who were questioned over a period of several years in widely separated regions of France. There is just enough variation in overlapping pieces of testimony to show that while the people testifying saw the same events, they were not reciting some contrived scenario that had been forced on them.
D’Alençon and Dunois were the two most important witnesses so far as establishing Joan’s role as a military leader was concerned. Significantly, d’Alençon detested Charles and was in fact involved in a failed plot against him some years after Joan died. D’Alençon would be arrested for treason less than a month after he gave his testimony about Joan. (Sadly, d’Alençon and Dunois would be on opposite sides of this failed coup attempt -- it would be Dunois who would arrest d’Alençon on Charles’ orders.)70 D’Alençon’s hatred for Charles meant that he was hardly in a mood to cooperate with Charles by saying good things about Joan just to enhance Charles’ legitimacy as king. D’Alençon must have been motivated to praise Joan’s skills as a military leader by a sincere sense of admiration for his long-dead friend.
Finally, it is a standard characteristic of the warrior nobility of any culture to possess a large measure of egotism. Dunois, d’Alençon, and all the rest would not have been exceptions to this rule. Why would men such as that have made up stories that exaggerated the role of a seventeen-year-old peasant girl telling them what to do? The very improbability of them saying what they did leads one to believe that they were saying things that were remarkable but true.
* * *
Making herself the guiding torch of inspiration for the army and the people and, in her own way, commanding the army in war -- this is what Joan did. But how did she do it? What was it about her that enabled her to do what she did?
First of all, Joan had to possess an innate genius that enabled her, an illiterate teenage farm girl, to quickly learn what she had to learn to deal as an equal with royalty, bookish clerics, and trained soldiers of high rank. Just as innate genius enabled Mozart to compose symphonies as a child, innate genius enabled Joan to shape the destiny of an army and a nation. Coupled with this genius there had to be phenomenal force of will. Her genius enabled her to quickly master the rudiments of military leadership despite her absolute lack of formal training. Her force of will empowered her, a peasant girl, to browbeat royal officials into granting her an audience with the Dauphin Charles VII -- and, having won that audience, to persuade Charles to place her at the head of his army with a horse, a suit of armor, a sword, a banner, and an entourage of her own.
If intellect and willpower are qualities that can be inherited, than we can see Joan’s capacities foreshadowed in her parents. Jacques d’Arc was a farming peasant in the village of Domrémy -- but among the village peasants he was first among equals. He commanded such respect among his neighbors that he served in several official roles in the affairs of the village. It was he whom they chose to represent the village to the regional military governor -- the same regional governor Joan was to badger for an escort to Charles at the beginning of her quest.71 Jacques, with a personal initiative that was unusual in a peasant, petitioned for, and obtained, the right for his neighbors to take shelter in an abandoned nearby castle whenever brigand bands and warring forces of the Hundred Years’ War threatened the village.72 Jacques was thus a man of notable intelligence, responsibility, and enterprise among the peasantry. He died in sorrow the same year his daughter died at the stake.73
Joan’s mother, Isabelle, was a woman of superb character. She showed what she was made of after Joan’s death. An illiterate peasant woman, she spent twenty-four years traveling France, beating on the doors of the mighty, to demand a posthumous retrial for her daughter. Her pleas for justice eventually reached the Pope in Rome and she lived to see her long struggle rewarded with Joan’s exoneration. If the potential 