The Loire

She met Charles at Tours and then at Loches, and she did not find a king ready to ride. The council wanted to weigh Burgundy, money, and the remaining Loire forts. She wanted Reims. Reims was a hundred leagues through towns that had sworn the Treaty of Troyes. To the captains who thought in terms of garrisons, a coronation march looked like theatre. To her it was the second half of the commission, and without it Orléans was a raid.1

Alençon was with her. So, increasingly, was the Constable’s shadow — Arthur de Richemont, out of favor at court, circling back toward usefulness. La Trémoille feared that more than he feared Talbot. The politics of the next weeks are a braid: a girl pulling toward Reims, a favorite pulling toward delay, captains pulling toward the English still sitting at Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency. For once the captains and the Maid could do the same thing first. The Loire forts had to come down or the coronation road would have an English army on its flank.2

Jargeau

On 11–12 June they took Jargeau. Suffolk was in it. The assault was fought in the streets and on the walls. Joan went up a ladder and a stone hit her helmet and knocked her down; she got up. Alençon later said she had told him to move from a place, and that a cannon-stone killed a man in the place she had named. Suffolk surrendered. An English commander of the siege of Orléans was now a prisoner of the people he had tried to starve. The war had reversed in six weeks.3

Meung and Beaugency

On 15 June they took the bridge at Meung-sur-Loire, not yet the castle. On the 16th and 17th they invested Beaugency. The English there, seeing the air change, yielded the town on terms. Richemont arrived with a force during these days, and there was a moment when the court party would have refused him. Joan, according to the men present, wanted every lance that would fight the English. The Constable stayed. Beaugency opened. The Loire crossings were coming back into Valois hands like doors on a single hinge.4

Patay

Talbot and Fastolf were in the field with the remaining English army of the region, trying to do what professionals do after a broken siege: concentrate, choose ground, fight on the defensive. On 18 June, near Patay, they were caught before the position was ready. A stag, in the chronicles, broke from the woods and through the English line, and the French scouts saw the movement. Whether or not one wants the stag, one wants the next sentence: the French horse came on at a gallop, Joan among the army, Alençon in the command, and the English did not have time to plant the stakes that had made Agincourt. Talbot was taken. The killing in the rout was large. Fastolf got away, and English opinion, which needs a coward when it has lost a legend, blackened him for it. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a long echo of this unkindness.5

Joan had said that morning, Alençon remembered, that the gentle king would have a greater victory than any he had yet had, and that her counsel had told her the English would be all theirs. Patay is the destruction of English offensive power in the Loire. After it, there was no field army to keep Charles from riding north if he chose.

He still had to choose.

The argument for Reims

At the council after Patay the old map came out again: Normandy, Paris, Burgundy, caution. Joan’s map had one road. Perceval de Cagny, Alençon’s chronicler, has her telling the duke to sound trumpets and put the dauphin on the way to his anointing. The Angevin party, Yolande’s interest, could hear that. The towns of the Champagne still had English or Burgundian garrisons, but they also had a habit, in this war, of opening when a king with an army and a ritual destination appeared. Medieval towns knew when a wind had changed.

On 24 June the army began to gather toward Gien, the staging-place for a march into the east. Charles came. The letters of summons for a coronation were sent. Joan wrote to the people of Tournai, loyal and far off, and she wrote to Philip the Good of Burgundy, telling him to make peace with the true king. She was already treating Reims as a fact that had not yet occurred. That is either arrogance or faith. The march would decide which word to use.6

A note, because Patay is easy to read as simple glory. The English dead and the prisoners were men. Joan’s tears at Saint-Loup have to be remembered here too, or the Catholic reading becomes a nationalism with incense. She wanted them out of France, not out of the Book of Life. The letter of March had offered peace on condition of departure. They had not departed. Patay is what the letter had promised as very great harm. It is not a contradiction of the offer. It is the other half of it.