The Maid and the Queen (14 page)

And then came a surprise: Yolande could not get Charles to sign it. He was beginning to listen to the more militant members of his entourage, like Tanneguy du Chastel, who had been targeted more than once by the duke of Burgundy. Tanneguy, it turned out, preferred not to come to terms with a man who routinely murdered, or tried to murder, his opponents whenever their interests conflicted with his own. But Yolande was in charge and she worked on Charles until finally, the next year, her efforts were rewarded. Over the course of three days, between July 8 and July 11, 1419, the dauphin met the duke of Burgundy face-to-face on a bridge near Melun, and after a series of talks they shook hands and signed a treaty of friendship. The two even exchanged “the kiss of peace.” At this time, they also made arrangements to meet later in the year, in order to continue the diplomatic dialogue. All of France breathed a sigh of relief.

Having maneuvered Charles into what she believed to be a position of security, Yolande felt comfortable enough to leave the dauphin in the hands of his advisers and make a journey that she had already been putting off for far too long. It had been two years since her husband’s death, and she still had not brought her eldest son, Louis III, to Provence so that he could be formally installed as count in his father’s place. Provence was an integral component of Louis III’s inheritance; he could not hope to renew the family
quest to conquer the kingdom of Naples without the county’s support. She needed to secure the homage of the principal Provençal barons by going from town to town with her son, just as her mother-in-law, Marie of Blois, had done so many years before with Louis II. And so as soon as she knew that the treaty with John the Fearless had been signed, Yolande left Saumur and began the long journey south, taking Louis III and her two youngest children with her.

When Yolande quitted the dauphin’s court, she took the voice of moderation with her, and this would be France’s undoing. For in August, Henry V’s forces easily took the city of Pontoise and an Armagnac spy informed the dauphin that the duke of Burgundy had treacherously aided the English in this conquest. Although it is impossible to determine if this source was reliable, John the Fearless’s past behavior did not recommend him to the good opinion of those in the opposition party. The advisers surrounding Charles, particularly Tanneguy du Chastel, did not hesitate to believe the accusation. In a moment, all Yolande’s careful diplomatic groundwork was undone and a desperate plan conceived and put into effect.

As it happened, Charles had already arranged to meet John the Fearless for another diplomatic talk on the bridge of Montereau-Fault-Yonne on September 10, 1419. (Bridges were so often used as venues in these cases because it was generally assumed that it would be more difficult to conduct an ambush out in the open in such a confined space; in the event, this piece of conventional dogma turned out to be of dubious value.) On the appointed day, the two sides met as planned. The duke of Burgundy and the dauphin each stepped out onto the bridge accompanied by ten members of their respective entourages. As dictated by chivalry, John the Fearless went down on one knee before Charles and swept off his large black velvet chapeau in the required gesture of homage, at which point Charles, also following protocol, politely took him by the hand, raised him to his feet, and indicated that he could return his hat to his head. The niceties having been satisfied, Tanneguy du Chastel then shoved the duke of Burgundy from behind, so that another of Charles’s entourage could slash at his face more easily with his sword, and then Tanneguy du Chastel finished him off with his axe. In less than two minutes the once feared duke of Burgundy was on the ground with his internal organs spilling out all over the bridge. The whole operation was conducted with such ruthless efficiency that John the Fearless’s men did not have time to move before their leader was dead and they themselves surrounded.

This violent act, meant both to improve the position of the dauphin relative to his powerful cousin, and as the long-sought retribution for the murder of the duke of Orléans, did not achieve the desired result; rather it sent Charles hurtling along a downward spiral. As a result of the assassination, Isabeau, mistrustful of her son and fearing reprisals from the English, convinced the king to come to terms with Henry V. In a series of letters issued in May 1420, which became known as the Treaty of Troyes, Henry V was married to the princess Catherine, and then Henry was officially adopted by Charles VI in place of the dauphin as regent and heir to the French throne. The English army moved into Paris and held the capital as well as Normandy, Gascony, and Maine, while the dauphin Charles, distraught and disinherited, was exiled to the provincial court at Bourges.

But to Yolande of Aragon, who would be confronted with the aftermath of this fiasco (and the responsibility for cleaning it up), the parallels to the story line of
The Romance of Melusine
were stunningly obvious. For just like Raymondin, the fictional male protagonist in Jean of Arras’s tale, the dauphin, having participated in the murder of his cousin, the duke of Burgundy, was wandering lost and despondent in the forest of southern France. According to this narrative, Raymondin—that is to say, Charles—would eventually inherit all of the duke’s estates, establish a royal lineage, and become an even greater lord than his murdered cousin. There was just one element missing to turn this fiction into reality.

Upon her return from Provence, the evidence suggests that the queen of Sicily actively sought a Melusine as part of her strategy for reinstating the dauphin as the legitimate heir to the French throne. It is difficult to trace her movements completely, as for political reasons Yolande exercised discretion, but of one fact there can be no doubt.

She knew her when she saw her.

C
HAPTER
6

Childhood in
Domrémy

HE COURAGEOUS YOUNG WOMAN
who would one day become known all over France as Joan of Arc was born in 1412, three years before the battle of Agincourt, on a small farm on the eastern frontier of the kingdom. Her baptism was not recorded; the evidence for her date of birth comes from Joan herself. “As far as I know, [I am] about nineteen years old,” she told her inquisitors in 1431.

Very little is certain about her family. Her father, a farmer who apparently also kept some sheep and cattle, was variously known as Jacques Tart, Tarc, or Darc—Joan herself referred to him as “Jacques Tarc.” Her mother, Isabelle, gave birth to four children in addition to Joan: three boys, Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre, and a girl, Catherine, who died in childhood. Joan seems to have been younger than all three of her brothers; probably she was the fourth child born to Isabelle.

The precise circumstances of her childhood are unclear, but the family was not wealthy, as, according to an eyewitness, Joan “dressed in poor clothes.” As for schooling, she had none. “[I] knew neither A nor B,” she
once confessed. What little religious instruction she had came from Isabelle. “It was from my mother that I learnt Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo. Nobody taught me my belief, if not my mother,” she told her inquisitors.

There was nothing unusual in any of this. The concept of public education of the lower classes—and especially of girls—would not be embraced for centuries. What was uncommon in Joan’s case was her very high level of intelligence, which manifested itself at an early age. Her verbal byplay, which she later wielded against her inquisitors, displayed enormous gifts—untrained and unschooled, she bested and eluded learned men twice her age who sought to ensnare her in her own words. Her power of speech impressed all who saw her, beginning with her own family; early on, she convinced the husband of one of her mother’s cousins to aid her in her fantastic quest to seek an audience with the dauphin, even though this meant his risking the scorn of the commander of the local fortress, a form of public humiliation. Most telling was the comment of Albert d’Ourches, a member of the provincial gentry from nearby Vaucouleurs. “This girl spoke terribly well,” he said of Joan. “I would really like to have had so fine a daughter.” Birth was everything in the Middle Ages. Members of the underclass were uniformly viewed as vulgar and contemptible. It was singular, even for a member of the bourgeoisie, to set aside these prejudices and admire a peasant.

Her mental aptitude evoked comparison to the better-known female mystics of the Middle Ages, such as Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine nun who became abbess of her convent in Germany, and who also had visions, and Clare of Assisi. But the medieval saint with whom Joan would seem to have the most in common is Catherine of Siena. Born in the previous century, Catherine had been the youngest of twenty-five children. When she was six, she claimed to have been visited by Jesus and knew from that point that she was destined for the Church. Over the strong objections of her family, who wished her to marry, Catherine succeeded in remaining a virgin and finally entered a convent at the age of seventeen. There she taught herself to read and write in the vernacular and subsequently inserted herself aggressively into international politics by conducting a ferocious letter-writing campaign with the pope and various heads of state, in which she lectured her targeted correspondents on the inadequacies of their foreign policies. Among the royal recipients of Catherine’s epistles were Charles V, king of France; Louis I of Anjou (husband of Marie of Blois); Elizabeth, queen of Hungary; and Joanna I, queen of Naples.

Perhaps because Joan’s acuity did not have a scholarly or creative outlet—books or a teacher were required for literacy, and she had access to neither—her talent came out in her speech, and in her instinctive perception of the world at large. Her cognitive process was obviously rapid and comprehensive. It was as though she had an internal antenna that picked up all sorts of disparate signals, unconsciously set to work organizing them into a coherent narrative, and then later replayed them in her head, like a song on a radio.

J
OAN’S ENTIRE CHILDHOOD
and adolescence were spent on her parents’ farm and in the tiny village in which she was born. She learned to sew and spin thread and to help her mother around the house; she also worked with the livestock. “When I was quite big and had reached the years of reason, I did not generally guard the animals, but I did help to take them to the meadows,” she reported. This pastoral existence seems to have provoked misconceptions about Joan’s degree of isolation from events in the outside world. Because of its location—Domrémy was situated on the eastern border separating France from the Holy Roman Empire—historians as a rule have generally assumed the village to be a provincial backwater, a hamlet so poor and far away from Paris that its inhabitants could not hope to understand or care about the complex political and military situation in which France found itself. “Life [in Domrémy] was like the countryside itself, barely undulating, dull, where all strangers were foreigners and potential enemies, and all new ideas suspect,” wrote John Holland Smith, one of Joan’s biographers. “How had provincial France declined into this miserable condition?”