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

court to the dukedom of Burgundy. To pay him back, John had Louis murdered in 1407, and power vacillated between the Burgundians, led by John, and the Armagnacs, led by Bernard VII, count of Armagnac.
    As a result of his marriage, Charles was in the camp of the anti-Burgundians. When he was fourteen but already married, Charles’s last older brother died, and he became dauphin. Almost immediately, he quarreled with his mother, who sided with the Burgundians and lived under the protection of the duke of Burgundy (the murderer of her lover) at a dissolute but luxurious court. The duke’s enemy, the count of Armagnac, who had possession of Paris and the loyalty of the dauphin, had Isabeau arrested and stripped of her wealth. She blamed her son for this.
    In September 1419, Charles involved himself in the murder of John the Fearless, an act of vengeance for the assassination of Louis of Orléans. Although the actual murderer of John was never named, it was known that Charles was present on the bridge where an ax was buried in John’s skull. For some reason, probably to safeguard her wealth and her place in the Burgundian court, Isabeau took sides against her son and in favor of the murderer of her former lover. The complications of Isabeau’s relationship with Charles, her disloyalty to her son and the kingdom of France, are perplexing to the point of incomprehensibility. Certainly the Treaty of Troyes is a historical anomaly: a mother explicitly supporting her son’s enemies and implicitly casting doubts not only on his legitimacy but on her own sexual probity.
    Charles inherited his mother’s shortness of leg and was knock-kneed as well. His face was unprepossessing; his eyes were small and squinty, and his chin was weak. Although contemporary chroniclers praised his love of learning, everyone agreed that he was changeable and fickle in his loyalties. He had a habit of attaching himself to stronger, older men, most notably the duke de la Trémoille, who would never be a friend of Joan’s.
    De la Trémoille was a fat man of enormous height; he had the deepest pockets in France. His ready cash was responsible for his enormous influence, but probably his dominating physical presence had a humbling effect on weak, puny Charles. His policy was always one of diplomatic negotiation with the Burgundians rather than military confrontation with them and their British allies. In this, he was utterly opposed to Joan, who despised truces and felt that the Burgundians could only be spoken to “at the end of a lance.”
    De la Trémoille was famous as much for his girth as for his wealth; he was kept alive when an assassin’s sword couldn’t pierce his flesh. Iconically, this obese, wealthy, well-born courtier was exactly the opposite of the fleet, abstemious girl who came from nowhere, itching for a fight.

C’est le Premier Pas Qui Coute
    The first step in Joan’s remarkable journey is the most inexplicable, for it was the one she took unaccompanied by any sign of authority of gender or of class. She approached Robert de Baudricourt, the lord of her local bailiwick, escorted only by her godfather. She was seventeen years old and an illiterate peasant. She was asking for an army.
    Myth has created Robert de Baudricourt as a doughty old soldier, gruff but good-hearted, reluctantly taken in by a brave girl. Even Shaw recycles a legend that when Joan appeared at Baudricourt’s keep in Vaucouleurs, the hens stopped laying and the cows ceased giving milk, returning to normal only when Baudricourt agreed to speak to Joan. In fact, Baudricourt was a notorious plunderer and womanizer, and many people were surprised that Joan escaped a meeting with him with her virginity intact.
    When Joan finally got to see Baudricourt, she approached him with a straightforward lack of deference, an assumption of equality (she was, after all, sent by her voices) that must have stunned him. At their first