The Sword in the Church
Sometime in April 1429, a seventeen-year-old girl who could not read, who could not write, who had never held a weapon or sat a warhorse, declared that a sword would be found buried behind the altar of the church of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois — a church she had never entered. Men were sent. They dug. They found it. The blade was rusted, but when they cleaned it the rust fell away as if of its own accord, and there it was: a sword marked with five crosses, waiting in the earth beneath a place of pilgrimage as though someone had planted it there centuries earlier for precisely this girl, precisely this moment. Whether you believe the voice of God told her where to look or that some canny political operator had staged the discovery in advance, the effect was identical. A peasant from a village on the edge of nowhere now carried a weapon that smelled of miracle. Within weeks she would break a siege that had strangled a city for six months. Within three months she would crown a king. Within fourteen months she would be captured, sold, tried, and burned alive at the age of nineteen in the marketplace at Rouen, her ashes scattered in the Seine so that no relic could be made of her body. The sword from Fierbois — that famous sword — would vanish from history around the same time, its fate as unrecoverable as her bones.
This is the central paradox of Jeanne d'Arc, called La Pucelle, the Maid of Orléans: everything about her is at once extravagantly documented and fundamentally inexplicable. We possess the full transcript of her condemnation trial in 1431, the depositions from the rehabilitation proceedings of 1455–56, her dictated letters, eyewitness testimonies from commanders and common soldiers, even the receipts for the oats bought for her horses. We know what she said under interrogation, how she answered trick questions about grace, where she was wounded and on which days. We know more about the interior life of this illiterate teenager than about most heads of state of fifteenth-century Europe. And yet the basic question — how a girl from Domrémy did what no duke, no constable, no prince of the blood could do — remains as resistant to rational explanation as the sword in the ground at Fierbois.
She is a figure upon whom everyone projects. French nationalists, Catholic mystics, feminist theorists, military historians, Marxist materialists, far-right populists, queer theorists — all have claimed her. Marine Le Pen invokes her.
Mark Twain called her "the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced," and he meant it without irony; his 1896 novel about her,
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, was, he insisted to the end of his life, his best work. The Catholic Church burned her as a heretic and then, 489 years later, canonized her as a saint. She has been the subject of works by Voltaire, Schiller, Tchaikovsky, Shaw, Dreyer, Anouilh, Brecht, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. She adorns a brand of canned beans.
Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England —
England, the nation that killed her — wrote that she "finds no equal in a thousand years."
What follows is not another hagiography. It is an attempt to see her as her contemporaries saw her: terrifying, unprecedented, politically useful, and ultimately disposable.
By the Numbers
La Pucelle d'Orléans
~17Age at the lifting of the siege of Orléans
9 daysTime from Joan's arrival to Orléans's liberation (April 29 – May 8, 1429)
11 daysDuration of her journey through enemy territory to Chinon
10,000 francsPrice Bishop Cauchon offered for Joan's transfer from Burgundian captivity
70Charges initially drawn against her at trial
19Age at execution, May 30, 1431
489 yearsBetween her burning and her canonization (1431–1920)
A Frontier Girl in a Broken Kingdom
To understand Joan you must first understand the France she inhabited, and that France was barely a country at all. It was a patchwork of duchies, counties, and contested allegiances, riven by civil war, occupation, plague, and famine. The Hundred Years' War — which would actually last 116 years, from 1337 to 1453 — was not merely a conflict between England and France but a dynastic inheritance dispute overlaid upon a French civil war between two branches of the royal family, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, who hated each other with the intimacy that only kinship can produce.
Domrémy, the village where Joan was born around January 6, 1412, sat on the Meuse River at the seam between these factions. Her father, Jacques d'Arc (or Darc — medieval surnames were fluid), was a tenant farmer of modest but not destitute means; he also served as a village tax collector and local official. Her mother, Isabelle Romée — the surname suggesting a pilgrimage to Rome — was devoutly Catholic and transmitted to her daughter a faith of unusual intensity. Joan never learned to read. She learned to sew, to spin, to tend animals, to pray. "I fear no woman in Rouen at sewing and spinning," she would later tell her judges, with characteristic competitive fire, even as they prepared to kill her.
The village had already been burned once by Burgundian raiders; the family had fled. This was the texture of life on the frontier: not abstract geopolitics but men on horses setting fire to your house, driving off your cattle, and requiring you to rebuild from nothing. Joan breathed the war's smoke before she ever claimed to hear its voices.
The broader political landscape was catastrophic. In 1415, England's Henry V — young, ruthless, brilliantly capable — had invaded France and annihilated the French army at Agincourt on October 25, slaughtering much of the French nobility in a few hours of arrow-shattered carnage. By 1420, Henry had forced the deranged French king Charles VI to sign the Treaty of Troyes, which disinherited the dauphin Charles — the king's own son — and designated Henry V as heir to the French throne. When both Henry V and Charles VI died within months of each other in 1422, an infant English king, Henry VI, was proclaimed ruler of both England and France, while the disinherited dauphin retreated to a rump kingdom south of the Loire, uncrowned, underfunded, and widely suspected of illegitimacy. The English, allied with the powerful Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, occupied Paris and most of northern France.
By 1428, the dauphin — Charles of Valois, technically Charles VII though he had never been consecrated — had essentially given up. He was considering fleeing to Scotland or Spain. Orléans, the last major city blocking the English advance into southern France, had been under siege since October 12, 1428. If it fell, nothing stood between England and total conquest of the kingdom.
Into this void stepped a girl who heard voices.
The Voices and the Vow
She was twelve or thirteen — she herself was never certain of her exact age — when it began. Standing in her father's garden in Domrémy, she saw a light and heard a voice. Over the following years, the voices multiplied and acquired identities: St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Margaret of Antioch. They spoke to her, she said, almost daily. She could see them. She could touch them. Sometimes she embraced and kissed them.
What to make of this is a question that has occupied theologians, historians, psychiatrists, and neurologists for nearly six centuries. Epilepsy, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, bovine tuberculosis from unpasteurized milk — the retrospective diagnoses pile up like the discarded hypotheses of embarrassed specialists. None of them explain what matters, which is not the origin of the voices but their content and their effect. The voices told Joan that she — not a knight, not a duke, not a prince — must drive the English from France and ensure the dauphin's coronation at Reims. She resisted for years. "I would prefer to spin wool beside my poor mother," she later said, "because this is not of my social station." But the voices insisted, and eventually she obeyed.
Historian Helen Castor has argued persuasively that Joan's contemporaries would not have been shocked by the mere fact of a woman hearing divine voices; female visionaries were "a noted feature of the time," a recognized if contested category of religious experience in an age still reeling from the Western Schism's fracturing of papal authority. What was genuinely shocking was what the voices told her to do: not to pray, not to prophesy, not to counsel a prince from a convent cell, but to put on armor, pick up a sword, and lead men into battle. That was without precedent. That was derangement — or divinity.
She took a vow of chastity. She chose the name "la Pucelle" — the Maiden, the Virgin — not merely as a descriptor but as a title, a claim to authority grounded in her undefiled body. In an age that believed the devil could not inhabit a virgin, Joan's physical purity was not incidental to her mission; it was the mission's credential. When she later arrived at Chinon, she would be subjected to a physical examination to verify her virginity. She passed.
Two Trips to Vaucouleurs
In May 1428, Joan walked to Vaucouleurs, the nearest garrison loyal to the dauphin, roughly ten miles from Domrémy. She asked the garrison commander, Robert de Baudricourt, for an armed escort to take her to the royal court at Chinon. She was sixteen. Baudricourt — a grizzled soldier who had held out against English and Burgundian pressure by stubbornness and political skill — thought she was either mad or a witch. He sent her home.
She came back in January 1429. Something had shifted. Perhaps it was the worsening military situation; perhaps it was the quiet persistence of the girl herself, her refusal to disappear, the strange gravity of her conviction. She gained the support of two local men of standing. She correctly predicted a French military defeat at the Battle of the Herrings near Orléans on February 12, before news of it had reached Vaucouleurs — a detail that electrified the garrison. Baudricourt, persuaded that she was "neither a witch nor feebleminded," relented.
On or around February 13, 1429, Joan left Vaucouleurs dressed in men's clothes — her hair cropped, her body wrapped in a soldier's tunic — accompanied by six men-at-arms. She was crossing 350 miles of enemy-held territory in midwinter. The journey took eleven days. She arrived at Chinon alive.
The men's clothing would become, in the end, the instrument of her death. But at this moment it was a practical necessity: a young woman traveling through lawless territory needed to pass as something other than prey. Joan would later justify the clothing on theological grounds — her saints commanded it — but the initial choice was survival, not theology. The theology came later, as it always does.
The Test at Chinon
The dauphin Charles was twenty-six, pallid, indecisive, haunted by rumors of his own illegitimacy — whispers that his mother, the famously dissolute Queen Isabeau, had cuckolded the mad king with any number of courtiers. He had the look, one chronicler noted, of a man perpetually awaiting bad news. His court at Chinon was a place of factionalism and paralysis, dominated by his chief adviser Georges de La Trémoille — a bloated, self-interested courtier whose primary talent was the prevention of anything decisive.
Charles tested Joan. He hid himself among three hundred courtiers, dressed identically to his nobles, and waited to see if the peasant girl could find him. Joan walked straight to him. She told him she had come to fight the English and to see him crowned at Reims. In a private conversation whose contents have never been revealed, she told him something — what, exactly, no one knows — that convinced him she carried a genuine message. One persistent tradition holds she described the details of a secret prayer Charles had made to God, begging for confirmation of his legitimacy. Whatever she said, it worked. The man who could not decide anything decided to believe her.
But belief required institutional validation. Joan was sent to Poitiers, where eminent theologians allied with the dauphin interrogated her for three weeks. The records of these examinations have not survived. What we know is her response when they demanded proof of her mission: "It is not at Poitiers but at Orléans that I shall give proof." The theologians, hedging their bets with the cautiousness of men who had survived the Western Schism, recommended that "in view of the desperate situation of Orléans," Charles should "make use of her."
Nine Days at Orléans
By April 1429, Orléans had been besieged for six months. The English had constructed a ring of fortified positions — bastilles — around the city, slowly choking it. The garrison and populace were demoralized, supplies dwindling, hope essentially extinguished. The Count of Dunois, commanding the city's defense — the bastard half-brother of the captive Duke of Orléans, a capable soldier in his own right — later testified that before Joan's arrival, "two hundred [English] would previously rout eight hundred or a thousand of the Royal troops."
Joan arrived on April 29 with a supply convoy. She had been equipped at Tours with armor, a military household, a squire named Jean d'Aulon, and the company of her brothers Jean and Pierre. She carried a standard painted with an image of Christ in Judgment and a banner bearing the name of Jesus. The sword from Fierbois hung at her side.
On the evening of May 4, she was resting when she sprang up — "apparently inspired," the sources say — and announced she must attack the English immediately. She armed herself, hurried to an English fort east of the city where fighting had already begun, and her arrival roused the French soldiers to take it. On May 5, she dictated a third letter to the English, this one fired by crossbow bolt into the fortress of Les Tourelles: "You, men of England, who have no right to this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and notifies you through me, Joan the Maiden, to leave your fortresses and go back to your own country; or I will produce a clash of arms to be eternally remembered. And this is the third and last time I have written to you; I shall not write anything further." The English called her a harlot. She burst into tears.
On May 6, Joan crossed to the south bank of the Loire and attacked another English position; the garrison evacuated. On May 7, the French assaulted Les Tourelles itself. Joan was hit by an arrow — it pierced the flesh between her neck and shoulder — but she pulled it out, had the wound dressed, and returned to the fight within the hour. Her presence — visible, bleeding, refusing to leave — held the attack together. The English capitulated by evening.
On May 8, the English retreated from Orléans. Joan refused to allow pursuit because it was a Sunday.
In nine days, a siege that had paralyzed France for half a year was broken. The girl who could not sign her own name had done what the constables and marshals of France could not.
I am sent here by God the King of Heaven — to drive you entirely out of France. And if they are willing to obey, I shall have mercy on them.
The Road to Reims
What followed was a campaign of breathtaking speed. Joan urged Charles to march immediately to Reims for his coronation — Reims, deep in enemy territory, the ancient city where French kings had been anointed since the fifth century. Without the sacred oil at Reims, Charles was merely a claimant. With it, he was the Lord's anointed. Joan understood something the professional politicians around Charles did not, or refused to acknowledge: that legitimacy in medieval France was a sacramental question before it was a military one.
Charles vacillated. His counselors advised caution — take Normandy first, consolidate, negotiate. La Trémoille whispered against haste. Joan overrode them all. "She was aware of the dangers and difficulties involved," the chroniclers note, "but declared them of no account." Her impatience was legendary; she harangued, pleaded, demanded. She won.
On June 18, 1429, at Patay, the French army met the English in open battle. Joan had promised success: "Charles would win a greater victory that day than any he had won so far." The English were routed. Their reputation for invincibility — built on Crécy, on Poitiers, on Agincourt — was shattered at last. This was the battle that truly broke the war's psychological architecture.
The march to Reims proceeded. Town after town submitted or opened its gates: Troyes, where Joan wrote to the inhabitants promising pardon if they surrendered; Châlons, where the count-bishop handed over the city's keys; and finally Reims itself, on July 16. The coronation took place the next day, July 17, 1429. Joan stood near the altar, holding her banner. When the ceremony was complete, she knelt before Charles and called him her king for the first time.
That same day — the very same day, with the sacred oil still drying on the king's brow — Joan dictated a letter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. It is a remarkable document: at once a plea for peace, a threat, and a confession of weariness. "Prince of Burgundy, I pray, beg, and request as humbly as I can that you wage war no longer in the holy kingdom of France," she wrote. "And if it should please you to make war, then go against the Saracens."
I tell you, in the name of the King of Heaven, my rightful and sovereign Lord, for your well-being and your honor and upon your lives, that you will never win a battle against the loyal French.
The Maid Abandoned
The coronation was the summit. Everything after was descent.
Charles, now legitimately king, no longer needed the girl whose visions had made him one. Worse, she had become politically inconvenient — too popular, too independent, too insistent that the war must be pressed to its conclusion. La Trémoille saw her as a rival center of gravity. The professional courtiers resented a peasant who spoke to the king as an equal and chastised lords for swearing. Joan's temperament did not help: she was volatile, impatient, capable of cutting sarcasm, and refused to defer to men whose birth outranked hers by every measure of medieval social hierarchy. She had once told Catherine de La Rochelle — a rival visionary who claimed a "white lady" spoke to her — to "return to her husband, do the housework and raise her children," a dismissal so acidly domestic it could have come from a fifteenth-century sitcom.
In August, Charles retreated from Paris when he should have attacked. On September 8, Joan led an assault on the city anyway, standing forward on the earthworks, calling on the Parisians to surrender. She was wounded — a crossbow bolt to the thigh — and continued fighting until ordered to withdraw. The next day she and the Duke of Alençon tried to renew the attack. The king's council forbade it.
The army was disbanded at Gien on September 22. Alençon and the other captains went home. "Only Joan remained with the king." The sentence, from the Britannica account, is devastating in its simplicity. The lords dispersed to their estates; the girl who had no estate, no title (not yet — the letters patent of ennoblement came in December), no power base beyond the conviction that God had spoken to her, had nowhere else to go.
Charles sent her on secondary campaigns: Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, taken in October through what her squire described as near-suicidal courage. La Charité-sur-Loire, besieged in November — but the supplies arrived too late, and after a month she had to withdraw. She dictated a letter to the citizens of Riom, asking for gunpowder, saltpeter, sulfur, projectiles, and crossbow catapults. "Do well enough in this matter," she wrote, "that the siege will not be prolonged for lack of gunpowder and other war materials, and that no one can say you were negligent or unwilling." The signature at the bottom — "Jehanne" — is believed to be her own hand. Someone had been teaching her to write her name.
The Sortie at Compiègne
By the spring of 1430, the Duke of Burgundy was threatening Brie and Champagne. Joan, who had been wintering with the king in towns along the Loire, left court in late March or early April — without authorization, accompanied only by her brother Pierre, her squire, and a small band of men-at-arms. She was done waiting for a king who would not fight.
She arrived at Compiègne by May 14. On May 23, she led a sortie against Burgundian forces besieging the city. She attacked twice, driving them back. On the third engagement, English reinforcements outflanked her. She remained at the rear to protect her retreating soldiers while they crossed the Oise River. She was pulled from her horse. She could not remount. She surrendered.
Renaud de Chartres, Archbishop of Reims — the man who owed his political position to the very coronation Joan had made possible — wrote to the people of Reims to inform them of her capture. He accused her of "rejecting all counsel and acting willfully." Charles VII, who was at that moment negotiating a truce with the Duke of Burgundy, made no attempt to rescue her. No ransom was offered. No diplomatic pressure applied. The king whom she had crowned simply let her go.
John of Luxembourg, the Burgundian captain who held her, sent Joan to his castle in Vermandois. She tried to escape. He sent her to a more distant castle. She jumped from a tower into the moat — a drop that knocked her unconscious but somehow did not kill her. At trial, this would be cited as evidence of attempted suicide.
On July 14, 1430, Pierre Cauchon — Bishop of Beauvais, a pro-English clergyman whose entire career had been built on collaboration with the occupation — presented himself before the Duke of Burgundy and, on behalf of the English crown, offered 10,000 francs for Joan's transfer. By January 3, 1431, she was in Cauchon's hands.
A Court Without Mercy
Pierre Cauchon was a man perfectly calibrated for this task. Born into the lesser nobility of Champagne, educated at the University of Paris — which had sided with the English — he had served as a Burgundian agent since at least 1415, when he accepted a commission to bribe officials at the Council of Constance on behalf of Duke John the Fearless. He was bishop of a diocese from which he had been expelled by Joan's victories. The trial was not a search for truth. It was a political instrument designed to discredit Charles VII by proving that the king owed his coronation to a heretic — or, at minimum, to a woman possessed by demons.
The trial convened at Rouen, in the castle of Bouvreuil, headquarters of the English military commander, the Earl of Warwick. Joan was chained in a cell guarded by English soldiers — men, inside her cell, at all times. She was denied access to Mass. She was denied counsel for her defense, as the Inquisitorial procedure of the period did not permit it. Her co-judges were Cauchon and Jean Lemaître, the vice-inquisitor of France, and the assessors — nearly forty of them — were almost entirely drawn from the pro-English University of Paris.
Between February 21 and March 24, 1431, Joan was interrogated nearly a dozen times. She was required to swear anew each time to tell the truth; she always stipulated that she would not reveal what she had told Charles in their private audience. She was nineteen years old, illiterate, alone in enemy hands, surrounded by hostile theologians, and she parried their questions with a wit and self-possession that still, nearly six hundred years later, astonishes anyone who reads the transcript.
Asked if she was in God's grace — a trap: to answer yes was heresy (presuming on divine judgment), to answer no was self-condemnation — she replied: "If I am, may God keep me there! If I am not, may God grant it to me!" Even her interrogators were impressed. When they threatened her with torture, she answered that "even if they tortured her to death she would not reply differently, adding that in any case she would afterward maintain that any statement she might make had been extorted from her by force." The interrogators, by a vote of ten to three, decided torture would be useless.
The seventy original charges were reduced to twelve, centering on her claim to direct divine communication, her refusal to submit to the authority of the church militant, her wearing of men's clothing, and her "blasphemous presumption" in identifying her pronouncements with divine revelation. On May 9, threatened with being handed over to secular authorities for execution, she responded: "I am relying on our Lord. I hold to what I have already said."
The Burning
On May 24, 1431, Joan was brought to the cemetery of the church of Saint-Ouen for the reading of her sentence. A theologian preached a sermon that violently attacked Charles VII; Joan interrupted him — "he had no right to attack the king, a 'good Christian'" — and asked that all evidence be sent to Rome. Her judges ignored the appeal to the pope and began reading the sentence abandoning her to secular execution.
She broke. Hearing the words — seeing the stakes, the wood, the fire — she declared she would do what the church required. She signed a document of abjuration, hesitatingly, on the condition that it was "pleasing to our Lord." She was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment and ordered to put on women's clothes. She obeyed.
Two or three days later, when the judges visited her cell, she was again wearing men's clothing. She told them she had resumed it of her own free will. Whether she chose this freely or was forced by her English guards — who may have removed the women's clothes from her cell, leaving her nothing else to wear — remains one of the most bitterly debated questions in the entire case. She told her interrogators that the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret had censured her "treason" in making the abjuration.
This was relapse. On May 29, her judges and thirty-nine assessors voted unanimously that she must be handed to the secular arm.
On the morning of May 30, 1431, Cauchon granted her — unprecedentedly for a relapsed heretic — permission to make confession and receive Communion. Two Dominican friars accompanied her to the Place du Vieux-Marché in the center of Rouen. A sign above the stake read: Jehanne, called la Pucelle, liar, pernicious, seducer of the people, diviner, superstitious, blasphemer of God, presumptuous, misbelieving the faith of Jesus Christ, braggart, idolater, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic. She asked one of the Dominicans to hold a crucifix high enough for her to see it above the flames and to shout the assurances of salvation so loudly that she could hear him over the roar of the fire.
She cried "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus" until the smoke took her voice.
According to the rehabilitation testimonies of 1456, "few witnesses of her death seem to have doubted her salvation."
Her ashes were thrown into the Seine. The English wanted nothing left that could become a relic. But they had already made her one.
If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.
The Verdict Reversed, the Saint Made
Charles VII, the king Joan had crowned, waited nineteen years to inquire into her trial. In 1450, after reconquering Rouen, he ordered an investigation — not, it seems, from guilt, but because the stigma of having been crowned by a convicted heretic was politically inconvenient. The inquiry was slow, bureaucratic, typically royal. A more thorough investigation followed in 1452. Finally, in 1455–56, on the order of Pope Calixtus III and following a petition from Joan's mother, Isabelle Romée — now elderly, now widowed, who addressed the opening session at Notre Dame with an impassioned plea to clear her daughter's name — a formal rehabilitation trial was conducted by Jean Bréhal, Inquisitor-General of France.
The rehabilitation collected testimony from 115 witnesses. Friends from Domrémy remembered her piety. Soldiers remembered her courage. The transcript is a remarkable document: an entire society trying, a quarter century too late, to reckon with what it had allowed to happen. The original condemnation was declared null and void on July 7, 1456. Joan was described as a martyr executed by a court that had itself violated church law.
Canonization took centuries longer. The process was interrupted by wars, revolutions, the separation of church and state. In 1869, the French Catholic hierarchy petitioned the Vatican. In 1909, Pope Pius X beatified her. On May 16, 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan of Arc as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church — not, notably, as a martyr or military leader, but as a virgin who exemplified heroic virtue. Over sixty thousand people attended the ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica, including 140 descendants of Joan's family. The French parliament, on June 24, 1920, decreed a yearly national festival in her honor, held the second Sunday in May.
The Hundred Years' War itself had continued for twenty-two years after Joan's death. It was the defection of Philip the Good from his English alliance in 1435, not any single battlefield victory, that provided the strategic foundation for France's recovery. Joan did not win the war. What she did was alter the war's meaning — from a struggle between competing feudal claims into something resembling a national cause. Before Joan, France was a collection of territories. After Joan, France was an idea.
The Girl at the Center of the Myth
Strip away the theology, the politics, the five centuries of appropriation, and what remains is a personality of extraordinary vividness, captured in the trial transcripts with the granularity of a modern deposition.
She was funny. When asked in what language her voices spoke to her, she replied: "Better language than yours." She was competitive: her boast about fearing no woman in Rouen at sewing and spinning is not the remark of a mystic but of a person who cares about being the best at things. She was volcanic — once she had authority, she did not hesitate to chastise prestigious knights for swearing, skipping Mass, or dismissing her battle plans. She accused her noble patrons of cowardice in their dealings with the English. She was physically tough: wounded at Orléans by an arrow between neck and shoulder, she pulled it out, had the wound dressed, and returned to the fight. Wounded again at Paris by a crossbow bolt to the thigh, she refused to leave the field until ordered. She survived a jump from a sixty-foot tower. She was compassionate: at the storming of Saint-Loup, she personally saved a group of English prisoners from being killed by her own troops. She was inflexible, willful, impossible. Renaud de Chartres's accusation — that she "rejected all counsel and acted willfully" — was intended as condemnation but reads, in retrospect, as the most accurate character description anyone gave of her.
She was also, crucially, a teenager. The sources record a girl who wept when the English called her a harlot, who worried about the people of Reims, who wrote letters of reassurance to frightened towns, who asked her judges to let her go to Mass. She was nineteen when she died. Whatever else she was — saint, heretic, military genius, political symbol — she was a nineteen-year-old girl burned alive by men who could not tolerate what she had done to the order of their world.
Mark Twain, who spent twelve years researching her and two years writing about her, who considered
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc his finest achievement, put it plainly: "She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one."
In the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen, where she burned, there is a modern church dedicated to her. On the wall of the marketplace, the words of André Malraux are inscribed: "O Jeanne, sans sépulchre et sans portrait, toi qui savais que le tombeau des héros est le cœur des vivants" — "O Joan, without tomb and without portrait, you who knew that the tomb of heroes is the heart of the living."
She had no tomb. She had no portrait — the only image made in her lifetime is a rough sketch by a clerk of the Paris parliament in 1429, drawn from hearsay, showing a girl with long hair holding a banner. She had never had long hair, and she never carried a banner like that. Even the one contemporary depiction of her got her wrong.
But the living remembered. They always have.
