Free Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint by Donald Spoto

a third of their contracted allowance. Additionally, the royal military commanders were little better than bandits, and many of them were hired from Italy, Spain, and Scotland. The English militia found it almost easy to defeat them in battle after battle, from 1423 up to the siege of Orléans in 1429, and Charles’s constant attempts to end the war by seeking reconciliation with Burgundy were stymied by the memory of the old duke’s murder. By the time Joan arrived on the scene, according to one source, he was discouraged and disgusted; he considered giving everything up to the English and retiring to Spain. Just such a confused and confusing man awaited Joan that day.

    E ARLY DURING THE evening of Sunday, March 6, the Maid and her companions rode up the steep approach and across a drawbridge to the castle, which was comprised of three fortresses linked by bridges. At that moment a widely reported incident occurred. As Joan was about to dismount, a man, also on horseback, reined in her steed. “Isn’t this the famous maid from Vaucouleurs?” he asked, adding with a lascivious sneer: “If I could have you for one night, you wouldn’t be a maiden any more!” The anecdote concludes with Joan scolding him for such conduct and warning him that he was near death—an event that apparently occurred within the hour.
    Joan was escorted into the Great Hall; seventy feet long and thirty-three feet wide, it was packed with more than three hundred courtiers, friends, and supporters of the dauphin. And then the carefully planned ruse was set in motion. Charles had put off his royal finery and was dressed like an ordinary citizen, surrounded by others, with nothing to suggest his identity. If Joan was all that she was rumored to be, then her purity of heart should enable her to detect the king of France amid a vast throng. This was a standard test of spiritual discernment.
    Joan approached Charles straightaway, not at all intimidated by the august gathering. Many of Joan’s partisans then and later took this as another miracle, but that may be an unnecessary interpretation. She may well have been told about the ruse in advance, or someone may have described the king to her. In any case, her discovery of him is not as critical as what then occurred.
    By their side that evening was a chamberlain and knight of the dauphin named Raoul de Gaucourt, who was also governor of Orléans and thus responsible for shoring up its defenses. Years later he clearly recalled Joan’s words: “My most eminent lord Dauphin, I have come, sent by God, to bring help to you and to the kingdom.” * It was as direct and unadorned a summary as the dauphin—and anyone else before or since—could ask. Help for him and for France: that was her message and her vocation.
    Joan spoke with such quiet conviction, and so undramatic and unadorned was her reference to being “sent by God” that she was difficult to ignore. At that time, claims to bear a mandate from God were not rejected out of hand: they were tested, doubted, challenged—but not forthwith dismissed as inauthentic. The medieval mind took for granted that just as God had done in the great events of revelation from Abraham through Jesus, so He continued to act in the world through human agency. From that moment in the Great Hall, Charles was fascinated by the seventeen-year-old girl who stood calmly and confidently before him.
    He then took Joan aside for a few moments, and after a brief but apparently intense private conversation, he seemed to one member of his court to be “radiant.” At Joan’s trial—and in countless works since then—many speculated about the content of that discussion, which neither she nor the dauphin ever disclosed. Did Joan impart a specific revelation from her voices? Perhaps, for at her trial she insisted that she shared the nature of her mystical experiences only with Baudricourt and the king. But precisely what was the content of the revelation she shared?