Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (fiction book recommendations txt) 📕
Description
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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It remained there three hundred and sixty years, and then was destroyed in a public bonfire, together with two swords, a plumed cap, several suits of state apparel, and other relics of the Maid, by a mob in the time of the Revolution. Nothing which the hand of Joan of Arc is known to have touched now remains in existence except a few preciously guarded military and state papers which she signed, her pen being guided by a clerk or her secretary, Louis de Conte. A boulder exists from which she is known to have mounted her horse when she was once setting out upon a campaign. Up to a quarter of a century ago there was a single hair from her head still in existence. It was drawn through the wax of a seal attached to the parchment of a state document. It was surreptitiously snipped out, seal and all, by some vandal relic-hunter, and carried off. Doubtless it still exists, but only the thief knows where. —Translator ↩
He kept his word. His account of the Great Trial will be found to be in strict and detailed accordance with the sworn facts of history. —Translator ↩
What she said has been many times translated, but never with success. There is a haunting pathos about the original which eludes all efforts to convey it into our tongue. It is as subtle as an odor, and escapes in the transmission. Her words were these:
“Il avait été à la peine, c’etait bien raison qu’il fut a l’honneur.”
Monseigneur Ricard, Honorary Vicar-General to the Archbishop of Aix, finely speaks of it (Jeanne d’Arc la Vénérable, page 197) as “that sublime reply, enduring in the history of celebrated sayings like the cry of a French and Christian soul wounded unto death in its patriotism and its faith.” —Translator ↩
Hog, pig. ↩
Cochonner, to litter, to farrow; also, “to make a mess of”! ↩
The lower half of it remains today just as it was then; the upper half is of a later date. —Translator ↩
ColophonPersonal Recollections of Joan of Arc
was published in 1896 by
Mark Twain.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Vince Rice,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2004 by
David Reed and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive (Vol 1, Vol 2).
The cover page is adapted from
Entrée de Jeanne d’Arc à Orléans,
a painting completed in 1887 by
Jean-Jacques Scherrer.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
July 10, 2021, 8:08 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
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