Joan of Arc

by Regine Pernoud

  “To Coeur-de-Lys, the twenty-eighth day of October, 1436, for a journey which he made for the town to the Maid who was at Arlon in the duchy of Luxembourg and for carrying the letters which he bore from Joan the Maid to Loches to the King, who was there, in which journey he spent forty and one days, to wit thirty-eight days in the journey to the Maid and seven days to go to the King, and set out the said Coeur-de-Lys to go to the Maid, Tuesday the last day of July and returned the second day of September following. For all this . . . Six pounds parisis.

  “To Jacquet Lepretre, the second day of September, for bread, wine, pears and green walnuts, dispensed in the chamber of the said town at the coming of the said Coeur-de-Lys who brought letters from Joan the Maid and for drink for the said Coeur-de-Lys who said that he was very thirsty. For this . . . two sous four deniers parisis.” (Q. v, 327)

  The messenger, then, had been to Arlon and back and had then been sent off again to the King at Loches. But meanwhile Petit-Jean, Joan’s brother, had come to Orleans on August 5th, and then had himself gone to the King at Loches. For this fact we are indebted to the Orleans account books: Jean du Lys had been to the procurator of the town to ask for some money, saying that the King had ordered that he be given a hundred francs, but that he had been given only twenty and that he had already spent twelve of them, and that he had not enough left for the return journey. But this exchange of letters does not seem to have made a great impression either on the people of Orleans or on the King: nothing whatever was done to follow it up.

  This was the moment of the bogus Joan’s journey to Cologne: apart from what the Dean of Saint-Thiébault has to tell us about this, her residence in that city is known to us from a work by the Alsatian Inquisitor, Jean Nidier, prior of the Dominicans at Nuremberg; it is entitled The Formicarium. It tells how the Inquisitor of Cologne summoned the false Joan to appear before him because of the attitude which she had taken in claiming to arbitrate between the two prelates who were, at the time, disputing the archiepiscopal see of Treves, and stating that she had been sent by God to support one of them. The false Joan would appear, on this occasion, to have accomplished such prodigies before the Inquisitor as seem to have made a great impression on Jean Nidier: she is said to have torn up a napkin and reassembled the pieces instantaneously: then to have smashed a glass against the wall and instantly made it whole again under the eyes of those present! What follows in Nidier’s account shows the bogus Joan marrying “a certain knight”, but without giving the name of Robert des Armoises who was presumably unknown to him. Later he says that she lived in a state of concubinage with a priest. We can hardly take much account of this story, excepting as to the fact of her residence in Cologne which Nidier may have known from the town Inquisitor.

  Be that as it may, the adventuress, who thenceforth called herself Joan and no longer Claude, did marry Robert of Armoises on November 7, 1431. The certificate of their marriage was published by Dom Calmet in his History of Lorraine (vol. 3, col. 195). We know of the event only through this publication, which was in 1728, for the author does not give his exact source; the original document has never been found again. However, there is nothing suspect in the form in which Dom Calmet gives it. As for Robert of Armoises, we know very little about him, but it is fairly well established that his family came originally from Champagne; Dom Calmet gives his genealogy but it is not very reliable. It seems clear that Robert’s family had settled in Lorraine towards the end of the fourteenth century, and that in the fifteenth Robert of Armoises who had hitherto held the fief of Norroy and the lordship of Tichemont, had had his property confiscated in 1435 by René of Anjou, Duke of Bar. This was probably why he was living in Metz; that town, like the whole duchy of Luxembourg, being hostile to René.

  Contrary to what is maintained in certain accounts of Claude des Armoises, notably in that of Anatole France, no document exists to show that she ever went to Vaucouleurs or to Domremy at the time in question. We know, in fact, nothing whatever about her until 1439 when she reappeared in Orleans. It is probable—we will give authority for this hypothesis below—that in the meantime her husband had died. On July 18th she was received by the town, as is proved by the account book; the town entertained her to a vin d’honneur and thereafter she was invited “to dine and to sup” on the following July 30th. On August 1st the town made her a present of two hundred and ten pounds parisis, “for the good which she did the town during the siege”. On September 3rd, again, she was given another vin d’honneur; for the same date we find the following item: “For eight pints of wine dispensed at a supper at which were Jean Luillier and Thevenon of Bourges, because it was thought to present it to the said Joan who left before the wine was come.” (Q. v, 331–332). It will be recalled that Jean Luillier was the merchant who had formerly provided the cloth for Joan’s clothes.

  The accounts thereafter do not mention her again. On the other hand, and for the same year 1439, they itemise the expenses for the funeral service which the town celebrates every year for the repose of the real Joan’s soul.

  Claude des Armoises, then, vanished rather suddenly, for she was expected at a dinner for which she did not turn up on September 4, 1439. It is known from other sources that she then made her way to the famous Gilles de Laval, lord of Rais. Now it happens that the King was expected at Orleans in the month of September 1439 and it may well be that Claude, whose principal object was to get money out of people who believed in her tales, left the town because she was afraid to be seen by him.

  As for Gilles de Rais, he was to be arrested at the beginning of the year 1440 and to undergo that famous trial for sorcery at the end of which he was hanged and burned. Claude des Armoises then went to Paris. Touching her residence in that city we have the account of the Bourgeois de Paris:

  “At the same time (August 1440) came great news of the Maid formerly burned at Rouen for her misdeeds. Many persons, deceived by her, firmly believed that her saintliness had enabled her to escape from the pyre and that another woman had been burned at the stake in error, in her place. But she was really burned and her ashes were really cast into the river to avoid the sorceries which might have followed. Now soldiers brought at this time to Orleans another Maid who was very honourably received, and when she drew near to Paris this great error began again and it was thought that she was the true Maid. But the University and the Parliament brought her to Paris willy-nilly, and she was shown to the people in the great court of the Palace on the marble stone, then preached to and interrogated. She said that she was not a maid and that she had been married to a knight by whom she had two sons.” (pp. 146–7)

  From this we may deduce, as mentioned above, that Robert des Armoises was dead, and it was probably under the spur of want that Claude went to Orleans and tried her luck, and then to Paris. The next passage in the Journal gives an account of the exploits which Claude boasted of having performed: she said that she had enlisted at Rome in the army of Pope Eugenius IV, which is by no means impossible but is attested only by this account.

  Thereafter Claude disappears from history. Her fraud is recounted at greater length in Pierre Sala’s Hardiesses des grands rois et empereurs, a work we have already referred to, when we pointed out that it was written rather late, between 1510 and 1516, but from sources which the author claimed to be first-hand. His story is that Claude des Armoises was unmasked by the King himself who, in greeting her, is made to say: “Maid, sweetheart, be you very welcome again,* in the name of God who knows the secret which is between you and me.” Whereupon Claude, frightened, fell upon her knees and cried “mercy” and revealed her fraud.

  At all events, what we can be sure of from the documents is that there was an adventuress gifted enough to pass herself off as Joan, even on Joan’s own brothers, at least one of whom, Petit-Jean, the elder, went to the length of undertaking to get her recognized by the people of Orleans in 1436. It has been claimed that Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, also recognized her. This is quite untrue; it is to be fou
nd in no document and, moreover, Isabelle Romée’s presence in Orleans is attested only from the month of July 1440, at which time Claude des Armoises was, as we have said, in Paris. The Orleans town account books mention that in July, indeed, Isabelle was in the town, she had fallen ill on the seventh of the month and was nursed at the town’s expense until August 31st. A monthly pension of forty-eight sous parisis was to be paid her thereafter, and it appears regularly in the accounts until her death in November 1458.

  We should likewise note that Joan’s other brother, Pierre, is only once mentioned in this connection, and that is in the chronicle by the Dean of Saint-Thiébault which we have quoted, and in the first MS. only. Now it was this brother who had been most devoted to his sister and who was made prisoner with her at Compiègne. It is not certain that he had been released from prison by 1436; he was held by the Bastard of Vergy, Jean, a Burgundian captain in the service of the English. In 1439 Charles VII granted him the farm of the tolls in the bailiwick of Chaumont as a means of livelihood after the payment of his ransom, which had utterly ruined him. Later, in 1443, Charles of Orleans, who had been released from his English prison three years before, made him a gift of the Ile-aux-Boeufs, up-river from Orleans. We shall here quote from the text of the deed of gift, since it has given rise to misleading commentaries:

  “Having heard the supplication of messire Pierre du Lys, knight, stating that to acquit himself loyally towards the King our lord and us, he left his country to enter the service of the King our said lord and of ourselves, in company with Joan the Maid his sister, with whom until his absentment and thereafter until the present time, he has exposed his body and his goods in that service and in the matter of the King’s wars, both in the resistance to the ancient enemies of the realm who laid siege to our town of Orleans, as in several journeys made and undertaken for the King, our said lord, and his chiefs in war, and otherwise in several and diverse places and by fortune of the said wars was made prisoner by the said enemies and constrained to sell his wife’s patrimonies to pay his ransom, requests that we may be pleased to give . . . etc. . . .” (Q. V, 213)

  The misleading commentaries in question relate to the words “until son (his or her) absentment”*, in which they see an allusion to Joan having supposedly “absented” herself, to reappear with her brother under the form and face of Jeanne des Armoises. But, grammatically speaking, the term absentment (absentement) can only be referred to the subject of the sentence, to wit Pierre himself; and, historically, at the date when this deed was drawn, three years had passed since Claude des Armoises had been unmasked and since any document mentions her name.

  Claude des Armoises was not the last adventuress to make a name for herself in this field. In 1457 King René, Duke of Anjou, granted a letter of remission to one Jeanne de Sermaize, married to an Angevin named Jean Douillet, who had been detained for three months in the prison of Saumur for having passed herself off as Joan the Maid; she too had succeeded in convincing several people who had formerly seen the real Joan.

  The success of such adventuresses may be surprising; it is, however, certainly not exceptional. History swarms with cases of people passing themselves off as somebody else. We may take our choice even in Joan’s own epoch. There is the case reported by Maurice Garçon (see his article Jeanne d’Arc est bien morte sur le bucher de Rouen, Ecclesia No. 158, May 1962, pp. 59–68). This concerns a woman who, in 1423, turned up in Ghent declaring herself to be own sister to the Duke of Burgundy, Philippe the Good, Marguerite, widow of Louis, Duke of Guyenne, and the elder brother of Charles VII. She was cared for by the people of Ghent for several weeks and so well treated that they refused to believe in the imposture when the duke, having got wind of the business, tried to undeceive them. He had to go to Ghent accompanied by his sister before they would consent to believe that they had been deceived.

  Some time before this, in the autumn of 1402, an adventurer had turned up at the Scottish court giving out that he was King Richard II who, imprisoned three years before when Henry IV of Lancaster had deposed him, had lived first in the Tower of London, subsequently in Pontefract Castle where he died on February 14, 1401. The bogus Richard was “recognized” under the guise of a beggar, by a lady of his former court, and taken to the Duke of Albany, in Scotland, who entertained him generously. Under the name of Richard Plantagenet he gathered a party of adherents about him. The fraud was carried to such lengths that the King of France sent an emissary to Scotland to investigate. A bastard son of the Black Prince, Roger Clarendon by name, rallied to Richard’s cause and there were several uprisings in his favour. People were still talking about it twenty years later. Now the King of England was better known, and had been seen by more people than Joan of Arc had been in a public life which lasted only one year.

  Still more remarkable was the famous case of Perkin Warbeck, a native of Tournai, who passed himself off as the eldest son of Edward IV, Richard of York, claiming to have miraculously escaped the Tower of London massacre. He found partisans in the Low Countries with Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, and an invasion of England was organised in support of his claims. In the end he was hanged on Henry VII’s orders. Without seeking further examples in the period of the false Louis XVII (of whom there were several), not to mention a certain Grand Duchess of Russia, it is, then, easy enough to find cases of successful historical impersonation which are, on the whole, much more surprising than that of Claude des Armoises.

  COMMENTARY

  “Joan was not burned at the stake; she was enabled to escape; another woman was burned in her place.”

  The people who have put forward this hypothesis found their case on the following documents:

  The Norman chronicle which we quoted (Q. iv, 344) from a MS. in the British Museum: apparently written in 1439 (see details on this subject in Q. iv, 339), it gives an exact notion of the state of public opinion and of the contradictory rumours about Joan’s fate then circulating.

  An abridged chronicle composed in Brittany in 1440 and contained in a MS. (No. 1155) now in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (see Q. iv, 344, in a note). The following passage appears in it: “Year 1431, the eve of the Sacrament, was the Maid burned at Rouen or condemned to be.”

  To these two documents, long well known to historians of Joan of Arc,* is added a work printed in the sixteenth century, Symphorien Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses, Lyon, 1503. In this a short passage devoted to Joan is followed by: “. . . and in the end was by treachery taken and given to the English who, despite the French, burned her in Rouen; they say it nevertheless, but the French deny it.”

  But this, self-evidently, is a literary work devoid of historic pretensions and which simply sets down the “they say” rumours in circulation about Joan, not the actual circumstances of her life and death. Only the other two documents, then, have any validity for historians. But the doubts which they express only reveal what was thought by many people in circles favourable to the French cause in the years 1439–40. It was natural enough, at that time, that people should refuse to believe in a death which seemed a justification of the English cause. The hope of seeing Joan return would have been strongest in places where faith in her had been strongest: hence we see Claude des Armoises trying her luck in Orleans, where Joan had spent only a short time in all (certainly from April 29th to May 9th, also January 19th 1430, when there was a banquet in her honour; and perhaps—but this is purely conjectural—on other occasions of which no record remains), but where the people would certainly all be fervently hoping that the news of her execution was false.

  The two chronicles in question date from the time when Claude des Armoises was creating a stir, the consequent rumours in circulation giving some foundation to the hope that Joan might have escaped from the English.

  Apart from those people who had actually seen her burned at the stake in Rouen, what, indeed, could be exactly known in a France divided by occupation and torn by war? All the people had to go on were t
he letters circulated by the English government and the University of Paris, both sources highly suspect among partisans of the French cause. For the French, no real light was to be shed on the case of Joan of Arc until they had reconquered Rouen in 1449 and were in possession of the trial papers and able to gather evidence from eye-witnesses (see Chapter 9).

  Thus, for the historian, the two chronicles throw light on the state of mind during the period of doubt between Joan’s death and the reconquest of the realm; they can throw no light on facts, nor, moreover, does either of them claim to do so. But on the other hand, the facts are established very clearly indeed by the documents which we have quoted in this chapter:

  1. Official documents: Letter from the University of Paris to the pope notifying him of Joan’s trial, condemnation and execution. It is definitely and expressly stated that she is dead—migravit a seculo. (C.435)

  The same notification made to the College of Cardinals. (C.435)

  Letter from the King of England to the emperor, kings, dukes and princes of all Christendom, dated from Rouen, June 8, 1431. (C.423)

  Letter from the same notifying likewise “the prelates of the Church, dukes, counts and other nobles, and to the cities of our realm of France”. Also from Rouen, June 28th. (C.426)

  2. Chronicles: That of the Bourgeois de Paris which we quoted and which relates a public act in which the Inquisitor of France in person officially announces to the people of Paris the condemnation and death of a heretic. Also Monstrelet’s.

  To the above may be added the diverse deeds and documents which imply Joan’s execution, for example the condemnation of Jean Bosquier accused in the official proceedings of saying that “it had been ill done . . . to abandon Joan to secular justice”, the conventional term used to indicate the execution of heretics (C.432); and, again, the letters of warranty given to those who had taken part in the trial and condemnation.