Saint Joan of Arc Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Vita Sackville-West

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  1 Jeanne d’Arc

  2 The Hundred Years’ War

  3 Domremy (1)

  4 Domremy (2)

  5 Domremy and Vaucouleurs (1)

  6 Domremy and Vaucouleurs (2)

  7 Vaucouleurs to Chinon

  8 Poitiers to Orleans

  9 Orleans (1)

  10 Orleans (2)

  11 Reims

  12 Reims to Paris

  13 Paris to Compiègne

  14 Compiègne to Rouen

  15 The Trial (1)

  16 The Trial (2)

  17 The Last Act

  18 Aftermath

  Appendices

  Chronological Table

  MAPS (by J. F. Horrabin)

  The France of Jeanne d’Arc

  The Loire country

  Orleans

  Compiègne

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The strange story of Joan of Arc, the obscure peasant girl who became the national saint of France, is retold in this celebrated, classic biography. Saint Joan lives for the reader on every page, as a shepherd girl in a remote part of fifteenth-century rural France, visited by visions of saints and angels; as the avenging virgin who regenerated the soul of a torn and wretched France and led her troops to victory; and as a condemned heretic and witch, burned at the stake and, five hundred years later, canonised as a saint.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as Vita, was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively before settling at Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, where she devoted much of her time to creating its now world-famous garden. Throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women, and her unconventional marriage would later become the subject of a biography written by her son Nigel Nicolson. Though she produced a substantial body of work, amongst which are writings on travel and gardening, Sackville-West is best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), and for the pastoral poem The Land (1926) which was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. She died in 1962 at Sissinghurst.

  ALSO BY VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

  Novels

  Family History

  Heritage

  The Dragon in Shallow Waters

  The Heir

  Challenge

  Seducers in Ecuador

  The Edwardians

  All Passion Spent

  Grand Canyon

  Non-Fiction

  Passenger to Teheran

  English Country Houses

  Pepita

  The Eagle and The Dove

  Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden

  For PHILIPPA

  ‘[And it was shown to her] how serious and dangerous it is curiously to examine the things which are beyond one’s understanding, and to believe in new things … and even to invent new and unusual things, for demons have a way of introducing themselves into such-like curiosities.’

  ADMONITION ADDRESSED TO JOAN OF ARC.

  Procés de condamnation, Vol. 1, p. 390.

  ‘Pauvre Jeanne d’Arc! Elle a eu bien du malheur dans ce que sa mémoire a provoqué d’écrits et de compositions de diverses sortes.’

  SAINTE BEUVE.

  FOREWORD

  There are many deliberate omissions in this book.

  Students of the period may ask why I have not entered more closely into such things as the relations between the Dukes of Burgundy, Brittany, Bedford, and Gloucester, Cardinal Beaufort, and so on.

  My answer is that I wished to concentrate on Joan of Arc herself, bringing in the minimum of outside politics.

  It seemed to me that Joan of Arc was far more important and problematical than any of the figures or politics which surrounded her. It became necessary for me to refer to some of those figures and politics: but, beyond that simplified reference, I have kept her consistently in the foreground, at the expense of other interests. It seemed to me, in short, that Joan of Arc presented a fundamental problem of the deepest importance, whereas the political difficulties of her day presented only a topical and therefore secondary interest. The history of France in the fifteenth century can hold no interest today save for the scholar; the strange career of Joan of Arc, on the other hand, remains a story whose conclusion is as yet unfound. I do not claim to have found it in this book. I take the view that many years, possibly hundreds of years, may elapse before it is found at all.

  In the meantime, I wish to record my gratitude to several people: to my sister-in-law, Gwen St. Levan, who provided and annotated many specialised books for me; to Mr J. F. Horrabin, who drew the maps; to Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., who gave me his time for discussion of Saint Joan; to Dr Baines for his views on the psychology of visionaries; to Mr Milton Waldman, who most generously lent me his notes on the trial; and to the Secretary of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, who sent me a table of the phases of the moon during 1429 and 1430.

  The question of footnotes troubled me considerably. I had at first intended to put none, but was gradually forced to the conclusion that a complete absence of reference to authorities was even more irritating to the reader than the constant check to the progress of his reading. Of two evils, I hope I have chosen the less.

  The question of proper names troubled me also. It seemed to me that Jeanne was ill-translated by Joan, and yet I could not bring myself to write the closer rendering of Jean. I therefore decided to stick to the French version of her name throughout, except in the title of the book itself.

  An analogous problem arose over the names of French cities. It will be observed that I have elected to print Orleans without an accent on the e. This is because most English readers are accustomed to pronounce Orleans in the English way. On the other hand, I have spelt Reims in the French way. This is because the addition of an h in no way affects the pronunciation, and therefore seemed to me pointless.

  I am advised on good authority that Domremy should be written without an accent on the e.

  V. S.-W.

  …Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,

  Qu’ Englois bruslèrent à Rouan:

  Où sont-elles, Vierge souveraine?

  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!

  FRANÇOIS VILLON

  1. JEANNE D’ARC

  I

  No contemporary portrait of Jeanne d’Arc is known to exist. Possibly none ever existed at all. She denied having ever sat for her portrait, although she admitted having seen, at Arras, a painting of herself in full armour, kneeling on one knee, presenting a letter to the King. This painting, she affirmed, was the work of a Scotsman. Apart from that, she said she had never seen another image in her likeness, nor had she ever caused one to be made. The frescoes depicting her life, which Montaigne saw on the façade of her home at Domremy on his way to Italy a hundred and forty-nine years after her death, were already in a bad state by then and have now entirely disappeared; l’âge, he wrote, en a fort corrompu la peinture. Yet there can be no question that she was, even during her lifetime, a person whom one would expect to find portrayed in a hundred different places; a person of legend. Butterflies in clouds accompanied her standard; pigeons miraculously fluttered towards her; men fell into rivers and were drowned; dead babies yawned and came to life; flocks of little birds perched on bushes to watch her making war.fn1 The magistrates of Ra
tisbon paid twenty-four pfennigs in 1429 for the privilege of looking at a picture showing how the Pucelle had fought in France, but the advantage as well as the expense is theirs, not ours.fn2 There is nothing left to tell us what Jeanne d’Arc looked like, although Eugélide, Princess of Hungary, gives us some reason to believe that she had a short neck and a little bright red mark behind her right ear.

  II

  On the other hand, hundreds of posthumous representations, in stone, in bronze, in plaster, in stained glass, in fresco, on canvas, or on wood, leave us with an impression neither blurred nor doubtful but only too definite and precise. Pen and ink, equally active, have lent their services to the willing imagination, so that from these various mediums of the artist and the historian a double image clearly emerges: the image of Jeanne pensive and pastoral, or the image of Jeanne embattled and heroic, the basis of truth in both interpretations heavily overlaid with all the hues of sentimentality and romance. If these interpreters are to be believed, then Jeanne the shepherdess sat permanently with folded hands and upturned eyes, and Jeanne the captain permanently bestrode a charger whose forelegs never touched the ground. The lover of truth sighs in vain for one plain portrait, unflattering, authentic, crude; a portrait which shall attempt no picturesque rendering of that remarkable destiny, no seizing of those dramatic moments, but a quiet statement of what Jeanne looked like, whether in daily life at her father’s house, or in the few strenuous months when by popular acclaim she became known throughout France and much of Europe as a suddenly public personage; as, in short, la Pucelle, Mulier illa quæ Puella vociferatur.fn3

  Such a statement, if ever drawn, is missing. Only by inference, only by the reasoning of probability, and with the help of certain given indications, is it possible to reconstruct today the physical appearance of either Jeanne the peasant or Jeanne the captain. The peasant, chronologically speaking, comes first. She breaks as an apparently ordinary little girl of twelve or thirteen into the pages of history. She comes of healthy parents, taking her share in the housework, in the work of the fields, in the care of the cattle, and in the general yearly round of a simple, practical, country family. There is every reason to presume her tough and sturdy; reasons racial, documentary, and evidential. There is every racial reason to presume her short and stocky, rather than tall and slender; every reason to suppose her muscular, with features homely (in the English, not the American, sense) rather than pretty. Many men and women who had known her in her youth came forward later to testify to her moral character, to her early avocations, to the personal impression she made on them, to the affection and respect with which they regarded her, but not a single one mentions even as a passing comment that she was pretty. Had she been pretty, her contemporary apologists would certainly have mentioned the fact, of outstanding importance, especially to Latin minds, in the case of a woman. One of them, at least, would have dragged it in, however irrelevantly, to increase the plea of her youth, her pathos, and her sex. The fact that none of them did so, not even Perceval de Boulainvilliers, whose admiration for her was great enough to allow him to remark, Hæc Puella competentis est elegantiæ, which one might colloquially render as ‘passably good-looking,’ may be accepted as a negative if not as a positive point in the inference that Jeanne was no prettier or more attractive than most girls of her region and class.fn4

  Apart from this surely legitimate inference, other deductions may be drawn from the very nature of the life she led at home and of the hardship she proved later able to endure. The climate of Lorraine is not always soft and favoured, as those who have known it only ,in spring and summer might be tempted to believe, nor does the existence of the working peasant in Lorraine or elsewhere consist always of lying among the buttercups of a golden meadow while contented cattle ruminate by the waters of a sleepy stream. Jeanne had to help her mother with the housework and the spinning, and her father and brothers with the ploughing and the harvest. Roughened fingers, a skin reddened by the sun, harshened by harder weather, stolid limbs, and stout muscles, the inevitable consequences of such a life, can scarcely have added to the feminine attractions of a girl whose feminine attractions, if she ever potentially had them, are never even mentioned by those who knew and loved her first.

  If common sense was one of her outstanding and most valuable characteristics, as I believe it to have been, then at least we owe it to her memory never to romanticise her unduly, as she would never have wished to be romanticised. There is enough romance, and to spare, in the facts of her life, without inventing also the legend of the china shepherdess leaning on her crook. Jeanne was not made of china, nor, except in legend, was she ever much of a shepherdess. Better, and truer, to see her prosaically, sensibly, and logically, as she herself would have wished to be seen, without embellishment or false claim.

  Those who describe her from either first-or second-hand knowledge give, on the whole, a consistent picture. Her hair, they say, was short and black; her complexion dark and sun-burnt, as might be expected. The author of the First Part of King Henry VI makes her refer to herself as black and swart; wildly unreliable chronicler though he was, it is still quite likely that his information on this point was derived from some handed-down tradition. The description of her hair given by witnesses who had known her received a curious little point of confirmation, when, in 1844, a letter came to light at Riom, addressed to the citizens of that town and signed ‘Jehanne.’fn5 But more interesting even than that signature was the seal, for a single black hair had been pressed into it by a finger. It was a common custom of the time, and it is tempting to believe that both the finger-print and the hair were Jeanne’s.fn6

  None of these witnesses mentions her eyes, but there is on racial grounds a strong presumption in favour of their having been brown; it has been suggested also, on the analogy of other visionaries, that they were slightly prominent. All witnesses agree that she was strong and well made: Estoit de grande force et puissance;fn7 Bien compassée de membres et forte:fn8 Belle et bien formée;fn9 her breasts were well formed, said the due d’Alençon, who had often slept beside her while on their campaigns. Young man as he was, he had watched her at her undressing; but he was careful to add that never had she aroused any carnal desire in him. So far they all seem to be in agreement. Only on the question of her height is there any apparent dissention. Was she short or tall? The Chronique de Lorraine describes her as haulte et puissante, but the Chronique de Lorraine is neither a reliable nor a contemporary document. On the other hand, an Italian soldier, who was present on her arrival at Chinon, told Philip of Bergamo that she was short as to her stature.fn10 The truth probably is that, although sufficiently tall for a woman, she looked much shorter when dressed as a man, a contention which may be personally endorsed by anyone who has seen even a tall woman in men’s clothes.

  We may presume her, then, to have been a strong, healthy, plain, and sturdy girl. Strong and healthy she certainly was, for otherwise she could never have taken her ordinary part in country life as a child, nor, later, could she have endured the sudden unaccustomed weight of armour and the long rides across country – rides which, one way and another, took her over some three thousand miles of our modem computation, or more than the distance from France to India.fn11 No evidence exists to the effect that her mysterious inspiration upheld her in these tesrs in any physical sense; it seems, rather, to have worked the other way round, so that her physical fitness came usefully to hand at the service of her celestial mission. Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret had chosen their servant well. In the inexplicable way of saints, they had picked on an ignorant able-bodied girl whose early training fitted her for the exhaustive demands they proposed to make on her toughness and her endurance.

  III

  All things considered, the little statue in the museum at Domremy probably comes nearest to a true presentation of Jeanne as she really was. The history of this statue is disputable and confused. Local tradition says that Louis XI, son of Charles VII, extended his royal b
enevolence to the preservation of the d’Arc family’s humble cottage at Domremy, and that the statue now in the museum, with its replica in a niche over Jeanne’s front door, represents a part of his tribute to the liberator of his father’s kingdom. That is as it may be. It seems more likely that the statue in the Domremy museum is a much later reproduction, with modifications according to the ideas of the time, of a section of a sculptural group set up in 1456 by the ladies of Orleans on a bridge spanrllng the river in that city.fn12 Certainly the statue at Domremy cannot be even an immediately posthumous portrait; it cannot be a portrait so nearly contemporary that we may suppose the sculptor to have been acquainted, if not with Jeanne in person, then at any rate with those to whom her features had been familiar, and from whom he could have taken advice as to her lineaments and general build. Yet there is something about this crude and clumsy little statue which carries conviction as other and more pretentious works fail to carry it. True, the portrait has been falsified in several particulars. The ruff and armour are obviously untrue to date; they are of the reign of Henri IV, or even Louis XIII, rather than of the reign of Charles VII. Then, again, Jeanne is represented with long hair: hair so long that it reaches to the buttocks in the kneeling statue; hair so ostentatiously long that she could have sat on it, were she sitting upright instead of kneeling. This is quite comprehensible when we reflect that one of the principal accusations against her was that she adopted men’s clothes and fashions; naturally, her apologists and rehabilitators, awkwardly embarrassed by her masculine career, aspired to present her under as feminine an aspect as possible. They went so far as to gild her sculptured hair, and traces of this particular rehabilitation survived so late as into the nineteenth century.fn13 Nevertheless, this fat untruthful little statue does contrive to suggest the commonsense, commonplace aspect of Jeanne as other more romantic portrayals fail to suggest her. There is something in those thick short thighs, those truncated arms, which evokes the unattractive peasant girl whom Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret so sagaciously selected for their purpose.