What is "Personal" about: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc?

In December 1905, the renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt wrote a telegram to Sam Clemens congratulating him for his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which she described as "an admirable work, sincere, full of life and personal. I finished it today."¹ It is not possible to know with certainty what Bernhardt was referencing by her use of the word "personal," but for us, over a century later, there are a host of meanings to understand and explore. (Figure 1.)

While the "personal" in Twain's title refers explicitly to the fictional first-person narrator's relationship with Joan of Arc, a subject we will come to in some detail toward the end of this article, an equally fascinating subject is Twain's own relationship over many years to the historic figure of Joan. It includes as well his extensive engagement with multiple texts about Joan that he read and annotated in preparation for writing his own narrative. Finally it also encompasses the ways his immediate family entered into his ultimate judgment that Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was the best book he wrote, and his favorite. These topics will be the focus of the first part of this study.

It is fair to say that Clemens had a nearly life-long fascination with Joan of Arc, beginning when he was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri. According to his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, in 1849, at the age of fourteen,

he was on his way from the [newspaper]office to his home one afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a book. [. . .] He caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from some history of Joan of Arc. The "maid" was described in the cage at Rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes. There was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue—her reproaches and their ribald replies.²

Paine goes on to say that Clemens felt "a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, The Recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl." We now know that this page, which told of some of the roughest treatment Joan received while she was imprisoned and on trial, was most likely from the English translation of Jules Michelet's 1845 history of Joan of Arc.³ It clearly made a deep impression upon the young Sam Clemens.

Figure 1.

The next extant indication of Twain's interest in Joan of Arc came in about 1866 in the form of a clipping Twain pasted in one of his scrapbooks. It's a relatively long article from an unknown newspaper, detailing the life of Joan from her time as a "poor shepherd-girl" to her cruel death by fire. This summary of her life is full of passion and written in such a way as to suggest it is a review of a book about her life, but precisely which book is unknown. Nonetheless, the tone of the review foreshadows to some extent the tone Twain's book would ultimately adopt. It ends with these sentiments:

Her death was agreed on long before the fatal judgment was passed, and thus guileless innocence once more passed to the flame, as it has so often done, at the institution of men bound to a faith whose [word obscured] mercies are bitter cruelty, in whose creed [the] words mercy and justice are unknown. Condemned by such a blood tribunal—at which to their eternal shame an English cardinal and an English bishop were found to preside—she went to the death of terrible agony by burning at the stake in the presence of some ten thousand bewildered, amazed, and pitying spectators, undaunted and undismayed. Every brutal ingenuity of malice that priestly craft could devise was devised to increase...