Introduction The novel begins with a "Translator's Preface," a translator note on the "Peculiarity of Joan of Arc's History," and a foreword by Sieur Louis de Conte. The "Translator's Preface" offers a condensed overview of Joan of Arc's life, with heavy praise ("the character of Joan of Arc ... occupies the loftiest possible to human attainment"). The "Peculiarity" note explains that Joan of Arc's life is preserved in court documents and that the particulars are provided by Louis de Conte, who, the Translator assures us, is reliable. The Foreword is Sieur de Conte's writing from 1492 (Joan of Arc died in 1431) about his intimate relation to Joan of Arc: "I was with her from the beginning until the end" Book One: In Domrémy Book One begins with the birth of de Conte on January 6, 1410, in Neufchâteau, France and his parents' subsequent move to Paris. He relates his early childhood as chaotic with the city tormented by mobs, criminals, and other instabilities. In 1415, following the death of his family by a Burgundian raiding party, de Conte is sent to a small, rural, rudimentary village named "Domremy" to live with the parish priest. Here, he meets young Joan d'Arc, an illiterate peasant. de Conte tells multiple incidents where Joan is shown to be the wisest, bravest, most virtuous child in Domrémy, such as her arguments to the priest on the fairies and her treatment of the wandering soldier and the criminal madman. In Chapter VI and VII, de Conte recounts his seeing Joan converse with a divine entity and her explanation that she has been chosen by God to "win back France, and set the crown upon the head of His servant that is Dauphin and shall be King." The governor and the people in the Domremy mock her when she openly announces this mission; her parents even keep her under watch. Nonetheless, Joan remains adamant.
About the Author: Mark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, United States, and died April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, is a writer, And American humorist. After a career as a military officer, a printer and a journalist with miners in Nevada, he became known through his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A child of the Border Mark Twain comes from a long-established family on the American continent, whose trajectory has married the pioneer front drawn by settlers. Twain's childhood environment is therefore the world of the American "Border". However, the Clemens family, like Twain himself when he reached adulthood, did not count among the adventurers and clearing people who had set out in the vanguard of the colonization movement towards the West. It slipped into the wake of this vast population movement and settled on land already worked by settlers where social life is already relatively stable. His mother, Jane Lampton, was born in Kentucky in a family that is probably one of the first generations of pioneers to cross the Appalachian Mountains; The family legend lends him a distant ancestry with the Lampton, dukes of Durham. The paternal branch of the family is native to the South of the country. His grandfather, a farmer in Virginia, migrated to Kentucky in the early 19th century to become a commissioner of revenue. Twain's father, John Marshall Clemens, studied law in the East and returned to Adair County (Kentucky) where he married Jane Lampton in 1823. He served as an attorney and ran his life After fortune. His quest takes him successively to Tennessee, Gainesboro and then to Jamestown in Fentress County, Tennessee where he invests his savings in 75,000 acres of land. The small number of cases of justice to treat pushes it to the reconversion: it becomes a merchant, opening a store of general supply, typical of the border. He tries his luck in several localities of Tennessee and then joins John Adams Quarles, his wife's brother-in-law, in Missouri on the advice of the latter. The village of Florida (Monroe County) in which the family settles is the scene of the birth of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, the fifth child of the family.