The Voices

She was in her thirteenth year. It was summer, toward noon, in her father’s garden at Domrémy, on a fast day. She heard a voice, to her right, toward the church. There was a great light. She was frightened. Later she said the first voice was Saint Michael, and that he told her to be a good girl, to go to church, and that Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret would come to her. They came. She said she saw them with her bodily eyes, crowned, that they spoke French and named themselves, and that she kissed the ground they stood on.1

This is the center of her life. Everything else — the men’s clothes, the sword, Orléans, Reims, the stake — follows from whether those sentences are treated as the testimony of a liar, a sick child, a political instrument, or a girl who was spoken to. The condemnation court treated them as diabolical or invented. A line of modern writers has preferred migraine, bovine tuberculosis, schizophrenia, or an inner monologue dressed in the only language a village girl had for authority. This book does not follow that line.

Why the reduction fails as history

A historian is not a physician of the dead. We have no body, no pulse, no vision field. We have answers given under threat of torture, in a language being written down by enemies, by a girl who refused to tell the court everything because her voices had forbidden her to. The medical readings all require us to know more than we know. They also require us to ignore what the record actually shows: consistency over six years, practical instruction that led to specific military and political acts, and a moral content — go to church, stay a virgin, take the king to Reims — that is not the content of a delirium. Delirium does not raise sieges.2

The Catholic reading, which is the reading she herself gave, is that God may send angels and saints to a soul, that such sendings are to be tested, and that the test is fruit: doctrine, humility, obedience to the Church in what the Church may demand, and works. In 1429 the test was put to her at Poitiers by theologians of the Valois obedience. They did not canonize her. They said they found no evil in her, and that a sign would be given at Orléans. In 1456 the Church annulled the process that had condemned her. In 1920 it canonized her. Those are facts of ecclesiastical history. They are not, by themselves, the proof of 1425. The proof, if one wants that word, is the coherence of the life with the claim.3

A Catholic historian is not required to be naive. Private revelation does not bind the faithful as dogma binds them. One may, without heresy, reserve judgment on the metaphysics of another person’s visions. What one may not do, if one is writing her history, is replace her account with a fashionable one she never gave and then call the replacement more honest. She named Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. She kept those names under the questions of men who would have spared her if she had recanted them.

What the voices told her

At first, she said, they told her to govern her life. Then they told her that she must go into France, that she must raise the siege of Orléans, and that she must lead the dauphin to be anointed at Reims. They told her to take the white standard. They told her, later, of a sword at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. They forbade her to speak of certain things, including the sign given to Charles. They promised her victory, and they also promised her — she said this at Rouen with a calm that still startles — that she would be taken, and that God would help her. She did not claim to know the day of her death at the beginning. The mission had a shape: Orléans, then the crown. After that the instructions, by her own account, became harder, and the captains’ will and the court’s will closed in.4

She made a vow of virginity, as long as it should please God. The title she took, la Pucelle, is that vow made public. It is not a modern slogan. In a war-band it was a practical protection and a theological sign: the kingdom would be saved by a virgin sent, a France restored as a body is restored. Medieval people could read that figure without help. The English, reading it the other way, called her a cow-girl, a whore, and a witch. Both sides understood that the claim was the person.5

She did not tell her father. She did not tell the parish, except as a girl who went more often to church. For three years, by her count, she lived with the voices in secret. That secrecy is one of the more credible marks in the testimony. Invented prophets usually need an audience. She needed, she said, to wait until the voices told her to go.

The saints she named

Saint Michael was the war-angel of the kingdom, the saint of the Mont-Saint-Michel which still held out in English Normandy, the weigher of souls. Saint Catherine of Alexandria was the learned virgin martyred on the wheel, patron of young women and of philosophers, a saint one spoke to about speech itself. Saint Margaret of Antioch was the virgin who came out of the dragon. A village church taught these figures in glass, in statue, in feast-day. That they were the ones who came to her does not make the coming a collage; it makes it intelligible. God, in the world she inhabited, did not send strangers. He sent the saints the Church already knew.6

Asked at Rouen whether they had hair, she said yes. Asked whether they had arms, she said they did, and that they spoke well. Asked in what likeness Michael appeared, she said she would not tell them everything. Asked whether she had embraced them, she said yes, she had embraced them both. The court wanted anatomy. She gave devotion. There is an impatience in her answers that is not fever. It is the impatience of a person being asked to put a visitation into the categories of a police report.

She also said, and this will matter at Chinon, that her voices had told her a thing for the king which would set his mind at rest. She never divulged it to Cauchon. Charles never published it. The secret is a hole in the evidence. It is not a hole in the claim. People do not usually die for a private joke.

When she finally spoke of the voices to men-at-arms, she spoke as someone giving orders she had received, not as someone offering an opinion. “I am not come of myself,” she would say, “but by God’s command.” The sentence is either true, or it is the most consequential lie in French history. This book will tell what it accomplished, and will leave that sentence standing where she placed it.