Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (3 page)

Of course, there are many stories of Joan’s life. She left her own insofar as an autobiography can be assembled from the answers to a set of hostile questions, many repeated over and over in the attempt to wear down her resistance and trick her into perjuring herself. Truth was never what her judges sought, but in this case it couldn’t be hidden.
Joan’s poise under fire demonstrated what she couldn’t by herself, even had she been erudite as well as literate. It’s one thing to assemble and polish a portrait of oneself, as did Saint Augustine, a professor of philosophy and rhetoric, and another to demonstrate at nineteen an integrity that a chorus of scheming pedants couldn’t dismantle, their sophistry displaying Joan’s virtues as she could not have done for herself. Few trial transcripts make good reading; only one preserves the voice of Joan of Arc. While the words of the judges are forgettable—all despots sound alike—Joan’s transcend the constraints of interrogation. Even threatened with torture and assaulted by prison guards attempting her rape, she could not be forced to assume the outline her judges drew for her. That was their script, their story of Joan’s life, and, unlike other such medieval documents, it was reproduced, bound, and distributed by her persecutors with the ironic purpose of establishing their punctiliousness in serving the laws of canon.

The nullification process, undertaken twenty-five years after Joan’s death with the purpose of vindicating her, provides a second official narrative, told by 115 witnesses who testified on her behalf: the defense she was denied while living. Beyond these two transcripts, there are contemporaneous chronicles such as the king’s counselor Guillaume Cousinot’s
Chronique de la Pucelle
, the French poet Alain Chartier’s
Epistola de Puella
, and the anonymously authored
Journal du siège d’Orléans
and
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris
; letters, both those dictated by Joan herself and those written about her by kings, clerics, friends, and foes; poems; theological analyses; and eulogies, biographies, and passion plays undertaken immediately upon her death. Joan was the reluctant object of veneration even before she died, her execution the final and necessary act of a drama that had unfolded before a rapt audience across all of Europe, an audience that consumed every rumor and report of her remarkable life and wove it into narrative.

Like all sacred figures whose extraordinary earthly existence separates them from the broad mass of humanity—including the lives of gods themselves, Allah, Christ—a saint is a story, and Joan of Arc’s is like no other. At the time of her birth, the Catholic Church was both center and substance of European culture. Medieval music and art were almost exclusively devotional and found their highest
expression within the walls of a cathedral, whose Gothic architecture emphasized light’s origin from above, the clerestory showering the faithful gathered under its roof with a spray of heavenly beams, its spires directing the eye upward to the source of that grace, even as they reminded humankind of God’s omniscient scrutiny. Each of the hundreds of cathedrals built during the Middle Ages was a great act of propitiation, one city competing with another for the favor of God’s grace. So completely did the Church pervade and control the attention of the people that
“even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg ‘during the length of time wherein you can say a Miserere.’ ” Far from being separated from government, the Church
was
the state. Rule was by divine right; only an archbishop representing Christ on earth could anoint a king. All across Europe—in Cambridge, Oxford, Bologna, Padua, Naples, Salamanca, Valladolid, Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans—the great centers of thought originated in religious communities.

For the wealthy, patronage of education and art was a means of buying the favor of a deity who, at the approach of a rich man, narrowed the gates of heaven to the size of a needle’s eye. For the illiterate poor, the Church offered religious education in the form of allegory and illustration of the Gospels: altarpieces, stained-glass windows, stations of the cross, chapbooks. When academics were paid by the Church, education necessarily reflected its biases and interests, and all medieval culture, from highest to lowest, was permeated by the same anxieties. The underclass in particular focused on the afterlife as a corrective to the endless tribulations of their mortal existence, and stories told around the hearth offered as much religious indoctrination as they did entertainment. Though folktales that would have been familiar to Joan predated—some by millennia—the birth of Christ, they shared themes and symbols with Christianity, the workings of magic taking on the role of divine intervention. The equivalent of the beatitudes’ promise that virtue is rewarded by heavenly blessings drove plots forward to judgment and just deserts. The moral of “Cinderella,” for example, might well be “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” the heroine’s innate goodness and obedience rewarded by a supernatural adjustment that doesn’t so much create as unveil her true radiance, freeing her from servitude
and delivering her to happily-ever-after in the arms of the king’s son. Sleeping Beauty, too, arrives at union with an exalted beloved, woken from sleep at the touch of a prince who cuts through a thicket of thorns to apply a redemptive kiss. Guileless Snow White bites into an apple, a fruit laden with the knowledge of good and evil, proffered by a wicked queen who steps in for the serpent. The incorruptible girl falls dead, beyond the reach of human influence, and waits for the arrival of a prince who, Christlike, resurrects her and bears her off to his kingdom. The fairy-tale forest is Eden’s dark inverse, a sunlit garden overgrown by shadow, concealing sin. When Little Red Cap forgets her mother’s warning and strays from the path of obedience, she meets the animal that has come to symbolize sexual predation, a wolf. As a narrative genre, hagiography is suspended between biography and fiction, borrowing freely from the second to enhance a truth that may or may not be historical. Some tales of the saints poach not only motifs but also plots directly from folklore, the story of Donkey-skin, for example, revised as that of Saint Dymphna, each pursued by a father who, grieving the death of his wife, tries to take his daughter as his bride. Donkey-skin ends up in the arms of an earthly prince; Dymphna, decapitated when she refuses her father’s incestuous advances, gets the heavenly version. Chivalry, too, was permeated by Christianity; the ideal knight served God above any other lord. Galahad never made it back to the Round Table with the Holy Grail before he ascended to heaven in a state of rapture so intense he chose to die in its embrace. Two centuries later, Cervantes’s spoof of the chivalric quest cannot escape the Messiah’s trajectory. Don Quixote descends into the Cave of Montesinos, which
“went down into the abyss”—the underworld—where he remained among the dead for three days before rising.

For centuries, no matter who told the story of Joan of Arc, he or she knew each recorded moment of Jesus’s life, knew it so well and from such an early age that it was natural to organize the trajectory of her short life to align with his—just as natural as it was for Joan, a girl Galahad, as she saw herself, to tread his messianic path toward her martyrdom. If her career wasn’t predicted in the Scriptures, its outline is there to be found, prefigured by the Gospel narratives that inspired it.

Prophecy, annunciation, virginity. A hidden sword, an angel bearing a crown of jewels. An army of knights, a cloud of butterflies, a phallic arrow that missed its mark. A tower cell, an evil bishop, a king’s betrayal. A heart that would not burn, a dove that flew from the flames that failed to dispatch that immortal heart. In Joan, fate, or God, or the gods, or random meaningless chance provided a real-life heroine whose short time on earth struck richly symbolic notes during a period whose limited media relied heavily on symbol. The story of Joan of Arc not only fulfilled a collective dream but also transfigured it, elevating it from the hearth to the heavens. Confounding in its facts, a biography like Joan’s invites invention; its provenance is the unconscious; its logic apart from reason. Too, like all good yarns, Joan’s spread by mouth, subject to additions and subtractions at the whim of the teller. But while many versions of her life bear a patina of loving details added by the faithful—not so much lying as regarding her through a worshipful lens—it unfolded in public. Witnessed by thousands, its lineaments weren’t imagined but known and safeguarded by hard documentation. Her earliest biographers told a story swept into the realm of myth even as it unfolded, one that would demonstrate immunity to mythologizing by virtue of a historical record remarkable in its detail.

The tension between truth and fiction continues to quicken Joan’s biography, for a story, like a language, is alive only for as long as it changes. Latin is dead. Joan lives. She has been imagined and reimagined by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Schiller, Twain, Shaw, Brecht, Anouilh, and thousands of writers of less renown. Centuries after her death, she has been embraced by Christians, feminists, French nationalists, Mexican revolutionaries, and
hairdressers, her crude cut inspiring the bob worn by flappers as a symbol of independence from patriarchal strictures. Her voices have held the attention of psychiatrists and neurologists as well as theologians. It seems Joan of Arc will never be laid to rest. Is this because stories we understand are stories we forget?

^*1
“Sinister,” from the Latin for “left,” indicates a stripe moving from the lower left to the upper right quadrant of the coat of arms.
À la main gauche
, or “by the left hand” (of the father), is a French expression for illegitimate birth.

^*2
The cadet line of the Capetian dynasty, whose kings ruled France from 1328 to 1589.

^*3
The wizard from the Arthurian legend, a mythical seer, and an English monk of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, respectively.

^*4
A popular medieval proverb attributed to Saint Jerome.

Joan’s birthplace, Domrémy, lies on the west bank of the upper Meuse River, in northeastern France’s region of Lorraine,
^*1
about 150 miles east of Paris. A census taken in the fourteenth century—it counted hearths rather than individuals—estimated the village’s population at a little fewer than 200 inhabitants. Today the head count hovers around 150. With the exception of the Joan of Arc Center and the basilica erected in her honor, Domrémy remains much as it was in her lifetime, the small seat of an agricultural community in a high valley of the Meuse. The climate is more temperate than severe, summer’s heat peaking in July at about eighty degrees, winter’s grip tightest in January, when the river, shallow and trending into marsh where it winds past town, slows and finally freezes. The soil, dense, clayey, and rich in limestone, is ideal for pasturing livestock and for the cultivation of oats, wheat, rye, and hemp—as well as grapes. Lorraine’s vineyards, known today for Beaujolais Nouveau, were first planted during the Roman occupation of Gaul.