Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 2
1896
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 2
1896
The second volume of Mark Twain's singular tribute to the Maid of Orléans. Having lifted the siege of Orléans and crowned a king, Joan now walks toward her doom. Through the eyes of Louis de Conte, her devoted page, we witness the prophecy closing around her, the English closing in, and the trial that will burn her alive. Twain writes with reverent fury, capturing both Joan's unshakable conviction and the devastating innocence of a world that will murder her for it. This is not historical fiction as entertainment but as lamentation, a prose liturgy for a saint the world was not worthy of. Twain spent twelve years researching and two years writing this book, his undisputed favorite, and it shows on every aching page.
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“The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.””
— Mark Twain
“To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.””
— Mark Twain
“Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.””
— Mark Twain
“I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.””
— Mark Twain
“The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me, I should have told them frankly no, it was not.That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it.””
— Mark Twain
“When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both”
— Mark Twain
“Consider this unique and imposing distinction. Since the writing of human history began, Joan of Arc is the only person, of either sex, who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a nation at the age of seventeen.””
— Mark Twain
“We are so strangely made; the memories that could make us happy pass away; it is the memories that break our hearts that abide.””
— Mark Twain
“It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor””
— Mark Twain
