Joan of Arc (10 page)

Charles's policy was responsible for his ultimate success twenty-five years after Joan's death, but it couldn't have happened without her. Shortly after Joan's death, the duke of Burgundy seems to have become favorably disposed toward seeking peace, a process that was concluded successfully four years later. An assassination attempt on the life of de la Trémoille, Joan's enemy, was frustrated because the sword couldn't penetrate his flesh, but it ended his appetite for court life. With him gone, the popular desire for military action was no longer thwarted. In 1437, Charles triumphantly entered Paris, fulfilling Joan's 1431 prophecy that this would happen within seven years.

But just as he could not have succeeded without Joan, Charles, given his character and resources, could not accommodate this difficult figure. There was probably no way—five hundred years later, there may still be no way— to make a place for a headstrong woman, full of faith, utterly lacking in self-interest, a little weak on policy but strong on popular appeal. In the relationship of Charles and Joan, we see played out the conflict between the visionary and the practical politician. The latter might need the former, but only for a while. In the long run, she's more a problem than an asset.

In all the months she spent in prison, Joan received no word from Charles. What is remarkable is that she never seemed to resent this; she died believing him worthy of her love and her devotion, the anointed of the Lord, anointed with the sacred oil of Clovis that shone on his temples because of her.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT KIND OF WARRIOR, WHAT KIND OF DEFEAT?

IT WOULD SEEM that a grateful Charles would have given the woman who was responsible for his coronation anything she wanted. But he was reluctant to wage war and particularly susceptible to the advice of de la Trémoille, who strongly favored a diplomatic solution. At the very time that Joan had no desire but to press forward for Paris, Charles was negotiating a truce with the duke of Burgundy, which was to last for fifteen days. Joan was suspicious of this truce, and rightly so. Burgundy never had any intention of giving Paris over to Charles; he had merely gained a crucial two weeks for himself, allowing the English to prepare to fight against Charles's army.

The duke of Bedford, the English regent in France, having plenty of time to prepare, seems to have wanted to challenge the French. He addressed an insulting letter to Charles on August 7, denying his legitimacy, accusing him of the murder of John the Fearless, and calling Joan “that disorderly woman dressed as a man.”
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But neither the French nor the English seemed really to want to fight, and not much of consequence happened in this period, except that de la Trémoille fell off his horse and was nearly taken prisoner because he was so heavy he couldn't get himself up off the ground. In the end, the two armies withdrew from one another, in the words of Vita Sackville-West, “like two dogs who have stalked round and round one another growling with raised hackles, but who have finally decided on discretion rather than valor.”
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Bedford went back to Paris, and Charles was persuaded to advance toward Compiègne. It seemed, for a time, as if Joan had regained her influence with him. She and the duke of Alençon proceeded to St.-Denis, near Paris, and the king sulkily removed himself.

Throughout the end of August there were skirmishes but no serious attacks. Then came September 8, an important date because it was the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. On Ascension Day, only a few months before, when Joan was powerful and victorious, she had refused to allow her troops to attack on a holy day. Now, stymied and frustrated, she ordered the attack. But she seems to have lost the ability to rally and inspire the troops. The French captains fought halfheartedly, and Joan's army suffered its first important reverse since Orléans.

An arrow penetrated Joan's thigh, and she was, against her protestations, removed from the field. Charles used her wound as an excuse to give up the fight and ordered Joan to withdraw and meet him at St.-Denis. Inexplicably—or perhaps his reluctance that Joan should capture and disturb his negotiations with Burgundy explains it—Charles had a bridge that the duke of Alençon had thrown up across the Seine burned. Perhaps he didn't trust Joan to obey his orders.

Of the poignancies surrounding Joan, the brevity of everything concerning her is perhaps the greatest. There is the brevity of her life as a whole: nineteen years. But it is astonishing to contemplate the fact that her success lasted, by the most generous interpretation, nine months (if you start calculating at Vaucouleurs) or, alternatively, less than five, if you begin counting at Orléans.

Joan's army was disbanded at the end of October. The docility with which she accepted this decline is surprising, given her fiery nature. Instead of going home to tend her sheep, as she'd said she wanted to do after the coronation, Joan traveled with the court for most of the fall. There could hardly have been a worse situation for her. It is dispiriting to imagine her trapped with the frivolous, luxury-loving but bankrupt courtiers, so inimical to everything she stood for and admired. Temperamentally, she was ill suited for the idleness of court life. She couldn't wait to return to battle, and her chronic impatience might have caused her to decide unwisely. Moreover, perhaps her constant urging made the court so anxious to get rid of her that they'd do whatever she said rather than put up with her presence.

It must have been a relief to her when the king authorized her to take the town of La Charité, fifty or so miles to the south of Orléans, which was “owned” by the warlord Perinnet Gressart. The first step was to take the small town of St. Pierre Le Moutier. There, greeted by a small force of English, she experienced another success, which she attributed to the fifty thousand she had behind her, either a reference to the heavenly host or a moment of madness, depending on your interpretation. In fact, the number of men she had with her was very small.

Her fifty thousand let her down, however, at La Charité. It was a long and unsuccessful siege, and in November she had to return to court a failure. A contemporary chronicler places the blame on the king because he had sent an army of mercenaries and then failed to pay them.

Joan understood herself as a symbolic figure, and she understood the symbolic nature of her entire enterprise. But a symbol, to be effective, must be unambiguous and without contradictions. As Max Weber says of the charismatic hero: “The continued existence of charismatic authority is, by its very nature, characteristically unstable. . . . those who entrust themselves to him must prosper. If they do not, he is not the master.”
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Joan symbolized victorious rescue; when she started to lose, her symbolism lost its potency. For a while, Joan could inspire the soldiers to fight against ridiculous odds, unpaid and underfed. But not forever. By the time the army was marching to Auxerre from Rheims, and certainly on its march to Paris, the poorly provisioned and unpaid soldiers had deserted in large numbers. Charles was unable or unwilling to give Joan the resources she needed to continue a difficult campaign; she couldn't make it work on air forever.

Her defeats, then, occurred when symbolic action was insufficient, when the reality drowned the image and the dream. When Joan actually began making tactical decisions—in Paris and at La Charité, for example—her lack of experience, her native impetuousness, betrayed her. She was not a professional, and there is something to be said for professionalism as a way of getting through the long haul.

Joan stayed with the court until March of 1430. By this point, even Charles had to admit that Joan was right: Burgundy was not bargaining in good faith, and peace would only be won “at the point of a lance.” She was sent to Melun, which turned its allegiance from Burgundy to France at the sight of Joan: an outcome which must have reassured her that she hadn't lost her touch. It was at Melun, though, where St. Catherine and St. Margaret warned her that she would be captured before midsummer. Despite what must have been her distress at her voices' first discouraging words, she moved on to Lagny, where another miracle occurred. A baby believed dead was brought to her. “As black as my cloak,” she reported at her trial. When she took the baby in her arms, he drew breath and lived long enough to be baptized before he died. It was at Lagny that she captured the Burgundian sympathizer d'Arras, a disastrous figure in her history.

After his capture, Franquet d'Arras was offered quarter and his ransom was fixed. She had intended to exchange him for another man, but then discovered that the other man had been executed. So, going back on her agreement to give Franquet d'Arras up for ransom, she brought him to trial. He was a bad character; his trial lasted fifteen days; he confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and a traitor. He was decapitated.

According to the rules of chivalry, his bad character didn't excuse what Joan did, nor did the death of the prisoner for whom he was meant to be exchanged. Joan had given her promise; the prisoner had been given quarter, ransom had been arranged. She went back on her word, her
parole,
sacred to the ideal of chivalry. Would she have made such an unwise and indeed brutal error if she had been in a time of greater success, more sure of herself, if she'd had the knights she fought beside at Orléans to coach her?

Charles understood that in order to rout the English and Burgundians, a victory on a scale greater than Orléans would be required. It was obvious that the English and Burgundians would join forces and that they would need to capture Compiègne, a town a few miles northeast of Paris that had refused to be handed over to the Burgundians, even though Charles was willing to give it up. If it remained in French hands, it would be a strong position from which to threaten Paris.

In May, events at the town of Soissons indicated that Joan had lost her authority. She wanted to cross the bridge of Soissons to outflank the Burgundians, but the captain of the town, who was in the process of literally selling the town to the Burgundians, would not let her and her men in. Joan's army slept in the field that night and was broken up the next day because the men could not be fed.

She contemplated taking Compiègne with only two or three hundred men. The Burgundian army consisted of six thousand. Some of her companions thought an encounter would be foolhardy; she responded with her usual bravado: “By my staff, we are enough. I will go and see my good friends at Compiègne.”
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This bravado had worked at Orléans, but she was then at the height of her power, the army was comparatively well fed, and, more important, it was ready to be inspired by her. She rode from Soissons to Compiègne all night and arrived at five in the morning, exhausted. But she insisted on making a sortie by 5 P.M.: another instance of her tirelessness, which in the past had worked well.

At first, she seemed to take the Burgundians by surprise. She approached the field on a light-dapple-gray horse, “very beautiful and fiery.”
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Her standards were flying. She had the bells rung. The first rush brought Joan into the Burgundian camp, where the soldiers were mostly disarmed and resting. She was lucky for a time, but only for a time. From a hilltop, the daunting Burgundian captain Jean de Luxembourg spotted Joan and had time to order his troops to meet her. Despite this, Joan, desperately and perhaps foolishly, made two further assaults, with at least some success. But then Luxembourg's men were joined by the duke of Burgundy's and the English. Her followers begged her to retreat to Compiègne, and she responded with anger. “Their discomfiture depends only on you. Think only of falling upon them.”
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It was the sort of challenge to which her men would have risen in the past, but she could not rally them now; either her authority had dissipated or the odds really were impossible.

Eventually, the English cut off Joan's line of retreat. Her men fled toward the safety of the town. Joan found herself trapped. The governor of the town, seeing the army so closely pursued by the enemy, drew up the drawbridge to keep the town in safety. Joan could not get into the town. She was entirely cut off. She fought gallantly, as gallantly as she had done at any point. But she was stuck in the boggy ground: a metaphor, perhaps, for the entropy from which she was trying to extricate her beloved France. The bog overwhelmed her, and a Picard archer seized her by the flaps of her beautiful gold and scarlet surcoat and pulled her ignominiously from her horse. Here another metaphor seems to hold sway. She was caught by the garment that she wore out of a love of display; she was pulled from the “fiery spirited horse,” and it was on horseback that she presented her most inspiring version of herself.

She was taken into custody by the duke of Luxembourg and imprisoned at the fortress of Beaulieu. The rumor is that the duke of Burgundy arrived that night to have a look at her. Had he been able to talk one of his employees, the court painter Rogier van der Weyden, into accompanying him, we might have a contemporary portrait of Joan by a master. But the duke came unaccompanied. That very evening, he wrote a letter to the inhabitants of St. Quentin, saying her capture was of the greatest importance, because it will expose “the error and foolish credulity of those who have been well disposed and favorable towards the doings of this woman.”

For the rest of her life, Joan was no longer a warrior but a prisoner. She would never be free again.

It would have been customary to make some attempt to ransom a warrior of her caliber, who would, of course, have been a knight. But no attempt was made by Charles or the French, and the Burgundians quickly gave up the hope that they would make money off their capture of Joan. The protections of chivalry seem to have dropped off her as quickly as her armor.