Orléans

Orléans on the night of 29 April was a city that had learned to live under guns. The English bastides did not complete a perfect ring — if they had, the Burgundy Gate would not have opened — but they had taken the bridge-fort of the Tourelles in October and had sat through winter. The Duke of Orléans was still a prisoner in England. Dunois held his brother’s cause. The people had eaten into their stores. Into this came the Maid, and the city, which is a character in the Journal du siège, went into the streets.1

She slept at Jacques Boucher’s house. A girl of the household shared her bed, which was the ordinary chastity-guard of the time and later a piece of evidence at the nullification. On the 30th she went to the boulevard of the Belle-Croix, on the broken bridge, and shouted at the English in the Tourelles. Glasdale — William Glasdale, Glacidas in the French — shouted back that she was a cow-girl and a whore. She told him he would die without the Church’s help if he did not go. The exchange is not courtly. It is the letter of 22 March, delivered at shouting distance.2

Dunois left the city on 1 May to bring up the rest of the Blois force and returned on the 4th. Joan rode the walls, reconnoitered the English forts, and heard mass. On the 3rd, the Finding of the Holy Cross, there was a procession. The war had not yet been restarted. It restarted the next day.

4 May: Saint-Loup

On 4 May the French went out against the bastide of Saint-Loup, east of the city, the fort that threatened the very gate she had entered. Dunois had just returned. Joan, according to her household, had been resting; she rose, armed, and rode out because the voices told her to go against the English. Saint-Loup was taken. English dead and prisoners were made. She wept, they said, for the slain who died without confession. A Catholic history can record the tears without using them to soften the fact: she had ordered a fight, and men were killed in it. She did not pretend otherwise.3

5 May: Ascension

Thursday was Ascension Day. She would not fight. She had a letter shot into the English lines on an arrow, again telling them to go, in God’s name, and they answered with insults. A day without combat in a siege is not a truce; it is a liturgical refusal. The captains used it to prepare the south bank.4

6 May: the Augustins

Friday they crossed to the south side of the Loire, toward the forts that covered the Tourelles. The bastide of the Augustins was taken after hard fighting. The English were now pressed back upon the Tourelles themselves, the stone fortress at the head of the ruined bridge. If it fell, the siege fell. Talbot still held the northern and western forts; he could not easily reinforce the isolated southern works once the French were on that bank in strength. Joan spent the night in the camp, not in the city. D’Aulon remembered her exhausted and still refusing to unarm until the work was done.5

7 May: the Tourelles

Saturday was the day. They assaulted the Tourelles from morning. Joan took an arrow above the breast, went back, confessed, prayed, and returned. The wound is not a legend. Multiple witnesses saw the arrow, saw her pulled from the field, saw her come back. Toward evening the fortress broke. Glasdale, in full armor, fell into the Loire when a burning drawbridge or a scaling accident took him, and drowned. The English in the Tourelles were killed or taken. Night came down on a different siege.6

She had said at Poitiers that the sign would be Orléans. The sign, if one is keeping the Poitiers bargain, is this evening. Not yet the raising of the whole ring — that is tomorrow — but the breaking of the lock on the bridge.

8 May: the English go

Sunday morning the English came out of their remaining bastides and formed in the field, as if for battle. The French formed. Joan forbade an attack. It was Sunday. The two armies looked at one another, and the English folded their line, abandoned the forts, and marched off toward Meung and Jargeau. The city went to church. A procession was made. The siege, opened in October, was over in ten days of her being there, and in four days of fighting.7

A military historian can explain much of this without a miracle: the English were over-extended; the southern forts were isolated; a relief army and a fed city change the mathematics; Talbot did not have the men to hold a complete ring against a sortie in force. Kelly DeVries has written that explanation with respect. It is not the enemy of the other explanation. Joan did not fight by magic. She fought by making a hesitant command attack the right forts at the right time and by being seen, standard up, in the places where a fifteen-minute panic decides a boulevard. The captains say they could not have made the men do it without her. That is a military fact as well as a religious one.8

Dunois, years later, told the nullification judges that at her coming the city had been desperate, and that after Saint-Loup he had believed. He was not a peasant of Domrémy. He was the bastard of Orléans, a professional of the war. His belief is part of the evidence.

On 9 May she left the city to go to the king. She had done the first half of what she had named at Vaucouleurs. The second half was a road to Reims, through towns that still had English garrisons, in a kingdom that still had not had an anointing. The captains would have preferred, many of them, to hunt the English in the Loire forts and then perhaps to go toward Normandy. She had not been sent, she said, to take towns according to a council’s map. She had been sent to take a king to a cathedral.