Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc v1

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc v1

by Mark Twain

In Two Volumes

Volume 1.


Consider this unique and imposing distinction. Since the writing of
human history began, Joan of Arc is the only person, of either sex,
who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a
nation at the age of seventeen

LOUIS KOSSUTH.

Chapter 1 When Wolves Ran Free in Paris

I, THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE, was born in Neufchateau, on
the 6th of January, 1410; that is to say, exactly two years before
Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to those
distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of
the century. In politics they were Armagnacs--patriots; they were
for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The
Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them,
and done it well. They took everything but my father's small
nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in
poverty and with a broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there
was the sort he liked, and that was something. He came to a region
of comparative quiet; he left behind him a region peopled with
furies, madmen, devils, where slaughter was a daily pastime and
no man's life safe for a moment. In Paris, mobs roared through the
streets nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested,
uninterrupted. The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings,
and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the
streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked by thieves, the unholy
gleaners after the mob. None had the courage to gather these dead
for burial; they were left there to rot and create plagues.

And plagues they did create. Epidemics swept away the people
like flies, and the burials were conducted secretly and by night, for
public funerals were not allowed, lest the revelation of the
magnitude of the plague's work unman the people and plunge them
into despair. Then came, finally, the bitterest winter which had
visited France in five hundred years. Famine, pestilence, slaughter,
ice, snow--Paris had all these at once. The dead lay in heaps about
the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured
them.

Ah, France had fallen low--so low! For more than three quarters of
a century the English fangs had been bedded in her flesh, and so
cowed had her armies become by ceaseless rout and defeat that it
was said and accepted that the mere sight of an English army was
sufficient to put a French one to flight.

When I was five years old the prodigious disaster of Agincourt fell
upon France; and although the English King went home to enjoy
his glory, he left the country prostrate and a prey to roving bands
of Free Companions in the service of the Burgundian party, and
one of these bands came raiding through Neufchateau one night,
and by the light of our burning roof-thatch I saw all that were dear
to me in this world (save an elder brother, your ancestor, left
behind with the court) butchered while they begged for mercy, and
heard the butchers laugh at their prayers and mimic their
pleadings. I was overlooked, and escaped without hurt. When the
savages were gone I crept out and cried the night away watching
the burning houses; and I was all alone, except for the company of
the dead and the wounded, for the rest had taken flight and hidden
themselves.

I was sent to Domremy, to the priest, whose housekeeper became a
loving mother to me. The priest, in the course of time, taught me
to read and write, and he and I were the only persons in the village
who possessed this learning.

At the time that the house of this good priest, Guillaume Fronte,
became my home, I was six years old. We lived close by the
village church, and the small garden of Joan's parents was behind
the church. As to that family there were Jacques d'Arc the father,
his wife Isabel Romee; three sons--Jacques, ten years old, Pierre,
eight, and Jean, seven; Joan, four, and her baby sister Catherine,
about a year old. I had these children for playmates from the
beginning. I had some other playmates besides--particularly four
boys: Pierre Morel, Etienne Roze, No‰l Rainguesson, and Edmond
Aubrey, whose father was maire at that time; also two girls, about
Joan's age, who by and by became her favorites; one was named
Haumetter, the other was called Little Mengette. These girls were
common peasant children, like Joan herself. When they grew up,
both married common laborers. Their estate was lowly enough,
you see; yet a time came, many years after, when no passing
stranger, howsoever great he might be, failed to go and pay his
reverence to those to humble old women who had been honored in
their youth by the friendship of Joan of Arc.

These were all good children, just of the ordinary peasant type; not
bright, of course--you would not expect that--but good-hearted and
companionable, obedient to their parents and the priest; and as
they grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and
prejudices got at second hand from their elders, and adopted
without reserve; and without examination also--which goes
without saying. Their religion was inherited, their politics the
same. John Huss and his sort might find fault with the Church, in
Domremy it disturbed nobody's faith; and when the split came,
when I was fourteen, and we had three Popes at once, nobody in
Domremy was worried about how to choose among them--the
Pope of Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no
Pope at all. Every human creature in the village was an
Armagnac--a patriot--and if we children hotly hated nothing else in
the world, we did certainly hate the English and Burgundian name
and polity in that way.

Contents: Translator's Preface A Peculiarity of Joan of Arc's History The Sieur Louis de Conte Book I -- IN DOMREMY 1 When Wolves Ran Free in Paris 2 The Fa‰ry Tree of Domremy 3 All Aflame with Love of France 4 Joan Tames the Mad Man 5 Domremy Pillaged and Burned 6 Joan and Archangel Michael 7 She Delivers the Divine Command 8 Why the Scorners Relented Book II -- IN COURT AND CAMP 1 Joan Says Good-By 2 The Governor Speeds Joan 3 The Paladin Groans and Boasts 4 Joan Leads Us Through the Enemy 5 We Pierce the Last Ambuscades 6 Joan Convinces the King 7 Our Paladin in His Glory 8 Joan Persuades the Inquisitors 9 She Is Made General-in-Chief 10 The Maid's Sword and Banner 11 The War March Is Begun 12 Joan Puts Heart in Her Army 13 Checked by the Folly of the Wise 14 What the English Answered 15 My Exquisite Poem Goes to Smash 16 The Finding of the Dwarf 17 Sweet Fruit of Bitter Truth 18 Joan's First Battle-Field 19 We Burst In Upon Ghosts 20 Joan Makes Cowards Brave Victors 21 She Gently Reproves Her Dear Friend 22 The Fate of France Decided 23 Joan Inspires the Tawdry King 24 Tinsel Trappings of Nobility 25 At Last--Forward! 26 The Last Doubts Scattered 27 How Joan Took Jargeau

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