Style Magazine. Richmond, VA. 1995.

France: Searching for Joan
Traveling in the Footsteps of a Saint.
By Jennifer Willis

Dreaded vacation time once again. It has always been a struggle to chose a destination so spectacular as to make staying put for the rest of the year somehow worthwhile. Last year I gave up completely and sat on the living room floor room for a week editing a video movie.

But this year would be different. This year I was going in search of Joan of Arc.

It was a writer's quest, taking manuscript research to an extreme. A working vacation -- so what? I was going to France. I would walk the same earth she had, pray in the same cathedrals, and step into her childhood home which still stands. I nearly had a nervous breakdown under the weight of my excitement.

So I landed in Paris, prepared for my journey. Although French is supposedly my second language, I had never been required to prove this to anyone. Not only had I never before been to Europe, I was also a young woman traveling alone. But I was making a pilgrimage. This would be an adventure indeed.

I immediately set out for Notre Dame. Joan had worshipped here when she came to save Paris from the English. Although the view of the city from atop the North Tower was tremendous, and though the cathedral's atmosphere was almost oppressively sacred, there was no Joan. I walked back to the hostel in the rain, wondering what Joan would have thought of people from all over the world taking photographs inside such an ancient place.

I also wondered what it was I hoped to find.

Orlèans was my next target. Here Joan saw her first and greatest military victory, relieving the English siege which had lasted many long months. This city had certainly not forgotten her over the five centuries since her death, but I did not expect Rue Jeanne d'Arc would be lined with Jeanne d'Arc cleaners and drugstores, in addition to a shopping mall named for her. I had managed to arrive on the one weekday on which all museums are closed, so I contented myself with photographing the many statues and monuments erected in her honor. I also went in search of the ancient city gate through which she had so ceremoniously passed into Orlèans on April 29, 1429. But a torrential downpour escorted me through the Old City, and what I found on the site of the grand portal were nothing but modern apartment buildings.

Then it was off to Rouen, the city whose claim to Joan is the place of her trial and execution. Here was the cathedral in which she had been forbidden to pray by her English captors -- Notre Dame of Rouen, immortalized centuries later in the paintings of Monet. I lit a candle in the tiny chapel of Ste. Jeanne, hoping that I might somehow be drawn closer to her, to have a more intimate understanding to inspire my writing of her life.

I found also the reconstructed tower in which she had been imprisoned, guarded by men who attempted rape every night of her more than year-long captivity. They never succeeded.

It was so strange to stand on the place of her burning, where a crucifix stands tall and proud, marking the very spot of her stake. An extremely modern church with elaborate stained glass also commemorates the site, and it was a great comfort to see her life thus celebrated.

But still, I had yet to find Joan.

The last stop in my quest found me in tiny Domremy, an agricultural town in Lorraine. And it was here that I stepped inside the room in which she had been born, and listened to the power tools overhead as workmen restored the more than five-hundred-year-old house. Immediately next door was the church in which her family had prayed, and many of the artifacts housed inside dated back to her youth.

And it was in the quiet of this sanctuary in which she had been divinely inspired, that I realized what I had been looking for. By reaching out across time, I had felt her touch my own life, perhaps sharing with me a small glimmer of her own spirit.