The fun of it is to try and decipher what the dickens Samuel Langhorne Clemens had in mind when he wrote it, and for whom it was intended. I had an inkling, even before reading it, that it's not what it seems, or not what it seemed to readers when it was first published serially in Harper's Magazine beginning in April 1895. Neither Clemens's real name nor his well-known pen name, Mark Twain, was attached to the serial. Instead it purported to be a translation, by "Jean François Alden," of an original unpublished manuscript dating from 1492, the "Personal Recollections" of an 82-year-old man, Le Sieur Louis de Conte, telling of his experiences as the childhood companion of Joan of Arc (1412-1431). Well now, kiddies, there was such a man as the Sieur de Conte, about whom less in known than would occupy this paragraph, but there were no such "Personal Recollections" to be translated by anyone. The whole book is a historical fiction, a `romance' in the pre-modern sense of the genre, a tale of wonder and magic. It's hard to imagine that any readers of Harper's were deceived, certainly not anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the literature and documents of the 15th Century. The literary manner of the book is pure 19th Century, as anachronistic and romanticized as the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. What's more, it's specifically the language of books written for children around the turn of the century, Clemens's era. Patently it's not the language of Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, or Henry James, Clemens's contemporaries. Why, be-dad, it's a lot like the language of "Tom Sawyer"! The children of Domremy, Joan of Arc's playmates, act and talk and sass their parents remarkably like children living along the Mississippi in the steamboat days! Plus, there's very little of the sweat and stench of 15th C peasant life in de Conte's `conte.' His description of Domremy has a pastoral charm about it, but de Conte would surely have remembered a grimmer reality. Are we supposed to trust his portrayal then, when it's plainly mythic? And how about Clemens? Was he hiding something behind his narrator's gullibility, or was he simply ignorant of the daily drudgery of villagers in the 15th C? Was there an expectation of `plausibility' or `credence' in the mind of Samuel Clemens when he presented this work to the public? That seems preposterous, but if so, the book has to be considered a coy literary device masquerading as a hoax.
The problem is that Clemens himself declared this book his `best.' He claimed to have researched it for twelve years, and he purported to regard Joan of Arc as the most flawless and admirable personage of human history -- "the most noble life that ever was born into this world save only One," in the language of the imaginary memoirist Louis de Conte. I wonder about those twelve years of research, mes amis. There's little proof of any study of social or cultural history in this novel, and what there is of political history could have been learned in a month, given the sources available to an anglophone dilettante in the 1880s and 1890s. Furthermore, when and where would Clemens have conducted those twelve years of study, presumably the actual years of his life from 1882 to 1892 (oops! make that 1880 to 1892), during which he wrote much of his total oeuvre? Or did he have an alternate lifespan as well as several pen names? And believe me, Clemens could not have read 15th C French by himself! It takes academic training just to decipher the script.
Is there any good reason why we shouldn't suspect that Clemens wrote his serial/novel for the simplest of reasons? For money? Clemens was in financial distress in the early 1890s, edging toward bankruptcy, as a result of bad investments and weak sales of his recent more-serious novels. Joan of Arc is not laborious reading. There's a good deal of gentle wit and mild buffoonery in the narrative, featuring the village boys who go to war with Joan, and a bit of sly mockery of both aristocracy and clergy. Clemens lived by his pen, don't forget!
The Sieur de Conte is what modern critics call a "naive narrator," one whose understanding of his story cannot be accepted by the reader as objective truth or indeed as the whole story. De Conte, for instance, speaks quite credulously of fairies around a tree in Domremy; he has no doubts that the local priest actually exorcized the fairies, thus providing an occasion for the girl Joan to demonstrate her spiritual and intellectual precocity. In literary terms, de Conte's credulity about the fairies prepares the reader for his far more significant `testimony' about the reality of Joan's visions and angelic voices. Likewise, de Conte's naivete is a guise with which Clemens can conceal the caustic skepticism of his alter ego, Mark Twain. Reader, beware! Don't make the fatal error of conflating Clemens with his credulous narrator!
According to de Conte, when Joan finally gains an audience with the Dauphin, she progresses to the sound of silver herald trumpets. Trumpeters were a privileged guild in the 15th C, employed both as ambassadors and spys as well as musicians, so the scene is not utterly fantastical, though a trumpet actually made of silver would be unplayable. But if the historical Jeanne d'Arc heard any sophisticated polyphony or courtly instrumental music, it would been purely by chance. Such music was not being performed in the village of Domremy, where she spent more than the first half of her brief life. Her best chance of hearing such music - unlikely as it is - would have been after she was captured by troops of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy from 1419-1467. The two greatest and most renowned composers of Europe at that time were Burgundians -- Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) and Gilles Binchois (1400-1460). Binchois is known to have been employed in the court chapel of Philip the Good in the 1420s. In fact, Philip was one of the most extravagant patrons of music and the visual arts of his era, an opulence he could afford as the ruler of the richest, most commercially and socially advanced regions of North Europe, including the lands that are now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine, and other 'counties' that are now part of France and Germany all the way to the Swiss border. Burgundy never evolved in a 'nation state' but in the 15th Century it was a sprawling realm of pelf and power. The painters Rogier van der Weyden (1400-1464) and Jan van Eyck (1395-1441) were Burgundians, patronized by Philip the Good and his courtiers, both secular and clerical. Philip himself was a ruler of such stature that it was he who founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, the most exclusive "club" in history, a knightly order of potentates from all of Europe which still exists today.
It's a cinch that Clemens/Twain never heard a note of Burgundian music, nor did anyone else in his lifetime, nor would he have had a glimmer of understanding it. Is that at all relevant? It seems so to me, since Clemens/de Conte virtually `pins the rap' for the martyrdom of Joan on the Burgundians, whom Clemens allows his de Conte to portray as a mere faction of the corrupt French nobility. It's a major deficiency in Clemens's book, if we choose to take it seriously as a historical study, that his spokesman de Conte tells nothing of what he would have known about Burgundy, about its de facto autonomy from France traced back to the decision of Charlemagne to divide his empire among his three sons. Burgundy was essentially the middle third, and the autonomy of the Benelux nations today is a vestige of that decision a millennium ago.
But you'd be right to object that I'm examining this book by the wrong criteria ... deliberately, of course. It isn't historiography; it's hagiography -- biographical testimony of sainthood -- and not so different from the hagiography of the Medieval "Legenda Aurea" except in its flashes of Twainish sarcasm. Hagiography is written for believers, not for skeptics such as we all know Mark Twain to have been. To `believe' this account of Joan's life, as its fictitious narrator insists we should, we need to believe, not so much in the literal fact of Joan's voices and miracles, but in the miraculous intervention of God on behalf of the French kingdom and its dynasty ruler. In short, we need to believe that God was/is a nationalist. Much as I love modern France, I'm not able to believe that God took sides in the 15th C, that God intervened in mystical favor of the nascent French state, which had no better claim than the English and Burgundians to hegemony over Languedoc, Normandy, Savoy, and the culturally distinct lands from Holland to Switzerland that were then Burgundy. France's history of slaughter and rapine against the Albigensians in the previous century, its usurpation of power from the Count of Toulouse, its religious genocide, doesn't seem righteously to support Joan's confidence that God wanted France to expand and nationalize. Therefore, yes, de Conte/Clemens's marginalization of Burgundy and villainization of Philippe le Bon -- Philip the Good, as his own people acclaimed him --seriously compromise the substance of this book.
In the end, what can we be sure of, concerning Joan of Arc? Was God a French partisan? No, that's absurd. Was Joan factually commanded and empowered by God to `lead the French armies' and crown Charles VII as legitimate heir to the kingdom? That's equally absurd. Was Joan of Arc a "Saint"? Yes, in the sense that the Papacy has the keys to Heaven and the mandate to name saints; the word has no other sense in my vocabulary. Was Joan the necessary catalyst of the French military resurgence and eventual triumph? That's a stickier question. Clemens lets his creature de Conte declare so; whether Clemens himself thought more deeply about the question isn't clear. He lived and wrote in an era of `historiography' that explained everything in the Past as the achievements of Great Men ... and a very few Great Women.
Most historians of recents decades have focused on other reasons for the eventual French victory, which didn't become final until 1453, twenty-some years after Joan's death. Already in 1424, the English had suffered a major loss in France to a Scottish army of 5,000 at Bauge. In the same year, the headstrong Duke of Gloucester had led an English invasion of Holland, putting the English at odds with the Duke of Burgundy. Burgundian support for the English was crucial; when the Burgundians withdrew any effective alliance, the English cause was doomed. The population of France was four times that of England, and the territory of France was as vast to the English in the 15th C as Russia was to Napoleon in the 19th C, making winning battles less significant than sustaining an occupation. The English occupiers in northern France were obliged to tie down large contingents of their soldiery in garrisons, thus thinning their outnumbered tactical forces dangerously. In this dry military and political history of the 100 Years War, Joan of Arc gets quizzical notice at most.
So there's a question, it seems, of what Joan of Arc really accomplished. The sober consensus is that she was the most visible expression of the upswelling of French national identity and the engagement fo the French `people' -- the peasantry -- in the war which had been until then essentially a dynastic conflict, urged on by aristocrats on both sides and fought by levies of mercenaries. That analysis credits Joan with converting the dynastic struggle into a religious war, just the `holy cause' that popular French historians have celebrated ever since.
And still, it's hard to know what to think of Joan of Arc. Clemens was hardly the only hagiographer; in fact, I haven't found a single biography of Joan in English that isn't a hagiography! I have a painful suspicion that I'd need to research the literature in German, Spanish, Dutch, or even Swedish to get a more objective account.
The harshest criticism I can make of Samuel Clemens's novelistic biography of Joan is that I have no better idea of her reality, no deeper understanding of the phenomenon of her life, than I had before I read it. My five-star rating of the book is purely a courtesy; it's NOT Mark Twain's best book by a long shot. Clemens's Romance is mildly entertaining but intellectually irrelevant.
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Reviews with images
Following your bliss
Well, I've gotten no closer to what really happened than this translation by Twain (yes Mark Twain) from the recollections of her very close friend from childhood to the person"whose hand she last held at the stake". If you are a "believe what they say no matter what" Roman Catholic you might not want to read it. I think of the slogan "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the truth." It is a hard choice to suggest that someone might dampen their faith if they knew the horrible horrible history of what they believe and that was/is done in the name of "love". On the other hand, organized religion is something of a corporation. Corporations want their flock (buyers) to be happy; give them treats (absolution); promise them an eternal super-reward when they die. Belief however is different -- Joan had it and through seemingly endless psychological and physical torments absolutely refused to renounce or betray it. If we can find something equally strong ourselves, and it starts with a religion/organization/specific trust in a person then OK there is a start. But if any of these or entities I have not named start to control you and direct you into something you feel in your conscience is not right -- move on. Take what you want and leave the rest. And if you are shunned by that community, well everything has a price. The reward. however, may be a stronger trust in the truths and rightness-es you find in your own self.
Top reviews from other countries
anne
A can't put it down book by Mark Twain
Reviewed in Canada on November 26, 2023
Luis
Awesome book! But really small font size.
Reviewed in Mexico on May 27, 2020
Luis
Reviewed in Mexico on May 27, 2020
Images in this review
Kevyn M.
Joan of Arc - revelations about a life well lived.
Reviewed in Australia on September 16, 2021