Joan of Arc 2/13
The second part of the thirteenth tale from Heroes of History
All those who had seen Joan told the same tale: she was always kind, simple, industrious, pious and yet merry, and fond of playing with the others.
One of her friends, a girl called Mengette, whose cottage was next to that of Joan’s father, said, “Joan was so pious that we other children told her she was too good.”
In peaceful times Joan would have lived and married and died and been forgotten. But the times were evil. The two parties of Burgundy and Armagnac divided town from town and village from village. It was as in the days of the Douglas Wars in Scotland, when the very children took sides for Queen Mary and King James and fought each other in the streets.
Domremy was for the Armagnacs—that is, against the English and for the Dauphin, the son of the mad Charles VI. But at Maxey, a village near Domremy, the people were all for Burgundy and the English. The boys of Domremy would go out and fight the Maxey boys with fists and sticks and stones. Joan did not remember having taken part in those battles, but she had often seen her brothers and the Domremy boys come home all bruised and bleeding.
Once Joan saw more of war than these schoolboy bickers. It was in 1425, when she was a girl of thirteen. There was a kind of robber chief on the English side, a man named Henri d’Orly, from Savoy, who dwelt in the castle of Doulevant. There he and his band of armed men lived and drank and plundered far and near. One day there galloped into Domremy a squadron of spearmen, who rode through the fields driving together the cattle of the villagers, among them the cows of Joan’s father. The country people could make no resistance; they were glad enough if their houses were not burned.
So off rode Henri d’Orly’s men, driving the cattle with their spear points along the track to the castle of Doulevant. But cows are not fast travelers, and when the robbers had reached a little village called Dommartin le France they rested, going to the tavern to make merry. But by this time a lady, Madame d’Ogevillier, had sent in all haste to the Count de Vaudemont to tell him how the villagers of Domremy had been ruined. So he called his squire, Barthelemy de Clefmont, and bade him summon his spears and mount and ride.
Barthelemy de Clefmont, with seven or eight lances, galloped down the path to Dommartin le France. There they found the cattle, and d’Orly’s men fled like cowards. So Barthelemy with his comrades was returning very joyously when Henri d’Orly rode up with a troop of horse and followed hard after him. He was wounded by a lance, but he cut his way through d’Orly’s men and also brought the cattle back safely—a very gallant deed of arms.
Three years later there was an alarm, and the Domremy people fled to Neufchateau, Joan going with her parents. Afterward her enemies tried to prove that she had been a servant at an inn in Neufchateau, had lived roughly with grooms and soldiers, and had learned to ride. But this was absolutely untrue.
In 1424, when Joan was between twelve and thirteen, a wonderful thing befell her. A Voice spoke to her and prophesied of what she was to do.
She told the same story both to friends and foes; to the learned men who, by her king’s desire, examined her at Poitiers before she went to war, and to her deadly foes at Rouen. Unluckily the book that was kept of what she said at Poitiers is lost. Before her enemies at Rouen, there were many things which she did not think it right to say.
When the Voice first came, she was in great fear. And it came, that Voice, about noonday in the summer season, she being in her father’s garden. And Joan had not fasted the day before that, but she was fasting when the Voice came. And she heard the Voice on her right side, toward the church, and rarely did she hear it but she also saw a great light.
Her enemies asked her if she heard these Voices there, in the hall of judgment, and she answered, “If I were in a wood, I should well hear these Voices coming to me.”
The Voices at first only told her to “be a good girl and go to church.” She thought it was a holy Voice, and that it came from God, and the third time she heard it, she knew it was the voice of an angel. The Voice told her of “the great pitifulness there was in France” and said one day she must go into France and help the country.
She had visions with the Voices, visions first of St. Michael, and then of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. “I saw them with my bodily eyes, as I see you,” she said to her judges, “and when they departed from me I wept, and well I wished that they had taken me with them.”
What are we to think about these visions and these Voices which were with Joan to her death? Some have thought that she was mad; others that she only told the story to win a hearing and make herself important; or, again, that a trick was played on her to win her aid. The last idea is impossible. The French court did not want her.
The second idea, as everyone will admit who reads Joan’s answers and follows her step by step from childhood to victory, to captivity, to death, is also impossible. She was as truthful as she was brave and wise.
But was she partially insane? It is certain that mad people do hear voices which are not real and believe that they come to them from without. But these mad voices say mad things. Now, Joan’s Voices never said anything but what was wise beyond her own wisdom, and right, and true. She governed almost all her actions by their advice. When she disobeyed her counsel, as she called it, the result was evil, and once, as we shall see, it was ruinous.
The End, Part Two