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

as Jehanne la Pucelle, Joan the Virgin, child of her heavenly rather than earthly father.
    We have no verifiable likeness of Joan and little physical description. Portraits made during her lifetime, including her profile pressed into, as stated in the trial record, “medals of lead or other metal in her likeness, like those made for the anniversaries of saints canonized by the Church,” would have been destroyed in the wake of her execution, no longer devotional objects but devil’s play. The single surviving contemporaneous image of Joan is the work of a man who never saw her, more doodle than drawing. Clément de Fauquembergue, the greffier , or “clerk,” who recorded the raising of the siege of Orléans inParis’s parliamentary record, sketched a long-haired girl in the register’s margin. Her body is covered by a dress; her face, drawn in profile, wears a severe expression; and she carries a sword in one hand, her standard in the other ( Fig. 1 ). If the clerk got one thing right, it was by accident. Her hair, a strand of which was found caught in the wax seal of one of her dictated letters, discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, was the color of his ink, black, as corroborated by an eyewitness at court. It was at court that Boulainvilliers first met the girl whose exploits would fill his correspondence, and he found her an “elegant” figure. She“bears herself vigorously,” he wrote, “speaks little, shows an admirable prudence in her words. She has a light feminine voice, eats little, drinks little wine,” and “wears a cheerful countenance.” The Duke of Alençon, who, like others of Joan’s comrades-in-arms, “slept on the straw” with her and had occasion to see her disrobe, praised her young body as beautiful, quickly adding that he“never had any carnal desire for her” and attributing the failure to Joan’s ability to banish the lust of any who might admire her, a power to which other men in her company bore witness.“Although she was a young girl, beautiful and shapely,” her squire, Jean d’Aulon, said, and he “strong, young, and vigorous,” and though in the course of dressing her and caring for her wounds he had “often seen her breasts, and … her legs quite bare,” never was his “body moved to any carnal desire for her.”
    That so many of Joan’s comrades described their inability to summon lust for her as a genuine miracle suggests that she was certainly not unattractive. Probably she was slender, given how universally those who had eaten with her commented on her abstemious habits. As she easily found men’s clothing to fit her while waiting for her own to be made, she might have been taller than most women of her time, perhaps as tall as five feet eight, the average height of a European man of the fifteenth century, although the more romantic accounts of her life tend to present her as petite. A physician who had occasion to examine Joan when she was a prisoner“found that she was stricta , that is, narrow in the hips.” If she and her sister shared that boyish silhouette, it might have ended Catherine’s life, lost as it probably was in childbirth. Without doubt, Joan was an athletic girl, and a strong one. The plate armor she wore immediately upon receiving it, for wholedays at a time, weighed between forty and fifty pounds, enough that knights in training typically took weeks to accustom themselves to carrying the added weight.
    As not even a written description of Joan’s face survives, imagination has had centuries of unobstructed influence. Shakespeare’s portrait of Joan in Henry VI , first produced in 1597, adroitly skirts the question of her physical appearance. “That beauty am I bless’d with which you see,” Joan tells the dauphin, is the gift of the Virgin, who “with those clear rays which she infused on me” transformed Joan’s appearance, gathering her into the radiance of her purity.“Black and swart before” as the result of