Word: dauphinate
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...Joan escapes Shaw's didactic clutches, and that is why audiences love her. She is an imp of candor and a lioness in courage. She lacks all humor but makes up for it with backslapping bonhomie. Minutes after she has been ushered into the presence of the Dauphin, she is calling him "Charley...
...only takes one great artist to keep a tradition alive." So runs the first sentence of William Rubin's monograph, and one is left in no doubt which prince is coming. But now that the English dauphin has been so well anointed with the oil of consecration, one may step back and reflect that after all, his work does not have the immense flawed vitality of David Smith's; that it is an intelligent, distinguished but sometimes only dec orative addition to the short history of constructed sculpture...
...enough to generate word of mouth, the word is likely to be "blah." Not that Goodtime Charley is malignant; it is merely inane. It is not clear how the notion entered the producers' heads that the saga of Joan of Arc raising sword and soldiers to have the Dauphin crowned King of France (while she ultimately dies at the stake) had the makings of a musical comedy. At that crazed moment, they should have consulted an exorcist...
...indeed-obstinate but rather dull with the protuberant brown eyes of a cow: "Looking at her, you nearly went to sleep." She is an object of manipulation. The knights wave her like a banner to win battles. The "fat clergy" cash in those victories as new ecclesiastical revenue. The Dauphin, of course, uses her to gain his crown. Keneally graphically savors the irony of this visionary innocent ("our little he-nun") ending up in the midst of disemboweled and headless corpses, moving from battlefield to bloody battlefield in the company of assassins, whores and lice...
...whose time had come - the peasant striding into the council of kings and lords of the church. As rude as common fare, she serves notice on the feudal system that knighthood is no longer in flower. As she lifts the siege at Orléans and pushes her balky Dauphin with the "fat, un happy lips" toward his coronation at Rheims, she is hurrying onstage not a monarchy but the modern nation-state. The descendants of this Joan are the bourgeoisie...