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This miniature was made during my lifetime — the only image we have from before my death. It shows a woman in armour holding a banner, but the face is generic. The painter had not seen me. He painted the idea of a woman warrior, not the woman.

I was nineteen when I died. I had raised the siege of Orléans, crowned a king at Reims, and been captured at Compiègne. I had done all of this in fourteen months. The English and Burgundians burned me as a heretic and a witch. Twenty-five years later the Church conducted a retrial and found me innocent. They made me a saint in 1920. The process took nearly five hundred years. Justice, it seems, is in no hurry.