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 | Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc v1 Ebook | |
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 | |  | | E-book Category: Classic
E-book Title: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc v1
Author: Mark Twain
Book Description: 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 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.More... | |
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