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Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Chapter 6
ALL THROUGH her childhood and up to the middle of her fourteenth year,
Joan had been the most light-hearted creature and the merriest in the
village, with a hop-skip-and-jump gait and a happy and catching laugh;
and this disposition, supplemented by her warm and sympathetic nature and
frank and winning ways, had made her everybody's pet. She had been a hot
patriot all this time, and sometimes the war news had sobered her spirits
and wrung her heart and made her acquainted with tears, but always when
these interruptions had run their course her spirits rose and she was her
old self again.
But now for a whole year and a half she had been mainly grave; not
melancholy, but given to thought, abstraction, dreams. She was carrying
France upon her heart, and she found the burden not light. I knew that
this was her trouble, but others attributed her abstraction to religious
ecstasy, for she did not share her thinkings with the village at large,
yet gave me glimpses of them, and so I knew, better than the rest, what
was absorbing her interest. Many a time the idea crossed my mind that she
had a secret--a secret which she was keeping wholly to herself, as well
from me as from the others. This idea had come to me because several
times she had cut a sentence in two and changed the subject when
apparently she was on the verge of a revelation of some sort. I was to
find this secret out, but not just yet.
The day after the conversation which I have been reporting we were
together in the pastures and fell to talking about France, as usual. For
her sake I had always talked hopefully before, but that was mere lying,
for really there was not anything to hang a rag of hope for France upon.
Now it was such a pain to lie to her, and cost me such shame to offer
this treachery to one so snow-pure from lying and treachery, and even
from suspicion of such baseness in others, as she was, that I was
resolved to face about now and begin over again, and never insult her
more with deception. I started on the new policy by saying--still opening
up with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung
out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time:
"Joan, I have been thinking the thing all over last night, and have
concluded that we have been in the wrong all this time; that the case of
France is desperate; that it has been desperate ever since Agincourt; and
that to-day it is more than desperate, it is hopeless."
I did not look her in the face while I was saying it; it could not be
expected of a person. To break her heart, to crush her hope with a so
frankly brutal speech as that, without one charitable soft place in
it--it seemed a shameful thing, and it was. But when it was out, the
weight gone, and my conscience rising to the surface, I glanced at her
face to see the result.
There was none to see. At least none that I was expecting. There was a
barely perceptible suggestion of wonder in her serious eyes, but that was
all; and she said, in her simple and placid way:
"The case of France hopeless? Why should you think that? Tell me."
It is a most pleasant thing to find that what you thought would inflict a
hurt upon one whom you honor, has not done it. I was relieved now, and
could say all my say without any furtivenesses and without embarrassment.
So I began:
"Let us put sentiment and patriotic illusions aside, and look at the
facts in the face. What do they say? They speak as plainly as the figures
in a merchant's account-book. One has only to add the two columns up to
see that the French house is bankrupt, that one-half of its property is
already in the English sheriff's hands and the other half in
nobody's--except those of irresponsible raiders and robbers confessing
allegiance to nobody. Our King is shut up with his favorites and fools in
inglorious idleness and poverty in a narrow little patch of the
kingdom--a sort of back lot, as one may say--and has no authority there
or anywhere else, hasn't a farthing to his name, nor a regiment of
soldiers; he is not fighting, he is not intending to fight, he means to
make no further resistance; in truth, there is but one thing that he is
intending to do--give the whole thing up, pitch his crown into the sewer,
and run away to Scotland. There are the facts. Are they correct?"
"Yes, they are correct."
"Then it is as I have said: one needs but to add them together in order
to realize what they mean."
She asked, in an ordinary, level tone:
"What--that the case of France is hopeless?"
"Necessarily. In face of these facts, doubt of it is impossible."
"How can you say that? How can you feel like that?"
"How can I? How could I think or feel in any other way, in the
circumstances? Joan, with these fatal figures before, you, have you
really any hope for France--really and actually?"
"Hope--oh, more than that! France will win her freedom and keep it. Do
not doubt it."
It seemed to me that her clear intellect must surely be clouded to-day.
It must be so, or she would see that those figures could mean only one
thing. Perhaps if I marshaled them again she would see. So I said:
"Joan, your heart, which worships France, is beguiling your head. You are
not perceiving the importance of these figures. Here--I want to make a
picture of them, her eon the ground with a stick. Now, this rough outline
is France. Through its middle, east and west, I draw a river."
"Yes, the Loire."
"Now, then, this whole northern half of the country is in the tight grip
of the English."
"Yes."
"And this whole southern half is really in nobody's hands at all--as our
King confesses by meditating desertion and flight to a foreign land.
England has armies here; opposition is dead; she can assume full
possession whenever she may choose. In very truth, all France is gone,
France is already lost, France has ceased to exist. What was France is
now but a British province. Is this true?"
Her voice was low, and just touched with emotion, but distinct:
"Yes, it is true."
"Very well. Now add this clinching fact, and surely the sum is complete:
When have French soldiers won a victory? Scotch soldiers, under the
French flag, have won a barren fight or two a few years back, but I am
speaking of French ones. Since eight thousand Englishmen nearly
annihilated sixty thousand Frenchmen a dozen years ago at Agincourt,
French courage has been paralyzed. And so it is a common saying to-day
that if you confront fifty French soldiers with five English ones, the
French will run."
"It is a pity, but even these things are true."
"Then certainly the day for hoping is past."
I believed the case would be clear to her now. I thought it could not
fail to be clear to her, and that she would say, herself, that there was
no longer any ground for hope. But I was mistaken; and disappointed also.
She said, without any doubt in her tone:
"France will rise again. You shall see."
"Rise?--with this burden of English armies on her back!"
"She will cast it off; she will trample it under foot!" This with spirit.
"Without soldiers to fight with?"
"The drums will summon them. They will answer, and they will march."
"March to the rear, as usual?"
"No; to the front--ever to the front--always to the front! You shall
see."
"And the pauper King?"
"He will mount his throne--he will wear his crown."
"Well, of a truth this makes one's head dizzy. Why, if I could believe
that in thirty years from now the English domination would be broken and
the French monarch's head find itself hooped with a real crown of
sovereignty--"
"Both will have happened before two years are sped."
"Indeed? and who is going to perform all these sublime impossibilities?"
"God."
It was a reverent low note, but it rang clear.
What could have put those strange ideas in her head? This question kept
running in my mind during two or three days. It was inevitable that I
should think of madness. What other way was there to account for such
things? Grieving and brooding over the woes of France had weakened that
strong mind, and filled it with fantastic phantoms--yes, that must be it.
But I watched her, and tested her, and it was not so. Her eye was clear
and sane, her ways were natural, her speech direct and to the point. No,
there was nothing the matter with her mind; it was still the soundest in
the village and the best. She went on thinking for others, planning for
others, sacrificing herself for others, just as always before. She went
on ministering to her sick and to her poor, and still stood ready to give
the wayfarer her bed and content herself with the floor. There was a
secret somewhere, but madness was not the key to it. This was plain.
Now the key did presently come into my hands, and the way that it
happened was this. You have heard all the world talk of this matter which
I am about to speak of, but you have not heard an eyewitness talk of it
before.
I was coming from over the ridge, one day--it was the 15th of May,
'28--and when I got to the edge of the oak forest and was about to step
out of it upon the turfy open space in which the haunted beech tree
stood, I happened to cast a glance from cover, first--then I took a step
backward, and stood in the shelter and concealment of the foliage. For I
had caught sight of Joan, and thought I would devise some sort of playful
surprise for her. Think of it--that trivial conceit was neighbor, with
but a scarcely measurable interval of time between, to an event destined
to endure forever in histories and songs.
The day was overcast, and all that grassy space wherein the Tree stood
lay in a soft rich shadow. Joan sat on a natural seat formed by gnarled
great roots of the Tree. Her hands lay loosely, one reposing in the
other, in her lap. Her head was bent a little toward the ground, and her
air was that of one who is lost to thought, steeped in dreams, and not
conscious of herself or of the world. And now I saw a most strange thing,
for I saw a white shadow come slowly gliding along the grass toward the
Tree. It was of grand proportions--a robed form, with wings--and the
whiteness of this shadow was not like any other whiteness that we know
of, except it be the whiteness of lightnings, but even the lightnings are
not so intense as it was, for one cal look at them without hurt, whereas
this brilliancy was so blinding that in pained my eyes and brought the
water into them. I uncovered my head, perceiving that I was in the
presence of something not of this world. My breath grew faint and
difficult, because of the terror and the awe that possessed me.
Another strange thing. The wood had been silent--smitten with that deep
stillness which comes when a storm-cloud darkens a forest, and the wild
creatures lose heart and are afraid; but now all the birds burst forth
into song, and the joy, the rapture, the ecstasy of it was beyond belief;
and was so eloquent and so moving, withal, that it was plain it was an
act of worship. With the first note of those birds Joan cast herself upon
her knees, and bent her head low and crossed her hands upon her breast.
She had not seen the shadow yet. Had the song of the birds told her it
was coming? It had that look to me. Then the like of this must have
happened before. Yes, there might be no doubt of that.
The shadow approached Joan slowly; the extremity of it reached her,
flowed over her, clothed her in its awful splendor. In that immortal
light her face, only humanly beautiful before, became divine; flooded
with that transforming glory her mean peasant habit was become like to
the raiment of the sun-clothed children of God as we see them thronging
the terraces of the Throne in our dreams and imaginings.
Presently she rose and stood, with her head still bowed a little, and
with her arms down and the ends of her fingers lightly laced together in
front of her; and standing so, all drenched with that wonderful light,
and yet apparently not knowing it, she seemed to listen--but I heard
nothing. After a little she raised her head, and looked up as one might
look up toward the face of a giant, and then clasped her hands and lifted
them high, imploringly, and began to plead. I heard some of the words. I
heard her say:
"But I am so young! oh, so young to leave my mother and my home and go
out into the strange world to undertake a thing so great! Ah, how can I
talk with men, be comrade with men?--soldiers! It would give me over to
insult, and rude usage, and contempt. How can I go to the great wars, and
lead armies?--I a girl, and ignorant of such things, knowing nothing of
arms, nor how to mount a horse, nor ride it. . . . Yet--if it is
commanded--"
Her voice sank a little, and was broken by sobs, and I made out no more
of her words. Then I came to myself. I reflected that I had been
intruding upon a mystery of God--and what might my punishment be? I was
afraid, and went deeper into the wood. Then I carved a mark in the bark
of a tree, saying to myself, it may be that I am dreaming and have not
seen this vision at all. I will come again, when I know that I am awake
and not dreaming, and see if this mark is still here; then I shall know.
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