Altogether a very rum story. A young & illiterate peasant girl has visions. She somehow pushes through to an audience with the Dauphin. She somehow persuades him to give her command of an army. She raises the siege of Orleans, wins sundry other battles on and around the Loire and gets the Dauphin crowned at Reims, in the heart of what had been Anglo-Burgundian territory. French ardour then cools off, she goes into a decline and gets herself captured by the Burgundians who for want of a better offer sell her to the English. The English get a French bishop to condemn her for a witch and then burn her at Rouen. Her life of action had lasted just a couple of years. Twenty years later, the French king, now secure on his throne, decides that having got there with the help of a condemned witch is not good cheese and gets the Pope to make her into a saint after all.
Rum in part because she is only a national hero because her Dauphin then King was hopeless. So hopeless that he did not even ransom her when she was captured - something which Twain is very sure that would have been a recognised usage of warfare at the time and was well within his power. He chose not to do it.
Twain is also very keen on soldiers and battles. His story is full of martial glory, flashing armour and tales of heroic deeds. He talks a lot of morions, which I know as a sort of helmet worn in the late sixteenth century, rather than the early fifteenth. Generally endows the story with the sort of pomp & pageantry which we only really got the hang of by the nineteenth century. Couldn't afford it until the industrial revolution got the prices of all those swords and banners down a bit.
He also makes Joan into a beauty, which Sackville-West, writing forty years later, is rather firm that she was not.
Along with the French King, the French Church comes out of it rather badly, getting itself tied up in knots in order to get Joan convicted of sorcery. One of the knots in question being the knotty question of whether angels spoke French or English.
But a good story. One comes away feeling that one has a bit more understanding of how such a thing could came to pass. That a leader with charisma really could turn things around and carry strong places by storm - something that professional soldiers were not that keen on, given the risks and casualties involved. Also how the professionals might get fed up with her impetuous ways and quietly, if ignominiously, allow the English to burn her when she had outlived her usefulness.
A worthy addition to my stock of arcery, started many years ago with the purchase of another fictionalised account, that of one Lord Gilles de Rais, by Robert Nye. Rais being a very high ranking French lord, a companion of the arc, who was also a murderer of small children. A murderous pedophile, the original bluebeard. Coincidentally, once the owner of the Talmont Castle which we visited many years ago when camping. A castle where the lady keeper grew her vegetables in the bailey; not very English Heritage at all. Otherwise the Château de Talmont, the tourist puff for which does not appear to go into the Rais angle. See gmaps 46.4670498,-1.6186266.
PS: Twain reminds me of the Battle of Patay, the culmination of the French campaign to regain the Loire, a victory for the French (and for Joan of Arc) comparable to that for the English & Welsh at Agincourt, 15 years previously. A battle which was omitted from the history that I learned and which rates only an inch in our Chambers Encylopedia compared to the three inches for Agincourt. Wikipedia includes rather more detailed accounts of both battles, but sticks up for us Anglophones and retains the three to one ratio. It also includes the rather striking illustration of the field of Agincourt, reproduced here.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment