Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon Page B

King Is Crowned; Then What?
    Joan left the city of Rheims at the height of her power and success. She suggested that, her mission to crown the king having been completed, it was time for her to go home to Domrémy. Had she followed this impulse, she would have experienced only success and might have died in bed, a local legend. But she wanted to go on to Paris, and she believed that the king wanted the same thing.
    Clearly, however, she and Charles had different goals. It is difficult to understand Charles favorably or, rather, to put him in any kind of nonexculpatory light. History has not been kind to him; it has painted him as a coward and a dupe. Certainly his behavior toward Joan is an example of crashing disloyalty; as soon as he was crowned, he seemed, at best, to lose interest in the woman who had crowned him. Many Joanolaters feel that he undermined her best efforts. Certainly he was invisible when she was in her most dire need.
    From a political standpoint, however, Charles was, in the long run, a success. He died with the French crown still on his head, ruling over a united France. His enemies had lost their sway, and if he betrayed Joan in life, he saw to it—for his own reasons, of course—that her name was, in death, glorified.
    To make a rather weak defense for him, the Joan whom he thought he was signing up at Chinon was not the person he had to confront after the coronation. At the center of a court paralyzed by a consistent low-grade depression, he was presented with a boy/girl on horseback who assured him of his legitimacy and whose energy and faith raised his dormant hopes. In equipping her and sending her to his demoralized army, he might have thought he was investing in a curiosity, someone who would be of temporary use and then disappear—or go home.
    But the victory in Orléans and the coronation strengthened Joan’s position as a figure whose source of power was only partly mythical. People flocked to her; she was a legend who prompted popular action. Because of her, Charles had a larger army than ever, and one his scant resources could hardly support. Having triumphed at Orléans, Joan was convinced of her own status as chef de guerre and of her right to take her place beside the great captains of the French army. She did not remain in the place Charles had wanted her to occupy.
    Charles and Joan illustrate a phenomenon that occurs when young women want to move from the realm of the symbolic, where male imagination has placed them, to the realm of the actual, where they want to be. A girl can be an ornament, but if she wants to act rather than be looked at, if she wants scope and autonomy rather than the static fate of the regarded, even the well-regarded, object, she becomes dangerous. Joan had not changed; she was, rather, misread. And for this misreading, for which she was not responsible except, perhaps, in failing to understand that other people lacked her courage and her tenacity of vision, she would be punished, at the very least by a loss of favor.
    It seems that the appetite for combat that Charles displayed when he equipped Joan to go to Orléans was quickly sated. Perhaps he only wanted a token victory; in any case, he certainly did not share Joan’s unequivocal determination to take Paris by force. Charles associated Paris with bad things; in 1418 he had escaped with his life when the Burgundians took over the city. It was a devastating defeat, a massacre in which nearly five thousand people were killed.
    Charles understood, perhaps better than Joan, the shaky situation of his finances and the consequences this would have on an army for which he would have to provide. A move to capture Paris would require a major capital outlay, and capital was what he did not have. This was one motivation for his desire to negotiate with Burgundy rather than to confront him militarily. His source of wealth, de la Trémoille, was of the party of negotiation; certainly this