Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, vol 1 | Page 5

dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic
outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the
country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and followed her.
She led it from victory to victory, she turned back the tide of the Hundred Years' War,
she fatally crippled the English power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER OF
FRANCE, which she bears to this day.
And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned, stood supine and
indifferent, while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely,
the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.
A PECULIARITY OF JOAN OF ARC'S HISTORY
THE DETAILS of the life of Joan of Arc form a biography which is unique among the
world's biographies in one respect: It is the only story of a human life which comes to us
under oath, the only one which comes to us from the witness-stand. The official records
of the Great Trial of 1431, and of the Process of Rehabilitation of a quarter of a century
later, are still preser4ved in the National Archives of France, and they furnish with
remarkable fullness the facts of her life. The history of no other life of that remote time is
known with either the certainty or the comprehensiveness that attaches to hers.
The Sieur Louis de Conte is faithful to her official history in his Personal Recollections,
and thus far his trustworthiness is unimpeachable; but his mass of added particulars must
depend for credit upon his word alone.
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