Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (Complete)
9781613100370
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
A fictional biography told as if written by Saint Joan's page and secretary. He relates Joan's brief life and stormy career with understanding and admiration that grew after her death. "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" by Mark Twain is a historical novel published in 1896. Presented as translated memoirs of Joan's fictional page, Louis de Conte, the novel chronicles her extraordinary journey from peasant girl to military commander. Through the eyes of her childhood friend and secretary, readers witness Joan's divine visions in Domrémy, her bold mission to restore France's rightful king, and her brilliant military campaigns that defied seasoned generals and drove back English forces. Narrated by a fictional childhood friend and secretary to Joan, the story follows her extraordinary rise from peasant girl to military commander. Volume 2 continues Joan's campaign as she leads French armies to victory against the English, culminating in the coronation of Charles VII. Through this intimate first-person account, Twain presents Joan's courage, wisdom, and divine mission while depicting one of history's most remarkable figures. 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.
