It's exactly her size, and its chinks and dents correspond to her war wounds. Experts have their doubts, but a Paris antiques dealer thinks the suit of armor in his shop belonged to Joan of Arc.
"I couldn't be more sure it's authentic if Joan of Arc herself were standing in it," Pierre de Souzy said Monday, posing next to the ornate helmeted suit of armor.De Souzy purchased the suit from an elderly French woman whose family bought it from a British sea merchant in 1760.
He said he began wondering about its origins when his 14-year-old daughter slipped it on just for fun.
"Oh!" his wife joked, "You could call her Joan of Arc!"
A metallurgist at the National Center for Scientific Research dated it to the 15th century and said it seems to have been designed for a woman, not a man.
What's more, it stands just under 5 feet tall - just like France's patron saint. Perhaps even more importantly, flaws on the helmet and breastplate correspond to wounds Joan is known to have suffered in battle before the English burned her at the stake in 1431.
But experts have their doubts the armor with its spiked knuckles, winged plates and missile-like toes belonged to Joan of Arc.
Curators at Paris' Army Museum said Joan's helmet probably had a visor, and the maker would have stamped a name or a crest somewhere on the suit - neither of which this one has.
"There are going to be countless irregularities that make it both challenging and scary to research," said Kent Russell, director of the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, Mass., site of one of the world's largest armor collections.
Legend has it that King Charles VII of France had Joan's suit made for her at a cost of 100 war horses. It vanished after she was taken prisoner May 23, 1431.