CHAPTER XII
THE SAVIOR OF FRANCE
Cettelle ne vient pas de la terre; elle est envoyée du ciel. Thus it is that a contemporary, a great politician and satirist, Alain Chartier, expresses his convictions regarding the Maid of Orléans. To Christine de Pisan, too, she seemed, as we have seen, a messenger from God. It was a time when all good patriots wept, when the fair land of France was a prey to the spoiler, when Armagnac, Bourguignon, and hated Saxon roamed at will over the land and laid it waste. In one of Alain Chartier's political satires, Le Quadriloge invectif, the three estates of the realm nobles, clergy, commons are in turn appealed to by La France, to "have pity of their common mother." The commons, or Peuple, replies: "It is the labor of my hands that feeds and clothes these cowardly loafers, and they oppress me with famine and the sword.... They live upon me, and I am slowly dying under them.... The banners of the host are raised, they say, against our enemies, but no deeds are done except against me." It was a complaint but too true, as was that in Chartier's Livre de I'Espérance: "The nights are too short for the shameless pleasures (of the gentlemen at court), and the days too short for sleeping.... It would seem that noble estate means no more than license to do wrong and yet go unpunished."
In this disregard of the moral law as well as of patriotic duties the dauphin himself led the way. One hardly knows what verdict to pass upon this man, for his character was a blend of qualities that might have made greatness and that yet resulted in nothing but meanness, littleness of soul, and ingratitude. It is not the acid meanness of Louis XI, his son, for that had a purpose; what in Louis XI was true vinegar, sharp and biting, had not yet gone through the full process of fermentation in Charles VII. and was simply a fluid evil to the taste, with no useful properties. Reared at a court where pleasure was the only law, under the evil influence of Isabeau de Bavière--whenever she thought to trouble herself about him--and, later, of the savage and unscrupulous Bernard d'Armagnac, who wished to retain power for himself and hence debauched the young prince, it is not surprising to find Charles a libertine, and one easily controlled by any favorite who happened to be in the ascendant. As a boy of sixteen he had been made an accomplice, whether constructively guilty or not of the actual crime, in the murder of Duke Jean de Bourgogne. At nineteen he was proclaimed King of France by his handful of followers, while the victorious English were proclaiming Henry VI. in Paris (1422). Defeat followed defeat for his armies, owing partly to the demoralization of the troops, partly to the inability of the leaders to maintain any sort of discipline among the bands of half savage men at arms from Gascony, Brittany, Scotland, and even Italy and Spain. Yet for most of the disasters, Charles himself was to blame, since he continued to lead a life of slothful pleasure, making no serious efforts to control himself or to take an active part in the affairs of his ruined kingdom.
The salvation of France was to come from a woman, one as nearly a saint as mortal can be; but some part of the preparation for the coming of that saint was made by other women, not by any means saintly. The wife of Charles VII. was Marie d'Anjou, who, with her husband, was under the domination of her mother, Yolande d'Aragon, one of those active, able, but unscrupulous women who rule by intrigue, who are content to let others claim the glory so long as the real secret of power is theirs. Queen Yolande, anxious to preserve the dignity of the house of Anjou for her son Rene, needed the support of France, and she hated England. She gained a remarkable ascendency over Charles VII., and used this most wisely for the good of France, though some of her methods may seem of a sort to disconcert prevailing opinions.
Seeing that Charles was by nature a libertine, she determined to make use of that side of his character, although at the expense of her own daughter. It was she who presented to Charles that famous and lovely Dame de beauté, Agnes Sorel. The rôle played by this mistress of the king is truly admirable as well as remarkable. Agnes was no vulgar woman, but an Aspasia of her time, of noble birth, beautiful, and of a character gentle as well as essentially good. It is no paradox to pronounce her good, though she led a life condemned by moral laws; for the laxity of the age must be considered, as well as the methods of the mistress herself. Even the wife of her royal lover respected Agnes Sorel, and there was friendship between them. So far from seeking to surround herself with idle and vicious companions and encouraging Charles in offending useful friends or wise counsellors, she used her influence, in conjunction with Yolande, to establish the credit of the Constable de Richemont, the most useful of Charles's allies at this time.
Legend has gilded her portrait for us, and much that is told of her is not susceptible of proof, but the tendency of her influence is shown by one little incident. Charles, unable to win back his kingdom, unable to maintain himself in it north of the Loire, unable to find money to pay his troops, was yet able to build a chateau at Loches for Agnes Sorel. Here he was basking in her smiles and heedless of the distress of France, when accident gave Agnes a chance to rouse his nobler feelings. Charles had, to amuse the passing hour, called a fortune teller to the chateau, and stood by while the man told the fortune of his well-beloved Agnes. The mountebank, with the cunning of his kind, thought to flatter this vain and lovely lady by prophesying: "Some day thou shalt be the wife of the greatest king on earth." Agnes, with ready wit, rose at once to her occasion. "If that be my true fortune," said she to the dauphin, "I must leave you this instant and go marry the King of England; for I see that, in the sloth that confines you here, you will not long be King of France." The shot told, and Charles was stung into momentary activity. Throughout her life Agnes continued to exert a salutary influence upon him; and when she died,--poisoned, it was said, by the then dauphin, afterward Louis XI,--evil favorites soon replaced the wise counsellors at the king's board, and his last years were as full of misery as had been those before Jeanne came mysteriously out of the east and gave him his crown.
It was not Charles, the miserable, ungrateful voluptuary whose character we have attempted to show, that was loved and saved by Jeanne d'Arc; it was France, represented to her in the person of the dauphin. For her, Charles was a symbol, a mere incarnate patrie for whose salvation she was commissioned by the Lord of Hosts; the man himself was nothing; in her simple peasant's heart, she hardly thought of him as a man, rather as a sort of divinity that could do no wrong, that must be worshipped, that must first of all be saved and set up safely in its tabernacle of Rouen. Unworthier idol never was created than this insensible thing called the dauphin, with as little care for the victims crushed beneath him as if he had been in very truth a mere wooden Juggernaut or Mumbo Jumbo; but all of us worship unworthy idols and are quite unconscious of their unworthiness. And, as in the case of Jeanne, if worship and worshipper be pure, what matter if the idol be a little unsteady on the pedestal to which our blind devotion has raised it?
The worship of Jeanne for the dauphin had begun in very childhood, when this dream-guided little maid of Lorraine hardly knew what "king" or "kingdom" meant. Writers have remarked, as De Quincey and Michelet, upon the fact that Jeanne was born in a border land, on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, in the debatable land between the great parties of Orléans and Burgundy; but the mere situation of this little village of Domremy upon the great Franco-German highway is a geographical fact that could be conned over and over, and then forgotten, without our being one whit the better or the worse. The dead fact is nevertheless a fruitful seed of thought, if we but allow it to come to germination. We may recall that in the present day the most enthusiastic of those patriots of France who are ever clamoring misguidedly for war are the people of this one-time border of France. However misguided may be the demonstrations of the crowds who annually drape in mourning the statue of Strasbourg on the Place de la Concorde, an enthusiastic patriotism is their inspiration. "The outposts of France, as one may call the great frontier provinces," De Quincey says, "were of all localities the most devoted to the Fleurs de Lys. To witness, at any great crisis, the generous devotion to these lilies of the little fiery cousin (Lorraine) that in gentler weather was forever tilting at the breast of France, could not but fan the zeal of France's legitimate daughters; whilst to occupy a post of honour on the frontiers against an old hereditary enemy of France would naturally stimulate this zeal by a sentiment of martial pride, by a sense of danger always threatening, and of hatred always smouldering.... The eye that watched for the gleams of lance or helmet from the hostile frontier, the ear that listened for the groaning of wheels, made the highroad itself, with its relations to centres so remote, into a manual of patriotic duty."