Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (Vols. I-II) Chapter 7 Our Paladin in His Glory
by Mark Twain
We were doomed to suffer tedious waits and delays, and we
settled ourselves down to our fate and bore it with a dreary
patience, counting the slow hours and the dull days and hoping for
a turn when God should please to send it. The Paladin was the only
exception--that is to say, he was the only one who was happy and
had no heavy times. This was partly owing to the satisfaction he
got out of his clothes. He bought them at second hand--a Spanish
cavalier's complete suit, wide-brimmed hat with flowing plumes,
lace collar and cuffs, faded velvet doublet and trunks, short cloak
hung from the shoulder, funnel-topped buskins, long rapier, and all
that--a graceful and picturesque costume, and the Paladin's great
frame was the right place to hang it for effect. He wore it when off
duty; and when he swaggered by with one hand resting on the hilt
of his rapier, and twirling his new mustache with the other,
everybody stopped to look and admire; and well they might, for he
was a fine and stately contrast to the small French gentlemen of
the day squeezed into the trivial French costume of the time.
He was king bee of the little village that snuggled under the shelter
of the frowning towers and bastions of Courdray Castle, and
acknowledged lord of the tap-room of the inn. When he opened his
mouth there, he got a hearing. Those simple artisans and peasants
listened with deep and wondering interest; for he was a traveler
and had seen the world--all of it that lay between Chinon and
Domremy, at any rate--and that was a wide stretch more of it than
they might ever hope to see; and he had been in battle, and knew
how to paint its shock and struggle, its perils and surprised, with
an art that was all his own. He was cock of that walk, hero of that
hostelry; he drew custom as honey draws flies; so he was the pet of
the innkeeper, and of his wife and daughter, and they were his
obliged and willing servants.
Most people who have the narrative gift--that great and rare
endowment--have with it the defect of telling their choice things
over the same way every time, and this injures them and causes
them to sound stale and wearisome after several repetitions; but it
was not so with the Paladin, whose art was of a finer sort; it was
more stirring and interesting to hear him tell about a battle the
tenth time than it was the first time, because he did not tell it twice
the same way, but always made a new battle of it and a better one,
with more casualties on the enemy's side each time, and more
general wreck and disaster all around, and more widows and
orphans and suffering in the neighborhood where it happened. He
could not tell his battles apart himself, except by their names; and
by the time he had told one of then ten times it had grown so that
there wasn't room enough in France for it any more, but was
lapping over the edges. But up to that point the audience would not
allow him to substitute a new battle, knowing that the old ones
were the best, and sure to imporve as long as France could hold
them; and so, instead of saying to him as they would have said to
another, "Give us something fresh, we are fatigued with that old
thing," they would say, with one voice and with a strong interest,
"Tell about the surprise at Beaulieu again--tell in three or four
times!" That is a compliment which few narrative experts have
heard in their lifetime.
At first when the Paladin heard us tell about the glories of the
Royal Audience he was broken-hearted because he was not taken
with us to it; next, his talk was full of what he would have done if
he had been there; and within two days he was telling what he did
do when he was there. His mill was fairly started, now, and could
be trusted to take care of its affair. Within three nights afterward
all his battles were taking a rest, for already his worshipers in the
tap-room were so infatuated with the great tale of the Royal
Audience that they would have nothing else, and so besotted with
it were they that they would have cried if they could not have
gotten it.
Noël Rainguesson hid himself and heard it, and came and told me,
and after that we went together to listen, bribing the inn hostess to
let us have her little private parlor, where we could stand at the
wickets in the door and see and hear.
The tap-room was large, yet had a snug and cozy look, with its
inviting little tables and chairs scattered irregularly over its red
brick floor, and its great fire flaming and crackling in the wide
chimney. It was a comfortable place to be in on such chilly and
blustering March nights as these, and a goodly company had taken
shelter there, and were sipping their wine in contentment and
gossiping one with another in a neighborly way while they waited
for the historian. The host, the hostess, and their pretty daughter
were flying here and there and yonder among the tables and doing
their best to keep up with the orders. The room was about forty
feet square, and a space or aisle down the center of it had been
kept vacant and reserved for the Paladin's needs. At the end of it
was a platform ten or twelve feet wide, with a big chair and a
small table on it, and three steps leading up to it.
Among the wine-sippers were many familiar faces: the cobbler, the
farrier, the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the armorer, the maltster,
the weaver, the backer, the miller's man with his dusty coat, and so
on; and conscious and important, as a matter of course, was the
barber-surgeon, for he is that in all villages. As he has to pull
everybody's teeth and purge and bleed all the grown people once a
month to keep their health sound, he knows everybody, and by
constant contact with all sorts of folk becomes a master of
etiquette and manners and a conversationalist of large facility.
There were plenty of carriers, drovers, and their sort, and
journeymen artisans.
When the Paladin presently came sauntering indolently in, he was
received with a cheer, and the barber hustled forward and greeted
him with several low and most graceful and courtly bows, also
taking his hand an touching his lips to it. Then he called in a loud
voice for a stoup of wine for the Paladin, and when the host's
daughter brought it up on the platform and dropped her courtesy
and departed, the barber called after her, and told her to add the
wine to his score. This won him ejaculations of approval, which
pleased him very much and made his little rat-eyes shine; and such
applause is right and proper, for when we do a liberal and gallant
thing it is but natural that we should wish to see notice taken of it.
The barber called upon the people to rise and drink the Paladin's
health, and they did it with alacrity and affectionate heartiness,
clashing their metal flagons together with a simultaneous crash,
and heightening the effect with a resounding cheer. It was a fine
thing to see how that young swashbuckler had made himself so
popular in a strange land in so little a while, and without other
helps to his advancement than just his tongue and the talent to use
it given him by God--a talent which was but one talent in the
beginning, but was now become ten through husbandry and the
increment and usufruct that do naturally follow that and reward it
as by a law.
The people sat down and began to hammer on the tables with their
flagons and call for "the King's Audience!--the King's
Audience!--the King's Audience!" The Paladin stood there in one
of his best attitudes, with his plumed great hat tipped over to the
left, the folds of his short cloak drooping from his shoulder, and
the one hand resting upon the hilt of his rapier and the other lifting
his beaker. As the noise died down he made a stately sort of a bow,
which he had picked up somewhere, then fetched his beaker with a
sweep to his lips and tilted his head back and rained it to the
bottom. The barber jumped for it and set it upon the Paladin's
table. Then the Paladin began to walk up and down his platform
with a great deal of dignity and quite at his ease; and as he walked
he talked, and every little while stopped and stood facing his house
and so standing continued his talk.
We went three nights in succession. It was plain that there was a
charm about the performance that was apart from the mere interest
which attaches to lying. It was presently discoverable that this
charm lay in the Paladin's sincerity. He was not lying consciously;
he believed what he was saying. To him, his initial statements
were facts, and whenever he enlarged a statement, the enlargement
became a fact too. He put his heart into his extravagant narrative,
just as a poet puts his heart into a heroic fiction, and his
earnestness disarmed criticism--disarmed it as far as he himself
was concerned. Nobody believed his narrative, but all believed that
he believed it.
He made his enlargements without flourish, without emphasis, and
so casually that often one failed to notice that a change had been
made. He spoke of the governor of Vaucouleurs, the first night,
simply as the governor of Vaucouleurs; he spoke of him the
second night as his uncle the governor of Vaucouleurs; the third
night he was his father. He did not seem to know that he was
making these extraordinary changes; they dropped from his lips in
a quite natural and effortless way. By his first night's account the
governor merely attached him to the Maid's military escort in a
general and unofficial way; the second night his uncle the governor
sent him with the Maid as lieutenant of her rear guard; the third
night his father the governor put the whole command, Maid and
all, in his special charge. The first night the governor spoke of his
as a youth without name or ancestry, but "destined to achieve
both"; the second night his uncle the governor spoke of him as the
latest and worthiest lineal descendent of the chiefest and noblest of
the Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne; the third night he spoke of
his as the lineal descendent of the whole dozen. In three nights he
promoted the Count of Vendôme from a fresh acquaintance to a
schoolmate, and then brother-in-law.
At the King's Audience everything grew, in the same way. First the
four silver trumpets were twelve, then thirty-five, finally
ninety-six; and byk that time he had thrown in so many drums and
cymbals that he had to lengthen the hall from five hundred feet to
nine hundred to accommodate them. Under his hand the people
present multiplied in the same large way.
The first two nights he contented himself with merely describing
and exaggerating the chief dramatic incident of the Audience, but
the third night he added illustration to description. He throned the
barber in his own high chair to represent the sham King; then he
told how the Court watched the Maid with intense interest and
suppressed merriment, expecting to see her fooled by the
deception and get herself swept permanently out of credit by the
storm of scornful laughter which would follow. He worked this
scene up till he got his house in a burning fever of excitement and
anticipation, then came his climax. Turning to the barber, he said:
"But mark you what she did. She gazed steadfastly upon that
sham's villain face as I now gaze upon yourse--this being her noble
and simple attitude, just as I stand now--then turned she--thus--to
me, and stretching her arm out--so--and pointing with her finger,
she said, in that firm, calm tone which she was used to use in
directing the conduct of a battle, 'Pluck me this false knave from
the throne!' I, striding forward as I do now, took him by the collar
and lifted him out and held him aloft--thus--as it he had been but a
child." (The house rose, shouting, stamping, and banging with their
flagons, and went fairly mad over this magnificent exhibition of
strength--and there was not the shadow of a laugh anywhere,
though the spectacle of the limp but proud barber hanging there in
the air like a puppy held by the scruff of its neck was a thing that
had nothing of solemnity about it.) "Then I set him down upon his
feet--thus-- being minded to get him by a better hold and heave
him out of the window, but she bid me forbear, so by that error he
escaped with his life.
"Then she turned her about and viewed the throng with those eyes
of hers, which are the clear-shining windows whence her immortal
wisdom looketh out upon the world, resolving its falsities and
coming at the kernel of truth that is hid within them, and presently
they fell upon a young man modestly clothed, and him she
proclaimed for what he truly was, saying, 'I am thy servant--thou
art the King!' Then all were astonished, and a great shout went up,
the whole six thousand joining in it, so that the walls rocked with
the volume and the tumult of it."
He made a fine and picturesque thing of the march-out from the
Audience, augmenting the glories of it to the last limit of the
impossibilities; then he took from his finger and held up a brass
nut from a bolt-head which the head ostler at the castle had given
him that morning, and made his conclusion--thus:
"Then the King dismissed the Maid most graciously--as indeed
was her desert--and, turning to me, said, 'Take this signet-ring, son
of the Paladins, and command me with it in your day of need; and
look you,' said he, touching my temple, 'preserve this brain, France
has use for it; and look well to its casket also, for I foresee that it
will be hooped with a ducal coronet one day.' I took the ring, and
knelt and kissed his hand, saying, 'Sire, where glory calls, there
will I be found; where danger and death are thickest, that is my
native air; when France and the throne need help--well, I say
nothing, for I am not of the talking sort--let my deeds speak for
me, it is all I ask.'
"So ended the most fortunate and memorable episode, so big with
future weal for the crown and the nation, and unto God be the
thanks! Rise! Fill you flagons! Now--to France and the
King--drink!"
They emptied them to the bottom, then burst into cheers and
huzzas, and kept it up as much as two minutes, the Paladin
standing at stately ease the while and smiling benignantly from his
platform.