Accustomed to the comic talent of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the general reader was not yet aware that Mark Twain had been enthralled by the story of Joan of Arc as an adolescent. To the surprise of the public who discovered only belatedly that the text was not what it said it was – Jean-François Alden’s translation into contemporary English of the medieval French testimony of The Sieur Louis de Conte – the greater shock was that the author, an avowed skeptic, could portray so religious a subject. 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented in a workshop session organized by Ronald Jenn and B (.)ġMark Twain’s historical novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by The Sieur Louis de Conte was serialized in 1895, then published in 1896 1.
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