Thief in Washington, D.C. Steals Joan of Arc Statue's Sword

Joan of Arc was a force to be reckoned with, but she probably would have been far less intimidating without her famous sword. According to the Associated Press, National Park officials announced earlier this week that a bronze statue of the French heroine in Washington, D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park is missing its weapon.

D.C.'s Joan of Arc is a replica of a statue at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims, France, created by sculptor Paul DuBois in 1889. It was dedicated in 1922, and was a gift from Le Lyceum Société des Femmes de France, a French women's society, to the women of the United States. Normally, the work depicts the warrior astride a horse, brandishing a sword. But someone vandalized the statue, and officials say its blade appears to have been broken off.

Nobody knows quite when the sword went missing, but the National Park Service thinks the theft occurred on Tuesday, September 20. A similar act of vandalism occurred in the 1970s, and the statue didn’t receive a replacement weapon until 2011. But this time around, local art lovers won’t have to wait four decades to see Joan of Arc get fixed: Park authorities are already arranging for her to receive a new blade.

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