English their first major defeat in France in a hundred years. After which she would march the Dauphin down the Loire Valley, with one town after another throwing open its gates and declaring loyalty, all the way to Reims Cathedral, where she would see him anointed with the sacred oil and crowned Charles VII, king of France.
And it turned out that she was right.