One of the guards threw her a crust of bread. She couldn’t eat right now, couldn’t chew. Her jaw.
Does it help to remember? she wondered. “The Pucelle,” they’d called her, the Girl, the Maiden, as if there were no other, as if she were the only girl in France.
Everyone knew her, in those days of glory right after Orléans. Everyone followed her, wanted her, but all she wanted was more. More Orléans. More days in battle, more nights deep in prayer. More horses, more soldiers, more comrades by her side.
Like the Duke of Alençon. He’d marched with her from Vaucouleurs, then stuck with her in court, and was always beside her in battle. He knew how to fight, and he was brave in the same way she was.
Did he know, she wondered, about her now? He had gone back to his estates in Normandy when it all broke up. She sat up suddenly—Normandy! Near here? Did he know she was chained in a dungeon in Rouen? She, his ally, the best fighter he knew, he said. If he found out she was here, mightn’t he at least try to save her? Even now?
For they had really been friends then. She could still almost see them, Alençon and herself, Joan of Arc, that is, laughing, riding, thundering like war gods, from Orléans straight to Reims.
Though it hadn’t been straight. She’d thought it would be. After Orléans, they’d rushed back to court, where she expected to find the Dauphin mounted and ready to ride out with them. He wasn’t. That is, he almost was, or claimed he would be soon, and would like to accompany them now, if only the roads were safer. Or the English not likely to be reinforcing, even as they spoke. Or if the towns along the way were his, not theirs.
“But they will be yours!” she cried to him. “All France shall be yours!” She was in a great hurry to get him to Reims Cathedral, where one drop of the holy oil there would turn the Dauphin from questionable pretender to the king of France, the point of her mission. She would ride in front, she assured him, and “win by battle” what didn’t come “from love.”
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret will be with us!” she assured him, swore that she stood ready to leave, morning or evening, it didn’t matter, just the sooner the better, that was all.
“Let it be today,” she prayed, every day, before breakfast, but the Dauphin was wavering. His chair was soft, his horse was hard, plus there were his councillors, all of them, advocating delay. Some were false, he suspected, some lazy, others afraid, but their consensus—that if he sat still, the crown, Reims Cathedral, would come to him—was not without resonance in his own heart of hearts.
Still, against all this there was one clear voice, positing saints and angels, and a holy coronation, and towns where people were waiting to throw open their gates to him. All of France would receive him as the duly crowned king, that voice repeated, for a month, longer, until finally, one night, just after midsummer with Scorpio rising, the Dauphin crossed to a window and looked out.
He stood there for a while, sniffed the air, and must have sensed something. Change, for though he’d never been moved before, and hardly would be again, that night as he retired, he announced to the court that he would set out to Reims with Joan of Arc in the morning.
They went first to Jargeau, which Suffolk was holding for the English. She and Alençon charged, and Suffolk surrendered. On to Meung, which they took easily, and then to Beaugency, which surrendered without a fight. They arrived next at Patay, where Lord Talbot himself, who had fled from Orléans, was captured, after his reinforcements retreated to Paris, terrified of the witch.
“You didn’t expect this to happen this morning, did you?” Alençon asked Talbot.
Talbot shrugged. “The fortunes of war.”
No, no, not fortune, said Joan of Arc, the way it would always be! That summer of dreams, dreams more than realized but surpassed. That march through France, with her army swelling daily, not just with knights and regular soldiers, but also with civilians, her people, more of them every day. Peasants, “jacques,” with their sticks and stones, and women and children. For them, the campaign was a pilgrimage to Reims Cathedral, where they would finally get their king.
They were stopped before Troyes, though, the biggest city on their way. The English were there in force, but Joan of Arc wasn’t daunted, and the feeling was that “nothing could resist her anymore.”
But after two days of inconclusive fighting, the Dauphin’s military advisors wanted to withdraw. This time, though, she was prepared. She refused them further audience, and went around them, right to the soldiers.
“Fill the moat with brush,” she commanded. “Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret say the city will be ours!”
The people of Troyes watched nervously through the night as their moat disappeared under brush and wood, and with the first light of morning they surrendered directly to “the Pucelle,” notwithstanding their strong English garrison.
“All through fear of her”—the English garrison was granted permission to withdraw with their “possessions,” but when Joan of Arc saw them leading away the manacled French prisoners which this included, she revolted. She was taxed with this during her trial; the prisoners, soldiers taken in battle, properly made part of the English possessions, argued the priests.
“But the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I saw them,” she explained.
“They are French!” she cried, there at Troyes, and her cheering army set them free. The common soldiers had never been cared for by a commander before. Nor had they ever cared for one as they cared for her.
Loved her, even—every true French heart loved her that summer. The next few cities sent her their keys without further fighting. Her march now became a procession, a triumph. The army hadn’t been paid, but no one wanted to leave her. They entered the town of Reims to the ringing of bells and cries of, “Noel!” Praise and joy, as she’d foretold.
Foretold, too, dreamlike, the way it swirled all around her. Only the coronation itself stood out clearly in her memory from those days. It was July 17, 1429, high summer by then. The cathedral was thronged with the people, as well as the priests, bishops, abbots, canons, white and purple and gold. The archbishop of Reims stood at the front, flanked by two knights of St. Remy who held the ampoule of holy oil, given by God directly into the hands of Saint Louis specifically for anointing the kings of France. Joan of Arc, in new white armor, knelt right behind the Dauphin, and she wept, and he wept, and he was crowned king of France, Charles VII.
And it was over.
She could see that now. It was too bad she hadn’t seen it then, in Reims Cathedral. Her mission had been specific, “Orléans and Reims,” and she’d fulfilled it. She should have gone home.
But she was seventeen. People were calling her their “Hector,” their “Alexander,” their “Caesar!” “O France,” bards were singing, “though you’ve had many heroes, you may stop now with this Pucelle!”
“Singular virgin! Marvelous, brave, the glory of France, of all Christendom!” Looking back, she should have thanked them all kindly and said adieu, but what she said was, “Let’s take Paris!” to Alençon.
But her saints hadn’t said “Paris,” and she didn’t take it. Could have, said the generals, if she’d listened to them and marched straight from Orléans, instead of to Reims.
Might have, she felt, when she finally did get there, if they hadn’t carried her from the battlefield when she was wounded, just slightly, in the thigh. She could have fought on, she felt sure—how many hundreds of times had she seen it in her mind? Her rising to rally her holy army, and Paris wanting her suddenly, as Troyes had wanted her, and throwing open its gates. Welcoming her, and her king, who would have marched beside her into his capital to greater rejoicing than either of them had known till then. And then, surely, she would have gone home.
But the generals ordered her carried from the field, and then it was shouted through Paris that “the witch” had “bled red blood!” The defenders took heart from that, and her own soldiers lost their way without her. They remembered, suddenly, that they hadn’t been paid.
And her army broke up after that. It was September. Summer was over. Even Alençon went home, and though they had great plans to rejoin in the spring to launch a new campaign for Paris, she never saw him again.