Mark Twain

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Warsaw 2019

Contents

BOOK I

IN DOMREMY

Chapter 1 When Wolves Ran Free in Paris

Chapter 2 The Fairy Tree of Domremy

Chapter 3 All Aflame with Love of France

Chapter 4 Joan Tames the Mad Man

Chapter 5 Domremy Pillaged and Burned

Chapter 6 Joan and Archangel Michael

Chapter 7 She Delivers the Divine Command

Chapter 8 Why the Scorners Relented

BOOK II

IN COURT AND CAMP

Chapter 1 Joan Says Good-By

Chapter 2 The Governor Speeds Joan

Chapter 3 The Paladin Groans and Boasts

Chapter 4 Joan Leads Us Through the Enemy

Chapter 5 We Pierce the Last Ambuscades

Chapter 6 Joan Convinces the King

Chapter 7 Our Paladin in His Glory

Chapter 8 Joan Persuades Her Inquisitors

Chapter 9 She Is Made General-in-Chief

Chapter 10 The Maid's Sword and Banner

Chapter 11 The War March Is Begun

Chapter 12 Joan Puts Heart in Her Army

Chapter 13 Checked by the Folly of the Wise

Chapter 14 What the English Answered

Chapter 15 My Exquisite Poem Goes to Smash

Chapter 16 The Finding of the Dwarf

Chapter 17 Sweet Fruit of Bitter Truth

Chapter 18 Joan's First Battle-Field

Chapter 19 We Burst In Upon Ghosts

Chapter 20 Joan Makes Cowards Brave Victors

Chapter 21 She Gently Reproves Her Dear Friend

Chapter 22 The Fate of France Decided

Chapter 23 Joan Inspires the Tawdry King

Chapter 24 Tinsel Trappings of Nobility

Chapter 25 At Last—Forward!

Chapter 26 The Last Doubts Scattered

Chapter 27 How Joan Took Jargeau

Chapter 28 Joan Foretells Her Doom

Chapter 29 Fierce Talbot Reconsiders

Chapter 30 The Red Field of Patay

Chapter 31 France Begins to Live Again

Chapter 32 The Joyous News Flies Fast

Chapter 33 Joan's Five Great Deeds

Chapter 34 The Jests of the Burgundians

Chapter 35 The Heir of France is Crowned

Chapter 36 Joan Hears News from Home

Chapter 37 Again to Arms

Chapter 38 The King Cries “Forward!”

Chapter 39 We Win, But the King Balks

Chapter 40 Treachery Conquers Joan

Chapter 41 The Maid Will March No More

BOOK III

TRIAL AND MARTYRDOM

Chapter 1 The Maid in Chains

Chapter 2 Joan Sold to the English

Chapter 3 Weaving the Net About Her

Chapter 4 All Ready to Condemn

Chapter 5 Fifty Experts Against a Novice

Chapter 6 The Maid Baffles Her Persecutors

Chapter 7 Craft That Was in Vain

Chapter 8 Joan Tells of Her Visions

Chapter 9 Her Sure Deliverance Foretold

Chapter 10 The Inquisitors at Their Wits' End

Chapter 11 The Court Reorganized for Assassination

Chapter 12 Joan's Master-Stroke Diverted

Chapter 13 The Third Trial Fails

Chapter 14 Joan Struggles with Her Twelve Lies

Chapter 15 Undaunted by Threat of Burning

Chapter 16 Joan Stands Defiant Before the Rack

Chapter 17 Supreme in Direst Peril

Chapter 18 Condemned Yet Unafraid

Chapter 19 Our Last Hopes of Rescue Fail

Chapter 20 The Betrayal

Chapter 21 Respited Only for Torture

Chapter 22 Joan Gives the Fatal Answer

Chapter 23 The Time Is at Hand

Chapter 24 Joan the Martyr

CONCLUSION

BOOK I

IN DOMREMY

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, Noel 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 two 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.

Chapter 2 The Fairy Tree of Domremy

OUR DOMREMY was like any other humble little hamlet of that remote time and region. It was a maze of crooked, narrow lanes and alleys shaded and sheltered by the overhanging thatch roofs of the barnlike houses. The houses were dimly lighted by wooden-shuttered windows–that is, holes in the walls which served for windows. The floors were dirt, and there was very little furniture. Sheep and cattle grazing was the main industry; all the young folks tended flocks.

The situation was beautiful. From one edge of the village a flowery plain extended in a wide sweep to the river–the Meuse; from the rear edge of the village a grassy slope rose gradually, and at the top was the great oak forest–a forest that was deep and gloomy and dense, and full of interest for us children, for many murders had been done in it by outlaws in old times, and in still earlier times prodigious dragons that spouted fire and poisonous vapors from their nostrils had their homes in there. In fact, one was still living in there in our own time. It was as long as a tree, and had a body as big around as a tierce, and scales like overlapping great tiles, and deep ruby eyes as large as a cavalier’s hat, and an anchor-fluke on its tail as big as I don’t know what, but very big, even unusually so for a dragon, as everybody said who knew about dragons. It was thought that this dragon was of a brilliant blue color, with gold mottlings, but no one had ever seen it, therefore this was not known to be so, it was only an opinion. It was not my opinion; I think there is no sense in forming an opinion when there is no evidence to form it on. If you build a person without any bones in him he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an opinion. But I will take up this matter more at large at another time, and try to make the justness of my position appear. As to that dragon, I always held the belief that its color was gold and without blue, for that has always been the color of dragons. That this dragon lay but a little way within the wood at one time is shown by the fact that Pierre Morel was in there one day and smelt it, and recognized it by the smell. It gives one a horrid idea of how near to us the deadliest danger can be and we not suspect it.

In the earliest times a hundred knights from many remote places in the earth would have gone in there one after another, to kill the dragon and get the reward, but in our time that method had gone out, and the priest had become the one that abolished dragons. Pere Guillaume Fronte did it in this case. He had a procession, with candles and incense and banners, and marched around the edge of the wood and exorcised the dragon, and it was never heard of again, although it was the opinion of many that the smell never wholly passed away. Not that any had ever smelt the smell again, for none had; it was only an opinion, like that other–and lacked bones, you see. I know that the creature was there before the exorcism, but whether it was there afterward or not is a thing which I cannot be so positive about.

In a noble open space carpeted with grass on the high ground toward Vaucouleurs stood a most majestic beech tree with wide-reaching arms and a grand spread of shade, and by it a limpid spring of cold water; and on summer days the children went there–oh, every summer for more than five hundred years–went there and sang and danced around the tree for hours together, refreshing themselves at the spring from time to time, and it was most lovely and enjoyable. Also they made wreaths of flowers and hung them upon the tree and about the spring to please the fairies that lived there; for they liked that, being idle innocent little creatures, as all fairies are, and fond of anything delicate and pretty like wild flowers put together in that way. And in return for this attention the fairies did any friendly thing they could for the children, such as keeping the spring always full and clear and cold, and driving away serpents and insects that sting; and so there was never any unkindness between the fairies and the children during more than five hundred years–tradition said a thousand–but only the warmest affection and the most perfect trust and confidence; and whenever a child died the fairies mourned just as that child’s playmates did, and the sign of it was there to see; for before the dawn on the day of the funeral they hung a little immortelle over the place where that child was used to sit under the tree. I know this to be true by my own eyes; it is not hearsay. And the reason it was known that the fairies did it was this–that it was made all of black flowers of a sort not known in France anywhere.

Now from time immemorial all children reared in Domremy were called the Children of the Tree; and they loved that name, for it carried with it a mystic privilege not granted to any others of the children of this world. Which was this: whenever one of these came to die, then beyond the vague and formless images drifting through his darkening mind rose soft and rich and fair a vision of the Tree–if all was well with his soul. That was what some said. Others said the vision came in two ways: once as a warning, one or two years in advance of death, when the soul was the captive of sin, and then the Tree appeared in its desolate winter aspect–then that soul was smitten with an awful fear. If repentance came, and purity of life, the vision came again, this time summer-clad and beautiful; but if it were otherwise with that soul the vision was withheld, and it passed from life knowing its doom. Still others said that the vision came but once, and then only to the sinless dying forlorn in distant lands and pitifully longing for some last dear reminder of their home. And what reminder of it could go to their hearts like the picture of the Tree that was the darling of their love and the comrade of their joys and comforter of their small griefs all through the divine days of their vanished youth?

Now the several traditions were as I have said, some believing one and some another. One of them I knew to be the truth, and that was the last one. I do not say anything against the others; I think they were true, but I only know that the last one was; and it is my thought that if one keep to the things he knows, and not trouble about the things which he cannot be sure about, he will have the steadier mind for it–and there is profit in that. I know that when the Children of the Tree die in a far land, then–if they be at peace with God–they turn their longing eyes toward home, and there, far-shining, as through a rift in a cloud that curtains heaven, they see the soft picture of the Fairy Tree, clothed in a dream of golden light; and they see the bloomy mead sloping away to the river, and to their perishing nostrils is blown faint and sweet the fragrance of the flowers of home. And then the vision fades and passes–but they know, they know! and by their transfigured faces you know also, you who stand looking on; yes, you know the message that has come, and that it has come from heaven.

Joan and I believed alike about this matter. But Pierre Morel and Jacques d’Arc, and many others believed that the vision appeared twice–to a sinner. In fact, they and many others said they knew it. Probably because their fathers had known it and had told them; for one gets most things at second hand in this world.

Now one thing that does make it quite likely that there were really two apparitions of the Tree is this fact: From the most ancient times if one saw a villager of ours with his face ash-white and rigid with a ghastly fright, it was common for every one to whisper to his neighbor, “Ah, he is in sin, and has got his warning.” And the neighbor would shudder at the thought and whisper back, “Yes, poor soul, he has seen the Tree.”

Such evidences as these have their weight; they are not to be put aside with a wave of the hand. A thing that is backed by the cumulative evidence of centuries naturally gets nearer and nearer to being proof all the time; and if this continue and continue, it will some day become authority–and authority is a bedded rock, and will abide.

In my long life I have seen several cases where the tree appeared announcing a death which was still far away; but in none of these was the person in a state of sin. No; the apparition was in these cases only a special grace; in place of deferring the tidings of that soul’s redemption till the day of death, the apparition brought them long before, and with them peace–peace that might no more be disturbed–the eternal peace of God. I myself, old and broken, wait with serenity; for I have seen the vision of the Tree. I have seen it, and am content.

Always, from the remotest times, when the children joined hands and danced around the Fairy Tree they sang a song which was the Tree’s song, the song of L’Arbre fee de Bourlemont. They sang it to a quaint sweet air–a solacing sweet air which has gone murmuring through my dreaming spirit all my life when I was weary and troubled, resting me and carrying me through night and distance home again. No stranger can know or feel what that song has been, through the drifting centuries, to exiled Children of the Tree, homeless and heavy of heart in countries foreign to their speech and ways. You will think it a simple thing, that song, and poor, perchance; but if you will remember what it was to us, and what it brought before our eyes when it floated through our memories, then you will respect it. And you will understand how the water wells up in our eyes and makes all things dim, and our voices break and we cannot sing the last lines:

“And when, in Exile wand’ring, we Shall fainting yearn for glimpse of thee, Oh, rise upon our sight!”

And you will remember that Joan of Arc sang this song with us around the Tree when she was a little child, and always loved it. And that hallows it, yes, you will grant that:

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