Song: Joan of Arc Patron Saint of Mothers and Soldiers
Viewed: 28 - Published at: 7 years ago
Artist: Phong Nguyen
Year: 2013Viewed: 28 - Published at: 7 years ago
JOAN OF ARC (1412–1481), the patron saint of mothers and soldiers, began life as a peasant girl in the town of Domrémy, in the Lorraine region of Northeastern France, then under Burgundian control. As a young woman she had a vision of the Archangel Michael, whose voice commanded her to break the English siege of Orleans, and bring the Dauphin Charles VII to Reims for his coronation, which she accomplished at the tender age of seventeen.
Though she was captured by the Burgundian army in 1431 and handed over to the English, she was eventually ransomed by King Charles, returned to French territory, and forbidden ever to lead an army into battle again.
Joan of Arc went on to live a modest life as a musician in the court of King Charles, and through royal proximity, gained the necessary titles to mother three sons who would go on to become a pope, a king, and an emperor, though she never married.
The following text is excerpted from the writings of Jean d’Aulon, Joan’s bodyguard and squire, and the source of much historical scholarship on the life of France’s most revered saint. Historians of the Early Renaissance have suggested that, for all his medieval posturing about chastity and virtue, Jean d’Aulon reveals a fondness for his charge that goes beyond mere loyalty.
~
As a prophet, Joan’s debut in French royal society began with the coronation of Charles VII at Reims. On that midsummer day in Reims Cathedral, under the oppressive glare of the rose window at full bloom with the sun at its zenith, she knelt near the altar in her shining white armor, carrying the flag of her country, at the feet of France’s true and rightful sovereign, and declared, “Noble Prince, the will of God is now accomplished which had commanded me to raise the siege of Orleans, then to bring you to this ancient city of Reims in order to receive the holy consecration which proves you to be the true king to whom of sacred right belongs the Kingdom of France.” And the congregation wept with joy and cried out, “Noel! Noel!”
But a peasant girl in the court of the Loire Valley quickly became a mere novelty, her presence descending into something of a nuisance. True, she had once been the savior of France and had led its army to its first victory in generations, but they began to wonder, what name did she bear? What did she and the nobility have in common?
At twenty-four years old, Joan still wore her armor everywhere she went. She still heard voices. And she was still as pure as the day she was born. Her virginity, which had been painstakingly discussed, and proven, by France’s clerical leadership, had formerly marked her as an emissary of God, but now simply branded her as an eccentric.
I flush with shame when I recall the insults heaped upon this hero of France when she visited the home of Jean Poton de Xaintrailles, one of her most loyal lieutenants, after the war. At a feast held in her honor, Xaintraille’s wife turned and said to Joan, “You tell the future! What a marvelous diversion! You should come to our chateau next week and tell us which of us will have sons and which will have daughters.” And this was the most idle of insults. To which Joan replied, most seriously, “But, Madame, you will have no heirs.” Such truth had never before been uttered in the presence of a French noblewoman.
On another occasion, a group of younger nobles, merry with too much wine, put her to mockery for wearing men’s clothing, in voices too loud to be ignored. Joan, in her disarming manner, replied, “Indeed, I wear a man’s armor, and a man’s sword,” to which remark the men answered with a sober silence. But the one insult they all could agree upon—the great consensus among these nobles, many of whom owed their very lives to her—was that our Joan was unavailingly mad. As her squire and dutiful friend, I kept my silence but raged within myself: “If this is madness, then sanity is overrated!”
Charles VI, the late king of France and the father of Charles VII, believed that he was made of glass. He forgot his own name, assaulted his own soldiers, blew bubbles into his soup at dinner, and covered his body in a thick padding in case he should ever topple over. It was soon after he died that Joan began to hear the voice of the Archangel. Had the Angel been speaking to Charles as well? Perhaps the Archangel drove him mad to clear the way for her glorious ascendance?
It was the cruel memory of “Charles the Mad” that plagued Joan’s own king, “Charles the Victorious.” Many a night after the Loire Campaign had ended, and France restored to French rule, Charles sought comfort from The Maid of Orleans, who had helped obtain his victories through her very madness. “Young and of strong erotic proclivities, Charles had found himself magnetized by her charming, wholesome personality, even as his soul was subdued by the sense of her supernatural power.” But Joan of Arc prized her virtue above all else, for it had become the seal of her divine favor.
Yet rarely now did Joan resort to invoking God to chase the King out from her tent, as she had on certain nights on the march to Reims years ago, shouting at the naked monarch: “Allez vous-en! Le fils de Marie!” (“Get out of here! By the Son of Mary!”) just as she had said to the English back in the city of Orleans.
Ever since he ransomed her from her Burgundian captors, the King and Joan of Arc had become close in a filial sense, with her ennoblement, and with the patronage of his mother-in-law, the Queen Yolande of Aragon, who treated Joan like a favorite daughter. And then there was the Duke d’Alençon.
If ever a man was suited to compromise the virtue of Joan, it was d’Alençon. They had fought side by side in the Battles of Jargeau, Beaugency, and Patay. She called him le beau Duc, and he knew her fondly as la belle guerriere. Indeed, he had the sort of roguish charm that good women everywhere seek to reform through their tender embraces. Tall and broad-shouldered, with well-cut features and a sculpted quality, he seemed out of place among the delicate nobility, and in fact, he had married into the royal family through Charles’ sister, Jeanne de Valois. Joan of Arc and her Duke shared an outsider’s awareness absent those forever confined within the circle.
And most pertinent of all, he possessed the libertine’s wisdom for fine conversation, by which the heart of a maiden is earned. Whenever the Duke appeared at court, Joan could not contain a smile of relief that she would not spend the weekend yoked to a procession of dullards who spoke exclusively of God or war, the subjects for which she herself had grown justly famous, and which she therefore detested as dinner-table talk.
As France was once again in the hands of the French, and God besought her for nothing more glorious than an occasional prayer, in her newfound idleness, Joan would seek out the Duke at his palace, and stroll with him far outside the range of the windows of his estate.
“Archery is an English sport,” the Duke complained, when Joan told him that she had taken up this pastime in her capacity as a gentlewoman.
“The day I concede that point is the day France forfeits the art of war to the English,” she said.
“Take solace, la belle guerriere, in this: that the French are better horsemen,” the Duke replied. “It is our nature to love living things.” He gave a friendly wink and put on a mischievous smile—just the sort of gesture that The Maid abided from no one else.
“From your tongue, the most innocent words are befouled,” she said, sympathetically. “I cannot help but read crudity into your character.”
“The fault is yours, then,” he said.
“When you speak of ‘our nature,’ surely you’ve neglected to mention that our nature is divine?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” the Duke answered with another comely smile, which once again had the effect of shuffling suggestively the meaning of the words just uttered. “I suppose I should be careful not to take long walks with beautiful unmarried women,” the Duke said. “Or . . . at least not when the Duchess is at home.”
Joan slowed her pace and folded her hands, closing her eyes as though to show the depth of her faith. “My virtue has been tested so many times, I could be your guardian angel, defending your virtue against temptation. The Duchess should thank me for having you along.”
At that, d’Alençon grew bold in a way to which only I, Joan’s shadow, am privy. “Won’t you ever grow weary of virtue? It is well enough for a girl at war to be chaste, but a woman of your beauty ought to know the lover’s embrace—and her own child’s embrace—before death’s.”
“I will be a mother,” Joan said, in the tone of knowing which she assumed when proclaiming a divine prophecy.
Joan of Arc once told Robert Baudricourt, the governor of Vaucouleurs, that she “would give birth to three sons: a pope, an emperor, and a king. In response to Baudricourt’s gallant offer to father one of these illustrious offspring, Joan declined, saying, ‘Gentil Robert, nennil, nennil, il n’est pas temps; le Saint-Esperit y ouvrera’ [nay, nay, Master Robert, now is not the time; the Holy Spirit will see to it]. Baudricourt circulated the story of this conversation, zestfully relating it more than once in the presence of clergymen and nobles.”
Those, like myself, who knew Joan as more than a savior—as a person of common faults and common vulnerabilities—understood that as a young woman she had truly expected, waited, to become a mother and remain pure, in the divine pattern of the Virgin Mother. Her whole life it seems she had been waiting for the Archangel Michael—who had been her guiding light, who had put her through the trials of war and defeat and humiliation—to do more than speak to her. Even Mary was touched by the Archangel Gabriel, rather than talked to, and did Mary feel any different from how Joan felt, when His words first penetrated her?
The Duke, though, was only the catalyst that excited a deeper transformation within The Maid, one that changed her in her very core. The desire that he had stirred within her found no outlet in the life of the court—a life somehow both sterile and debauched—and Joan was soon possessed by a restlessness that she could neither name nor quench.
After years of striving for purpose among the purposeless, Joan announced that she would return to her family in Lorraine, whereupon she was bid farewell and departed with little fanfare, but received back into the little town of Domrémy like a queen.
She soon discovered that her childhood companions, her neighbors, even her family, had lived so long with the legend of Joan of Arc that they could no longer see her plainly. She decided to sojourn again, this time farther north, to Cambrai, where she pursued God with the same vigor and relentlessness with which she pursued the English armies not long ago.
I did not join her on this particular journey, but a piece of writing survives from her years of retreat into the monastic life: the “Apology to the Archangel Michael,” which she wrote while studying scripture and music at Cambrai Cathedral:
The first place where I felt every stitch in the weave of my soul responding to the gravity of God was shivering from the granite tones of the pipe organ of Cambrai.
When I sat in the pews, there was a deathly silence, as of a man cupping his hands over my ears. I wondered for a moment if I had gone deaf—if God had taken away Your voice, and all other voices with it. I was like a newborn fascinated by its own powers of sense.
Then, “at the ringing of the angelus bells, at the very hour when the Ave Maria was being prayed in remembrance and renewal of the Annunciation,” the first strains of that exquisite instrument were sounded. A dropping, heavy wind, from the ceiling down, like a spirit taking possession; then a light, lifting melody, as though a bird were pursuing the errant soul. The music surrounded me, vibrating in the stone, casting spears of light across my field of vision, pervading the very ether with tones that I could taste.
I admit that the glories of Cambrai Cathedral had not touched me at first. I had seen the great cathedrals of Orleans, Rouen, Reims, and Paris. Its flying buttresses, ionic columns, and all its grotesques had seemed to me simply another pattern in the great veil of the world that conceals the divine. Nothing in my sight had ever been sacred, it seemed to me then, and the more I witnessed, the more the scurf of the world merely yielded to the profane. It was only when I shut my eyes, and listened to Your voice, that I ever knew holiness. And then that day, in Cambrai Cathedral, when I heard that contradictory fugue, well, the revelation of music overwhelmed the revelation of voices, and drowned out its tyranny of endless meanings.
When it was finished, I will never forget, I was still on my knees, and I said to you, “Enough of this repenting.”
Four years into her apprenticeship, Joan summoned me. I arrived at Cambrai after twilight, the night sky lit only by a wan crescent moon, hearing the same dulcet tones that had once inspired Joan as I approached the Cathedral. Only this time, as I passed under the threshold of God’s house, and the setting of her new life was revealed to me, Joan herself sat at the organist’s bench, mastering the pedal and key as though the instrument (and the church itself) were an extension of her body. Taking notice of my arrival, she descended and, as I made to kneel, lifted me into an embrace. We pulled away, and I gazed upon her.
It was the most startling transformation I have ever witnessed. Age was evident in her face now, in the most appealing way. Each crease described a habit of emotion that she could no longer mask with piety. Her aloof and sanctimonious stare was gone. In its place were eyes that searched, and found, another self within the other’s gaze. She had become human in a way that would have been startling to those who sought to deify her, or to slander her. What war had wrought upon our Joan was nothing compared to the alchemy of time, music, and solitude.
Had these changes really taken place while living in the cold cellar of a church? I asked of her.
“No, Jean, God is more like a song than like a building. He does not sit by and wait to be crumbled, but is always moving in so many directions that you cannot locate Him and say there is God, yet you always know He is there.” Here again was Joan the prophet. In the most significant way, she remained unchanged.
She had summoned me to aide in her first mission since the liberation of France, which was to find the Duke d’Alençon, who was destined to father her children. My disappointment must have been visible, because Joan put her hands upon my shoulders and brought her face close to mine, just as she had done with La Hire, Xaintrailles, and d’Alençon before a great battle. Her sense of purpose shone from her eyes, as fervently as it had back then. I dared not question the resolve of this extraordinary woman to whom France owed her very existence.
With my limited powers of mind, I cannot fathom the agonies to which Joan must have submitted herself in order to reach this crisis. La Pucelle, defined by her virtue, yearned now to become a sinner, one of the despoiled, an animal like the rest of us.
She could not, as Mary had, be both mother and maiden. To fulfill her own prophecy, that she would give birth to a pope, an emperor, and a king, she had to sacrifice her virginity, her proof of divine favor.
Four leagues out from the Duke’s palace, with dusk rapidly approaching, Joan halted our party and announced that we would set up camp where we stood. “Le beau Duc must come to me,” she announced.
I wondered, was it prophecy or pride that caused this delay? Now that I had accommodated myself to my Lady’s desires (however I may have disapproved), I simply wished for her to be fulfilled. I feared that Joan, forged in war, polished in court, and ensouled in the teachings of the church, might fail in love. But then, when he sent word that he would be arriving that morning, I remembered that Duke d’Alençon was a man, and untroubled by morality, undeterred by the coyness of her sex.
Before dawn, the Duke d’Alençon rode into our encampment, and dismounted before his gray steed had come to a full stop, which bespoke an eagerness, unseemly in a man of his position. The Duke strode forth with a swagger that struck me as undeserved, as though he were a boy playing at knighthood, about to be rewarded with a prize he neither earnestly sought nor fairly earned. But I will not deny Joan her love story, should she so wish to name it. As her sworn protector, I remained with her as the Duke entered the pavilion. I watched furtively as they smiled tears and whispered to each other, of what you and I will never know.
For all his gloating outside the tent, d’Alençon was skilled enough in love to treat his prize delicately, and the tiring business of removing her armor somehow maintained an innocent quality. Rather than displacing her breastplate first, d’Alençon occupied himself with all of the ties and buckles that bound her limbs in iron coils, keeping such steady eye contact that it must have been slightly burdensome, but perhaps hypnotic. I turned away at first, but, as the Duke d’Alençon fell short of my threshold of trust, I was obliged to watch.
The act itself was neither languorous and slow, nor quick and hungry, but conveyed an impression of two mountaineers climbing upward, hands always grasping for an edifice, with sudden pauses to give their straining limbs repose. Joan bled upon the greaves of her armor: for all their patience, they did not finish removing her leggings.
That night we imposed upon the Duke to stay in his palace. D’Alençon somehow overcame his scruples and went to bed with his wife. As I tossed and turned in my own bed, not far from Joan’s, my mind stirred with irony at the memory of Joan’s beau Duc on the eve of their first battle, when he confided his fears about the superior numbers and training of the English. Joan had said, comfortingly, “Why do you fear, gentil duc? Have I not promised your wife to bring you back safe and sound?”
Though such memories interfered with my sleep, moments later I had already descended into the cellars of dream, when I was rudely awakened by a light, blinding at first, then dissipating into its spectral elements, leaving behind the silhouette of three angelic figures. Though the scene was partly obscured by the curtain, and I lay delirious with night wakefulness, I saw the drifting forms advance like figures in a stained-glass window.
To this day, no man has ever borne witness to Joan’s visions but I. They were beautiful and strange. They lent a pall to the atmosphere that was somehow frightening in its capacity to comfort, instantly, all who fell under it. This was not the Archangel Michael, nor the saints Catherine and Margaret, all of whom had visited her before—but minor angels, strangers to Joan’s pantheon of voices.
From my vantage, it appeared as though the seraphim were hovering above Joan’s bed. They did not appear gentle and serene, but austere. In fact they glowed only faintly of God’s reflected light, and each of them wore a stare that was studious, unfatherly.
Then they appeared, to my horror, to be inspecting her, lifting her sheets and reaching down to her prostrate body, widening the distance between her two ankles, bending her knees into a lurid pose. The scene was reminiscent of others endured by Joan—this hero of France!—so many times before. I saw it when Joan was “handed over to the Queen of Sicily, by whom The Maid was privately examined; and after examination made by the matrons, the lady stated to the King that she and the other ladies found most surely that this was indeed a true Maid.”
And again, when she was seized by the English, and subjected to “odious examinations calculated at least to humiliate her and break her nerve. Then the royal Bedford took the fore, ordering a further test, which in no way injured his victim, while it gave his name to eternal disgrace. For this exalted Englishman had taken care to have a peep-hole made in the wall, in order to gratify his noble curiosity.”
Now the angels. But, to their chagrin, Joan had donned her armor before bed, sleeping even in her padding and mail, and in their haste to investigate her fabled purity, they jostled her body, and she awakened. Perhaps the angels had believed, all this time, that Joan’s armor was her chastity? Yet she proved, in thwarting their perverse design, that the white armor was not a badge of virtue, but a cross to ward off the cold gaze of ministering angels.
She spoke not a word, but rose from her bed, and though her height was unimposing, her eyes burned with that old fury which had sent so many Armagnacs to war, and sent so many English soldiers to the grave. Then she cried out in a lion’s voice to the Lord himself, asking why He sent such poor proxies, as though He were too brilliant to be gazed upon, and Joan drew her sword, and she chased His sexless kinsmen away.
~
True to her prophecy, Joan bore and mothered three great men: a pope, a king, and an emperor. But for all her sons’ titles, which each of them received as an inheritance from France’s savior, none of their accomplishments reached the heights of Joan of Arc’s legacy, nor could ever displace her memory in that nation’s history.
Though her children were born illegitimate, precluding ipso facto any claim to either virginity or fidelity, Joan was beatified by Pope Pius X in 1909 and canonized by Pope Benedict XV in the year 1920, which led to an opening up of sainthood to those holy women who had previously been regarded as sinful in the eyes of the church, merely for using the instruments that God gave them.
~
Suggestions for Class Discussion:
Why did all the men of France (and the angels in heaven) try so relentlessly to establish Joan’s virginity? Was her maidenhead the savior of France? What, after all, are the genitalia of a saint, to God? How else could Joan have lived out her life, than in music? What do you do with the rest of your years, when you’ve already liberated your country and coronated the king at the age of seventeen?
Though she was captured by the Burgundian army in 1431 and handed over to the English, she was eventually ransomed by King Charles, returned to French territory, and forbidden ever to lead an army into battle again.
Joan of Arc went on to live a modest life as a musician in the court of King Charles, and through royal proximity, gained the necessary titles to mother three sons who would go on to become a pope, a king, and an emperor, though she never married.
The following text is excerpted from the writings of Jean d’Aulon, Joan’s bodyguard and squire, and the source of much historical scholarship on the life of France’s most revered saint. Historians of the Early Renaissance have suggested that, for all his medieval posturing about chastity and virtue, Jean d’Aulon reveals a fondness for his charge that goes beyond mere loyalty.
~
As a prophet, Joan’s debut in French royal society began with the coronation of Charles VII at Reims. On that midsummer day in Reims Cathedral, under the oppressive glare of the rose window at full bloom with the sun at its zenith, she knelt near the altar in her shining white armor, carrying the flag of her country, at the feet of France’s true and rightful sovereign, and declared, “Noble Prince, the will of God is now accomplished which had commanded me to raise the siege of Orleans, then to bring you to this ancient city of Reims in order to receive the holy consecration which proves you to be the true king to whom of sacred right belongs the Kingdom of France.” And the congregation wept with joy and cried out, “Noel! Noel!”
But a peasant girl in the court of the Loire Valley quickly became a mere novelty, her presence descending into something of a nuisance. True, she had once been the savior of France and had led its army to its first victory in generations, but they began to wonder, what name did she bear? What did she and the nobility have in common?
At twenty-four years old, Joan still wore her armor everywhere she went. She still heard voices. And she was still as pure as the day she was born. Her virginity, which had been painstakingly discussed, and proven, by France’s clerical leadership, had formerly marked her as an emissary of God, but now simply branded her as an eccentric.
I flush with shame when I recall the insults heaped upon this hero of France when she visited the home of Jean Poton de Xaintrailles, one of her most loyal lieutenants, after the war. At a feast held in her honor, Xaintraille’s wife turned and said to Joan, “You tell the future! What a marvelous diversion! You should come to our chateau next week and tell us which of us will have sons and which will have daughters.” And this was the most idle of insults. To which Joan replied, most seriously, “But, Madame, you will have no heirs.” Such truth had never before been uttered in the presence of a French noblewoman.
On another occasion, a group of younger nobles, merry with too much wine, put her to mockery for wearing men’s clothing, in voices too loud to be ignored. Joan, in her disarming manner, replied, “Indeed, I wear a man’s armor, and a man’s sword,” to which remark the men answered with a sober silence. But the one insult they all could agree upon—the great consensus among these nobles, many of whom owed their very lives to her—was that our Joan was unavailingly mad. As her squire and dutiful friend, I kept my silence but raged within myself: “If this is madness, then sanity is overrated!”
Charles VI, the late king of France and the father of Charles VII, believed that he was made of glass. He forgot his own name, assaulted his own soldiers, blew bubbles into his soup at dinner, and covered his body in a thick padding in case he should ever topple over. It was soon after he died that Joan began to hear the voice of the Archangel. Had the Angel been speaking to Charles as well? Perhaps the Archangel drove him mad to clear the way for her glorious ascendance?
It was the cruel memory of “Charles the Mad” that plagued Joan’s own king, “Charles the Victorious.” Many a night after the Loire Campaign had ended, and France restored to French rule, Charles sought comfort from The Maid of Orleans, who had helped obtain his victories through her very madness. “Young and of strong erotic proclivities, Charles had found himself magnetized by her charming, wholesome personality, even as his soul was subdued by the sense of her supernatural power.” But Joan of Arc prized her virtue above all else, for it had become the seal of her divine favor.
Yet rarely now did Joan resort to invoking God to chase the King out from her tent, as she had on certain nights on the march to Reims years ago, shouting at the naked monarch: “Allez vous-en! Le fils de Marie!” (“Get out of here! By the Son of Mary!”) just as she had said to the English back in the city of Orleans.
Ever since he ransomed her from her Burgundian captors, the King and Joan of Arc had become close in a filial sense, with her ennoblement, and with the patronage of his mother-in-law, the Queen Yolande of Aragon, who treated Joan like a favorite daughter. And then there was the Duke d’Alençon.
If ever a man was suited to compromise the virtue of Joan, it was d’Alençon. They had fought side by side in the Battles of Jargeau, Beaugency, and Patay. She called him le beau Duc, and he knew her fondly as la belle guerriere. Indeed, he had the sort of roguish charm that good women everywhere seek to reform through their tender embraces. Tall and broad-shouldered, with well-cut features and a sculpted quality, he seemed out of place among the delicate nobility, and in fact, he had married into the royal family through Charles’ sister, Jeanne de Valois. Joan of Arc and her Duke shared an outsider’s awareness absent those forever confined within the circle.
And most pertinent of all, he possessed the libertine’s wisdom for fine conversation, by which the heart of a maiden is earned. Whenever the Duke appeared at court, Joan could not contain a smile of relief that she would not spend the weekend yoked to a procession of dullards who spoke exclusively of God or war, the subjects for which she herself had grown justly famous, and which she therefore detested as dinner-table talk.
As France was once again in the hands of the French, and God besought her for nothing more glorious than an occasional prayer, in her newfound idleness, Joan would seek out the Duke at his palace, and stroll with him far outside the range of the windows of his estate.
“Archery is an English sport,” the Duke complained, when Joan told him that she had taken up this pastime in her capacity as a gentlewoman.
“The day I concede that point is the day France forfeits the art of war to the English,” she said.
“Take solace, la belle guerriere, in this: that the French are better horsemen,” the Duke replied. “It is our nature to love living things.” He gave a friendly wink and put on a mischievous smile—just the sort of gesture that The Maid abided from no one else.
“From your tongue, the most innocent words are befouled,” she said, sympathetically. “I cannot help but read crudity into your character.”
“The fault is yours, then,” he said.
“When you speak of ‘our nature,’ surely you’ve neglected to mention that our nature is divine?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” the Duke answered with another comely smile, which once again had the effect of shuffling suggestively the meaning of the words just uttered. “I suppose I should be careful not to take long walks with beautiful unmarried women,” the Duke said. “Or . . . at least not when the Duchess is at home.”
Joan slowed her pace and folded her hands, closing her eyes as though to show the depth of her faith. “My virtue has been tested so many times, I could be your guardian angel, defending your virtue against temptation. The Duchess should thank me for having you along.”
At that, d’Alençon grew bold in a way to which only I, Joan’s shadow, am privy. “Won’t you ever grow weary of virtue? It is well enough for a girl at war to be chaste, but a woman of your beauty ought to know the lover’s embrace—and her own child’s embrace—before death’s.”
“I will be a mother,” Joan said, in the tone of knowing which she assumed when proclaiming a divine prophecy.
Joan of Arc once told Robert Baudricourt, the governor of Vaucouleurs, that she “would give birth to three sons: a pope, an emperor, and a king. In response to Baudricourt’s gallant offer to father one of these illustrious offspring, Joan declined, saying, ‘Gentil Robert, nennil, nennil, il n’est pas temps; le Saint-Esperit y ouvrera’ [nay, nay, Master Robert, now is not the time; the Holy Spirit will see to it]. Baudricourt circulated the story of this conversation, zestfully relating it more than once in the presence of clergymen and nobles.”
Those, like myself, who knew Joan as more than a savior—as a person of common faults and common vulnerabilities—understood that as a young woman she had truly expected, waited, to become a mother and remain pure, in the divine pattern of the Virgin Mother. Her whole life it seems she had been waiting for the Archangel Michael—who had been her guiding light, who had put her through the trials of war and defeat and humiliation—to do more than speak to her. Even Mary was touched by the Archangel Gabriel, rather than talked to, and did Mary feel any different from how Joan felt, when His words first penetrated her?
The Duke, though, was only the catalyst that excited a deeper transformation within The Maid, one that changed her in her very core. The desire that he had stirred within her found no outlet in the life of the court—a life somehow both sterile and debauched—and Joan was soon possessed by a restlessness that she could neither name nor quench.
After years of striving for purpose among the purposeless, Joan announced that she would return to her family in Lorraine, whereupon she was bid farewell and departed with little fanfare, but received back into the little town of Domrémy like a queen.
She soon discovered that her childhood companions, her neighbors, even her family, had lived so long with the legend of Joan of Arc that they could no longer see her plainly. She decided to sojourn again, this time farther north, to Cambrai, where she pursued God with the same vigor and relentlessness with which she pursued the English armies not long ago.
I did not join her on this particular journey, but a piece of writing survives from her years of retreat into the monastic life: the “Apology to the Archangel Michael,” which she wrote while studying scripture and music at Cambrai Cathedral:
The first place where I felt every stitch in the weave of my soul responding to the gravity of God was shivering from the granite tones of the pipe organ of Cambrai.
When I sat in the pews, there was a deathly silence, as of a man cupping his hands over my ears. I wondered for a moment if I had gone deaf—if God had taken away Your voice, and all other voices with it. I was like a newborn fascinated by its own powers of sense.
Then, “at the ringing of the angelus bells, at the very hour when the Ave Maria was being prayed in remembrance and renewal of the Annunciation,” the first strains of that exquisite instrument were sounded. A dropping, heavy wind, from the ceiling down, like a spirit taking possession; then a light, lifting melody, as though a bird were pursuing the errant soul. The music surrounded me, vibrating in the stone, casting spears of light across my field of vision, pervading the very ether with tones that I could taste.
I admit that the glories of Cambrai Cathedral had not touched me at first. I had seen the great cathedrals of Orleans, Rouen, Reims, and Paris. Its flying buttresses, ionic columns, and all its grotesques had seemed to me simply another pattern in the great veil of the world that conceals the divine. Nothing in my sight had ever been sacred, it seemed to me then, and the more I witnessed, the more the scurf of the world merely yielded to the profane. It was only when I shut my eyes, and listened to Your voice, that I ever knew holiness. And then that day, in Cambrai Cathedral, when I heard that contradictory fugue, well, the revelation of music overwhelmed the revelation of voices, and drowned out its tyranny of endless meanings.
When it was finished, I will never forget, I was still on my knees, and I said to you, “Enough of this repenting.”
Four years into her apprenticeship, Joan summoned me. I arrived at Cambrai after twilight, the night sky lit only by a wan crescent moon, hearing the same dulcet tones that had once inspired Joan as I approached the Cathedral. Only this time, as I passed under the threshold of God’s house, and the setting of her new life was revealed to me, Joan herself sat at the organist’s bench, mastering the pedal and key as though the instrument (and the church itself) were an extension of her body. Taking notice of my arrival, she descended and, as I made to kneel, lifted me into an embrace. We pulled away, and I gazed upon her.
It was the most startling transformation I have ever witnessed. Age was evident in her face now, in the most appealing way. Each crease described a habit of emotion that she could no longer mask with piety. Her aloof and sanctimonious stare was gone. In its place were eyes that searched, and found, another self within the other’s gaze. She had become human in a way that would have been startling to those who sought to deify her, or to slander her. What war had wrought upon our Joan was nothing compared to the alchemy of time, music, and solitude.
Had these changes really taken place while living in the cold cellar of a church? I asked of her.
“No, Jean, God is more like a song than like a building. He does not sit by and wait to be crumbled, but is always moving in so many directions that you cannot locate Him and say there is God, yet you always know He is there.” Here again was Joan the prophet. In the most significant way, she remained unchanged.
She had summoned me to aide in her first mission since the liberation of France, which was to find the Duke d’Alençon, who was destined to father her children. My disappointment must have been visible, because Joan put her hands upon my shoulders and brought her face close to mine, just as she had done with La Hire, Xaintrailles, and d’Alençon before a great battle. Her sense of purpose shone from her eyes, as fervently as it had back then. I dared not question the resolve of this extraordinary woman to whom France owed her very existence.
With my limited powers of mind, I cannot fathom the agonies to which Joan must have submitted herself in order to reach this crisis. La Pucelle, defined by her virtue, yearned now to become a sinner, one of the despoiled, an animal like the rest of us.
She could not, as Mary had, be both mother and maiden. To fulfill her own prophecy, that she would give birth to a pope, an emperor, and a king, she had to sacrifice her virginity, her proof of divine favor.
Four leagues out from the Duke’s palace, with dusk rapidly approaching, Joan halted our party and announced that we would set up camp where we stood. “Le beau Duc must come to me,” she announced.
I wondered, was it prophecy or pride that caused this delay? Now that I had accommodated myself to my Lady’s desires (however I may have disapproved), I simply wished for her to be fulfilled. I feared that Joan, forged in war, polished in court, and ensouled in the teachings of the church, might fail in love. But then, when he sent word that he would be arriving that morning, I remembered that Duke d’Alençon was a man, and untroubled by morality, undeterred by the coyness of her sex.
Before dawn, the Duke d’Alençon rode into our encampment, and dismounted before his gray steed had come to a full stop, which bespoke an eagerness, unseemly in a man of his position. The Duke strode forth with a swagger that struck me as undeserved, as though he were a boy playing at knighthood, about to be rewarded with a prize he neither earnestly sought nor fairly earned. But I will not deny Joan her love story, should she so wish to name it. As her sworn protector, I remained with her as the Duke entered the pavilion. I watched furtively as they smiled tears and whispered to each other, of what you and I will never know.
For all his gloating outside the tent, d’Alençon was skilled enough in love to treat his prize delicately, and the tiring business of removing her armor somehow maintained an innocent quality. Rather than displacing her breastplate first, d’Alençon occupied himself with all of the ties and buckles that bound her limbs in iron coils, keeping such steady eye contact that it must have been slightly burdensome, but perhaps hypnotic. I turned away at first, but, as the Duke d’Alençon fell short of my threshold of trust, I was obliged to watch.
The act itself was neither languorous and slow, nor quick and hungry, but conveyed an impression of two mountaineers climbing upward, hands always grasping for an edifice, with sudden pauses to give their straining limbs repose. Joan bled upon the greaves of her armor: for all their patience, they did not finish removing her leggings.
That night we imposed upon the Duke to stay in his palace. D’Alençon somehow overcame his scruples and went to bed with his wife. As I tossed and turned in my own bed, not far from Joan’s, my mind stirred with irony at the memory of Joan’s beau Duc on the eve of their first battle, when he confided his fears about the superior numbers and training of the English. Joan had said, comfortingly, “Why do you fear, gentil duc? Have I not promised your wife to bring you back safe and sound?”
Though such memories interfered with my sleep, moments later I had already descended into the cellars of dream, when I was rudely awakened by a light, blinding at first, then dissipating into its spectral elements, leaving behind the silhouette of three angelic figures. Though the scene was partly obscured by the curtain, and I lay delirious with night wakefulness, I saw the drifting forms advance like figures in a stained-glass window.
To this day, no man has ever borne witness to Joan’s visions but I. They were beautiful and strange. They lent a pall to the atmosphere that was somehow frightening in its capacity to comfort, instantly, all who fell under it. This was not the Archangel Michael, nor the saints Catherine and Margaret, all of whom had visited her before—but minor angels, strangers to Joan’s pantheon of voices.
From my vantage, it appeared as though the seraphim were hovering above Joan’s bed. They did not appear gentle and serene, but austere. In fact they glowed only faintly of God’s reflected light, and each of them wore a stare that was studious, unfatherly.
Then they appeared, to my horror, to be inspecting her, lifting her sheets and reaching down to her prostrate body, widening the distance between her two ankles, bending her knees into a lurid pose. The scene was reminiscent of others endured by Joan—this hero of France!—so many times before. I saw it when Joan was “handed over to the Queen of Sicily, by whom The Maid was privately examined; and after examination made by the matrons, the lady stated to the King that she and the other ladies found most surely that this was indeed a true Maid.”
And again, when she was seized by the English, and subjected to “odious examinations calculated at least to humiliate her and break her nerve. Then the royal Bedford took the fore, ordering a further test, which in no way injured his victim, while it gave his name to eternal disgrace. For this exalted Englishman had taken care to have a peep-hole made in the wall, in order to gratify his noble curiosity.”
Now the angels. But, to their chagrin, Joan had donned her armor before bed, sleeping even in her padding and mail, and in their haste to investigate her fabled purity, they jostled her body, and she awakened. Perhaps the angels had believed, all this time, that Joan’s armor was her chastity? Yet she proved, in thwarting their perverse design, that the white armor was not a badge of virtue, but a cross to ward off the cold gaze of ministering angels.
She spoke not a word, but rose from her bed, and though her height was unimposing, her eyes burned with that old fury which had sent so many Armagnacs to war, and sent so many English soldiers to the grave. Then she cried out in a lion’s voice to the Lord himself, asking why He sent such poor proxies, as though He were too brilliant to be gazed upon, and Joan drew her sword, and she chased His sexless kinsmen away.
~
True to her prophecy, Joan bore and mothered three great men: a pope, a king, and an emperor. But for all her sons’ titles, which each of them received as an inheritance from France’s savior, none of their accomplishments reached the heights of Joan of Arc’s legacy, nor could ever displace her memory in that nation’s history.
Though her children were born illegitimate, precluding ipso facto any claim to either virginity or fidelity, Joan was beatified by Pope Pius X in 1909 and canonized by Pope Benedict XV in the year 1920, which led to an opening up of sainthood to those holy women who had previously been regarded as sinful in the eyes of the church, merely for using the instruments that God gave them.
~
Suggestions for Class Discussion:
Why did all the men of France (and the angels in heaven) try so relentlessly to establish Joan’s virginity? Was her maidenhead the savior of France? What, after all, are the genitalia of a saint, to God? How else could Joan have lived out her life, than in music? What do you do with the rest of your years, when you’ve already liberated your country and coronated the king at the age of seventeen?
( Phong Nguyen )
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