The Gate at Saint-Honoré
8 September 1429 · Joan of Arc, wounded outside Paris, as the king she helped crown orders a withdrawal
She is in the ditch under the wall with a crossbow bolt through her thigh, and she will not be carried out. The moat is deeper than the ladders are long, the assault has been going since noon, and she is still calling for more bundles of wood to fill it.
The city can be taken. She believes this the way she believes everything, and the men around her have watched her be right before: Orléans was supposed to be impossible and its siege was broken in nine days.
The King has ordered the withdrawal. The King she found at Chinon, argued into a war, and stood beside seven weeks ago at his coronation, because a crowned king is a legitimate king and that was the entire point of everything she did.
He is negotiating with Burgundy. A truce suits him. Another month of siege does not.
She can be carried back and the army goes home. Or she can keep calling for the wood, and the men in the ditch will keep passing it forward, because they are looking at her and not at the messenger.
Obey the withdrawal
Keep calling for the woodOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
She was carried out of the ditch against her will after dark and the assault was called off; the next morning the King had the bridges over the Seine broken so it could not be resumed. She never regained the momentum. Within weeks the army was disbanded for the winter, and she was captured at Compiègne the following May and sold to the English by the men who took her. Charles VII, crowned, made no attempt to ransom her. She was tried at Rouen, signed a recantation under threat of fire, resumed male dress three days later, and was burned on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen. A retrial annulled the verdict twenty-five years later.
The philosophers weigh in
Withdraw"She spent a year making a king, and a king who can be overruled by the person who made him is a decoration. The obedience is not separate from the achievement. It is the achievement."
Press on"The men in that ditch had gone further on her word than any of them had gone on his. Authority is where people actually are, and on that afternoon it was in the ditch, whatever the paperwork said."