My name is Jehanne d’Arc. First name, Jehanne. Middle name d’. Last name Arc. I hate the name Joan. I hate English. Don’t call me Mademoiselle d’Arc, either. Or Madame d’Arc. Or Saint anything. I’m not a saint now and I never was one.
First, let’s deal with the idea that I was some kind of shepherdess, happily and virginally jaunting through the meadows, feeling the glow of the warm sun on my face and telling my sheep how much I gloried in keeping them as my flock, as though I were a ewe in the flock of Jesus. Me, surround myself with a herd of foul-smelling and noisy beasts all day? Not on your life. My father had money, okay? He was a farmer, but we owned property and we lived in a two-story house in Domrémy, which for some reason you now call Domrémy-the-Maid (that old virgin nonsense). Two stories. We weren’t wealthy but we weren’t sleeping in a manger either. Did I occasionally have to interact with the so-called “domesticated” species? Sure, who the hell in the Middle Ages didn’t? They were around, slopping in the mud and yowling all night. But I kept away from them as much as possible and I sure didn’t have a flock of anything.
The stories about me “hearing voices”? You don’t know by now where I got that one from? Ermengarde the Ugly, that’s who. She was addicted to ergot, in a bad way. It wasn’t even laced with anything. She bought it on the street (Domrémy only had one) and sucked that purple fungus down her throat faster than a monk flees a rape scene. The last I remember, she was running naked through the street yelling, “I had some dreams there were clouds in my mead, clouds in my mead.” The only way to get her home and clothed was to hire Old Gilibert the gravedigger to dig big holes around the village until she fell into one. We used the rest of the holes for storing potatoes and playing tricks on the Romish Pope’s traveling emissaries. Ermengarde’s the one God spoke to.
And what was the secret of my success in battle? The Lord’s blessings? Mahaude the Witch’s potions? My surplus testosterone? Yes, my mother sported a beard from age twelve, but that wasn’t it. None of your boneheaded historians have figured out that it was my support hose. Flemish. 90% wool, 10% spandex. I wore black—didn’t show the stains as much. Yes, those hosen kept my calves hopping and popping along, jazzed up for more sieges than I care to remember. The only problem was falling asleep. It wasn’t the Lord keeping me up all night, it was my popping calves. There was no way I was going to remove the hosen what with the cold and dampness, not to mention the man-love mania amongst the soldiers—remember, they thought I was a boy. I kept them on as tight as Perrette the Crazy’s chastity belt, the one her man Olfert attached every time he went off on a Crusade. They’d be clasped to my calves until I made it home and could rend them to shreds in the full sunlight of the back pasture with the dreamy Flemish hosen dealer, the one with seven intact teeth.
This brings us to the tale of me dying a virgin. Really? You believe that? Do you have any notion of what it was like in the Late Middle Ages? We all knew the Renaissance was coming and we were worried shitless. More books to read, more discoveries in “science,” and more and more outlandish outfits. Is it any wonder we partied in the 1420s like it was 1999? Do you know anyone who lived through 1999 and remained a virgin?
There’s a lot more I could share, like how I told the Dauphin he was a total fuck-up at a gender reveal party in Chinon. But I hear the hosen fancy man calling my name, so I’m off . . .