The Ride to Chinon

The Loire in March is a wide, cold river, and Chinon sits above it on a long spur of rock, a castle of several keeps rather than a single tower. Joan arrived about midday on 4 March 1429, if the reconstructed itinerary is right, and was put in a hostelry in the town. She did not walk straight into the king’s chamber. Courts do not work like that, even ruined ones. There were two days of looking at her.1

Behind those two days lay the eleven she counted. The company had passed Auxerre, heard mass, and kept off the main garrisons. At Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, on the last day before Chinon, she heard mass more than once and had a letter written to Charles asking to be received. Fierbois was a shrine of Saint Catherine, her saint, a place where French knights left tokens. She will send back here, a month later, for a sword. The halt is not a tourist’s piety. It is the first time the mission touches a royal sanctuary rather than a parish church.2

Charles’s counselors argued. A girl in hose, claiming saints, arriving from a frontier captain, might be a Burgundian plant, a madwoman, or a tool of Yolande of Aragon’s Angevin party. She might also be, in the categories they actually used, a messenger. Gerson had not yet written. Gelu had not yet written. The only test immediately available was the eye of a frightened prince and the gossip of a castle.3

The hall

On the evening of 6 March, or a day that cannot be far from it, she was brought into the great hall. The hall was full on purpose. The famous scene — Charles disguised among his courtiers, Joan going straight to him — is told by chronicles that like a sign. The rehabilitation witnesses are more careful. They agree that she recognized him and greeted him as if she knew him, and that there were many men, and that some had hoped to confuse her. Whether he had swapped a hat with a favorite is the sort of detail that grows in the telling. What does not grow, because too many people later swore to it, is the recognition itself, and the private interview that followed.4

She told him, in the hearing of others, why she had come: to raise the siege of Orléans and to take him to Reims to be anointed. She addressed him as dauphin, not yet as king. That distinction is hers, and it is exact. He was not king in the sense she meant until the oil. Then they withdrew. What she said to him in private she would not later tell a court that had the power to spare her life for the telling.

The secret

Later writers, some at some distance, said the secret concerned a prayer Charles had made, asking God that he might know whether he truly was the heir of France — a prayer born of the Treaty of Troyes and of his mother’s wrecked name — and that Joan told him the prayer, or told him God’s answer. Alain Chartier’s circle, the chronicler Sala, and others offer versions. Charles never confirmed them. Joan, at Rouen, said she had given him a sign from God and that her voices had forbidden her to speak it. The historian’s position is to report the existence of a secret that convinced him, to report the later explanations as later, and not to fill in the words.5

It convinced him enough. Not enough to put her at the head of an army the next morning — he was not a fool, and his clergy would not have allowed it — but enough to send her to Poitiers, where theologians of his obedience could examine her. Enough, also, to let her be seen. The Duke of Alençon, riding in from hunting, met her within a day or two, saw her take a lance, and became her partisan. Alençon was royal blood, a prince of the fleur-de-lis, recently ransomed. His friendship is one of the worldly instruments Yolande and the war party could use.6

Chinon did not yet give her armor. It gave her a hearing. In a court that had been losing for a decade, a hearing was already a political act. If she was a fraud, the king who received her was diminished. If she was sent, the king who buried her in an inn was disobedient. They chose the middle path of the late Middle Ages: examine, then use. Poitiers, not yet the battlefield, would be the first trial. It has been lost on paper. It has not been lost in what followed, because the men who sat there let her go on to Orléans, and Orléans is not a lost paper.