Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

aid. And it was in the midst of this calamity that Joan came, and I believe it firmly, she came from God and was sent to raise up the king and the people still within his allegiance for at that time there was no help but God. 1
    All of Charles’s life, beginning with his birth, was lived under a star of disorder and ill governance. He was born in 1403, the eleventh child of his parents. At the time of his birth, two older brothers stood before him in the line of succession. His father was Charles VI of France, and his mother, the German princess Isabeau of Bavaria.
    By the time Charles was born, his father had for years been subject to recurrent fits of madness, what in modern terms might be diagnosed as schizophrenia. He had his first attack in 1392, when he lost his mind during a military expedition and killed four attendants. He was sometimes violent and sometimes buffoonish; he suffered from hallucinations, such as believing that he was made of glass and had to carry pieces of iron in his clothing to protect himself. He refused to eat and sleep at regular hours; he allowed himself to become filthy and had to have his linen changed by force. Sometimes he would tremble and cry out that his body was being pricked by a thousand steel points.
    In 1392, Charles became so insane that he couldn’t rule at all; his brother Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, was made regent. Philip had married the heiress of Flanders and acquired her land, so he had aggregated an enormous amount of territory; this, in addition to his role as regent, made him immensely powerful. But when Charles was sane, he followed the advice, not of Philip, but of his other brother, Louis of Orléans. Both Burgundy and Orléans used their periods of power for their own ends; for example, each, when he was in favor, exempted his own lands from taxation. As a result of the king’s mental illness, the French court was in a state of utter disarray.
    Charles’s mother, Isabeau, provided no countervailing force of stability. She was terrified of thunder and had a special conveyance built to protect her from it; she was phobic about disease and agoraphobic. She was frightened of crossing bridges and would cross none without a balustrade. At the end of her life, she was grotesquely fat, to the point that her obesity made it doubtful that she could act as regent of the kingdom. She suffered from gout, and by 1425 she had to get around in a wheelchair. Pilgrimages were made in her name for her menstrual troubles.
    Despite her weight, her shortness of leg and stature, and her ill health, she was infamous for her promiscuity. She was probably the lover of Louis of Orléans, her husband’s younger brother. Her flagrant infidelities gave credence to the belief that her son Charles was illegitimate. In the Treaty of Troyes, which she signed in 1420, she suggested that he was not the lawful heir to the French throne.
    It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the uncertainty about Charles’s legitimacy, both to him and to the state. The sacred power of the king was his, literally, by blood, and if the blood could not be traced to his father, he was on the throne, not by the will of God, but by a subterfuge. Questions of authority are always interpretive, and Charles’s uncertain antecedents shook even the grounds upon which such an interpretation could be made.
    In signing the Treaty of Troyes Isabeau agreed to an arrangement that disinherited her son and made Henry V of England heir to the French throne on the grounds that he had married Isabeau’s daughter, Charles’s sister Catherine. But the problems between Isabeau and Charles began with the death of Louis of Orléans. The rivalry between Louis, who was ruthless and brilliant, and his nephew John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, had been a feature of Charles’s life since his childhood. Louis had, in his own financial interest, cut off the flow of money from the French