Personal Recollections of Joan by Mark Twain

thinking.

What Joan did that day bore fruit the very day after. The King was

obliged to respect the spirit of a young girl who could hold her

own and stand her ground like that, and he asserted himself

sufficiently to put his respect into an act instead of into polite and

empty words. He moved Joan out of that poor inn, and housed her,

with us her servants, in the Castle of Courdray, personally

confiding her to the care of Madame de Bellier, wife of old Raoul

de Gaucourt, Master of the Palace. Of course, this royal attention

had an immediate result: all the great lords and ladies of the Court

began to flock there to see and listen to the wonderful girl-soldier

that all the world was talking about, and who had answered the

King’s mandate with a bland refusal to obey. Joan charmed them

every one with her sweetness and simplicity and unconscious

eloquence, and all the best and capablest among them recognized

that there was an indefinable something about her that testified

that she was not made of common clay, that she was built on a

grander plan than the mass of mankind, and moved on a loftier

plane. These spread her fame. She always made friends and

advocates that way; neither the high nor the low could come

within the sound of her voice and the sight of her face and go out

from her presence indifferent.

Chapter 6 Joan Convinces the King

WELL, anything to make delay. The King’s council advised him

against arriving at a decision in our matter too precipitately. He

arrive at a decision too precipitately! So they sent a committee of

priests–always priests–into Lorraine to inquire into Joan’s

character and history–a matter which would consume several

weeks, of course. You see how fastidious they were. It was as if

people should come to put out the fire when a man’s house was

burning down, and they waited till they could send into another

country to find out if he had always kept the Sabbath or not, before

letting him try.

So the days poked along; dreary for us young people in some ways,

but not in all, for we had one great anticipation in front of us; we

had never seen a king, and now some day we should have that

prodigious spectacle to see and to treasure in our memories all our

lives; so we were on the lookout, and always eager and watching

for the chance. The others were doomed to wait longer than I, as it

turned out. One day great news came–the Orleans commissioners,

with Yolande and our knights, had at last turned the council’s

position and persuaded the King to see Joan.

Joan received the immense news gratefully but without losing her

head, but with us others it was otherwise; we could not eat or sleep

or do any rational thing for the excitement and the glory of it.

During two days our pair of noble knights were in distress and

trepidation on Joan’s account, for the audience was to be at night,

and they were afraid that Joan would be so paralyzed by the glare

of light from the long files of torches, the solemn pomps and

ceremonies, the great concourse of renowned personages, the

brilliant costumes, and the other splendors of the Court, that she, a

simple country-maid, and all unused to such things, would be

overcome by these terrors and make a piteous failure.

No doubt I could have comforted them, but I was not free to speak.

Would Joan be disturbed by this cheap spectacle, this tinsel show,

with its small King and his butterfly dukelets?–she who had

spoken face to face with the princes of heaven, the familiars of

God, and seen their retinue of angels stretching back into the

remoteness of the sky, myriads upon myriads, like a measureless

fan of light, a glory like the glory of the sun streaming from each

of those innumerable heads, the massed radiance filling the deeps

of space with a blinding splendor? I thought not.

Queen Yolande wanted Joan to make the best possible impression

upon the King and the Court, so she was strenuous to have her