Joan of Arc’s story is remarkable for its endurance in popular consciousness: the peasant girl from Domrémy (in the Duchy of Lorraine) condemned by the Church as heretic, later reclaimed as saint. In Joan of Arc: A History Castor spins out the threads of the story of La Pucelle and weaves them into an intricate pattern, illustrating the precise difference that the arrival (and acceptance) of Joan in March 1429 at the court of the dauphin (the future King Charles VII) made to the course of the history of two warring nations. At her trial for heresy, Joan told the interrogator theologian Jean Beaupère that ‘no one could best her at sewing and spinning’ (p. Helen Castor’s illuminating new book is that Joan was, by her own admission, quite skilled at such craft. (4) In fact, it turns out that Durtal was not entirely off the mark, for one of many details contained within Dr.
Whether or not one fully concurs with the counterfactual speculation contained in Huysmans’ Là-bas, it can sans doute be said that had Joan of Arc (the Maid or La Pucelle as she is known in France) stuck to embroidery, events would most certainly have turned out differently and the course of the history of ‘exhausted’ France could have followed an alternative path. Her flesh had been scourged and her bones sucked dry by England which, like that mythological monster the Kraken, had arisen from the sea and cast her tentacles over Brittany, Normandy, parts of Picardy, the Ile de France, the entire north, the interior as far as Orléans, leaving a trail of devastated towns and ravaged countryside in her wake. (2) Durtal, something of an alter-ego for Huysmans, as well as being an expert on the history of the period of Charles VII, also laments that:įrance, exhausted by bloodlettings, and ravaged a few years earlier by the plague, was on her knees.
Thus declares the fictional character Durtal, would-be biographer of the infamous 15th-century child killer Gilles de Rais, to his friend Des Hermies in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 19th-century novel Là-bas, set in fin-de-siècle Paris. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which would have formed one territory, as it did in prehistoric times before the Channel existed, populated by one race. If Jeanne d’Arc had stuck to embroidery under her mother’s petticoats, then Charles VII would have been overthrown and the war would have ended.
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