Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (fiction book recommendations txt) 📕
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The essential facts regarding Joan of Arc are well known. A young teenage girl hears voices that tell her she will deliver France from England’s oppression during the Hundred Years War. She manages to take her message to the dauphin, who after some persuasion places her at the head of his army. That army promptly lifts the siege of Orléans, throws the English out of the Loire valley, hands them another significant defeat at Patay, and marches all the way to Reims, where the dauphin is crowned King Charles VII. After an ill-advised and short-lived truce, Joan is captured by the Burgundians—French nobility who have aligned themselves with the English—and they try her for heresy and burn her at the stake.
Twain first became fascinated with Joan as a teenager. When he finally decided to write a book about her, he researched it for a dozen years and spent two more years writing it. It was, in his words, “the best of all my books,” and became his last finished novel. Although a work of fiction, Twain’s research was time well spent: the known facts of Joan’s life, and especially the trial, are very accurate in their depiction. To tell Joan’s story, Twain invented a memoirist, Louis de Conte, a fictionalized version of her real-life page, Louis de Contes. Twain has the fictional de Conte grow up with Joan, and so he is able to tell her story from her early childhood all the way through the trial and execution. The result is the story of one of the great women in history told by one of history’s great storytellers.
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- Author: Mark Twain
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Presently the preacher formally summoned Joan to submit to the Church. He made the demand with confidence, for he had gotten the idea from Loyseleur and Beaupere that she was worn to the bone, exhausted, and would not be able to put forth any more resistance; and, indeed, to look at her it seemed that they must be right. Nevertheless, she made one more effort to hold her ground, and said, wearily:
“As to that matter, I have answered my judges before. I have told them to report all that I have said and done to our Holy Father the Pope—to whom, and to God first, I appeal.”
Again, out of her native wisdom, she had brought those words of tremendous import, but was ignorant of their value. But they could have availed her nothing in any case, now, with the stake there and these thousands of enemies about her. Yet they made every churchman there blench, and the preacher changed the subject with all haste. Well might those criminals blench, for Joan’s appeal of her case to the Pope stripped Cauchon at once of jurisdiction over it, and annulled all that he and his judges had already done in the matter and all that they should do in it henceforth.
Joan went on presently to reiterate, after some further talk, that she had acted by command of God in her deeds and utterances; then, when an attempt was made to implicate the King, and friends of hers and his, she stopped that. She said:
“I charge my deeds and words upon no one, neither upon my King nor any other. If there is any fault in them, I am responsible and no other.”
She was asked if she would not recant those of her words and deeds which had been pronounced evil by her judges. Here answer made confusion and damage again:
“I submit them to God and the Pope.”
The Pope once more! It was very embarrassing. Here was a person who was asked to submit her case to the Church, and who frankly consents—offers to submit it to the very head of it. What more could anyone require? How was one to answer such a formidably unanswerable answer as that?
The worried judges put their heads together and whispered and planned and discussed. Then they brought forth this sufficiently shambling conclusion—but it was the best they could do, in so close a place: they said the Pope was so far away; and it was not necessary to go to him anyway, because the present judges had sufficient power and authority to deal with the present case, and were in effect “the Church” to that extent. At another time they could have smiled at this conceit, but not now; they were not comfortable enough now.
The mob was getting impatient. It was beginning to put on a threatening aspect; it was tired of standing, tired of the scorching heat; and the thunder was coming nearer, the lightning was flashing brighter. It was necessary to hurry this matter to a close. Erard showed Joan a written form, which had been prepared and made all ready beforehand, and asked her to abjure.
“Abjure? What is abjure?”
She did not know the word. It was explained to her by Massieu. She tried to understand, but she was breaking, under exhaustion, and she could not gather the meaning. It was all a jumble and confusion of strange words. In her despair she sent out this beseeching cry:
“I appeal to the Church universal whether I ought to abjure or not!”
Erard exclaimed:
“You shall abjure instantly, or instantly be burnt!”
She glanced up, at those awful words, and for the first time she saw the stake and the mass of red coals—redder and angrier than ever now under the constantly deepening storm-gloom. She gasped and staggered up out of her seat muttering and mumbling incoherently, and gazed vacantly upon the people and the scene about her like one who is dazed, or thinks he dreams, and does not know where he is.
The priests crowded about her imploring her to sign the paper, there were many voices beseeching and urging her at once, there was great turmoil and shouting and excitement among the populace and everywhere.
“Sign! sign!” from the priests; “sign—sign and be saved!” And Loyseleur was urging at her ear, “Do as I told you—do not destroy yourself!”
Joan said plaintively to these people:
“Ah, you do not do well to seduce me.”
The judges joined their voices to the others. Yes, even the iron in their hearts melted, and they said:
“O Joan, we pity you so! Take back what you have said, or we must deliver you up to punishment.”
And now there was another voice—it was from the other platform—pealing solemnly above the din: Cauchon’s—reading the sentence of death!
Joan’s strength was all spent. She stood looking about her in a bewildered way a moment, then slowly she sank to her knees, and bowed her head and said:
“I submit.”
They gave her no time to reconsider—they knew the peril of that. The moment the words were out of her mouth Massieu was reading to her the abjuration, and she was repeating the words after him mechanically, unconsciously—and smiling; for her wandering mind was far away in some happier world.
Then this short paper of six lines was slipped aside and a long one of many pages was smuggled into its place, and she, noting nothing, put her mark on it, saying, in pathetic apology, that she did not know how to write. But a secretary of the King of England was there to take care of that defect; he guided her hand with his own, and wrote her name—Jehanne.
The great crime was accomplished. She had signed—what? She did not know—but the others knew. She had signed a paper confessing herself a sorceress, a dealer with devils, a liar, a blasphemer of God and His angels, a lover of blood, a promoter of sedition, cruel, wicked, commissioned of Satan; and this signature
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