Joan of Arc

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
Joan of Arc

“Gordon writes not as a professional biographer, or as a historian, but as a master of the story form, as a careful reader, as a woman attuned to power and longing and as a believer for whom God is a mystery but not a stranger. Gordon is perfectly matched with Joan of Arc, and the book she has written is both a compelling life story and a shrewd analysis of the mythical uses to which it has been put.” —
The New York Times Book Review

“Agree or disagree with Gordon's numerous insights and interpretations, she gives us Joan as she was, letting us fully appreciate why the Maid will grip our attention for all time.”
—Forbes

“Gordon's biographical meditation is a readable and substantive introduction to the life and meaning of this medieval heroine.”

“A bold ‘biographical meditation' that persuades the skeptic to meditate on the inexplicable something Joan made happen, and keeps on happening, to this day.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Gordon avoids the dramatic and approaches her brassy, devout and defiant subject with a thoughtful air.
Joan of Arc
is an engaging meditation on one of the West's most memorable figures.”

—Star-Telegram
(Fort Worth)

“A large part of the enjoyment here is the highly personal intelligence of Gordon's prose style, laying out the facts of Joan's career and her martyrdom, and considering their ramifications.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Gordon, McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College, is the bestselling author of six novels, three collections of short stories, and two memoirs. She lives in New York City.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2008

Copyright © Mary Gordon, 2000

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Horae Canonicae”
from
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson.
Copyright © 1955 by W. H. Auden. .

eISBN : 978-0-143-11397-3

1. Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431. 2. Christian women saints—
France—Biography. 3. France—History—Charles VII, 1422-1461.
4. Charles VII, King of France, 1403-1461—Coronation. I. Title.
DC103.G68 2000
944'.026'292—dc21 99-055678

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TO ANTOINETTE O'CEALLAIGH

THERE ARE over twenty thousand books about Joan of Arc in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. This figure suggests the impossibility of reading even a substantial portion of what has been written about her. I am particularly indebted, therefore, to two excellent studies on Joan, Edward Lucie-Smith's and Marina Warner's, both entitled
Joan of Arc.

Posterity has been fortunate that the records of Joan's trial have been preserved. The translation of the trial record I used is by W. S. Scott. The text was taken from an original known as the Orléans Manuscript.

I am greatly indebted to the generosity of two of my colleagues at Barnard College: Joel Kaye of the Department of History and Christopher Baswell of the Department of English. I also wish to thank Joanne MacNamara, Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College.

For his heroic patience and help, my thanks go to my husband, Arthur Cash, frustrated military historian and footnote fetishist extraordinaire, whose distinction as a biographer humbles me as a would-be colleague, but fills me with pride as an actual wife.

1337
The Hundred Years' War begins

1412
Jan. 6 probably
Birth of Joan of Arc

1420
The Treaty of Troyes

1424
Midsummer probably
Joan first hears the voices

1428
July
Flight to Neufchâtel

1429
Jan.-Feb.
Visit to Vaucouleurs

Feb. 23
Joan leaves Vaucouleurs for Chinon

March 6
Arrival at Chinon

March 9 (approx.)
Received by the dauphin

March -April
At Chinon, Poitiers, Tours, and Blois

April 28
Arrival before Orléans

April 29
Enters Orléans

April 29-May 10
At Orléans

May 7
Journée des Tourelles

May 8
The siege raised

May 10
Departure from Orléans

June 11-12
Capture of Jargeau

June 15
At Meung-sur-Loire

June 16-17
Capture of Beauregency

June 18
Battle of Patay

July 17
Charles VII crowned

July 21
Charles VII and Joan leave Rheims

1429
Aug. 12
At Lagby-le-Sec

Aug. 18-23
At Compiègne

Aug. 26-Sept. 8
At St.-Denis and La Chapelle

Sept. 8
Attack on Paris (Joan wounded)

Sept. 9
La Chapelle and St.-Denis

Sept. 10 and 13
At St.-Denis

Sept. 13
Departure from St.-Denis for the Loire

Nov. 24
Attack on La Charité

1430
April
Battle of Lagny

May 23
Compiègne and assault on Margny; Joan taken prisoner

? May, June, July
At Beaulieu, a prisoner

Dec. 25-May 30
Prisoner in a tower of castle of Phillipe Auguste, Rouen

1431
Jan. 3
Delivered to the Inquisition and the Church by the English

Jan. 9
Trial begins

May 24
The recantation

May 30
Burned at the stake

1450
Examination of witnesses for the rehabilitation begins, under the direction of Guillaume Bouillé

1452
Resumes under Cardinal d'Estouteville, bishop of Digne, and Jean Brehal, inquisitor of France

1455-1456
Continued by order of Pope Calixtus III

1456
July
The sentence revoked by Pope Calixtus III

She is one of the few figures in history who cannot be anything but protagonists, who are never subordinate, always an end and never a means.

—JOHAN HUIZINGA

Charisma . . . bursts the bonds of rules and tradition and overturns all ideas of the sacred. It enforces a subjection to something which has never before existed.

—MAX WEBER

Youth forgets itself in its own ardor. . . . When youth has once grasped where beauty dwells, its self-surrender is absolute.

—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

MARCH 14, 1999. The city of Rouen, the province of Normandy, the country of France, the continent of Europe. It is 5 P.M. on an unseasonably warm spring day. People have flung their jackets over their shoulders. They are sitting outside in cafés, reckless from the sunlight, which seems miraculous, unearned, suggestive of improvidence. We are in the marketplace, the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. An attempt has been made to make this a viable city center; there is an open space for a market and, next to it, a cathedral. It is one of those good ideas that didn't work; it might have worked had there been a genius to design it, but it was not designed by a genius. The church is in the shape of an overturned boat, and the motif is meant to be nautical: Rouen is a seafaring city. But the idea fails; it provides us only with the always dispiriting spectacle of overstrained originality. The church has the sad, earnest quality of mediocre modern architecture, and we are left with a sense of betrayal, because we think that plain materials and an abundance of light ought to equal beauty, and when they don't, not only art, but nature as well, has let us down.

It is a Sunday, late afternoon. A ruddy light hangs low over the pavement. In the way of failed modern spaces, this one has become a haven for the underemployed, unprosperous young. Boys with greasy hair and tattoos throw their cigarette butts onto the ground. Two other, younger boys are throwing a soccer ball, with a disturbing violence, against the wall of the marketplace. They throw it against the words André Malraux wrote in 1964 when he dedicated this complex:
“Jean d'Arc, sans sepulchre et sans portrait, toi qui savais que le tombeau des heros est le coeur des vivants.”
(“Joan of Arc, without tomb and without portrait, you who knew that the grave of heroes is the heart of the living.”) I try to read the words between the blows of the soccer ball—
blam,
blam,
goes the leather against the concrete, leaving only narrow windows of legibility.

A little to the left of the wall is a public toilet out of which boys skulk. Suddenly, there is the sound of girls shouting. Everyone in the area stands still. The two girls, both wearing jeans and boots and sleeveless shirts, are punching each other. One throws the other to the ground and straddles her, hitting her face. A boy stands in the background, ineffectually urging them to stop. No one from the watching crowd moves to stop them. Then the police come, and everyone scatters. There is one small patch of blood on the concrete slope that leads from the church to the surrounding street.

In this spot, over five hundred years ago, a girl the same age as the two fighting girls gave up her life. This shocks us still, as we were shocked by the violence of the two fighting girls—far more than we would have been by fighting boys. Girls are not supposed to be violent. But girls are not supposed to be warriors, whose métier is, after all, violence. They are not supposed to be burned alive. It is precisely the disjunction between our expectations of what girls should do and the shape of Joan of Arc's life that has been, for half a millennium, a source of fascination.