By Joan's sad fate, I don't mean her terrible death by fire at the age of 19 on the 30th of May, 1431, but her new sad fate. It is highly unfashionable these days in France to show affection or admiration for Joan of Arc because she has been taken as a symbol by the far right, both the anti-foreigner Front National, which meets at her statue every May 1st, and the bizarroïde royalists of Action française (si, si, there are actually people alive in France today who want this man to be king of France).
Joan was illiterate but learned how to write her own name
I still admire the real Joan, the brave young woman who led an army in her white armor and tossed the goddams, or English, out of France, bringing an eventual end to the Hundred Years' War. (One of my ancestors was named Langlois, the Englishman. I wonder what that story was.) If you want to know more about the real Joan, a good place to start is The Retrial of Joan of Arc, where you can read the testimony of people who knew her. For starters, she was quite brilliant, and a pretty girl. When she was crossing a moat at Chinon to meet the yet-uncrowned king Charles VII for the first time, one of his officers joked that she would not be a maid long if he had his way with her. She looked at him and said, "How can you jest and your death so near?" and went into the castle. Before she came out again, he had accidentally fallen into the moat and drowned in his heavy armor. Don't mess with la Pucelle! She will overcome this new obstacle too.
