Thus, doubly, Jeanne had heaid of Robert de Baudricourt from two men who had probably seen and spoken with him. He was, in a sense, no stranger to her. Deeply and rightly as one mistrusts the historian who draws too freely on his imagination to fill in the details of the cold outline provided by official documents, there are occasions when it becomes only reasonable for him to do so. The present occasion enters, I think, into this category. It is impossible not to imagine that Jacques d’Arc, on his return from Vaucouleurs, related his experiences at great and repetitive length to his friends and his family. After all, it had constituted quite an adventure for a small man. Robert de Baudricourt was a power in the little local world of the Meuse valley. He may not have approached royalty in their eyes, even as a representative of the Dauphin, but he did at least, putting it into modern terms, approach something more than the equivalent of the local JP. Not only did he hold the sword of justice: he held also the sword of a royal lieutenant, combining the military with the civil. And Jacques d’Arc, although by that time described as doyen of Domremy, remained a simple villager to whom the governor of Vaucouleurs was a great man. Jean Morel, too, described as a labourer of Grewe, must have been equally impressed by his introduction into the castle of Vaucouleurs and into the presence of its commander. They must both, one imagines, have been rather halting and intimidated and tongue-tied so long as they were within its precincts; they must both, equally, have let themselves go when they got home, boasting perhaps a little, certainly describing their visit in every detail over and over again, after the fashion of the countryman who has experienced an unusual interruption to his normal life – the kind of interruption which in the England of today would provide an endless topic of conversation in the local public house. In France of the fifteenth century, the family circle would replace the local public house. In an English village, the pub is the club. In a French village, in spite of a possible cafe, people are more domestically minded. When disposed to talk, they are quite ready to talk in their own homes. The children are not sent to bed earlier than their elders, everybody goes to bed at the same time, grown-ups and children, at an hour dictated only by the going-down of the sun and by the necessity of getting up early on the following morning. Therefore, it is fair, I think, to assume that Jacques d’Arc would be inclined to sit talking about Robert de Baudricourt during the family supper and even after supper was over; and that Jean Morel, when he came from Greux to see his friends Jacquot and Zabillet, would join with Jacquot in recounting the experiences that Jacquot’s long-suffering family had already heard a hundred times. One member of the family, at any rate, kept her ears open, even though her mother may have yawned and wished she might be free to go about such household tasks as clearing away and washing-up. That one member, silent, noncommittal, and receptive, must have registered every word relating to the representative of the Dauphin at Vaucouleurs. The conversation, however reiterative, however boring to others, must have been full of value and information to the one really interested member of the audience. To her, Robert de Baudricourt was an important, even a vital, figure. Her father and her godfather, so far as she was concerned, might discuss him as much as they pleased. They were contributing valuable information to one whom they little suspected of pigeon-holing every comment for her own purposes. Robert de Baudricourt was the man she must see before she could set off on her ultimate journey. He was the man from whom she must obtain a safe-conduct, horses, and an escort. Therefore no scrap of information about him was negligible: it was extremely lucky for Jeanne, in fact, that her father and her godfather should have been in a position to describe him so fully, being meanwhile unaware that the silent girl at the table intended within the year to make use of the redoubtable governor to send her on her mission into France. Jacquot described; Jeannette listened. Jean Morel joined the circle of his friends occasionally. The brothers were probably tired, and rather bored.
The foregoing passage reads plausibly enough, and the gist of it has been indicated by practically every biographer of Jeanne d’Arc. In point of fact there is no actual evidence to prove that either Jacques d’Arc or Jean Morel ever set eyes on Robert de Baudricourt at all. It is true that Jacques was once seen in Vaucouleurs;fn8 it is true, also, that both he and Morel were concerned in the acte de refus. But it is equally true that Vaucouleurs was only twelve miles from Domremy, so that Jacques probably went there frequently during the course of his life; and it is equally true that being concerned in the acte de refus did not necessarily entail any personal contact with Baudricourt, any more than a mortgagee necessarily comes into personal contact with the mortgagor whose signature appears on the same document as his own. Insistence on this point may seem exaggerated and pemickety. But the point as to whether Jacques and Morel had really ever seen Baudricourt or not is interesting, not only for the amusement of first drawing a picture and then tearing it up, but because it also affects one of Jeanne’s so-called miraculous inspirations. It is well known that, when she finally got to Chinon, she was able to pick the Dauphin out of the crowd of his courtiers, even though another man had been designated to her in the attempt to trick her as a test of her sincerity. She claims the same power of recognition as regards Robert de Baudricourt, although she had never yet seen him. ‘She recognised the said Robert through her voices, the voice having told her who he was.’fn9 Now if she had heard her father describe Baudricourt, her recognition of him was not at all miraculous but quite natural; if, on the other hand, her father had neither spoken with nor, consequently, described him, her recognition may fairly take its place among such facts of her life as are difficult if not impossible to explain or to explain away. With a remnant of caution, however, one must take into consideration that, even failing her father, she may have heard the accounts of other people who had caught a glimpse of the local governor, even so distantly as to see him riding through the streets of Vaucouleurs. On the whole, I think we must take this particular miracle with a very large grain of salt; and prove, later on, that the analogous miracle of her recognition of the Dauphin may likewise be explained by perfectly normal means.
III
However it may be, it was natural, and indeed, necessary, that Jeanne should decide to make her way towards Robert de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs. Her voices themselves had told her to do so. They assured her, moreover, that he would give her an escort to go into France. She, alarmed by these instructions, replied at first, rather piteously, that she was only a poor girl who knew neither how to ride nor how to conduct war.fn10 The voice told her, also, that she should go to her uncle, a command which must have seemed as comforting and reassuring as the other command was frightening, for Durand Lassois, the ‘uncle’ in question, was, as I have already pointed out, an amenable man. fn11 Nothing was more natural than that Jeanne should suggest going on a short visit to her relations. The visit was short indeed – only a week, fn12 but during that week, if she did not succeed in accomplishing her main desire, she did at least make the most of her time and contrive to lay a trail due to prove very useful to her in the future.
IV
This first visit to Durand and Jeanne Lassois took place in 1428, towards the feast of the Ascension, which in that year fell on May 13th. According to M Siméon Luce, Jeanne refrained, till her visit was drawing to a close, from tackling her ‘uncle’ direct on the subject of her real purpose.’fn13 Probably she had spent the preceding days in preparing the way to gaining his help and sympathy. For Durand Lassois, although persuadable, was still a peasant, and therefore naturally slow and cautious, and the proposal which Jeanne had to lay before him was, to say the least of it, startling – no less a proposal than that he should escort her into the presence of the governor. When one reflects that she was a girl of sixteen, and her ‘uncle’ a man of nearly forty who, as such, must have regarded her as having only just emerged from childhood; when one reflects, furthermore, that the very idea of bearding the governor in his fortress must have appeared to him, a mere labourer, as an almost
unthinkable piece of impertinence, one begins to realise how disturbing that week’s visit to the stolid, peaceful household at Burey-le-Petit must have proved to the head of that household. The pretext itself was a crazy one: that of introducing a young relative, a girl, arbitrarily demanding an authorisation to journey into France to trouble no less a personage than the Dauphin with the wild scheme of restoring France when experienced soldiers and statesmen had for nearly a hundred years failed to do so. One puts it inevitably into modem terms, saying: What would an agricultural labourer in England today think, if his wife’s sixteen-year-old cousin arrived on a week’s visit to his cottage in a small village, and by gradual degrees broke to him that she wished him to conduct her before the Lord-Lieutenant of the County, with a view to despatching her to tell the King at Windsor not only what he ought to do for the salvation of his conntry, but nndertaking to perform that duty on his behalf? Let us imagine, for the sake of emphasis, that such a proposal had been made at any time during the late European warfn14 (as, indeed, it was; see Appendix A, here), for the Hundred Years’ War in France, with its prolonged attrition and exasperation, must have appeared as distressful and endless to the French of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, events moving more slowly then, as the European war, in its more intensive form, appeared to us of the twentieth. It is hard to imagine that an agricultural labourer in, let us say, a village of Herefordshire, would have welcomed with any enthusiasm the proposal that he should introduce his wife’s sixteen-year-old cousin to his Lord-Licutenanr, in order that she might make her way to Windsor or Downing Street, uniting in her own person the offices of Marshal Foch and the Archbishop of Canterbury. For that, in short, was what Jeanne proposed to do. She proposed, first, to vanquish the enemy, and then to crown the King. Certainly, she did not propose to set the crown upon his head with her own hands: her modesty and her respect for the Church would alike have precluded her from so arrogant a programme. But she did intend to vanquish the enemy, and fully believed herself to be the appointed saviour. She broke it gently to her puzzled cousin, supporting her intentions with references to current prophecies. Had he not heard, she asked, that France, having been lost through a woman, would be restored by a girl?fn15 This was a prophecy uttered by one Marie d’Avignon, and had evidently taken a hold on Jeanne’s mind, for she repeated it later in a more specific form to Baudricourt,fn16 but in talking to Durand Lassois she left it as a mere generalisation. She did, however, end by telling him that she must go into France to get the Dauphin crowned, and that he must conduct her to Vaucouleurs with that object in view.
His consent may seem astonishing, but it becomes less astonishing when one takes two factors into consideration: first that Durand Lassois was, naturally, a Catholic, and second that the general standard of religious credulity was far more simple in the fifteenth century than it is now. On the first count, the analogy with the agricultural labourer of Herefordshire is thereby not quite accurate; on the second count, saints and miracles were taken far more as a matter of course by everyone, the ignorant and the educated alike. Visions, voices, and prophecies were matters of relatively common occurrence. Visionaries such as Jeanne abounded, the difference between them being one of degree rather than of kind; and, as later events were to prove, of accomplishment as opposed to bombast. Durand Lassois and his prototypes must have been quite well acmstomed to hearing gossip and rumours about such people. Therefore, when Durand Lassois discovered that his young cousin imagined herself to have joined their ranks, the surprise and incredulity cannot have been so great as we, in our more rational age, might suppose. Whatever the explanation, he gave way and did as she demanded.
V
Most fortunately, two eye-witness accounts remain to us of the first interview between Jeanne and Baudricourt, apart from Jeanne’s own account, which is brief and exceptionally uncommunicative. The first eye-witness is, of course, Durand Lassois himself. His evidence is muddled and incomplete; he does not, for instance, differentiate at all clearly between the first time Jeanne persuaded him to take her to Vaucouleurs and the second. Similarly, when he tells us that at one moment she made up her mind to start out independently on her jourmey in search of the Dauphin, and borrowed his clothes for that purpose, he is evidently confusing the two visits. Here, however, is his account, which appears to apply to the first visit: ‘She asked me to go to Robert de Baudricourt, who would cause her to be conducted to the place where the Dauphin was. The said Robert told me several times that I should take her back to the house of her father, and should give her a smacking.’fn17 The second eye-witness, who gives more details, is a certain Bertrand de Poulengy, then a man of thirty-six, who afterwards became one of Jeanne’s most loyal adherents. He had known her home at Domremy, for he had often been to her parents’ house; he was present at her interview with Robert de Baudricourt. He heard her telling Robert that she had approached him in the name of her Lord, in order that tl1e said Robert should send a message to the Dauphin to conduct himself with discretion, and not to engage in battle with his enemies, because her Lord would give him help after mid-Lent. The reason she gave for these rather arbitrary commands enjoined on the Dauphin, was that the kingdom was no concern of his, but was the concern of her Lord. Nevertheless, she said, her Lord intended the Dauphin to become king, and to hold the kingdom in fief; and added that the Dauphin should become king despite his enemies, and that she herself would lead him to his coronation. When Baudricourt, not unnaturally, enquired whom she meant by her Lord, she replied, ‘The King of Heaven.’fn18
This remarkable interview, thus recorded by Bertrand de Poulengy, ended abortively for Jeanne. Baudricourt simply laughed at her, and not only told Lassois to take her back to her home after a sound correction, but jested coarsely that he might hand her over to the pleasure of his soldiers. fn19 Abortive though the interview turned out to be, it gives rise to one or two curious speculations. For instance, Jeanne’s allusion to mid-Lent of the following year (1429) suggests that she never intended to accomplish her mission as an immediate result of this first visit to Vaucouleurs, but regarded it rather as a preliminary skirmish, almost as a warning to Baudricourt of the real attack he might expect from her later on. There is this further point, to which, so far as I know, attention has never hitherto been drawn. Jeanne’s first visit took place in the middle of May 1428. Her second visit lasted from the beginning of January till the middle of February 1429.fn20 Jeanne’s pretext on this occasion was that Lassois’ wife was about to have a baby, and that she, Jeanne, by going to stay with her relations, would be able to lend a helping hand. Now Jeanne Lassois, ifshe were going to have a baby in January 1429, would just have begun to suspect the fact in May 1428. In any case, Burey-le-Petit and Domremy were so close that this anticipated event would have come to Jeanne’s ears some time during the ensuing months. I think it is therefore likely that she laid her plans accordingly, more especially as Lent always meant a great deal to her, and would have appeared a most propitious moment for embarking on her enterprise. It is worth noting, also, that Saint Margaret, one of the saints who habitually appeared to Jeanne, was the especial protector of women in childbirth, and of peasants.
VI
We have no record of how Jacques d’Arc received his daughter on her return, or of whether the correction recommended by Baudricourt was ever administered or not. It is a mere, though perhaps not an unfair, assumption to imagine that Jeanne’s home life during the succeeding months of 1428 was not made too easy for her. She may have counted herself lucky that outside events should have occurred to distract her father’s attention from the speculation as to whether his daughter was merely eccentric or actually going off her head. For the position at Domremy was becoming serious. Vaucouleurs itself was threatened by the Burgundians under Antoine de Vergy, and by the second half of July it was clear that the inhabitants of both Domremy and Greux would have to seek a temporary refuge’fn21 within the walls of the neighbouring town of Neufchâteau. It is not necessary to enter
into too many details; what concerns us is to note that Jeanne and her parents, taking their cattle with them, shared in the general exodus which left their village abandoned to the enemy. There can be no doubt that she accompanied her parents on this occasion, or that, more importantly, she was accompanied by them. She was, in fact, seen at Neufchâteau by one Jacquier de Saint-Amant, who observed her driving her father’s cattle into the fields.fn22 This flight to Neufchâteau had one disagreeable consequence for Jeanne at her trial. She and her parents having found a lodging with a certain Madame la Rousse, it was charged against her that she had spent some time in an inn which was in reality a house of ill fame. The accusation is absurd. Not only does la Rousse appear to have been a perfectly respectable woman, but Jeanne’s parents were scarcely the type of people to find their lodging in a brothel, much less to allow their daughter to accompany them there, and certainly not the type to countenance their daughter contributing to the amusement of such an establishment. The accusation was apparently based on a supposition that Jeanne had been employed as a servant in the inn, fn23 a supposition which probably arose because Jeanne, a hefty girl, accustomed to helping her mother with the house-hold duties at home, extended her good nature to helping her hostess, with the work involved in looking after her sudden influx of guests. As M Siméon Luce suggests, the refugees from Domremy must have found some difficulty in filling up their time in their unfamiliar surroundings, so it was natural that Jeanne should carry on with her habitual ploys.
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