The First Roads

The voices had given her a destination before they gave her a welcome. In the late spring of 1428 she went to her kinsman Durand Laxart, who lived at Burey-le-Petit, and told him she must go to Vaucouleurs to see Robert de Baudricourt, the captain. Laxart is called uncle in the depositions; he was the husband of her cousin. He took her. It is the first recorded act of the mission in the world of men.1

Baudricourt was a practical soldier holding an island of Valois loyalty in a Burgundian sea. A sixteen-year-old who said the King of Heaven had sent her to save France was not a military asset he could enter in a ledger. The story that he told Laxart to box her ears and take her back to her father is in the later testimony; it is the right kind of story even if the slap is too neat. He refused her. She went home.2

Home was not waiting. In the same season the war came down on the Meuse villages. The people of Domrémy drove their cattle to Neufchâteau and took shelter. Joan’s family lodged at the inn of a woman called La Rousse. The stay lasted a fortnight or so. The rehabilitation asked about the inn with a particular anxiety: had the girl lived among soldiers and loose women? Witnesses said she kept to the house, went to confession, and stayed close to her parents. The English later wanted a tavern Joan. The village gave them a refugee.3

The man who said she had promised him

There was also a lawsuit. A young man of the country claimed she had promised him marriage. She denied it and went before the officiality at Toul, the ecclesiastical court of the diocese. She won. The episode is easy to skip in a life of battles; it should not be skipped. It shows her already in conflict with the ordinary fate of a labourer’s daughter — marriage, a hearth, her father’s peace — and already willing to walk to a town and speak in a court rather than be bound. She said her voices had told her she must not marry. The Toul case is the vow meeting the village.4

Dates here are not clean. Some reconstructions put the first Vaucouleurs visit in May 1428, around Ascension; some put the Toul case after the flight to Neufchâteau; some put a stay with Laxart in 1425 that may be a memory mixed with later journeys. The sequence that best fits the witnesses is: first refusal at Vaucouleurs; raid and flight; return to a damaged village; the marriage claim; then, as Orléans began to starve, the second and third assaults on Baudricourt’s patience.5

Orléans as a clock

In October 1428 the English sat down before Orléans. Joan did not yet know the captains’ names she would later throw at Talbot in a letter, but her voices had already named the city. The siege is the clock of this volume. From the moment Salisbury’s guns opened, her private instruction had a public deadline. A mission to raise a siege is a mission that can fail in a calendar. That is partly why men eventually listened. Prophets who promise the end of the world can be postponed. A girl who names a city presently surrounded can be tested by the event.6

She went again to Laxart. She went again to Vaucouleurs. The second refusal was less complete than the first, because this time she did not go home to disappear. She stayed in the town, at the house of Henri and Catherine Le Royer. Catherine later testified to her spinning, her prayer, her going to the church of Saint-Nicolas. The town began to look at her. That is how a mission leaves a garden and enters politics: not by a miracle in the sky, but by a girl who will not go away, in a fortress that has no help to send its king.7

Baudricourt had her examined, in some accounts, by a priest, to see if there was evil in her. There is a memory of an exorcism, or of a blessing, at the church — a priest commanding any devil to leave. She submitted to it. The devil did not make a scene. The captain was not convinced, but he had begun to run out of the easy answers. Meanwhile the Duke of Lorraine, old and ill at Nancy, heard of her and sent for her, thinking perhaps she could cure him. She went, told him to put aside his mistress and be good to his wife, and asked for his help to go into France. It is a remarkable piece of nerve: a peasant correcting a duke in his own hall. He gave her four francs and a horse. He did not give her an escort to Chinon.8

By January 1429 she was back at Vaucouleurs. Orléans had been under siege for three months. The court of Charles had not relieved it. Two soldiers in Baudricourt’s garrison — Jean de Novelonpont, called Jean de Metz, and Bertrand de Poulengy — had begun to listen to her as men listen to someone who has already cost them their skepticism. De Metz later recalled asking her whether she meant to go in her own clothes. She said she would take a man’s dress. The town provided one. The hair was cut. The second life begins there, in borrowed wool, in a captain’s town that still had not said yes.9