Jeanne D’arc: The Great Soul

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At this moment, when all seemed lost, the miracle occurred. At a time when it seemed that at last, after all the miseries of the Hundred Years War, the English claim to rule France must become a complete reality; the Capetian dynasty was saved by the inspiration of an illiterate peasant girl.

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Her name was Jeanne d’Arc, and she was born in the year 1412, the daughter of a peasant proprietor-the most influential personage of the village of Domrémy, on the Meuse. She was a pious child, unable to read or write, but proud of her skill in needlework, and able to help her father with his flocks and herds. Her home was in country partly French and partly Burgundian in sympathy, and she was from her earliest years familiar with the troubles that beset her native land.

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When Joan was twelve, she declared that she had heard a voice from God, and from then on she vowed that she would remain a virgin and lead a holy life. During the next few years she continued to hear voices, and to see visions, and she became convinced that it was her mission in life to save her country and crown the true king in Rheims Cathedral.

It seemed a wild and fantastic notion to her companions and her parents. Her father, a prosaic country man of sound common sense, said he would drown her rather than let her yield to such ideas. But Joan had made up her mind, and nothing would stop her. In 1428, when she was sixteen, she confronted in his castle Robert de Baudricourt, who held Vaucouleurs for the dauphin, and demanded an escort to Chinon. Robert was flabbergasted. He was a rough, simple soldier, not the man to be impressed by the story that the apparitions of St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret had entrusted to a peasant maid the task of freeing France from foreign invaders. In short, he told her not to be a little fool, and sent her home.

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But Joan was convinced of the genuineness of her inspiration and no initial failure would daunt her. She tried again, and this time won over certain of Baudricourt’s followers, with the result that he was prevailed upon to give her the escort she demanded. In January, 1429, dressed as a man, and with six followers, the maid set out for Chinon.

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For the moment her difficulties were over. Charles, in utter despair, and ready to jump at the vaguest hope, received her with open arms, and after a private conversation with her, in which she reassured him as to his legitimacy, and convinced him of her own divine mission by a revelation which she ever afterwards kept secret, he publicly declared his confidence in her, and, in spite of the blustering of the gross and incompetent La Tremouille, announced that, provided she would submit herself to examination by theologians at Poitiers, he would give her command of a force to relieve Orleans, which was then being besieged by the English in their efforts to penetrate south of the Loire.

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She went to Poitiers, satisfied the theologians, and Charles fulfilled his promise. On April 28, Joan, in white armor, wearing a sword with five crosses, which she had previously declared would be found in the church of St. Catherine de Fierbois and which was so found, with an army of 4,000 men, accompanied by the Duke of Alencon and escorted by a procession of priests, arrived before Orleans, and joined the commander of the garrison, the Bastard of Orleans, afterwards Count of Dunois.