The Power of Joan
A few months ago, my wife’s book discussion group was reading Mark Twain’s neglected classic Joan of Arc. This novel purports to be the recollections of Sieur Louis de Conte, Joan’s playmate in childhood and later her secretary. Twain employs this fictional narrator skillfully to tie together Joan’s diverse lives with his personal recollections of all the events and characters.
Some readers will be in a hurry to get to the scenes of battle and court intrigue, but I lingered over charming episodes of village life, in which the illiterate farm child develops her skill at persuasion and begins to show her gift of prophecy. Soon enough the narrator goes on to the thrilling saga of the unlikely military hero who freed France from the English occupation that had followed Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, and at last the tragic courtroom drama starring the martyr who brilliantly defended herself unassisted against an array of theologians and doctors of law in the most famous trial of the Middle Ages.
Twain’s Reverence
I picked up the book at first out of curiosity, and continued to the end with pleasure at rediscovering one of the world’s greatest true stories. Twain’s account is in no way satirical, although there is plenty of delightful humor in the bantering of Joan’s rustic companions. On the contrary, America’s greatest humorist tells Joan’s story reverently, accepting the miracles at face value and painting Joan as the pious, chaste, brilliant, witty, courageous, and loving military genius that her devoted followers knew her to be. It seems that Joan’s conquest of Mark Twain’s head and heart was as complete as her defeat of the English army of occupation several centuries earlier.
Twain’s reconstruction of Joan’s life was only partly an act of creative imagination, and mainly an exercise in painstaking historical scholarship. Joan’s life is one of the best documented in premodern history. Her several trials, before and after her death, left voluminous records of testimony under oath about what Joan was like and everything she did from childhood to death at the stake, from her enemies and persecutors as well as her supporters, all meticulously supervised by the expert lawyers who managed the proceedings.
If modern readers find it hard to believe that saints from heaven actually visited a peasant girl in order to direct her to take command of the king’s army and liberate France, plenty of Joan’s contemporaries were equally skeptical of her fantastic claims, and yet her power to persuade the skeptics and then to prove her bona fides by deeds was nothing less than supernatural.
Mark Twain devoted twelve years to studying the historical record before deciding, after many false starts, that he knew how to tell the story rightly. When he had finished writing, he concluded that the life of St. Joan of Arc was not only his finest book, but worth more than all his other books put together. The public and the critics did not agree, either at the time or subsequently, probably because the work was so unlike anything they expected to come from the irreverent Mississippi river pilot who had so hilariously burlesqued the literature of knights in armor when he planted a hardheaded Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Anyone would expect a life of St. Joan by Mark Twain to be a parody, and yet the evidence convinced this latter-day skeptic that Joan was every bit as wonderful as she had seemed to her contemporary admirers. He even convinced himself that he knew what Joan must have looked like. Protesting against those artists who had portrayed Joan as coarse because she was a peasant, he wrote in a 1904 essay that “the artist should paint her spirit—then he could not fail to paint her body aright. She would rise before us then, a vision to win us, not repel, a lithe, young splendid figure, instinct with the unbought grace of youth, dear and bonny and lovable, the face beautiful, and transfigured with the light of that lustrous intellect and the fires of that unquenchable spirit.”
I cannot resist quoting the final words from Twain’s essay: “Taking into account all the circumstances—her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquests in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”
The Right Story
Some readers may judge those words excessive, but Twain’s superlatives are founded securely on the historical record, and they come from one who seems among the least likely of all men of his time to have written them.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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