Armor, Standard, and Sword

At Tours the household of a king who had little money spent some of it on her. She was fitted with a suit of plate, white armor, made to her size. She was given a horse. She was given a household of her own: pages, a squire, Jean d’Aulon as her master of the household — a good, dry, loyal man who would ride with her until Compiègne and testify, decades later, without frosting. Two of her brothers came. A Franciscan, Brother Richard, will appear later on the road to Reims; at Tours the spiritual furniture was simpler: she heard mass, confessed often, and had a priest within reach.1

The standard was her true weapon. She described it at Rouen with more care than she described any killing. The field was white, sown with lilies. On it, the world, an angel, the names Jhesus Maria. God, she said, had given her a bearing, and the painters at Tours made it. She had a smaller pennon besides. She held the standard in the fighting so that she would not use the sword, and she said she had never killed anyone. The captains who watched her did not take this for pacifism. The standard was a rallying point, a claim visible a mile off: the King of Heaven’s commission, not a baron’s colors.2

The sword from behind the altar

She sent to Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois for a sword. She said her voices had told her it was there, buried behind the altar, with five crosses on the blade. The clergy of Fierbois, asked to look, found a sword in the earth, rusted, and cleaned it. The story is in her trial answers and in the legend that grew around it. A Catholic history can say at least this: she named a place she had visited, a saint she had already claimed, and a weapon was produced from that church and put in her hand. The English would later call it witchcraft. The Valois called it a sign. The thing itself, as a blade, did not win Orléans. She said she loved the banner more.3

There is a temptation to make the Fierbois sword a relic in the narrative, as later piety did. The trial questions already treat it as a marvel that might be turned against her. Her own tone is almost offhand: she was told, she sent, they found it, she wore it until she broke it — on a camp-follower’s back, in one story, at Saint-Denis, which is Volume II. In April 1429 it is equipment. The mission is still the city.

Blois and the priests

She moved to Blois, where a relief army and a food convoy were being assembled for Orléans. The force was not large by the standards of Agincourt. It did not need to be, if it could enter the city and then fight the bastides. La Hire — Étienne de Vignolles, a hard captain with a hard mouth — was there, and the other captains of the Loire. Joan made them go to confession. She ran the blasphemy out of the camp as far as a girl could. La Hire is said to have invented a prayer that kept the words he knew: God, do what La Hire would do if he were God, and God were La Hire. Whether he said it or not, the tradition knows the collision: a professional butcher of men and a maid who would not let him swear.4

She also insisted that the convoy go with priests, singing. The Veni Creator on the road is in the chronicles. This is easy to sentimentalize. It was also discipline. A relief column that thinks it is on a pilgrimage behaves differently from a relief column that thinks it is on a looting march. Dunois, who was about to meet her, was a soldier who could use that difference.

The English still held the Tourelles and the western bastides. The obvious road into Orléans from Blois along the Loire’s south bank, then across, ran at those forts. Dunois, coming out to meet the convoy, took it instead by a longer loop, crossing to approach the city from the east, where the Burgundy Gate still opened. Joan, when she understood that they had avoided a fight to get the food in, was angry. The anger is reported by Dunois himself, which is why it can be trusted. She had not been sent, she said, to sneak flour past Talbot. She had been sent to throw him out.5

On 29 April 1429, in the evening, she entered Orléans by the Burgundy Gate. The people came with torches. A white horse, a white standard, a girl in plate. Jacques Boucher, treasurer to the Duke of Orléans, took her into his house. The city had been waiting since October. It had a week to go.