Joan of Arc

by D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS

How can one fix on one supreme moment in a life like Joan of Arc’s? How does one perceive some irregular leap in the trajectory of a meteor? Which is the highest wavelet in a great river sweeping to the sea? How, in a life lived continuously on a plane far above that of the ruck of humanity, can the ordinary observer detect a level still higher? Where, in a pure and gallant spirit which never knew despair, is there room for that sudden soaring exhilaration which is itself conditioned usually by despair, or some degree of it? At what time was there any upsurge of transport in one to whom even the crowning at Reims was a fulfillment long foreseen?

Fortunately we are dealing with an extremely human being, possessed (the jolly, healthy wench) of a quick temper and a sense of fun; as essentially feminine, were such a comparison permissible, as Lola Montez, the standard adventuress-type, but, unlike that trollop, deriving no perpetual stimulant from challenges to her ego. The only two unforeseen calamities of any importance in Joan’s career were overcome far otherwise. The frustrated captain throwing down her useless armor in tears after that retreat from Paris for which the politicians were solely responsible took the field again with her old brilliance and rode highhearted to her known end. Tricked into recantation, the exhausted victim of judges bought and sold died six days later proclaiming the divinely inspired integrity of her mission at the top of her voice, in smoke and flame. In neither crisis did Joan fall into despair, which she knew from her childhood’s catechism to be one of the sins against the Holy Ghost, or recover by selfsufiiciency. Nevertheless she was flesh and blood like the rest of us. I am apt to believe, with all due reserves, that she knew a unique and ecstatic moment of joy and achievement on the night of March 6, 1429.

It would be a relatively high moment, even then; not producing the kind of deep, self-satisfied intoxication experienced in such circumstances by a Napoleon or a Bernhardt. To compare any of Joan’s spiritual experiences with those of the ordinary great, or ordinary humanity in general, is dilficult because she is not an ordinary person. By all modern standards, indeed, she is an abnormal type: a superbly healthy, happy, perfectly integrated human entity with a completely resolved “unity of tension” and a high, clear, constant objective; one of those in whom — to pursue current fashionable jargon a little further — all valuepotentialities become value-actualities; one of those “completed early,” and for good. Fortunately for the psychiatry trade, such types are always a minority; fortunately for civilization, they emerge in every age to some degree, and apparently haphazard. That a remote peasant stock in French Lorraine should after centuries of total obscurity suddenly throw up a dazzling portent like Saint Joan and resume obscurity again is a kind of enigma recurring in human history, except for those who acknowledge the hand of God.

Copyright 1963, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

In this brief survey God will be, so to speak, a major issue, since without Him Joan’s existence makes no sense. It must be recalled that she lived in a different world from our own; a world which, wallowing almost as luxuriantly in cruelty and crime as ours, had not to a large extent, turned its back on the Divine. The most evil of Joan’s contemporaries, even such a fantastic monster as Gilles de Raiz, were often capable of a penitence as enormous as their sins. Hers was in fact a fundamentally Christian world, and it must be treated as such. Romain Rolland, no friend to Joan’s religion, underlines this essential in a comparison of Shaw’s drama with Péguy’s Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc: “In itself a good play, witty, emotional, lively, and human, but after Péguy’s nothing at all: superficial, devoid of real spirituality, completely foreign to the spirit of Catholicism, unaware of what goes on in the simplest and apparently most detached of Catholic souls; historically futile and frivolous.” Modern criticism has produced few more wholesome correctives to excessive adulation.

A cognate matter arises and must be briefly dealt with before one can proceed to the main issue. Joan’s history involves certain attested happenings inexplicable by normal experience. Complete skepticism is entirely permissible to observers sharing Joan’s religion, who are not obliged to accept the authenticity of any specific miracle whatsoever, barring those of Our Lord recorded in Holy Writ. It will be assumed here, therefore, that to doubt Joan’s sworn testimony to the objective and tangible reality of her visions and voices would be as insulting as to question the integrity of the liberalagnostic newspaper editor from Lisbon who testified to the terrifying dance of the sun at Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917.

Yet it must be noted that, the supernatural in Joan’s life, fusing perfectly with a joyous rustic humanity, manifested itself in no momentous prophecies, revelations, ecstasies (“My child,” said Saint Teresa to a new postulant, “we don’t want ecstasies here, we want someone who can wash dishes”), or other mystical phenomena, and was sometimes hardly discernible to the casual eye. The women of Bourges, beseeching her to bless their rosaries and waved on to her hostess with the cry “Touch ‘em yourself—your touch is as good as mine,” are not the only spectators in history to find Joan disconcerting. That a 17-year-old girl in close personal contact with Heaven all her life should call an errant page “You bloody boy” (sanglant garçon); that she would occasionally smack her fellow captains on the back and swear harmless rustic oaths; that she excelled at breaking vicious horses and laying field guns; that her genius for tactics and strategy and her fearlessness in the front line of attack staggered the hardest-bitten professionals in the French army; that she could fight and sleep and ride long distances in armor — to anyone desirous of judging this feat, I recommend the trying-on of a suit of fifteenth-century plate — and loved gay, rich gowns and was pert to professional theologians (“Light does not shine only on you, Master Beaupère”), whom she took, wrongly, to be drones and dilettanti carried on the backs of a hard-working priesthood — all these things are extremely unsaintlike, according to the accepted view, and have often been overemphasized.

Of the same girl Guy de Laval said in awe, breathlessly, after meeting her for the first time, “She seemed to me a thing divine.” What the careless young Breton noble was expecting we do not know. He probably saw no beauty by Hollywood standards. But he encountered Sanctity serene, aureoled, and absolute, and it shook him, as it shook so many others, apart, from t hose who saw her by chance weeping for joy at the Communion rail, tending the wounded of both sides, kneeling apart for hours in absorption with the Infinite, comforting the miserable, in every way confirming the report of the Royal Commission which examined her at Poitiers in 1429: “We find in her nothing but goodness, humility, purity, devotion, honour, and simplicity.” Why the learned doctors stopped short of detecting in her any traces of actual sanctity — it was not their function, in any case—might be traced largely, I think, to her saucy and celebrated retort to Friar Séguin, professor of theology, whose thick Limousin twang added the final touch to her boredom.

“What language do your Voices speak?”

“A better one than yours, brother.”

A palpable hit. While it relaxed a few austere lips in that assembly, it may simultaneously have accounted for the commission’s frigidly skeptical footnote, in the very spirit of the Roman Curia, on the so-called marvels attending this girl’s progress. It may incidentally be observed that the theologians composing this commission were in every way the equals in learning and status of the theologians at Rouen who were to send Joan to her death, at Cauchon’s bark, as a servant of the Devil. Perhaps, thinking of these men in her last moments on earth, she saw the English daggers at their unfortunate ribs and forgave them.

2

FRANCE in 1429 was for all practical purposes an appanage of the English Crown, ruled from Paris, firmly but not brutally, by John, Duke of Bedford, acting as regent for Henry VI, his infant nephew; a country largely sacked, wasted, and depopulated by ninety years of war. Immense tracts of rich land had gone back to virgin bush, desert, and jungle; hedges grew in the streets of Beauvais; half the population of Lyons had emigrated into the Empire; whole towns and villages were deserted; the countryside almost everywhere stank of death and ruin. A resistance movement in Normandy carried on a fierce guerrilla war with the English and their Burgundian allies. What remained of the French army, smashed to pieces at Agincourt in 1415, lay mostly on the Loire and was due to be rolled up as soon as the English took Orleans from its hard-pressed garrison. A few other walled towns still held out against desultory Anglo-Burgundian attacks. Roving bands of military thugs known as the Flayers (Ecorcheurs) added their quota to the general misery created by famine, rapine, disease, unemployment, murders, reprisals, deportations, lootings, heavy taxation, black markets, requisitions, and all the concomitants of total war familiar five centuries later to the heirs and legatees of progress.

The Blood Royal of France, in the person of the 26-year-old Dauphin Charles, son of Charles VI, duly proclaimed King but as yet uncrowned, dragged out a depressed, hunted, and impoverished existence with a handful of followers in the safer parts of Touraine, and it highly diverted the English conquerors to know that at one time Charles was unable to pay his shoemaker. They deemed him a nonentity, but they erred. Homely, long-nosed features, thin, bandy, knock-kneed legs, and dubious, peering eyes notwithstanding, Charles was a man of education and intelligence, destined at length to pull France sufficiently out of the mud to enable his son Louis XI, that human dynamo, to restore her to the status of a leading European power.

Charles was neither bad nor weak. His chief handicap, at this time, was a tendency to listen to advice; his chief burden was a racking doubt of his own legitimacy. In pure hate he had been described as “the so-called Dauphin of France” by his mother, the foreign harlot Ysabeau of Bavaria, in the treaty of surrender signed at Troyes by her, since his aged father was insane. At the beginning of March, 1429, when the strange girl from Lorraine rode into his orbit, the Dauphin and his little court were staying at the chateau of Chinon in Touraine, waiting for the end.

It was in May of the preceding year that one of the Voices Joan heard in the garden at Domrémy became imperative and insistent, enforcing its urging of her to go to the King’s help by a direct command for the first time. “Child of God, go to Robert de Baudricourt in the town of Vaucouleurs, that he may give you an escort.” Ceasing to protest her humble condition and natural fears, she sought her uncle’s house at Burey-en-Vaulx, a few miles away, and prevailed on him to take her to the fortress where Baudricourt held Vaucouleurs for France.

The tough, genial, burly soldier, a nobleman of means, evinced legitimate amazement as he heard a country girl in “a poor red dress” giving him his orders. “I have come to you on behalf of my Lord (Messire) to tell you to send to the Dauphin. He is not to engage the enemy, because Messire is sending him help before mid-Lent. This kingdom belongs not to the Dauphin but to Messire, but it is the will of Messire that the Dauphin shall be crowned King.”

“And who is ‘Messire’?” asked Baudricourt, goggling.

“The King of Heaven.”

Something more amusing was coining. The girl in the shabby red gown added calmly: “In spite of his enemies the Dauphin will be crowned. It is I who will lead him to his crowning.”

One hears the belch of mirth as Baudricourt turns on Uncle Durand Lassart (“Uncle” by rural courtesy— he was an elderly cousin-by-marriage): “Give her a few good cracks over the ear (de bons soufflets) and take her home to her father.”

So Lassart and Joan returned to Domrémy; he, doubtless, irritable and abusive; she, as we know, disappointed but unshaken. Her Voices had not promised instant success, and she possessed no vanity to be wounded. She resumed her place in the home circle, her daily duties, prayers, and meditations, presumably her intermittent converse with her Visitants, though she does not mention this specifically at the trial.

3

IT WAS not till January, 1429, that Joan was able to evade her father’s watchful eyes — he had threatened to drown her if he caught her dangling after soldiers again — and to seek her kinsman once more. Lassart gave in reluctantly, lodging her at Vaucouleurs in the house of friends, Henri and Catherine Royer; and before long Robert de Baudricourt, barring his doors to this crazy hussy, the talk of the town, but unable to rid his mind of her, was visited by the suspicion that she might not be ordinarily mad but demoniacally possessed, or even worse. Witches were not unknown in fifteenthcentury Lorraine; early in the following century Nicolas Rémy, Public Advocate to the Duchy, smoked out a whole nest of them.

There was no harm in finding out. Baudricourt therefore clanked in unexpectedly one day as Joan sat spinning with her hostess, bringing with him the parish priest of Vaucouleurs, Jean Fournier; and to Joan’s astonishment, since Fournier was at the moment her confessor, the priest put on his stole in silence and began the office of exorcism. She endured and passed this test with equanimity, but when Fournier had left she spoke of him with something of heat. “That’s a rotten trick! (C’est mal fait à lui!) He’s heard me in confession — surely he ought to know me!”

She had not much longer to spin and chafe. A whole countryside was now abuzz with gossip and conjecture and remembering old wives’ prophecies of a girl deliverer from the Bois-Chenu, for she spoke frankly of her mission to anyone who cared to listen, cleric or lay. Very soon a messenger appeared from the Duke of Lorraine at Nancy, bringing a summons and safe-conducts. To Charles of Lorraine, an old man, very sick and feeble, under the thumb of an ambitious mistress, and an ally of Anglo-Burgundy, it had occurred that the fey wench at Vaucouleurs might possess some medicinal powers. Joan swiftly disillusioned him, urging him to take back his wife and imploring him, since Baudricourt continued hostile, to send her, Joan, into France, The Duke waved her civilly away with a present of four francs and a horse for the return journey. By the time she reached Vaucouleurs again she had evidently discovered, with Heaven’s aid, how to end the shilly-shally. Insisting on an immediate interview, she apparently gave Baudricourt a piece of news which hit him in the midriff: namely, that two hundred miles away on the previous day, February 12, at Rouvray, near Orleans, one of the Dauphin’s best remaining captains, La Hire, had taken a disastrous thrashing from Sir John Fastolf in that affray since known, from the food convoys involved, as the Battle of the Herrings. Within the next ten days the news was confirmed to Baudricourt by royal messenger, and he gave in.

The story of this clairvoyance is not Joan’s but that of a contemporary chronicler, Cousinot. If authentic, like the announcement of the Lepanto victory by Saint Pius V in Rome on the evening of the day it occurred, it seems to me a more rational explanation of Baudricourt’s sudden surrender than the feeble “miracle” story about eggs invented by Shaw. For Baudricourt wasted no more time. An escort for Joan was selected and sworn to aid and protection, and Baudricourt gave her a letter of recommendation in his own hand and found her a sword to boot. On the evening of February 23, dressed in male costume for safety’s sake, mounted on a horse subscribed for by the townspeople, and attended by two new and devoted adherents, Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy, with two servants and the King’s messenger, Joan left Vaucouleurs by the Porte de France and took the southwest road with Baudricourt’s valedictory shout, “ Va! et advienne que pourra! — Go, come what may!” and the cheers of the populace ringing in her cars.

Some three hundred miles of unremitting danger stretched before them through a country infested by the English, the Burgundians, and strong companies of brigands as formidable as either. Four broad rivers — Marne, Aube, Seine, and Yonne — lay across their path, all in flood after the winter rains and to be crossed only by bridges which would certainly be guarded, at least by day. Two big cities along the high road, Troyes and Orleans, were to be especially avoided. What ambushes the hard-riding sextet might fall into, what roving enemy forces they might meet, were of course incalculable. By traveling all night and lying hidden off the track by day in some friendly house, lay or monastic, or some isolated farm, Joan’s escort reduced risks to the minimum. She laughed and fretted at their excessive caution. “God is showing me my way, my brothers in Paradise tell me what to do — what are you afraid of?” They revered and guarded her nevertheless like a major relic, and only twice, at St. Urbain and Auxerre, did she manage to escape their vigilance and slip away to early Mass. At Gien, eleven nights after leaving Vaucouleurs, they crossed the Loire into French territory, to Joan’s great joy. At St. Catherine-de-Fierbois they entered Touraine and next day came to their journey’s end.

4

So WE arrive at what seems to me, and may have seemed at the time to her, the one vital moment in her career on which all else depended. Her joy at overcoming the obstacle involved cannot, I think, be compared with her joy at Reims when the steeples rocked and the trumpets blared and a multitudinous roaring of “Vive le Roi!” simultaneously announced the crowning of the true King of France and her mission, within three months of taking the field. This was the natural and foreseen climax to a crescendo of victories in arms. At Chinon she won a different kind; a psychological one, if the term is adequate; more accurately, a spiritual one.

Her task was to convince the Dauphin Charles, immediately, at sight, that she was in possession of a secret known at that time (he believed) only to him and his Creator.

What came to be called the King’s Secret was as follows. One day in 1428, when doubts of his legitimacy had become almost unbearable, Charles kneeled down in his oratory and made a mental prayer; “uttering no words” — I quote the form in which it was revealed and published four reigns later—“but in his heart imploring God that if he were indeed the true heir, of the blood of the noble House of France, and the Kingdom rightfully his, God would be pleased to guard and defend him, or at least to grant him the grace to avoid death or captivity, and escape to Spain or Scotland.” Such a prayer, admitting such personal doubt and dismay, could not be uttered aloud, even behind locked doors in the privacy of an oratory. Some eavesdropping servant, some spy in the pay of Anglo-Burgundy, about the Court could have wrecked the last hopes of France, and one may well surmise that Charles’s own minister and chief adviser, fat La Trémoïlle, bred up at the Court of Burgundy and having a foot in both camps all his life and no scruples, would have been delighted to register and hold such a confession in reserve.

In the first week of March, 1429, therefore, the Dauphin Charles was absolutely certain that his secret was shared only with Almighty God. But he was wrong. A sturdy peasant girl from Lorraine, whom he was shortly to meet, knew it as well. Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition — such labels, even if they apply, do not explain the source of her knowledge, which is undoubted. Her psychological condition was notoriously sane and robust — strong of itself, doubly strong by reason of a simple, devout Christian faith. She had no mark of the medium, never fell into trances, never claimed or displayed necromantic powers.

Given all this, the terrible necessity to stagger the bourgeoisie has naturally inspired a few attempts to degrade the feat above mentioned to the level of a fraud. The most interesting is Vallet de Viriville’s suggestion that Joan was somehow indoctrinated and briefed in advance by the King’s confessor, Maehet, whom Viriville imagined as breaking the seal of confession and conspiring with an unknown girl to fool his master — a theory which might be called fit for the film trade were one not amply aware that no theory is too wild for a certain type of materialist pedant at grips with the supernatural. When it is recollected that Charles never told his secret to Machet or any other confessor, being under no obligation to do so, tins fantasy evaporates.

It was more than eighty years after Joan’s death, in the reign of Francois I, that the King’s Secret was publicly revealed by one Pierre Sala, formerly a member of the household of Louis XI. Sala had it from the aged De Boisy, a former gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles VII, a trusted friend and a man of honor, to whom Charles once mentioned it, apparently sometime after Joan’s appearance. De Boisy kept the secret for some twenty years after Charles’s death. Its telling could then do France no harm, and in 1516 Sala published it in a chronicle called Hardiesses des Grands Roys, in which it is set forth as quoted above. Thus the world learned at last what Joan had stubbornly refused to reveal even under threats of judicial torture; and since the fact of her possession of this secret in March, 1429, is accepted, despite himself, by the dry, cautious, and agnostic Quicherat, still a leading authority on her career, it seems sufficient for anybody. To those acknowledging the omnipotence of God there is no great mystery in it.

5

THIS, then, is Joan’s position on the evening of her arrival in Chinon, March 6, as one may imagine her reviewing it, none too calmly, by the parlor fire of the inn “of good repute,” kept, by a woman of honesty, at which she and her escort put up. On her fate in the next few hours depended the fate of France. She had reached Chinon at midday. That same afternoon she had gone to the Château and been turned away by the guards, a rebuff more dismaying then than now. Over nearly ten centuries at least, from Charlemagne to Louis XVI, the rulers of France were what Henry James so pleasingly called George Sand, “eminently accessible.” The populace had contact with them constantly, as a right; their palaces were not fenced off like those of the rulers of the Republic; some of them could even be buttonholed in the street. But the Dauphin Charles lived in constant danger, and his doors were kept .

Moreover, nobody in his household had ever heard of this girl, for the reason, as appeared later, that the carefully reticent letter she had dictated and dispatched to the Dauphin from St. Catherinede-Fierbois, on the eve of her entry into Chinon, never reached him. Andrew thinks that La Trémoïlle, to whom it would come like all other state correspondence, tossed it into the fire. Baudricourt’s enclosure he kept, nevertheless; possibly (thinks Lang) as a curious specimen of military wits gone astray.

Joan’s arrival in Chinon had nevertheless caused a stir in the little town which had been noted at the Château. Sometime later in the day there were inquiries at her inn, and either she or Jean de Metz informed an envoy from the Dauphin’s Master of Requests of her état civil and her mission. She did not know that on receipt of this bizarre news the Royal Council, presided over by Charles, met to discuss her in some heat and perplexity, some of the councillors arguing that in view of the desperate appeals from Orleans, now increasing, any straw should be snatched at, and others, notably La Trémoïlle, recommending that this girl should be expelled from the town as an impostor. Eventually a messenger was sent to the inn with orders to take Joan back for examination. Even as they rose, the majority of the Council were warning Charles to be wary of this creature.

It is here and now, immediately after receiving the summons, in my judgment, that Joan experienced the only approach to doubt, bewilderment, and panic she ever felt in her actual fighting career — here in the inn parlor, with the waiting man-atarms whistling a tune at the door.

I base this conviction on two of her statements at the trial. Questioned on her Voices generally, she answered that before she left to see the King one of them spoke to her, saying “Go, boldly! When you are before the King he will have a good sign to receive and believe you.” “Boldly” is here, I hold, an operative word pregnant with significance, occurring as it does in the records only at times of great stress — for example, once or twice during the trial, when she was told by her Voices to “answer boldly.” That she received the call to courage at the particular moment we are considering seems to me to follow directly from her declaration elsewhere that Saint Michael the Archangel, chief of her three Visitants, spoke to her on the day of her arrival at Chinon, in “the house of a certain woman” — namely, the hostess of her inn.

None of her three beloved Voices, as she reports them, ever speaks needlessly or wastes words; least of all Saint Michael, whom she saw and heard first of all at Domrémy, and who instructed her exclusively for some time. His words frequently have a crisp military ring befitting the Generalissimo and Provost of Paradise, whereas the function of her other two saints, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, appears to be to assist with gentle encouragement and consolation. The direct commands come from “Monseigneur Saint Michel,” and when they do it is because Joan has need of them. At this eventful moment I think she certainly had, and the giver of the boldness she needed was at her elbow.

When the messenger from the King clumped into the parlor she must have realized suddenly all that lay before her. Her superb natural courage fled: she was once more the startled child of thirteen at Domrémy, or even the girl of a year ago, shocked into dismay by the sudden order to ride to Vaucouleurs, shrinking from the light and crying, as she had cried before, “I am only a poor girl! I can neither ride nor make war!” It took several repetitions (“two or three times a week”) to conquer this fear. The swaggering unsexed hoyden of Shavian drama conveys a curiously false impression of a girl whose Christian humility was extreme and whose boisterous moments were few. Nothing seems more obvious to me than that at this moment, with the signal for her first decisive action clear and urgent, Joan found herself in the grip of the same helpless fear as before, a lapse more horrifying to a nature like hers than can easily be imagined.

Moreover, if one may call on the common experience of large masses of mankind in every age, her fear was almost certainly being exploited at this moment by mankind’s enemy. Another inward voice would be speaking to her now, as the Accuser of the Brethren spoke to David Balfour; a thin, precise, mocking, donnish voice, familiar to all saints and many lesser men, repeating and emphasizing her ridiculous lack of qualification for the colossal task she was daring to undertake; reminding her of the fantastic nature of the formula with which she, a rustic nobody, hoped to conquer Royalty at sight, if she ever got that far; the unknown terrors of a Court, with its hostile, contemptuous eyes and tongues; the dreamlike strangeness of her present position, from which she might well wake before long to find herself shuddering in bed at Domrémy; and — undoubtedly, this being a routine climax — suggesting the bare possibility that she might, after all, be mistaken, deluded, a dupe guilty of monstrous pride and blasphemous presumption, inviting the just anger of Heaven and man.

The same voice, murmuring the same subtle invitations to despair and surrender, has inspired memorable pages of Huysmans and Bernanos. It is a recurring commonplace in the lives of most practicing Christians, and there seems no reason to assume that Joan was exempt. For her, too, at length, the diabolic cloud dissolved in a flood of light as another Voice spoke. “Go, boldly! When you are before the King . . .”

The whole trouble may not have lasted thirty seconds. While it lasted it would be to such as Joan very like some of the agony and desolation of what the great Spanish mystic calls the dark night of the soul. She was to hear the evil voice again and suffer far worse a couple of years later, in vastly different circumstances, and to emerge once more victorious. But in May, 1431, she was not brimful of energy and spirits and on the threshold of her career, with the fate of a kingdom in her hands.

So, for a flash, the destiny of France — not to speak of England — hung in the balance. Then certitude returned, and she strode out after the messenger.

6

How she triumphed that night, a moment or two after being taken into the great hall by Louis do Bourbon, has been so often told that it hardly needs retelling. Undazzled by the light of fifty flambeaux, undaunted by the stares of a silent, glittering crowd, she looked round swiftly for (as she says) the light on the King, singled him out immediately from the group in which he was mingling by previous arrangement, divested of all royal tokens, went straight to him, doffed her cap, and kneeled on one knee. “God grant you good life, gentle Dauphin!”

“Jeanne, I am not the King.”

“In God’s name, gentle prince, you are he and no other.”

Charles drew her aside. At her next words, as every eyewitness of the occasion testifies, whether claiming to have overheard them or not, the morose and dubious features of the Dauphin lit up suddenly with an immense joy. Her ordeal was over.

What she actually said to him, according to her later recollection to Dom Pasquerel, her confessor, was: “I tell thee” — using the rustic and familiar tu, as to an equal — “I tell thee, from Messire, that thou art the true heir of France and the son of the King.” After they had spoken together privately for some time a bedchamber was ordered for Joan, with proper attendance, in the Tour de Coudray. With what ecstatic thanksgivings and prayers and vows and happy tears she closed her eyes that night one may readily conjecture.

Next morning, and for some days afterwards, she was summoned to the Dauphin’s presence. “As to what she said to the King,” wrote the reliable chronicler Alain Chartier in a letter four months later, “nobody knows that; but it was most clear that the King was greatly encouraged, as if by the Spirit.” She likewise affirmed, in the additional presence of four of the Council, her knowledge of “something of great consequence which he (the Dauphin) had done in secret,” but the details and proofs of this she reserved for Charles alone. He examined and re-examined her closely, with and without witnesses, heard her whole story and her plans for the immediate relief of Orleans, and finally, with one reasonable mental reservation, accepted her, as well he might. Her cup of joy was full. The cynical passing smile of a La Trémoïlle, the cold eyes of a Regnault de Chartres, the shrugs and pursed lips of others of her enemies-to-be on the Council she can hardly have noticed. She had reached the heights.

An anticlimax, however mild, was inevitable.

As noted already, the Dauphin Charles was no fool. Release from his mental burden had, not unnaturally, given him already a new confidence of bearing and a new authority; nothing in comparison with the energy of years to come, but sufficient for him to impose this girl on his Council, skeptics and otherwise. This presupposed an official inquiry; if affirmative, as seemed almost certain, it would banish any last flicker of doubt from his own mind as well. In due course, therefore, Joan learned that instead of being dispatched with a force to Orleans, an order for which she had been imploring the Dauphin ever since convincing him of her mission, she was being sent before the assembly of learned doctors of theology.

She took the news with anger and dismay. “Poitiers! for God’s sake! I know I shall have trouble enough! Well, let’s be going.” It was to be her first experience of professional theologians, and it gave her, longing and aching as she was for action, a distaste for them for life. “In God’s name,” she burst out early in the proceedings, “I did not come to Poitiers to work miracles! Take me to Orleans and I’ll show you the signs of my sending!” But it took six weeks to satisfy her examiners completely, and the Orleans garrison had to wait for news of relief until, in mid-April, she was released with that honors certificate to which a jury of three highborn matrons added necessary testimony. Then at last Joan’s high spirits returned completely. Even the despised divines at Poitiers had signed and sealed her captain’s commission.

“The King [their report ended] should not prevent her proceeding to Orleans. To mistrust or reject her would be an offence against the Holy Ghost and a sign of unworthiness of God’s help.”

Thus was the exaltation of her reception night at Chinon recaptured, and her work launched on a great joyous wave of confidence and power. Fecisti viriliter . . . aptly does the office for her feast day quote the Book of Judith, a heroine of her own kind.

To assert that the direct consequence of Joan’s recovery of her courage at one single moment on the night of March 6, 1429, is the expulsion of the last of the English from French soil — Calais only excepted — in 1453 sounds odiously like what in well-bred circles is called “journalism.” The chain of events is nevertheless solid enough. But for her acceptance that night by the Dauphin, the startling new hopes infused in him by her presence, the subsequent appointment of a raw country girl to a front-line military commission, her brilliant leadership in the field, and the tremendous sacramental and national tonic of the coronation at Reims, the French would certainly never have found the spirit or the means to throw off foreign oppression in that century at least.

She did not live to see the climax of the movement she started, and so longingly called bouter les Anglais hors de France. It began in a small way at Compiègne, the scene of her capture, some five months after her prearranged murder by that beau procès of Cuuchon’s which still delights the tribe of lawyers, so smoothly, legally, devilishly correct is the procedure (from which, as a graceful history don lately admitted, “we English cannot be said to come out. very well”). Four years after the Anglo-Burgundiun failure at Compiègne, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, with his troops everywhere on the run, recollected that he was a Frenchman and joined forces with Charles VII.

The crescendo of the Reconquest quickens from that moment. The year 1436 saw the recapture of Paris. By the end of 1453 France was free, and at Charles’s death in 1461 was enjoying an industrial and commercial boom and the practical monopoly of the Levant trade. The metamorphosis of Charles, which began that March night at Chinon, might indeed be called not the least of Joan’s miracles. Shocked by the shame of her death, he left off taking advice and developed into that man of action who has bequeathed a highly respectable name to French history for good sense, firmness, and justice. Charles is, so to speak, Joan’s creation, flowering late, like the resurrection of France.

Their debt to this girl the French have recollected anew during the past half-century, thanks in great measure to a poet of genius. One could wash gratitude could have been expressed in happier terms than those of the sweetly languishing marble set up not long ago on the site of Joan s passion in the Place du Vieux-Marché. You can hear her incredulous hoot of merriment from here.