Vaucouleurs

Jean de Metz asked her, in the Le Royer house, what she wanted. He was a gentleman of the garrison, not a mystic. His deposition of 1456, given when he was old, still has the snap of the first conversation. She said she had come to the captain so that he would send her to the king. She said she must raise the siege of Orléans and take the dauphin to be anointed. De Metz asked whether she meant to go like that, in a woman’s clothes. She said she would take a man’s dress and a sword. He gave her his word that, God willing, he would take her.1

Bertrand de Poulengy made the same promise. They are the first captains of her war: not famous, not on the later lists with Alençon and Dunois, but the reason she ever saw Chinon. Without two soldiers willing to risk a ride through Burgundian country with a girl the English would have burned as a mascot, there is no story. They believed her enough to go. That is a different and more expensive belief than a crowd’s.2

The Day of the Herrings

Baudricourt still held the gate. Then Joan told him something that, if the witnesses are right, he could not have expected. On or about 12 February 1429 she announced a reverse to the king’s arms near Orléans. She could not, by any ordinary road of news, have known that Fastolf’s herring convoy had broken the French and Scots at Rouvray that same day. When the report reached Vaucouleurs, the captain’s last easy explanation — that she was a local nuisance — was thinner. Even a careful man has to decide what to do with a girl who names a defeat at the hour of the defeat.3

This is one of the handful of incidents that must be handled with care. The testimony is later. News did move, and a captain’s town was a place for rumors. It is possible to write a version in which a scrap of information reached the Meuse and was dressed, afterwards, as prophecy. It is also possible to take de Metz and the others at their word. A Catholic history, without becoming a book of marvels, is allowed to say that the coincidence is in the record, that it helped to break Baudricourt, and that it is of a piece with the later, better-attested signs.4

There was a blessing or an exorcism at the church. Colet de Vienne, a royal courier, was in the town and could take a message. A small escort was drawn up: de Metz and his servant, Poulengy and his servant, Colet, and an archer called Richard. Six men and the Maid. The town bought the clothes. Baudricourt gave her a sword. He did not give her a letter that amounted to a full political endorsement, but he gave her what she needed, which was permission to leave his gates alive and mounted. “Go,” the tradition has him say, “and come what may.”5

Departure

They rode out of Vaucouleurs in the late afternoon of 22 February 1429, or the day beside it — the twenty-third is also argued. It was the dead of winter. They traveled by night when they could, through country that would have paid for her. She wore the tunic and hose, hair cut round as a squire’s. She slept in her clothes. The men later swore that they never desired her, which is a formula, and also that she had a quality that killed the thought, which is not only a formula. Poulengy said they slept beside her on the road and that her presence was a bridle.6

Eleven days, she said afterwards, to reach the king. The number is hers. The stages reconstructed by modern itineraries run Vaucouleurs to Saint-Urbain, then Clairvaux country, Auxerre, and west toward the Loire: a line that threads between garrisons. At Auxerre she heard mass in the great church. She was going into France as she had named it, and she was going as a soldier because that was the clothing of the command.

Behind her, Domrémy returned to its cattle and its river. Jacques d’Arc’s dream had come true, and he had not drowned her. Ahead, a prince who had lost Paris, lost his father’s name in a treaty, and lost a battle of herring, sat at Chinon among advisors who did not agree on whether he still had a war. Between them, in February mud, a small company moved that would make his anointing possible. They did not look like the salvation of a kingdom. That, too, is in the sources: the poverty of the instrument, insisted on by the girl herself. I am a poor maid. I would not have known how to begin, but for God.