Joan of Arc (27 page)

But with a shrug of his shoulders he must do his best:

With her maidenly hands, he says, she strengthened the French stem of the fleur-de-lis, saved the king from English fury and at the high altar in Reims had him anointed. In just four lines he recapitulates what she achieved. His true subject is announced in the lines that follow. He would have liked a beautiful heroine as gentle as a lamb rather than Joan with the heart of a lion, but she caused consternation by acting as she did; and what he most admired about her was that she kept her virginity for a whole year. And so, after a few swipes at Chapelain, he was off: his theme would be the losing of virginity. The variations on the theme kept him and his readers enthralled for twenty-one books and over 8,000 lines. As he explains in a note correcting Boileau’s epigram, at least unlike Chapelain he had not written twelve times twenty-four cantos, nor, unlike Chapelain, had he been rewarded with a pension of 12,000
livres tournois
by the Longuevilles, a sum that could have been better employed. Voltaire did not add that his own writing had made him rich.

Chapelain was only an excuse. Soon, without a nod to chronology, Voltaire was expatiating on the physical charms of Charles VII’s mistress Agnès Sorel. She would be the comic foil to Joan, ever liking the idea of being faithful to her royal lover, but sadly fragile whenever a handsome young man came near her. The king’s love-making worries St Denis, patron of France, who, admitting that he has an instinctive dislike of the
race bretonne
, justifies it on the grounds that his people, the French, will stay good Catholics while the English will become heretics; and for this reason St Denis puts his trust in the arrival of a
pucelle
. The presence of St Denis on one side and St George on the other enables Voltaire to guy Milton’s warfare in heaven in
Paradise Lost
. He admits that in the end the saints must make peace, but enjoys the opportunity to have a go at one of his pet obsessions, as St George speaks for the Old Testament – Voltaire never failed to point out how savage was the Israelite idea of God – while St Denis replies for the New Testament:

But if religion is never far from Voltaire’s mind, he focuses on chastity. Joan has to be constantly rescued from ever more bizarre temptations. Of all his masters in heroic romance Voltaire is closest to the Italian Ariosto, only more ridiculous, for instead of the Italian’s hippogriff, a horse with wings, the Frenchman elects for a winged donkey. So he stresses the gentle absurdity of his tale, as it moves to a fitting conclusion. Orléans will be saved and Joan will lose her virginity to the man who truly loves her, Dunois.

For all his intelligence, Voltaire’s mind was closed. He had little appreciation of traditional France, which survived happily in the provinces, where the year was still marked by the festivals of the Church, where great numbers of priests, canons, monks and nuns occupied large areas of every town and where during the quiet prosperity of the eighteenth century there was a new sense of ease and contentment. Joan’s adopted town of Orléans did well out of its close connection with the royal family and also its exploitation of international trade – its factories refined much of France’s valuable Caribbean sugar – and it fondly remembered Joan.
¹⁶

For centuries Orléans was devoted to Joan. As early as 1430 money was paid for candles to be lit to commemorate the lifting of the siege the year before; and from 1435, even while Joan’s memory was blackened by her condemnation as a sorceress and heretic, the Orléannais celebrated her goodness to them with songs, floats and lights. The habit lasted for centuries.

One of the most extravagant of the early entertainments was the very first, staged at his own cost by Marshal Gilles de Rais in spring 1435; or so an archivist told an historian.
¹⁷
The documents recording the events have vanished but the story is plausible, for that year de Rais sold off as much of his extensive property as he could. Only foolhardy expenditure can explain his behaviour, and nothing in the fifteenth century, except being ransomed, could cost as much as organising a pageant. The point of the liquidation of his assets seems to have been his determination to give the Orléannais an experience they would never forget.

Le Mystère du Siège d’Orléans
eventually became enormously long, with speaking parts for 140 people and walk-on parts for 500 extras. The venues for the action, as was common with a medieval mystery play, were dotted about the city, scenery was carved and decorated, costumes magnificent. No extant account tells how the citizens reacted to this show, but the
Mystère du Siège d’Orléans
was put on until about 1470, while it grew with each performance. No later production can have been quite like the first, but then Gilles de Rais could not sustain his moment of glory. Already the man who rode a Barbary horse covered in rich blue cloth (his ‘
barbe bleu
’) was being changed into the fairy-tale Bluebeard (‘
barbe bleue
’), who murdered many wives. The facts are more grotesque than the fiction. Gilles de Rais was already indulging his perverse taste for abusing and killing children that led to his death just twelve years after he was enthralled by the high-spirited girl with and for whom he had fought and in whose presence, briefly, his life had had some meaning.

Gilles de Rais was forgotten: in their adopted city the memory of Joan and her family survived. Isabelle Romée, her mother, and Pierre, her brother, came to live there; and there the people heard that Joan’s trial for heresy was being reinvestigated and that its verdict had been nullified. Once this process had been completed, Cardinal d’Estouteville encouraged participation in the celebrations of 8 May; and his practice was followed by other eminent ecclesiastics. When the
Mystère
was no longer played, new pageants took its place. From the time of Charles VIII (1483–98), grandson of Joan’s Charles VII, or of Louis XII (1498–1515), son of Joan’s Duke of Orléans, dates a motet honouring Joan sung at the Porte Dunoise (named after Dunois, Joan’s beloved Bastard):

(‘Noble city of great fame,/rejoice on this day,/valiant and very loyal French people . . ./At the sweet prayer comes the Maid shep-herdess/who fights for us . . ./Sing, Clerics and citizens . . .’)

Members of Joan’s family came to Orléans. Pierre, elevated as Pierre du Lys to the ranks of a gentleman entitled to bear arms, was welcomed in 1436; the city supported Joan’s mother between 1440 and 1458, the year she died; and on his marriage Pierre’s son received a handsome gift from the city. The family was favoured by Charles VII, by Charles d’Orléans, by Louis XI. In the annual procession to commemorate the relief of the city, Pierre’s son would walk behind a huge wax candle on which was carved a picture of his aunt. He died in 1502, but as late as 1550 he was still fondly remembered by one of his former domestics.

With devotion to Joan and her family Orléans coupled devotion to the king and the royal family, and the kings of France reciprocated this love. Francis I came there in 1515 and from his reign dates the curious custom of having Joan’s role played by a virginal boy, the
Puceau
, a practice that lasted until 1912. Other changes caused problems. The citizens asked for a ruling from the next king, Henry II: could a bishop with a beard preside? The answer was yes. Three years later Henry was dead, killed in a tournament by a Huguenot nobleman, and so his three weakly sons became kings in turn. The lack of a decisive king left the way open to those powerful enough exploit the growth of religious dissent. Jean Calvin, the leading French Protestant, had studied in Orléans before taking refuge in Geneva; and nearby Saumur, now famous for its light wines, became a centre of Huguenot theology. The Loire valley was full of Huguenots, whose leaders, once religious war broke out, tried to take it from the king.

In 1568 the fiery Prince de Condé, uncle of the future Henry IV, made Orléans a Protestant base; and his troops set about attacking the cathedral. Condé intended it for Protestant worship (
un beau temple calviniste plutôt qu’une ruine papiste
)
¹⁹
but could not prevent his men blowing up the central tower and much of the nave. Meanwhile, city magistrates took to plundering Catholic property and to having Catholics hanged. Four years later Catholics exacted revenge after the marriage of Henry, then the new King of Navarre, to his royal cousin. Instead of the intended religious reconciliation, the queen mother’s botched assassination of one leading Protestant led to a general massacre of Protestants throughout France. In the bloodshed Joan was forgotten; and not until after 1589, when Henry of Navarre as a beneficiary of the Salic Law became King Henry IV, could the Orléannais celebrate their heroine again.

For the next two centuries Orléans enjoyed royal and ducal favour. In 1601 Henry IV spent April in the city. The restoration of the cathedral by his grandson Louis XIV confirmed the strong bond between Orléans and France’s kings. Joan’s feast was still being celebrated in 1650. A hundred years or so later, work on the cathedral was virtually finished in a second lengthy reign, that of Louis XV, and, as Orléans cathedral recovered, so did devotion to the Maid.

From the time of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, Duke d’Orléans, one duke of Orléans placidly succeeded another; and the commemoration of Joan continued under the joint patronage of city and duke. On one occasion the
Puceau
was splendidly arrayed in sixteenth-century costume in the city’s gold and red colours, with a scarlet hat on his head sporting two plumes. Late in the century the old bridge, where Les Tourelles had been sited, was replaced by the Pont Royal; and in rue Royale leading off it there was soon a new bronze monument to Joan. In 1786 the
Puceau
, chosen as always by the city council, was joined by a girl,
la Rosière
, the ‘rose’ of her village, chosen for her outstanding virtue. This role was invented by the duke and duchess, who declared that they wished to mark the feast of 8 May by the marriage of a poor, virtuous girl from the city, to whom they offered a dowry of 1,200
livres
.

On 14 July 1789 a mob in Paris sacked the Bastille; and in 1792 France was declared a republic. In the steady downfall of Louis XVI (1774–92) the Duke of Orléans, Philippe ‘Egalité’ took the principle of equality so far as to vote for the execution of his distant cousin ‘Louis Capet’, the former king, perhaps hoping to be king himself; but in April 1793 he was arrested, imprisoned and guillotined. The feast in Orléans stopped.

The French Revolution swept away its royal family in the year that it swept away the cult of Joan; and soon French armies were marching all over Europe in order to sweep away the old order wherever it survived in neighbouring countries. As revolutionary France took on all the unregenerate monarchies of Europe, the bronze monument to Joan in Orléans was melted down to be a cannon, since Joan of Arc seemed tied irrevocably to France’s past. No one expected that the Maid of Orléans could belong to France’s future; a modern scholar has even claimed that ‘Joan of Arc was the creation of nineteenth-century historians.’
²⁰

Voltaire died in Paris in 1778, less than a decade before the collapse of the French
Ancien Régime
. As France moved with a seemingly inexorable logic towards a revolution in the affairs of State and Church, abolishing privilege in favour of unitary social order, Voltaire was regarded as a luminary of the age. He would have hated this description. The very thought of heroism would have alarmed him, but heroism was the order of the day.

Joan had been a medieval, Catholic, royalist heroine. The new heroine of revolutionary France was the classical, half-naked Marianne. Joan found admirers in the land of the old enemy, England, and in Weimar, arguably the seat of the most civilised court in Europe.

The age of revolution was also the age when the movement called Romanticism began. Young writers became fascinated by the medieval past. One of Joan’s first advocates was the Englishman Robert Southey, now the least known of the Lake poets. At this stage Southey, not yet Wordsworth, was close to Coleridge. With Coleridge Southey had planned to apply the principles of ‘Pantisocracy’ in a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna river in New England. Coleridge married Southey’s wife’s sister; and he cooperated with Southey in the production of a poem about Joan.

Traditionally, the writing of an epic was a task for middle or old age, but Southey wrote an epic poem before he was twenty. In six weeks he dashed off twelve cantos, the same number as in Virgil’s
Aeneid
, a friend then suggested revisions, so several lines and two cantos were cut. For the second canto Coleridge added 450 lines. Southey, the chief author, was rewriting when the manuscript was at the printers. In 1796 the poem was published in Bristol.

In his preface Southey expatiated on the merits and defects of his Italian and Portuguese predecessors Ariosto, Tasso and Camões and he discussed Spenser, ‘the favourite of my childhood’, and ‘the singular excellence of Milton’, whom a whole troop of English poets had imitated during the eighteenth century. With easy fluency Southey used Milton’s curious inversions, lengthy constructions, Latinate diction and rolling blank verse. He troubled to do some research. He knew of Voltaire’s poem, while admitting he had not read it, and through Boileau he knew of Chapelain. He knew English views of Joan from Holinshed, Shakespeare’s main source, he knew Hume’s
History of England
and he quoted from Monstrelet and Rapin. As a young radical he willingly admitted Henry V’s cruelty at Agincourt, when the English king had ordered the killing of many prisoners by having their throats cut. He chose to side with his French heroine.