Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog: Traveling with Joan of Arc...

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Saturday, January 08, 2005

Traveling with Joan of Arc...

...guided by Mark Twain. That's the subject of an excellent travel piece, "A heroine's footsteps," written by Linda Joyce Forristal and appearing in today's Washington Times. Forristal write:

So much is known about Joan of Arc probably because the papers associated with her trial were preserved in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Scholars and writers have studied them for centuries, and there are many books and movies about Joan's life, but I have a favorite.
I became interested in retracing some of Joan's footsteps upon reading Mark Twain's "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." He originally published his work on Joan, as well as writings in Harper's Magazine, under the pseudonym of the Sieur Louis de Conte -- as if it were a lost manuscript discovered in the national archives of France and translated by a scholar.

Twain considered this book on Joan his most important literary contribution. He spent 12 years in research and many months doing archival work in Paris and London.

Twain wrote: "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none."

In the past hundred years, Twain's book has had several publishing lives and is available from Ignatius Press in San Francisco. This is one of the primary resources I used in planning my itinerary.

You can read more about Twain's Joan of Arc (and order it as well) by going to Ignatius.com.

Posted by Carl Olson on Saturday, January 08, 2005 at 02:08 AM | Permalink