Saint Joan of Arc

by Vita Sackville-West

  I think it is not unfair to qualify her as unattractive. Men attempted no rape, nor were women jealous. She made war, but not love. Those who choose to take the purely religious point of view may maintain that some spiritual quality in her personality exalted her above all such human failings. Possibly. But human beings are human beings, slow to recognise the exceptional spiritual qualities, and there is no reason to suppose that they were less human in the fifteenth century than they are today. Yet the fact remains that Jeanne travelled and slept in a comradely way with men, day after day, night after night, keeping her virginity intact to the last; and that she also came into contact with various women who would have been among the first to suspect her of making a, to them, dangerous appeal. But somehow or other, for all the excitement of her startling notoriety, she clearly aroused neither the natural desire of men nor the competitive mistrust of women. The men of her first escort, travelling with her in the most intimate conditions for eleven days, sleeping beside her at night, avowed themselves in strong and detailed terms as having been completely free from carnal thoughts. The men-at-arms at Vaucouleurs were even less complimentary, for when Robert de Baudricourt, their leader, jocosely suggested turning Jeanne over to their pleasure, there were some who would have taken advantage of this offer; but, as soon as they saw her, desire left them and they felt no further inclination.fn14 Witness, also, the list of women whose admiration she had gained, such as the poet Christine de Pisan, or those whom she could count among her friends, not only the village friends of her childhood, not only the matrons of Neufchâteau, Vaucouleurs, Chinon, Poitiers, Bourges, Tours, and Orleans, not only the three ladies of Luxembourg, but also princesses such as Yolande d’Aragon, Marie d’Anjou, and the young Duchess of Alençon.

  It is evident that the complications of sex presented few difficulties to Jeanne herself or to others in regard to her.

  Her views on feminism, as concerned herself, were characteristically clear-cut and bold: ‘It is true that at Arras and Beaurevoir I was admonished to adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.’fn15

  At the same time, it is impossible to believe that her unusual experiences had left no trace upon her features and found no answering reflection in her eyes. One does not begin at the age of twelve to spend four to five years in the daily company of saints, secretly nursing a mission of so alarming a gravity, without some corresponding change in one’s expression, of exaltation, mystery, and awe. Even so short a time as four years, at her tender age, must have sufficed to leave their mark upon her. Nor can one be born with the aptitude to entertain such company, and to be charged by them with such a mission without some indication of that temperament becoming discernible to the eye of the observant. Still, such inward beauty of expression as Jeanne may, and surely must, have possessed, was not of a nature to rouse the concupiscence of men-at-arms, or to endanger her chastity by increasing the appeal of her youth and sex. Rather, it must have been definitely discouraging to those who were sensitive enough to be aware of it, and, in a subtle subconscious way, eventually discouraging also for those cruder ones who otherwise might have seen in the healthy young body merely a temptation to mischief and natural play. It would take, of course, a little time for the chill to work. Those who had learned to know her might entertain for her nothing but the most platonically minded veneration; but what of her avowed enemies, and what of uninformed newcomers, to whom her sex and virginity would appear only as a ribald joke? Robert de Baudricourt himself, before she won him round to do what she wanted, had exercised his smutty wit at her expense, when only the disinclination of his soldiers, once they beheld her, saved her from further trouble.

  It was, however, not enough for her to know that she had only to appear in person for these objectionable ideas to be dispersed. Something more drastic must be done about it: the practical inconvenience of belonging to the wrong sex must be faced and overcome; and Jeanne, with her usual common sense, took the obvious step of turning herself into the least outward semblance of a woman possible. Off came both her skirt and her hair. It was an indicated measure – it was, indeed, a measure necessary for a girl who proposed to ride in the company of six men for hundreds of miles over a countryside thick with soldiers – but it was a measure that must have required considerable moral courage. One wonders what her feelings were, when for the first time she surveyed her cropped head and moved her legs un-encumbered by her red skirt – the coarse red skirt still worn by the peasant women of Lorraine within living memory. The unfamiliar masculine garments which she then assumed were not even her own: she had acquired them from her cousin, Durand Lassois, who recounts the circumstance philosophically and without comment, saying merely that she ‘had received’ them from him, Ipsa recepit vestis ipsius testis.fn16 What he really means, is that she took them. Before very long have arrangement evidently ceased to satisfy her, and one may hope that the long-suffering Lassois had his clothing returned to him when his arbitrary young relative induced the townsfolk of Vaucouleurs to buy her a man’s complete outfit, including boots. By what means she or her friends induced them to do this is not related. Certainly Robert de Baudricourt had nothing to do with it, for later, when she was specifically asked if her change of costume had not taken place according to Baudricourt’s orders, she denied the suggestion, admitting no other authority in this matter than that of God and His angels. However she managed it, it was done: she stood equipped as a man and a soldier. According to the greffier of the Hôtel de Ville of La Rochelle,fn17 she arrived at Chinon dressed in a black doublet, a short black tunic (robe courte de gros gris noir), high boots, and a black cap. As she had travelled straight from Vaucouleurs to Chinon, we may fairly suppose that this was the original equipment supplied to her by the people of Vaucouleurs, for she would hardly have wasted time stopping to buy anything else on the way; such delays as she permitted herself in towns were devoted to the services of the Church. The most interesting piece of information with which the greffier de La Rochelle provides us, is his remark about her hair. It was, he tells us, black and short. That settles once and for all a question which might otherwise have been a matter for dispute.

  What happened to her own red gown is not clear: it would appear as though she had taken it with her, for at Châlons, on her way to Reims to crown the Dauphin, she met Jean Morel, her godfather from Greux, near Domremy, and gave him a red garment of her own.fn18 Was this the one in which she had travelled from Domremy to Vaucouleurs? If so, the gift must have represented the last link with her old life; for her, no doubt, a briefsignificant moment – a moment carrying her back home at the height of her glory.

  IV

  It would be a mistake to represent Jeanne, although so prompt to abandon her feminine semblance, as lacking in appreciation of fine raiment and its suitable complements. For all her privately religious integrity, she had no inclination in favour of the hair-shirt. She regarded herself, I think, as the captain, never as the saint, though other people tended to regard her as the saint rather than as the captain; and as the captain she seems to have enjoyed a richly decorative taste for equipment and picturesque adjuncts. She seems rapidly to have acquired a nice approval of pageantry; one of the endearing inconsistencies of her simple, surpnsed nature. For all her severity, for all her single-mindedness, there was something of the woman in her make-up, undeveloped partly owing to her extreme youth; partly to the extraordinary and terrifying mission imposed so early upon her inexperience; partly to the plain peasant life she had seen around her and had herself led, lacking all grace or elegance. It is interesting to observe how the woman in Jeanne made the most of the chance provided by her sudden emergence from obscurity into a public personage. Cinderella turned into a princess could scarcely have been assailed by a greater bewilderment, and it remains very much to Jeanne’s credit that she did not wildly lose her head – but indulged herself only in such harmless decorative extravagances as mi
ght have been expected from her years, her sex, and her opportunity.

  Consider what had happened. The dark little cellar-like room at Domremy had been replaced by the splendours of Chinon and the relative comforts of Poitiers and Tours. The rude company of peasants had been replaced by the company of princes, courtiers, and ladies. Instead of her father’s farm-horses she had chargers of her own to ride; she broke lances with a royal duke; instead of a pitchfork she carried a banner and a sword; instead of doing menial work herself, she had pages attached to her service. From being a little girl, ordered hither and thither by her parents, she had blossomed suddenly into the envoy of God, browbeating a king into doing the bidding of the King of Kings. The change of worlds and of circumstances must have been, to say the least of it, difficult to grasp.

  In this changed world Jeanne could have practically anything she liked to ask for – clothes, banners, horses, and accoutrements. To do her justice, it would appear that she did not have to ask for them, but merely accepted and used them with pleasure once they had been given. Contemporary records exist, describing tunics of cloth of gold and scarlet, lined with fur;fn19 contemporary account-books record the purchase by the Duke of Orleans of crimson Brussels doth, green cloth, and white satin. They dressed her in the colours of the house of Orleans – scarlet and green – embroidering the heraldic nettles of Orleans on her robes. The townsfolk of Orleans subscribed to send her such miscellaneous gifts as com, wine, bread, partridges, pheasants, rabbits, and capons. Probably these tributes in kind appealed to her less than the gifts of apparel, for she was as abstemious as regards eating and drinking as she was natural in her love of finery. It has been suggested, and I think with truth, that Jeanne as a captain was shrewdly aware of the value of fine clothes, floating standards, and shining armour for the inspiration of her followers, but it detracts in no way from her ideals to recognise with a smile mat in this matter the service of the servant of God was agreeably compatible with the tastes of her age and sex.

  Two other feminine traits are chronicled by her contemporaries: her womanly voice and her ready tears. Surprising and endearing, they soften the conception which might otherwise incline to harshness. Both Guy de Laval and Perceval de Boulainvilliers, the one in a letter to his mother, the other in his letter to the Duke of Milan, make reference to her voice: Assez voix de femme, says de Laval; her voice is womanly, says Boulainvilliers.fn20 Yet Boulainvilliers was not trying to make her out more feminine than she need be, for in the preceding sentence he says frankly that she had something virile in her bearing and remarks also that, so great was her strength in the endurance of fatigue, she could spend six days and six nights without removing a single piece of her armour. This clear voice, proceeding from the sturdy peasant, evidently struck both these young men as something agreeably unexpected. Boulainvilliers, again, in the same letter, is responsible for a comment (though by no means our only authority) on her capacity for tears: her tears, he says, flow freely. She was, in fact, emotional, and wept copiously at every possible opportunity – as queer a mixture of feminine and masculine attributes as ever relentlessly assaulted the enemy and then must cry on seeing him hurt.

  2. THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

  I

  It will be assumed (perhaps unjustifiably, but I hope forgivably) for the purposes of this brief chapter, that the reader is possessed of no greater knowledge of conditions in France at the time of Jeanne’s birth and dur;ng her subsequent career than he may have vaguely and confusedly remembered from the unpalatable books of his schooldays. I have observed that quite well-educated people retain no more than a vague impression that Jeanne d’Arc was a peasant girl who heard voices, saw visions, raised the siege of Orleans, and was burnt to death by the English at Rauen. Going a step further, you may be told that an English soldier made two pieces of wood into a cross, and gave it to her as the flames rose round her on the pyre. Such romantic facts and details have taken a hold on the general mind, abetted by such brilliant and untrustworthy artists as Mr Bernard Shaw and M Anatole France. But if you ask what the English were doing in France, and why Jeanne’s own countrymen connived with the English at her burning, they are unable to give any clear answer. I have observed, also, a tendency to believe that very little is known of Jeanne beyond the cardinal facts of her inspiration, achievement, and death. Nothing could be less true. We know practically every detail of her passive existence as a child and, as to the few months of her active career, they are so thoroughly documented that we know exactly where she spent each day, and in whose company; what she wore, what horse she rode, what arms she bore, what she ate and drank; and, more importantly still, what words she uttered. Scores of her friends, neighbours, followers, and companions-in-arms have left vivid testimony as to her appearance, manners, habits, character, and speech. The idea that there is any paucity of material for reconstructing her life and personality is fallacious in the last degree.

  The initial difficulty, however, lies in disentangling the twisted strands of history before the pattern of Jeanne can stand out, clear-cut, simple, uncompromising. The state of political parties, the rich crowd of personages, the endless rivalries, battles, truces, treaties, assassinations, relationships, alliances, enmities, treacheries, produce an effect of maddening bewilderment upon the reader. It seems impossible, at first, that he can ever hope to sort them out. All those various kings and princes – they all seem to have been christened by the same name, or a name chosen out of a most restricted list of names. They all seem to have been each other’s uncles, nephews, cousins, sons-in-law, brothers-in-law, or sometimes merely fathers and sons. The difficulty one found as a child in arranging one’s own relations, who at least were living people with recognisable features, personal characteristics, and known homes, is as nothing compared with the difficulty of distinguishing between these remote figures of history, whose faces are unknown and whose names for the most part are meaningless labels plus a Roman numeral. It is absurdly difficult to differentiate, without a conscious effort, between a Charles V, a Charles VI, and a Charles VII. How greatly do the victims of this system of nomenclature suffer from its levelling impersonality! Immediate and instinctive recognition refuses to leap into the mind. Nor can I believe that any honest reader would maintain that occasional epithets really assist him: John the Good, John the Fearless, Philip the Bold, Charles the Bad – such downright black-and-whiteness fails to convince and offers very little help towards instant identification. Then, again, historians, in an almost inevitable effort to avoid clumsy repetition, seek to vary their descriptive references to the prince in momentary occupation of their paragraphs: he becomes ‘the late king’s son-in-law,’ or ‘the younger brother of the queen,’ or ‘the nephew of the cardinal,’ until the unfortunate reader holds his head in the effort to remember who the late king was, or who the queen is, or who the cardinal. In the case of the historians of Jeanne d’Arc, an extra confusion is introduced, for, since they are obliged constantly to allude to the young man whom Jeanne was trying to restore to his throne, they refer to him now as the Dauphin, now as the King, now as Charles VII, now as Charles tout court, now as ‘the son of the late mad King’ – anything rather than choose one form of designation and, having chosen it, stick to it. All these traps lie in the way of the historian and, conseguently, of his reader. I have suffered from them myself to such an extent that I have come to the conclusion that, even at the risk of monotonous repetition, it is better to say France, France; England, England; Burgundy, Burgundy; Dauphin, Dauphin; Orleans, Orleans; over and over again, rather than introduce a possibly elegant but certainly confusing variation. The difficulty of understanding the situation existing in France at the tin1e when Jeanne d’Arc was a child is sufficiently great without the introduction of stylistic complications.

  II

  In order to understand the task which confronted Jeanne, it is necessary to start with some knowledge of the back-history of France up to the tin1e of her birth. Never had a country been so unh
appily divided. Not only were Frenchmen divided amongst themselves, but the kingdom itself was disputed by two different thrones. War, both civil and foreign, had intermittently been raging for over seventy years. Stated briefly the position which had led up to the war was as follows:

  Through their descent from William the Congueror, the Kings of England had always claimed and enjoyed sovereignty over the greater part of France, Normandy, of course, was theirs, and through Matilda, William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, who had married Geoffrey of Anjou, they also possessed Maine, Anjou, and Touraine. Matilda’s son, Henry II of England, in addition to these inherited provinces, further acquired Gascony, the Limousin, Poitou, tl1e Angoumois, and other territories through his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine. It will readily be seen that such a partition of the whole country of France was liable to give rise to serious trouble. Then there were other contributing factors, which need not be gone into in too much detail here, but among which must be mentioned the constant interference of the French in Scottish affairs, and French interference in the vassal county of Flanders. It was obviously impossible for Edward III of England to tolerate the presence of French troops in Scotland; it was equally impossible for him to allow English trade with the Flemings to be imperilled by the actions of France. The Flemings themselves, under the leadership of Jacob van Artevelde, appealed for help to the English King, going so far as to suggest that he should definitely lay claim to the French crown. It would have suited the Flemings admirably to become the vassals of England instead of France, for the English interests were their own, and although they could scarcely support the King of England against their lawful liege the King of France, they could quite well and logically, as the vassals of England, oppose the King of France, if he were to be declared a usurper, in favour of the English King.