Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (11 page)

“Before mid-Lent I must be with the King,” Joan told him. “Even if I have to wear my legs down to the knees.” The salvation of France had been ordained, and
“for that she was born,” she said to Henri Le Royer, identifying her messianic role as clearly as Jesus had to those who
“sought him and would have kept him from leaving them” to minister to “other cities also, for,” as Jesus said, “I was sent for this purpose.” As it had been for Bertrand de Poulengy, the fervor of Joan’s answer made Jean de Metz her friend for life, a man of good standing who became another of her instant adherents.
“I had great trust in what the Maid said,” Jean testified, “and I was on fire with what she said, and with a love for her which was, as I believe, a divine love.”

“I believed in what she said,” Catherine Le Royer testified, “and
so did many others”—enough that Joan could gather together a party of companions and set out for Chinon without Baudricourt’s blessing. But according to Catherine the mission was quickly aborted. “Joan said that this was not the way in which she ought to depart,” and the party came back to learn that Joan’s fortunes had shifted once again, just as they had the last time she’d returned to Vaucouleurs. But that was after an absence of many months, not the few days it took to get to Saint-Nicolas, a quarter of the way to Chinon, and back. As Saints Catherine and Margaret had promised, God had indeed cleared her way to the lord dauphin.

Of the two royal houses that supported Charles’s hegemony, the Armagnac name dominates the pages of history books, but the house of Anjou was larger and more powerful. The “Queen of Four Kingdoms”—Aragon, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Sicily—Yolande of Aragon was titular queen consort of Naples, Countess of Provence, and Duchess of Anjou (
Fig. 7
). The death of her elder sister, Joanna, in 1407, left the twenty-three-year-old Yolande the sole remaining heir to her father’s crown, or would have, were she a man. Instead, she married Louis II, the Duke of Anjou, and after he died, in 1417, acted as regent for the eldest of their six children, Louis III. Her second son, René, was married off to Isabella, Duchess of Bar and daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, thus securing Yolande’s influence in the north of France. As a noblewoman, Yolande had been tutored in those subjects considered appropriate to her gender—
“reading and writing in French and Latin … music, astronomy, and some medicine and first aid.” What she studied was political intrigue and maneuvering—the international relations of her day—and concluded she didn’t necessarily need a crown to rule a kingdom, just a malleable king. In 1419, immediately in the wake of Agincourt, and five years before the Burgundians formalized their alliance with the English, Yolande cemented the houses of Anjou and Valois by means of that most popular and generally trustworthy form of political alliance, matrimony. Her daughter Marie was just ten when betrothed to the twelve-year-old dauphin Charles, whose father she’d persuaded to sign a decree
claiming the dauphin as his son and heir. As Charles VI was known to have been Isabeau’s sole sexual partner during the period of time when the dauphin was conceived, common sense supported his claim to the throne, but it couldn’t rescue him from the effect of his mother’s casting doubt on his birthright. When Isabeau demanded she return Charles to the French court, Yolande is said to have declared her unfit to raise the dauphin.
“We have not nurtured and cherished this one for you to make him die like his brothers or to go mad like his father, or to become English like you. I keep him for my own. Come and take him away if you dare.”

Sometimes depicted as a lazy dilettante without any interest in rule, or as a simpleminded playboy, the dauphin was neither stupid nor apathetic. Prior to his mother’s betrayal he had been known for his theatrical military exploits, leading an army against the English when still a teenager. But Isabeau’s betrayal left him prey to a psychic paralysis that made him vulnerable to scheming courtiers jockeying for power, some with allegiance to the Burgundian party. His marriage, in the spring of 1422, when the dauphin was nineteen and Marie seventeen, and the subsequent death of his father that fall resolved nothing. Seven years later, as Joan struggled to make her way to Chinon, the dauphin had yet to claim what was his, the throne of France remained empty, and Yolande had financed an army Charles didn’t have the confidence to dispatch. She wasn’t about to sacrifice the kingdom she’d secured for her daughter to his inertia, and her immediate concern was to keep the remaining houses of France united while fending off an advancing enemy. For months now she had been searching for a means to guide, or force, if need be, Charles into a war she wanted and he didn’t. That a girl claiming to be the Virgin from Lorraine had arrived in Vaucouleurs to announce she’d been sent by God to lead France’s army and escort the reluctant dauphin to be anointed king at Reims was news Yolande seized with excitement. Immediately upon coming into possession of so welcome a rumor, she dispatched her messenger, Colet de Vienne, from the court at Chinon to that of her son René, the future Duke of Bar and Lorraine and Baudricourt’s immediate overlord.

Sir Robert, Yolande wrote to René, was on no account to squash or banish this peasant girl, not when his country needed the energy
and confidence inspired by a prophecy fulfilled. René must contact Sir Robert immediately and tell him to have the girl evaluated and her words taken as those meriting serious attention.

Son obeyed mother; captain obeyed duke; Catherine Le Royer found herself with unexpected visitors. Baudricourt had done what Joan never thought to do: he summoned a Church authority to validate her mission, obliging Joan to participate in what she knew was a charade and considered a waste of time.
“I saw Robert de Baudricourt, then captain of the town of Vaucouleurs, and Messire Jean Fournier enter my house,” Catherine testified. “I heard Joan say that this man, who was a priest, had brought a stole, and that he had exorcised her in front of the captain, saying that if there was any evil thing in her, let it begone away, and if there was any good thing, let it come to them all.” Since he had heard her confession, and thus already knew the state of her soul, “Joan said that this priest had done wrong.” Promised success by her voices, Joan hadn’t troubled to puzzle out how it might be realized, nor did she defer to earthbound clerics who ruled what they called the Church Militant,
“all good Christians engaged in the struggle against the enemies of Christ,” to distinguish it from the Church Triumphant, whose members inhabited heaven. Still, all the rest of the world, who lacked direct access to God, believed that to offend Church doctrine was a grave mistake, and it was only after Joan had Fournier’s sanction that she received a summons from René’s father-in-law, the old Duke Charles of Lorraine.

An invitation to the home of a nobleman was as good as an announcement that through the inaudible direction of her voices and the invisible hand of Yolande Joan had bounded out of the peasantry and into the highest echelon of society, an accomplishment rare enough to qualify as something of a miracle. Now her appearance needed to reflect her new station.
“I asked her if she wanted to travel in those clothes,” Jean de Metz said of Joan’s dress of “the reddish-brown homespun material known as russet.” If it was the typical farm girl’s dress, it was long sleeved and ankle length, with a laced bodice. “She replied that she would rather have a man’s clothes,” Jean said.
“Then I gave her a suit and breeches belonging to my servants, so that she could put them on.”

But, Joan’s uncle Durand said,
“some people of Vaucouleurs” determined that Joan should go off to see the duke in the clothes of a gentleman, not a servant, and had “everything that was necessary” made for her. As the clothing was offered as a gift, the citizens who outfitted their virgin warrior can hardly have found the idea of a woman wearing male clothing “abominable to God and man, contrary to laws both divine and natural and to ecclesiastical discipline … and prohibited under penalty of anathema.” The trial record dilates this judgment with a description of Joan’s dress so lingering in its specificity that it can only have been inspired by the delight taken in counting up the sins of others. Joan “wore shirt, breeches, doublet, with hose joined together and fastened to the said doublet by twenty points, long leggings laced on the outside, a short mantle reaching to the knees, or thereabouts, a close-cut cap, tight-fitting boots and buskins.”

Joan, as it turned out, was—or she quickly became—something of a fop. The tailor-made clothes the citizens of Vaucouleurs gave her awoke a taste for the luxurious fabrics and flamboyant styles that sumptuary laws held out of a peasant’s reach: velvet surcoats embroidered with gold thread; fur-lined mantles; colorful tunics bearing coats of arms; tight-fitting damask doublets with jeweled buttons and slashed sleeves that revealed contrasting silk linings; brightly colored hose; voluminous gowns—
houppelandes
—with sleeves that hung to the ground;
pigases
with their extravagantly long and pointed toes; chamois gloves; belts hung with bells and trinkets; an
“infinity of hats … tam-o’shanters and furred caps, hoods and brims, chaplets of flowers, coiled turbans, coverings of every shape, puffed, pleated, scalloped, or curled into a long tailed pocket called a liripipe.”

Joan could not have chosen a more dramatic moment to defy a dress code. Costume historians identify the high Middle Ages as the arrival of fashion in western Europe. Cotton from Egypt; silks from the Ottoman Empire; improved dyes and dyeing techniques; complex patterns and new fabrics, like brocade and velvet, made possible by Chinese innovations in weaving: crusaders went east bearing murder and returned home with the ingredients for haute couture. And
the increased social mobility that accompanied the aristocracy’s loss of power and conjured the ambitions of a man like Jacques d’Arc strengthened the yet ruling nobility’s resolve to assign and maintain standards of dress that identified a peasant as a peasant, no matter how much money he had to spend on disguising himself as a lord. Etymology identifies
villein
as the progenitor of “villainous,” as is
churl
of “churlish,” suggesting the regard in which the aristocracy held a peasant, whose lowly stature was received as proof of his base character. The Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain
“attributes sublime virtues only to the nobility,” Huizinga observed of his
Chronique des choses de mon temps
, a history of the years 1417–74 that was written when
“God, the theory went, had established an intangible order of which costume was merely the expression.” The Third Reich didn’t invent the yellow badge that announced its wearer as a Jew; it revived the idea from a decree made by Pope Innocent III in 1215 that Jews be “marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples.”
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By the time Joan was born, two centuries of increasing social unrest had drawn the strictures of sumptuary laws that much tighter; never before or since has Europe insisted on so rigid and visible a classification of its citizens. Even were a prostitute successful enough to afford the fine clothes of an aristocrat, she could never be confused with a lady, required, as she was by law, to wear a striped hood or cloak. Within this context, Joan, whose dress revealed, in the opinion of her judges, “her obstinacy, her stubbornness in evil, her want of charity, her disobedience to the Church, and the scorn she has of the holy sacraments,” refused to acknowledge the most basic and essential distinction, that drawn between male and female.
“It was characteristic of the time, of the doctors’ narrowmindedness, of their blind attachment to the letter without any consideration for the spirit,” Michelet wrote, “that no point seemed more grievous to them than the sin of having assumed the garments of a man.”

“Mark what I say,” Shaw’s inquisitor lectures, “the woman who quarrels with her clothes and puts on the dress of a man is like the man who throws off his fur gown and dresses like John the Baptist:
they are followed, as surely as the night follows the day, by bands of wild women and men who refuse to wear any clothes at all.” Shaw’s representation of the clerics’ response isn’t drawn from historical record, but it represents the Church’s viewpoint well enough. As pronounced by an anonymous member of the University of Paris,
“If a woman could put on male clothing as she liked with impunity, women would have unrestrained opportunities to fornicate and to practice manly acts which are legally forbidden to them according to doctrine … for example, to preach, to teach, to bear arms, to absolve, to excommunicate.”