Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured Read Online Free PDF Page A

journey from which he didn’t necessarily expect to return. As friends and neighbors universally attested, both Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée were“true and good Catholics, upright and brave.”
    “Honest farmers,” they grew rye and oats, but the local diet, and their livelihood, was based on livestock—milk, cheese, eggs, fowl, and pork. The wool Jacques sheared from his sheep each spring bought what the family didn’t grow or make for itself. Prosperous among the peasantry, they had a few hundred francs *2 in savings, as well as food and room enough to offer the occasional traveler dinner and a night’s rest, either on the floor before the hearth downstairs or in one of the two lofts that formed the second story of“the only house in the village that was built of stone, not wood and thatch,” in an age when almost all dwellings, urban as well as rural, were made of wood.
    The fourth of her parents’ five children, Joan was born in 1412, after her brothers Jacquemin and Jean and her only sister, Catherine, and before Pierre. Sources are inconsistent as well as incomplete, however, with respect to the birth order of Joan’s siblings and their respective ages. According to some, Jacquemin, the eldest, was bornin 1406, when Isabelle was thirty, which would have made him a very young groom in 1419, the year he is said to have married and settled on his mother’s land in Vouthon, where he remained until the spring of 1429. By then, Joan’s fame had drawn all her siblings into its glare and on into history books, a rare destination for a peasant. After Jean and Pierre followed their little sister into battle, Jacquemin returned to Domrémy to help his parents, who were then in their mid-fifties, run the family’s farm. By then, Catherine had married, moved to the neighboring town of Greux, and died, most likely in childbirth.

    The accuracy of the day traditionally celebrated as that of Joan’s birth, January 6, or Twelfth Night, is called into question by the date’s sole extant source, an excitedly florid letter from a courtier within the dauphin’s inner circle—a man who was almost certainly not present at a remote village’s celebration of a Church feast day.“It was during the night of the Epiphany that she first saw the light in this mortal life,” Perceval de Boulainvilliers wrote to the Duke of Milan in June 1429.“Wonderful to relate, the poor inhabitants [of Domrémy] were seized with an inconceivable joy …[and] ran one to the other, enquiring what new thing had happened. The cocks, as heralds of this happy news, crowed in a way that had never been heard before, beating their bodies with their wings; continuing for two hours to prophesy this new event.” The only of Lord Perceval’s letters known to have survived, it was written on June 21, 1429, a month after Joan had raised the siege of Orléans, eclipsing the festering shame of Agincourt and demonstrating God’s long-awaited mercy. As king’s councillor and a recruiting officer for the French army, Boulainvilliers had reason to celebrate a triumph that made his job not only possible but also effortless. Men who had previously fled from the front made an about-face to chase after Joan for a chance to fight under her command. The court was jubilant, even giddy, but the dauphin Charles of Valois wasn’t the center of its attention. That was occupied by Joan, the international sensation to whom France owed its victory. Letters like Boulainvilliers’s flew from Chinon to castles and manors across Europe. That every literate European spoke and read French acceleratedthe trajectory of Joan’s fame, the impulse to embroider what was already fantastic as irresistible to a lord as to a gossiping housewife at market. Human prophets had predicted Joan’s advent; now nature, one species anyway, had confirmed her arrival. As it was not the habit of medieval people to take note of birth dates, it was that much easier for the unreliable