Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 2 by Mark Twain (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) 📗
- Author: Mark Twain
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“Had you not a treasury?”
“Yes. Ten or twelve thousand crowns.” Then she said with naivete “It was not a great sum to carry on a war with.”
“You have it yet?”
“No. It is the King’s money. My brothers hold it for him.”
“What were the arms which you left as an offering in the church of St. Denis?”
“My suit of silver mail and a sword.”
“Did you put them there in order that they might be adored?”
“No. It was but an act of devotion. And it is the custom of men of war who have been wounded to make such offering there. I had been wounded before Paris.”
Nothing appealed to these stony hearts, those dull imaginations—not even this pretty picture, so simply drawn, of the wounded girl-soldier hanging her toy harness there in curious companionship with the grim and dusty iron mail of the historic defenders of France. No, there was nothing in it for them; nothing, unless evil and injury for that innocent creature could be gotten out of it somehow.
“Which aided most—you the Standard, or the Standard you?”
“Whether it was the Standard or whether it was I, is nothing—the victories came from God.”
“But did you base your hopes of victory in yourself or in your Standard?”
“In neither. In God, and not otherwise.”
“Was not your Standard waved around the King’s head at the Coronation?”
“No. It was not.”
“Why was it that your Standard had place at the crowning of the King in the Cathedral of Rheims, rather than those of the other captains?”
Then, soft and low, came that touching speech which will live as long as language lives, and pass into all tongues, and move all gentle hearts wheresoever it shall come, down to the latest day:
“It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor.” (1) How simple it is, and how beautiful. And how it beggars the studies eloquence of the masters of oratory. Eloquence was a native gift of Joan of Arc; it came from her lips without effort and without preparation. Her words were as sublime as her deeds, as sublime as her character; they had their source in a great heart and were coined in a great brain.
(1) 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, a 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 Venerable, 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.
12 Joan’s Master-Stroke Diverted
NOW, as a next move, this small secret court of holy assassins did a thing so base that even at this day, in my old age, it is hard to speak of it with patience.
In the beginning of her commerce with her Voices there at Domremy, the child Joan solemnly devoted her life to God, vowing her pure body and her pure soul to His service. You will remember that her parents tried to stop her from going to the wars by haling her to the court at Toul to compel her to make a marriage which she had never promised to make—a marriage with our poor, good, windy, big, hard-fighting, and most dear and lamented comrade, the Standard-Bearer, who fell in honorable battle and sleeps with God these sixty years, peace to his ashes! And you will remember how Joan, sixteen years old, stood up in that venerable court and conducted her case all by herself, and tore the poor Paladin’s case to rags and blew it away with a breath; and how the astonished old judge on the bench spoke of her as “this marvelous child.”
You remember all that. Then think what I felt, to see these false priests, here in the tribunal wherein Joan had fought a fourth lone fight in three years, deliberately twist that matter entirely around and try to make out that Joan haled the Paladin into court and pretended that he had promised to marry her, and was bent on making him do it.
Certainly there was no baseness that those people were ashamed to stoop to in their hunt for that friendless girl’s life. What they wanted to show was this—that she had committed the sin of relapsing from her vow and trying to violate it.
Joan detailed the true history of the case, but lost her temper as she went along, and finished with some words for Cauchon which he remembers yet, whether he is fanning himself in the world he belongs in or has swindled his way into the other.
The rest of this day and part of the next the court labored upon the old theme—the male attire. It was shabby work for those grave men to be engaged in; for they well knew one of Joan’s reasons for clinging to the male dress was, that soldiers of the guard were always present in her room whether she was asleep or awake, and that the male dress was a better protection for her modesty than the other.
The court knew that one of Joan’s purposes had been the deliverance of the exiled Duke of Orleans, and they were curious to know how she had intended to manage it. Her plan was characteristically businesslike, and her statement of it as characteristically simple and straightforward:
“I would have taken English prisoners enough in France for his ransom; and failing that, I would have invaded England and brought him out by force.”
That was just her way. If a thing was to be done, it was love first, and hammer and tongs to follow; but no shilly-shallying between. She added with a little sigh:
“If I had had my freedom three years, I would have delivered him.”
“Have you the permission of your Voices to break out of prison whenever you can?”
“I have asked their leave several times, but they have not given it.”
I think it is as I have said, she expected the deliverance of death, and within the prison walls, before the three months should expire.
“Would you escape if you saw the doors open?”
She spoke up frankly and said:
“Yes—for I should see in that the permission of Our Lord. God helps
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