Joan: A Novel of Joan of Arc

by Katherine J. Chen

There are no happy stories, just stories that make you feel grateful you weren’t born somewhere else, somewhere like Rouen.

What choices does a woman have for vengeance, for justice? For we cannot simply pray. I can’t stomach my mother’s prayers. We cannot afford to wait and be still. I won’t live this way—not anymore. So when I spoke to God that morning, I decided, if I am to scream, let it be in battle. There is no chance for peace except at the point of a sword.”

“I have pawned my stones before, for my husband’s sake, and I will do so again for my children.

I believe that God shows Himself not only in holy words, prayers, and sermons, but in . . . genius.

“Yes . . . yes, you are no one, and no one will listen to a peasant, it is true. A poor, unlearned woman who has run away from home with no family to protect her. What is she? Nothing! But everyone will listen to an instrument of God.”

She wore her piety like a new dress, and she was vain about her devotion to God.

She had always thought, My gifts come from myself. They were beaten into me. That is all. For if it was God who gave me this strength and these gifts, then it is the same God who is also helping the English to win and the Burgundians to gain more and more towns. It is the same God who let Catherine die.

Either a woman must be raised high, higher than the heads of men, or she will be crushed beneath their feet. So, we must raise you high. We must raise you to the height of the heavens themselves. We must dress you in the very mantle of God.

will pray for you in my capacity as a queen, as a noblewoman of the kingdom of France, but also as a former wife, a mother who loves her children, a humble servant of the Holy Virgin. A woman.”

She was commander of nothing, but no one commanded her, either.

It is as if Joan already belongs to them: the mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters of the city who look to her to lift the siege. The men will free the men, but you will free us.

Her heart is the drumbeat that accompanies her to war.

After the battle, she sought out La Hire and Dunois. She fell exhausted into their arms, and they held her, supporting her weight. They embraced her as they would a man—not gently or with consideration of where she had been hurt. They squeezed her shoulders and compressed her spine until her bones cracked. And she left on them the imprint of her arrow wound, like a bloody handprint, which they touched as if she had just given them a holy medal.

It’s not always armies that win a battle. Sometimes it’s fear. Fear can stop a battle before it is even fought.

So, I ask myself, what is a king but a leader of men? And if he is not a leader of men, then is he still a king?

There is no God to listen to her here.

She knows she is testing God by kneeling in the cold. “Are you still here? Were you ever here?” There is no answer.