THE TRANSLATOR.
THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE
To his Great-Great-Grand Nephews and Nieces
THIS IS the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I
am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and
as a youth.
In all the tales and songs and histories of Joan of Arc, which you
and the rest of the world read and sing and study in the books
wrought in the late invented art of printing, mention is made of
me, the Sieur Louis de Conte–I was her page and secretary, I was
with her from the beginning until the end.
I was reared in the same village with her. I played with her every
day, when we were little children together, just as you play with
your mates. Now that we perceive how great she was, now that her
name fills the whole world, it seems strange that what I am saying
is true; for it is as if a perishable paltry candle should speak of the
eternal sun riding in the heavens and say, “He was gossip and
housemate to me when we were candles together.” And yet it is
true, just as I say. I was her playmate, and I fought at her side in
the wars; to this day I carry in my mind, fine and clear, the picture
of that dear little figure, with breast bent to the flying horse’s neck,
charging at the head of the armies of France, her hair streaming
back, her silver mail plowing steadily deeper and deeper into the
thick of the battle, sometimes nearly drowned from sight by
tossing heads of horses, uplifted sword-arms, wind-blow plumes,
and intercepting shields. I was with her to the end; and when that
black day came whose accusing shadow will lie always upon the
memory of the mitered French slaves of England who were her
assassins, and upon France who stood idle and essayed no rescue,
my hand was the last she touched in life.
As the years and the decades drifted by, and the spectacle of the
marvelous child’s meteor flight across the war firmament of France
and its extinction in the smoke-clouds of the stake receded deeper
and deeper into the past and grew ever more strange, and
wonderful, and divine, and pathetic, I came to comprehend and
recognize her at last for what she was–the most noble life that was
ever born into this world save only One.
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,