Shot through the leg, she still called for another attack

SAINT-DENIS, France, September 1429 AD — The attack on Paris began at ten in the morning on September 8. The soldiers carried scaling ladders and bundles of brushwood, and they went down into the ditches outside the wall. The armed men of Paris held the wall.

Saint Joan of Arc was seventeen years old. She climbed down into the dry outer ditch in her white armour.

She crossed that ditch and came up on the bank right under the wall. In front of her was a second moat, and this one had water in it. She pushed her lance down into the water to find a place shallow enough for her men to cross. Then a crossbow bolt hit her in the thigh. She would not come off the bank. They carried her away from it while she was still calling for another attack.

The army was the king’s, not hers

St. Joan wanted the capital next. In May she had broken the English siege of the city of Orléans. On July 17, 1429 AD she stood beside Charles VII at Reims while he was crowned King of France. After that she pressed the king and his princes every day to attack the capital.

The king’s counsellors wanted a deal instead. In August they signed a truce with Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. The point of it was to stop the king’s army where it was. Several towns were handed over to the duke. For the next four months the king’s soldiers were not allowed to attack anyone, and the army was the king’s, not hers. St. Joan had not waited for the truce, or for the men who were making it.

On August 23 she and her field commander, Jean, Duke of Alençon, marched soldiers out of Compiègne without orders. They rode for Paris and left the king behind. Three days later they reached Saint-Denis, a town a few miles north of the wall of Paris.

She lived in that town from the end of August, while the army camped in the villages around the capital. Twice at Saint-Denis she was a baby’s godmother. She was glad to give the boys the name Charles, for her king, and the girls the name Jeanne.

What she left on the altar

On September 10 the king ordered the army to pull back from Paris. In the days after that, St. Joan carried a suit of white armour and a sword into the abbey church at Saint-Denis. She laid them on the altar. That church was the burial place of the kings of France.

She had given the armour out of devotion, she told her judges at Rouen. It was what soldiers do when they are wounded, she said. Her own wound had healed in five days. She had been wounded before Paris. She gave the armour to Saint Denis because his name was the war-cry of France. Her judges asked whether she had meant people to worship the armour, and she said she had not.

The sword she left on the altar was one she had won before Paris. It was not the sword she loved. In the spring, before Orléans, she had sent a man to the church of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. A sword lay buried behind the altar there. She loved that sword because it had been found in the church of St. Catherine, she told the court. She had carried it every day from the day it was brought to her.

She meant to stay at Saint-Denis. Her voice had told her to stay there, she told the court at Rouen, and she wanted to stay. But “against her will the lords took her away,” St. Joan said. On September 13 the troops began the march back south to the Loire. She went with them, carrying the sword from Fierbois. If she had not been wounded at all, she said, she would never have left Saint-Denis.