I served under her army. I did not know her. I was blessed by her once in passing. At the time I was uncertain about what talents humans possessed and the actual nature of the universe as I am now. I e used my lifespan to watch and build a picture of the universe that fits what I have seen and all available evidence Ive had since the advent of scientific thought. I’ve told you I label some humans as Sensitive. And it’s not merely you are or aren’t. It’s a spectrum of perception. At the time though, I had no concept of this. Some people seemed aware of me and some not. In her case—this happening before my firm decision never to abide by religious dogma ever again—I could not know if she was truly sent by god or spoke to demons or whatever. I avoided her, and late at night I’d listen for her to see what I thought of her.
I still am not quite certain of her, and the reason is, while I observed her in life, I did not do so with the tools I have now. So a firm answer is impossible. I have thought about her often, my brush with sainthood. I will say that she was reserved, spoke very carefully and cautiously. Put thought into every word and deed. I do not think she was sensitive, as she gave no heed to me—though to be fair, we all looked rather the worse for wear and I had a lucky charm. Most of the soldiers around me wanted to be in my group. So they were rather careful not to point out my failings. She prayed furiously at night. She would pace. She would walk through the camp. She would argue with herself and god. She was very shrewd, if uneducated. She knew she was being used by Charles. She didn’t care. She believed the men around her who had come to revere and admire her would protect her. They did.
People like to paint her as either severely and overtly mentally ill, or placidly demure. She was neither. She did more than wave around a banner though that was a point of contention at her trial. She was shrewd and would have been excellent at chess had she learned it.
My tacit opinion on her, was that she was young and angry, which motivated her. I do believe she had some sort of mental health issue, but this merely gave her a sense of absolute confidence in her intuition, which proved itself, as she had good intuitive skills. She could cold read, know what to say and what not to, and the successes of her actions merely reinforced her delusion that god was protecting her. Even when shot, she believed she could not die, and so got up. Which was honestly the best way for her not to die. She flouted all social conventions because of her absolute confidences, which had to be ordained by god, because no woman of the time would even fathom what she was doing. You see the logic? She had to be ordained, to even consider it. And so the fact that she was brazen actually gave her credence. Especially at that moment when she could be of so much use. Right place, right temperament, right time.
Notice that god failed to protect her, when she fought beyond the coronation, and the king pulled his support of her, and her troops. God only had her when the king had her. Once the men who revered her were cut off from her, the King—who was a Machiavellian bastard spawned by a loathesome family—realized he could use her to negotiate the ceasefire, so he did. He let the English keep her, and eliminate for him someone who rivaled his popularity. He also gave his army a martyr. Her delusion, however, stayed. Because you see, it wasn’t god who had failed her, but the cowardice of men. Her handling of her confessors and the inquisitors was brilliant and spoke to her shrewd handling of people. I don’t think this was pure genius. Meaning I don’t think she was that kind of intelligence to realize all these things were possible if she pretended to be protected by divine law. I think she actually believed it. I also think she’d been traumatized at some point, though it was reputed she was still a virgin, so I do not think sexual assault. I think it more likely she saw terrible terrible things, and came to be so filled with rage she had a breakdown.
The simple truth is, we were an army. We were not given to rallying behind charisma. No matter what the films and plays and histories say. When she came to us, she was an unknown. But they all missed their mothers, their wives, their sisters, their daughters, and she had grace and poise and the shrewdness to demonstrate to the generals how useful she was. At first she was a banner, by the end, she was a leader. No one had ever seen a woman shot with an arrow in battle. And no one had ever seen one break off the stem and get back up again and keep fighting alongside. That alone made a powerful impression.
A dangerous one on some people. De Rais wouldn’t have been half so vile and murderous had he not crossed paths with her perfection of carriage and found himself lacking. That’s my belief anyway.
Anyway...it’s worth noting that there was a second Jeanne. She appeared some time later, and fooled many people who actually knew Jeanne. She came through the region claiming to have been spared from execution. She said the English captors had sprung her, but that the nobles killed some poor imposter so as not to lose face. She did look very much like Jeanne, but it was most definitely not her. Her voice was wrong, her actions wrong, her intelligence not the same, her smell very different. All these things might change through trauma and time, I’ll grant you, but it was too drastic to my mind. The humans merely missed their deity and wished for her to be unbroken. They wanted her back. So they allowed it. She lived as Jeanne for the rest of her life and married very well.
One of my chief regrets is that I did not follow Jeanne on her quest, and therefore put myself in the region when she was killed. I feel...it would have done me some good to be present for her execution, which seems an odd and possibly terrible thing to say. Likely people are thinking “why wouldn’t you save her?” Or “why would you want to see her die?” I know it’s a complicated thought, but stay with me. I was not a nice person and at that time I had come to hate humanity a great deal. When she was executed I was living in the countryside, trying to process having a life that wasn’t built around war, and learning that people were only willing to tolerate me if I was useful, and war was my most useful skill. I still had ideas that perhaps God had cursed me. That all these terrible things I felt and thought and did were actually caused by the fact that people like the priests From whom I sought charity or the saint who once blessed me for slaying the heathen English, were somehow actually making things worse. I felt as if I was constantly hiding and playing a part and that at any point mysterious forces might align against me. I learned there was no god during the century after I left the army. Jeanne’s death was at the beginning of that. Seeing her off would have given me a great sense of peace and understanding. True, it may also have enraged me against the English, and therefore altered the entire course of my life, but I had already come to realize that none of you were different from the others, and that these noble conquests were merely the conquests of nobles, not the work of sanctified fate.
Also, I rather liked her. She may have recognized me. I don’t know what she felt then. Her final words give proof of her composure, but I know death is a cold and lonely thing, and pain is horrible. She might have recognized me. She might have found comfort in my presence. I wasn’t skilled enough yet to truly control my effect on her but perhaps I might have helped. At the very least I could confirm for all that in fact she was executed. Alas I cannot. I can only say that when I knew her, she was a positive force. She was a figure of great note and surprising even now. Look at young people like Greta Thunberg—she has a remarkably similar aspect to her. That sort of calm delivery of things she has spent a long while contemplating, and her she is still an exception, an oddity. Imagine how Jeanne was perceived, in an age when women didn’t even walk around without a veil and weren’t worthy of note unless they were married and could control an inheritance and children. Such people were few. So I do not nor cannot claim to know her mind. I cannot say if she was delusional or if she believed in god or not. I can only tell you what I saw and heard and felt.
I felt no difficulty following her strategy. If anything, I felt she was exceptional, and that we were lucky to have her. If she was lying, if it was all a ruse to give tired and careworn men some confidence to do what they had to to keep hold of their country, then I view that as a clever and useful lie, and still have no anger for it.
To be fair, going into that war, I hated the English. And the Burgundians to be more specific. There are reasons. They were bastards. This is the problem with having a long memory. There were times during my life in a England that we again went to war wth both France and Spain and even the Netherlands and I simply had too much old hatred for how the English had behaved toward all those nations that I could not fight for the country in which I lived. Of course I also hated the countries they were fighting, and so found myself somewhat ambivalent. So I simply refused to go. Difficult to recruit me, I’m afraid. I made a sport of avoiding it, in fact.
