Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon Read Free Book Online

who had never traveled more than ten miles from her home, who had never in her lifetime lived in a united France or under an honored monarch, be so fixed on the idea of endowing a wobbling dauphin with authority?
    Part of the answer is that the idea of the sacredness of French kingship was probably the stuff of local lore. The image of a divinely bestowed kingship, made manifest by the symbol of the crown, was something that permeated French society. The legend of the sacred oil, carried in the beak of a dove in order to anoint Clovis, first king of the Franks, was readily available to Joan’s imagination. Her parish church of Domrémy was dedicated to St. Remy, the patron saint of Rheims, the very place where the sacred oil was housed and the kings of France were anointed. There were local cults devoted to the sacred kingship of Clovis and Louis IX, and prayers were regularly offered to them for the protection of the king, who was seen to be under God’s special care. That Joan would have been susceptible to such a religious iconography is evident by her naming St. Michael as one of the three saints who spoke to her in her visions. St. Michael was Charles VII’s particular patron, and Charles had sponsored festivals and places of worship to encourage the association of himself with the Warrior Angel.
    The symbols connected with the king: the crown and the holy oil, the archangel Michael, and the kingship they represented may have served someone like Joan, who wanted order and clarity and singularity, with an image capable of creating a coherence that would be an alternative to the chaos and disorder that had constituted public life since her birth. But though it was a problem to create the image of a united France—particularly considering the civil war with Burgundy—the image of a single, divinely protected personage was much easier to come by. Certainly a French king would seem a solution to the horror wreaked by his enemies the Burgundians.
    Perhaps Joan extended the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend to include the notion that the opponent of my marauder may be my salvation. In any case, after 1428, when the Burgundians invaded Domrémy, Joan’s visions changed from the personal to the political; the saints spoke less of her preserving her virginity and more of her saving France. By the winter of 1428, or half a year after the Burgundians destroyed her home, Joan was fixed on the idea of making herself the soldier who would crown the king.
    Joan may have imagined that Charles and his court were models of stability and order, but this was not the case. In fact, the entire history of Joan’s imagination of Charles, and her relations with him, can be read as the conflict between mythical ideal and reality. The court of Charles VII was financially bankrupt, psychologically debilitated, and politically paralyzed. The butcher of Bourges refused to provide meat for the court on the grounds that he had not been paid, and for the same reason a cobbler refused to deliver slippers that Charles had ordered. Despite the financial realities, Charles felt compelled to keep up the extravagant and overelaborate court life that was a feature of the times, creating an atmosphere of decadent luxury and plunging himself further into debt. Margaret La Touroulde, wife of the king’s receiver general, later one of Joan’s hostesses, paints a dark picture of the state of Charles’s court.
    When Joan came to the king at Chinon, I was at Bourges where the queen was. At that time there was in his kingdom and in those parts in obedience to the king such calamity and lack of money that it was piteous, and indeed those true to their allegiance to the king were in despair. I know it because my husband was at that time Receiver General and, of both the king’s money and his own, he had not four crowns. And the city of Orléans was besieged by the English and there was no means of going to its