Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, vol 1 | Page 6

Mark Twain
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, ice, snow--Paris had all these at once. The dead lay
in heaps about the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured them.
Ah, France had fallen low--so low! For more than three quarters of a century the English
fangs had been bedded in her flesh, and so cowed had her armies become by ceaseless

rout and defeat that it was said and accepted that the mere sight of an English army was
sufficient to put a French one to flight.
When I was five years old the prodigious disaster of Agincourt fell upon France; and
although the English King went home to enjoy his glory, he left the country prostrate and
a prey to roving bands of Free Companions in the service of the Burgundian party, and
one of these bands came raiding through Neufchateau one night, and by the light of our
burning roof-thatch I saw all that were dear to me in this world (save an elder brother,
your ancestor, left behind with the court) butchered while they begged for mercy, and
heard the butchers laugh at their prayers and mimic their pleadings. I was overlooked,
and escaped without hurt. When the savages were gone I crept out and cried the night
away watching the burning houses; and I was all alone, except for the company of the
dead and the wounded, for the rest had taken flight and hidden themselves.
I was sent to Domremy, to the priest, whose housekeeper became a loving mother to me.
The priest, in the course of time, taught me to read and write, and he and I were the only
persons in the village who possessed this learning.
At the time that the house of this good priest, Guillaume Fronte, became my home, I was
six years old. We lived close by the village church, and the small garden of Joan's parents
was behind the church. As to that family there were Jacques d'Arc the father, his wife
Isabel Romee; three sons--Jacques, ten years old, Pierre, eight, and Jean, seven; Joan,
four, and her baby sister Catherine, about a year old. I had these children for playmates
from the beginning. I had some other playmates besides--particularly four boys: Pierre
Morel, Etienne Roze, No‰l Rainguesson, and Edmond Aubrey, whose father was maire
at that time; also two girls, about Joan's age, who by and by became her favorites; one
was named Haumetter, the other was called Little Mengette. These girls were common
peasant children, like Joan herself. When they grew up, both married common laborers.
Their estate was lowly enough, you see; yet a time came, many years after, when no
passing stranger, howsoever great he might be, failed to go and pay his reverence to those
to humble old women who had been honored in their youth by the friendship of Joan of
Arc.
These were all good children, just of the ordinary peasant type; not bright, of course--you
would not expect that--but good-hearted and companionable, obedient to their parents
and the priest; and as they grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and
prejudices got at second hand from their elders, and adopted without reserve; and without
examination also--which goes without saying. Their religion was inherited, their politics
the same. John Huss and his sort might find fault with the Church, in Domremy it
disturbed nobody's faith; and when the split came, when I was fourteen, and we had three
Popes at once, nobody in Domremy was worried about how to choose among them--the
Pope of Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no Pope at all. Every
human creature in the village was
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