Reims

Sunday, 17 July 1429. The cathedral of Reims is a forest of stone built to do one thing: to take a man who claims France and make him, by oil and by prayer, a king. Charles went in with the peers who could be gathered, with the Archbishop Regnault de Chartres — the same prelate who had had to swallow a peasant’s mission — and with the Maid, in armor, her standard in her hand. The Sainte-Ampoule was brought. The oil that the legend of Clovis had made the oil of Frankish kingship was put on him. He was Charles VII, in the only sense Joan had ever been willing to use the word.1

She stood near the altar with the banner. They asked her, later, why the standard had been there, as if a girl at a coronation were a breach of order. She said it had been in the pain, it was right that it should be in the honor. It is one of her sentences that does not need a gloss. The banner that had been at the Tourelles was at the unction. That was the theology of the five months, in cloth.2

When it was done she knelt before him, and the chronicles say she wept, and that she called him her king. Some give her the words in the epigraph. They are in the manner of her speech — gentle king, the pleasure of God, the two tasks named — and they may be close to what was heard. Even if a clerk has combed them, the sense is not a clerk’s invention. She had said since Vaucouleurs that these were the two things. They were done.3

The family, the village, the tax

Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée came to Reims. The fact is easy to pass over in the smoke of a coronation, and it should not be. A labourer and his wife walked into the city where their daughter had just made a king, in the world’s eyes, and they saw her. Whatever had been the dream of drowning, it ended here, in a street in Champagne, with their child still alive, still armored, still their Jehannette. Isabelle would walk farther than this. In 1456 she would walk to Paris, old, to open the process that cleared her daughter’s name. That is Volume II. This volume allows them a night in Reims.4

Joan asked that Domrémy and Greux be exempt from the taille. Charles granted it. The exemption held until the Revolution, a peasant’s petition become a royal act become, for three centuries, a local memory of the Maid. If one wants a measure of what she thought a kingdom was for, this is a better measure than a statue: a village not bled for taxes because a girl had asked a king on the day he became one.5

The same day she dictated a letter to the Duke of Burgundy. She called him to the peace of the King of Heaven, to the true king now anointed, and to the withdrawal of his garrisons. She told him that they were ready to make peace, and that if they must fight, they would fight. Philip did not come to the coronation. He had been invited, in the logic of the letters, as a French prince to a French anointing. His absence is the political unfinished business of the day. The crown had been taken. The kingdom had not yet been gathered.6

What had been accomplished

In February she had left Vaucouleurs with six men. In March she had been examined at Poitiers as a possible heretic or a possible fraud. In April she had been armed. In a week of May she had broken the siege of Orléans. In June she had been at the destruction of the English army of the Loire. In July she had stood in Reims cathedral while the dauphin was oiled. There is no other five months like them in the history of the war, and few in the history of Europe. A military account can list the causes: English overextension, Burgundian hesitation, Yolande’s faction, the hunger of Orléans for any hope, the professionalism of Dunois and Alençon once they were allowed to attack. All of that is true. None of it was sufficient in April. The sufficient thing, in the evidence of the men who were there, was the girl who said she was sent.7

A Catholic reading does not require that every arrow was steered. It requires that we not perform, at the end of the story she named, a reduction we would be ashamed to perform on her own sentences. She said the King of Heaven sent her to do these two things. She did them. Charles was king in the sacramental sense. Orléans was French. The Treaty of Troyes had a crowned Valois in the field against it, which is what it had been written to prevent.

The edge of the volume

She thought, the chronicles suggest, that the work might now be finished, or that the next commands would be as clear as the first. They were not. Paris would not open. The court would go back to weighing Burgundy. In September she would be wounded again, under the walls of Paris, and in May of the next year she would be pulled from a horse at Compiègne. The voices, she said at Rouen, had told her she would be taken. They had not, in 1429, told the council to be wise.

That is why this book ends here, on 17 July, in the cathedral, with the standard still in her hand. Volume II is the long unwinding: the stall, the capture, the process, the fire, the second trial, the centuries. Volume I is the claim and the fulfillment. The rest is what men did with a miracle they had not asked for, and what they did to the girl who had brought it.

She was seventeen. She had not yet been to Rouen. She had not yet, on this Sunday, any reason to think that the Church she obeyed would one day light the wood. She had taken the king to the oil, as she had said she would. In the record that is the last clean sentence of her mission.