Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte; tr. by Jean Francois Alden by Mark Twain

Once, in a bookstore, I found a copy of the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and read on the back jacket flap the statement that Mark Twain considered this his best book. That's a surprise, and in the reading lists they assign and laud, it's clear college professors and other authorities don't agree with Twain's self-analysis. But I do believe I enjoyed this more than I ever enjoyed Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Reading a master's work at one's own pace, untroubled by thesis deadlines, may help. Also, I like the middle ages.

It's a strange book, as well is should be since it's about a strange person. It may be the most serious and the most transparent in tone of any novel of Twain's I remember. You really do feel that a mournful fifteenth-century relic is speaking out of heartbreak, and only occasionally does the normally ebullient and joshing Mark Twain get a word in ("I still opened up with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time"). The language is very simple, simpler also than what I remember in Twain's other novels. It's as if the language must serve appropriately as a frame for Joan's own simple background, speech, and goodness. The book is a bit like another gospel, in which Joan's words, like Christ's, really ought to be set off in red type.

What the author wants to understand in these Personal Recollections, written from the point of view of Joan of Arc's page and secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte (whose initials match Samuel Langhorne Clemens') is what every historian and biographer has wanted to understand about her. We know who she was and what she did, and what was done to her. But why was she believed and obeyed, and then why was she destroyed?

It seems that, when this illiterate peasant girl came out of Domremy in the winter of 1429 to demand that she be allowed men-at-arms to go and fight the English occupying France -- she spoke of going "into" France, as if her birthplace had been outside it -- what stunned people was her ability to speak to her betters without fear. I can only assume that class differences were so enormous in those days that even the term is weakly inappropriate. When she faced lords and generals calmly, it was not just that a peasant was talking uppity. It was as if an animal was speaking. It was a miracle. In Twain's telling, she quickly became famous for being famous, like a speaking deer or calf from the pasture, and her career was underway.

For background, in 1429 France north of the Loire had endured English assault and occupation for ninety years, and France south of the Loire was a kind of medieval Vichy, a France in quotation marks. England's three great victories against French chivalry on French soil, Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, had each served as near death blows to the country. Before his death the French King Charles VI, who was insane, had actually signed over his throne by treaty to the English monarchy as a result of the defeat at Agincourt. His son the Dauphin, eventually to be Charles VII, not only thus had no throne to assume but worried about his legitimacy anyway. Justly so. Twain does not say, but Wikipedia does, that in fact Charles' own royal parents told him he was his mother's bastard by another father. He was on the point of fleeing the country.

Into this mess from out of nowhere stepped the beautiful young Maid, the speaking deer, claiming her divine Voices commanded her to do two things: to raise the siege of Orleans and so defeat the English in their current predatory project, and to escort the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned and anointed by God King of France, and insane men's treaties be damned.

She did both things. Twain notices what must have been her fundamental role in all this, assuming that France and all its generals were not simply suddenly awash in a white light of revelation for upwards of two years because of her. She was a talisman. Famous for being famous, examined and vetted by the Church in an era when the supernatural and organized religion both bestrided Western national life, her presence at the head of the armies intoxicated men and really drove them to victories as nothing else had done, for ninety years. To serve in this way she did not need to be a natural military genius, freakishly come to earth in the body of a peasant girl, although these Recollections describe her as that, too. She had only to inspire, to command by divine instruction a simple and temporary change in French tactics: assault against occupied cities and forts, rather than the perpetual enduring of siege or, at most, wearily besieging the besiegers. Somehow she seems to have known at least this, what other generals -- MacArthur, for one -- have known. Defensive warfare is defeat.

But at some point during her brief career, maybe at the height of her triumphs -- standing in full armor at the altar of Rheims cathedral, watching her king being crowned -- it must have dawned on powerful men around her that after her work was done, this weird force of nature could never be released and left to her own devices again. Imagine the miracle of the speaking animal in some other lord's camp, on future battlefields, or dazzling other peasants, or serving as some duke's marriage prize. She had to be kept close, even while the French court undermined her victories by timidly backing away from attempting the great prize, the capture of English-occupied Paris, in favor of more treaties with enemies whom Joan had proven she could destroy. While the king dithered past the glory days of summer 1429, she stayed on, skirmishing here and there in the environs northwest of the capital. And who knows, for all her protestations that after Rheims her mission was done and she wanted to go home and tend her sheep, La Pucelle may have long since learned to thoroughly enjoy her extraordinary new life and been very loath to give it up. She must have had other aspects to her personality besides her "Voices."

In May of 1430 she was captured by the forces of the English-allied Duke of Burgundy, who kept her for the ransom he expected to be paid by a mortified and grateful Charles VII. It didn't come; the French were probably glad to be rid of her. Her English enemies offered the ransom instead, and legally the Duke was obliged to accept it. She was now a year from her death.

Her destruction was as strange, to modern eyes, as was her rise to power. For a year, French churchmen and lawyers in England's pay pursued the same two rough courses with her that, it so happens, a later generation of powerful men would pursue in the legal and physical destruction of another woman and another force of nature, Anne Boleyn. The cases are unrelated except that both times, authority wanted two things, an admission of guilt from the accused, which should have led to rehabilitation and mercy, -- and it wanted the death penalty. (The Tudor system was at least mercifully quick. Anne Boleyn was dead two and a half weeks after her arrest.)

What the French authorities harped on, sixty men looming over her in six consecutive trials during which Joan sat publicly in chains with no legal counsel, was her refusal to swear an oath to reveal everything about her career to the Church. In other words, the church wanted to officially pass judgment on her Voices, and to know exactly all they said to her. She insisted that these Voices, whom she identified as St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, had specifically commanded her to keep a few things secret. She answered her accusers as well as possible but would not promise to disobey these divine orders.

Her consulting with her own private experience of God over the Church's understanding of it therefore made her, essentially, a Protestant. She was not tried as such and would not have understood herself as such, but it was her obedience to her private religious conscience that brought her to the stake. That, and of course the English monarchy's determination that she should die. In the last days of her life, she actually did submit to the churchmen's demands, having been brought out of her dungeon to see the stake and the pile of smoldering wood waiting for her amid excited crowds in the middle of Rouen's town square. She believed that upon signing a paper then (remember she was illiterate) and returning to women's dress, another thing authority harped on, she would be allowed to attend mass again and at least have women jailers. If Twain's Sieur de Conte is correct, back at the prison her English guards simply instantly stole her new women's clothing while she slept, and left a nineteen-year-old girl nothing to wear but her former, useful men's things. When she put them back on, she was considered to have relapsed into heresy. The punishment was death by burning, in Rouen on May 30, 1431.

A quarter of a century later, she was officially rehabilitated and declared a martyr by the French church. Twain's loyal Sieur shrewdly notices that this was after the English had been almost entirely driven out of France, and could only look back and spit that the pusillanimous king, Charles VII (called "the well-served"), had no better rights to his throne than those given him by a condemned witch and Satan worshipper long since properly burned as heretic. One way to wipe away that smear was to declare his benefactress Joan of Arc good again. Her aged mother had survived, to attend the opening of the rehabilitation trial at Notre Dame in Paris. Beatification followed many centuries later, in 1911, and then sainthood in 1920, although of course Mark Twain could not know that; I remember a college professor of mine saying that this last had everything to do with buttressing French morale after World War I.

She is such a strange figure that it's hard to know, to put it bluntly, what is the weirdest thing about Joan of Arc. Her youth? Her sex? Her humble origins? Her acceptance by men as a military commander, even if only a talisman show of one? (And she may have been a good one anyway.) What of the Voices? -- rye fungus poisoning, common in the European diet perhaps as far back as ancient Greece, and a possible source of hallucinations? God, truly? Why did the voices happen to speak French, the English wanted to know, and why were they mute when it came to warnings of what her persecutors in Rouen were up to, her Sieur wanted to know? And how can she have been a patriot before what textbooks call "the rise of the nation state"? And a French patriot to boot, who yet spoke of leaving Domremy to "come into" France? If so, then where was Domremy?

In the end, there is no doubt that a large part of her fascination for Twain and perhaps for many readers is that she is also a very Christlike figure. (She was "the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One.") She seems to have been personally flawless and totally innocent, that is, for someone whose destiny was bizarrely military. She transfixed crowds, loved righteous battle, but after victories cradled dying Englishmen in her arms. That all her life is known from sworn testimony at a trial ("the only story of a human life which comes to us under oath," italics original) also conjures up images of patient silence before Pontius Pilate and a recording humanity too, albeit when her time came Joan was not silent. Her very character seems to have been miraculous. Even at the stake, while burning, she warned a man nearby who was holding a cross aloft for her to gaze at that he must move away, or he would be hurt. One wonders if, in another era, she could have easily served as the unwitting foundress of another church herself.

The Recollections are a very different piece of work from what we think of as the oeuvre of Mark Twain. His best book? Perhaps not, but perhaps he meant it was the one he most loved writing. To at least honor his taste in reading it, even for curiosity's sake, seems the right and really very pleasureable thing to do.



Birthplace of Joan of Arc, Domremy, France

The Kaiser: His Life and Times by Michael Balfour

The theme of this enormously dense book is Kaiser Wilhelm's personal responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, and consequently for its hideous aftermath, World War II, and the decline of Europe (John Keegan would say its "ruin") as a civilized world power.

It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write enormously dense books about the Kaiser, but in the sense that by publication date (1964), enough time had passed to give the author some perspective, all the while events remained alive enough to encourage him to take his reader along on leisurely explorations of little details which later scholars probably summarize or ignore. There are details, for example, about how fast the train went carrying the body of Queen Victoria to her funeral site in 1901, the Kaiser her grandson, who hated being late, accompanying her ... possibly 92 miles per hour ....

I am not sure, also, if later books on the World Wars are quite so apt to begin, as this does and as William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp did, with serious and pained explorations of the, do we dare say, atrocious German character. It was 1964. Photographs and memories of the concentration camps were only twenty years in the past. Veterans of 1940-1945 were still young men barely into their forties; plenty of veterans of 1914-1918 were still hearty men in their late sixties or just nearing seventy. They had had their lives shaped and had set foot on a continent whose millions, across two generations, had had their lives destroyed by German decisions. When they sat down to read or to write about it, it seems they wanted answers to the question why. Why the Germans.

The passage of forty more years has laid most of those veterans in peaceful graves, and so has faded immediate memories and dulled that curiosity. I suspect political correctness has done the rest, frankly freezing any tendency to dare ask questions about national characteristics which sober men once asked -- even when they recognized that the Nazis were partial to those questions, too. Michael Balfour begins what one expects to be a simple biography of the Kaiser with a chapter on the huge topic "The Historical Background: 400 B.C. - A.D. 1880," and follows this with a second big chapter on "The Background to Anglo-German Relations." Anyone expecting a life story to begin with a discussion of a subject's parents or grandparents soon learns he is in the hands of a different type of scholar.

As he probes the Kaiser's moral responsibility, what Balfour studies in this book is the tragic conflation of three or four giant historical circumstances, centering on one people when that people was still burdened with the personal crapshoot of a hereditary monarchy. By the nineteenth century political liberalism and parliamentary democracy had evolved, most naturally and prominently in Britain. But "Germany" -- Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, dozens of other small warmed-over medieval fiefdoms -- had only just united as a nation state, and Germany's people equated their country with the means that had unified it: a powerful military, a landed and splendid noble class, and a mystic, ancient German-ness outdazzling small things like individual rights, middle class urban living, and drab, democratic electioneering. By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and surging economic prosperity had arrived, most prominently in sea-girt, trading, colonizing Britain. But Germany was landlocked, and its economic life amounted to a long game of catch-up, mostly Balfour thinks because so much of its population was either absorbed in farming and the military, or lost to emigration ("800,000 left in the decade after unification alone," among them a set of my own great-grandparents, who departed in 1874.)

In the late nineteenth century, also, the nations of Europe still stood ready to contemplate war with one another in any combination at any time for any reason. It seems as if the middle ages had not died, and powerful men still ogled dragon-drawn maps and grinned over what dukedom could be had for what princess and why. Add to this that behemoth to the east, Russia, which considered itself the owner of the Balkans and yet made it policy to overleap central Europe ("we are Central Europe," the Kaiser said) and ally with France and Britain, too, for whatever reasons it liked. Add to this the Industrial Revolution's improvements in weaponry and transportation, and you have a sinister stage for the Kaiser to tread.

Then there is Wilhelm himself. The reader expecting to learn about his private life, his marriage, and the births of his children will not learn much. This is a man's book. Wilhelm grew up under the thumbs of his frantically English mother, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, and -- not to sound comical -- of the frantically German Bismarck. German-ness and Englishness warred within him. He was intelligent but light-minded, and he had power, simply because he was born, at a time when a Germany suffering political and economic growing pains could pursue lethal plans because "the national mood" would not have it otherwise.

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. The killer was a Serbian subject of that empire. The assassination of an empire's heir really serves as an announcement that that empire is stupid and shouldn't exist. A simple way of putting it, but those of us who have never quite understood why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death mattered might perhaps understand that. Russia, would be owner of the Balkans, supported Serbia. Outraged Austria was Germany's ally, and so in that summer the clanking machineries of alliance and counter alliance, of monarchical and ministerial decision-making in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, all moved. Russia was the first to mobilize troops. In five weeks, the rest was done. One of the reasons why war had to be declared, Balfour says, was simply because pre-arranged railway timetables for getting German troops to the front --any front, for any reason -- required the pestering of Russian officials for explanations and replies that, outrageously, failed to come on time. When they didn't, the Kaiser, on August 1, 1914, signed the declaration of war which called into being all the others.

At the back of Norman Davies' huge book Europe, there is an appendix with the numbers of soldiers killed or dead of wounds by 1918: in round figures Russia lost 1.7 million, France 1.35 million, Britain 908,000, Italy 650,000; Germany lost 1.7 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million. It remains incomprehensible to see human deaths, and these the deaths of active young men only, expressed as fractions of a million.

The Kaiser signed the paper which started World War I, but how much was he responsible for everything leading up to it? Balfour concludes that "he was not fit for the outsize job destiny assigned him." True, but no one would have been. And, under the Kaiser's leadership (or lack of it), what was Germany's responsibility? More than once, Balfour says that it should be incumbent on nations, as it is on individuals, to realize they are not alone in the world and that their actions and ambitions will rub up against other peoples' and other nations,' and perhaps cause problems and suffering. Small actions, apparently trivial choices especially could be paramount in retrospect; in describing the Kaiser's birth to a young mother who suffered a horrific labor and delivery, Balfour asks whether history might have moved differently, if only the doctor attending had been a German committed to saving the baby rather than an Englishman committed to saving the mother (who lived to work the influence she did).

He does not quite say that the Great War proves nations should rise above happenstances, recognize their frightful moral interdependence, and trim the sails of their self-interest accordingly. As a historian and an adult he knows they don't and won't, especially not the most active and the most ambitious. On his last pages he writes, in fact, that there is no way of imagining how World War I could not have happened. "There are a number of things which one cannot imagine happening in a significantly different way unless one presupposes so many other alterations in the world as to turn the exercise into idle speculation." Germany was anxious for its "place in the sun." Britain was rich. Russia supported Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm was born. And so on. " 'It happened because it happened,' " as Norman Davies quotes a later scholar in Europe.

Balfour ends with a quote that is true, if not terribly helpful. (What helps to understand World War I, and/or human nature? Scholars write huge books, and still don't know.) It also serves to illustrate a writing style that is really beautiful, and beautifully sustained, throughout all the enormous density:

We must always remember that it is our choices and decisions which will go to circumscribe the freedom of succeeding generations. Taken individually they may seem trivial, but taken together, and along with other people's, they add up to destiny.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson

I do, occasionally, take up brand new books. I like those nice, crackly new mylar covers, and the feel of new paper and the look of clean bright typeface. I like, who does not, the possibility of fresh discovery, something good of today. And I remember finding and liking new books when I browsed the library shelves at the age of ten or twelve or a little more. Have I since become snarkily judgmental? Or have the books all declined precipitously in quality? Surely it can't be possible that intelligence and talent left the human race -- or the English-language publishing world -- sometime around June of 1977.

I plucked this, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, off the New Arrivals shelves a few days ago. It looked good. A quick sample of the prose was nice ("a routine of mutton and moonscapes, walking and headaches, watching and waiting, pie baking and poem making"). I am sorry to say that within thirty pages, the promise fell away and the book confirmed the teachings of my inner voice, which has warned me for a long time: in general, avoid new books.

Why? Because not only did this one begin awkwardly and self-consciously, with the author writing in the present tense and omnisciently ("She can stand it no longer. When she looks from her window ....") about a subject whom she will subsequently treat in a more traditional style ("This is the story of four small notebooks whose contents Dorothy Wordsworth never meant to be published"). But it exemplified the bloodless, navel-gazing, oh so archly aware attitudes that come straight from people whose only meaningful education has been in the thin air of the university classroom, and whose cohorts have these last thirty years gone on to suck any healthful oxygen out of English-language publishing officialdom. The result is not only a book like this, but a veritable book-stuffed universe lived in, loved, and guarded by themselves. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth sings the Academy, with a capital A.

What people learn in an Academy's English literature departments, it seems, is to perfect a basic human skill, and that is the ability to see patterns. If you can see patterns and then weave them into something more or less semantically clever -- if you can " 'make extracts,' " as Mr. Bennett teases his bluestocking daughter Mary in Pride and Prejudice -- then you may be on your way to a book contract with an important firm. (Did I mention that no important firm has ever offered me a book contract? Full disclosure.) Here is where I stopped reading Frances Wilson:

She weighs and measures her condition: her heart is full, she cries until it is lighter; her brothers are together, she is apart from them; they are walking, she is still; she leaves them under the trees, she sits upon a stone. Dorothy initially wrote that she sat upon a stone at "the foot of the lake" before changing "foot" to "margin," which gets in more her sense of frames, limits, borders. It is William who provides the contours of her life.

I would not doubt that William Wordsworth provided the contours of his sister's life, but in this particular case, she may have read over this one page, realized that lakes don't have feet but they do have, what, beaches, shorelines, ah! -- margins! and corrected even her private words accordingly. But to an academic, this is pattern. Capital P. This is something to analyze. And of course the resulting extract is always plausible, publishable, because as long as you provide evidence, who is to say that your pattern analysis might not have been right? At any rate you are thinking for yourself, as your professors want you to do. You are writing your paper. Dorothy Wordsworth is in no position to argue.

I don't know what the rest of the book is like, but I take it that Frances Wilson's oeuvre is the dissection of the idea of the Journal, any journal, as such. "The self as a perceiving subject." Pity, then, poor Dorothy, or any diary keeper. Who knows why people do it? To purge the mind (Aristotle). To not purge it (" 'Aw, Sport, because I've seen them, and I want to remember them,' " Harriet explains in Harriet the Spy). Every journal keeper might list the pretty flowers she saw on a walk, or write down an appalling encounter with a bereaved neighbor who had lost all her children to disease in a year and a half. Let those jottings come under the eye of a well-meaning academic two hundred years on, however, and you've got pattern. The flowers "symbolize her sorrow," as they do for Hamlet's Ophelia; by the tale of the mourning neighbor she "communicates her own fear for her immediate future." It didn't all just happen. No one could get a book out of that.

In the end you can tell you've got an anemic, modern book on your hands, Modern with a capital M, when the quotes in it from older sources, meant to be ancillary, stand out as fresh, adult, and simply normal. The lines from Wordsworth's poems stand out. A bit less so do the snippets from Dorothy's journals. You read them and feel encouraged to go and seek them out for their own sake. That's good; and previous eras have certainly also produced their share of anemic books, which I am sure one by one suffered their inevitable fate, and were forgotten. What strikes me about Modern publishing, and what makes my inner voice say 'life is short, avoid it,' is that a whole industry should seem to be so devoted to making and selling such thin, repetitive, adolescent product. The really dense, impressive but new book, randomly plucked from a shelf as opposed to sought out from an author whose talent you know, is a rare treat. How do good, untried things ever pass the narrow gate? Perhaps it is just randomly done.

Madame du Barry by Stanley Loomis

Madame du Barry was the last of a long line of official royal mistresses of the French kings. She followed Madame de Pompadour into the affections and the lit of King Louis XV, and lived splendidly with him at Versailles for the last six years of his life, from 1768 to his death in 1774. The monarch was succeeded by his grandson, the unfortunate King Louis XVI, who for a variety of reasons not least of which was marriage to Marie Antoinette, seems to have kept no mistresses of his own.

When Louis XV and Madame du Barry met, he was in his late fifties and she was in her early twenties. The circumstances of their meeting, the role she played, the whole course of her life, all was so extraordinarily alien to us and our world that it seems one can't really write a review of a biography of her. One must muddle along and almost rewrite the biography, not because it wasn't good enough but simply to get all the information straight.

The position of royal mistress at Versailles was virtually a ministerial one. Exactly as in the Tudor court of sixteenth century England, powerful or merely grasping or merely needy people scouted out beautiful women to place before the king's eye, hoping that a new and grateful "Favorite" would be able to persuade him to grant favors, lands, incomes, religious sanctions, best of all official government posts, among the faction to whom she owed her elevation. (In Madame du Barry's case, this was one Jean du Barry, called "the Roue," a provincial comte who was making a living in Paris by schooling and then essentially selling pretty girls to wealthy men.) A difference between Tudor England and eighteenth-century France was that Henry VIII would never find himself seriously baited with a woman who was not herself of some genuinely powerful landed family; Louis XV, in contrast, met Madame du Barry because the palace of Versailles was open to the public. One spring day, because her patron, the Roue, had a kind of small-claims-court issue to pursue with the royal bureaucracy, she arrived, and his Majesty saw her in the crowd.

She was breathtakingly beautiful, voluptuous, ash-blond, large-eyed, and it seems sweet- natured and gentle, too. (It's a pity really that she should have been portrayed in Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette as a belching gypsy.) Within a few months, she was ensconced in that vipers' nest of a palace, where every faction faced a counter-faction fighting to the death for position and power, and the personal really was political. She lived in a blazing whirl of jewels, glorious dresses, fabulously appointed private chateaux, gambling parties, hate and gossip. And like all previous "Favorites," her position ultimately depended on the health of the king. As long as he lived in sin, his Catholic Majesty could not hear Mass or take Communion. Yet, he could not die without having returned to the forgiveness and sacraments of the church, and he could not return to them unless he first dismissed the Favorite forever. In those days of sudden mortal illness, La Dubarry, like all her predecessors, never knew when a royal "indisposition" might become a "maladie," and spell the end of her "Left-handed" reign. When the time came, etiquette required that she leave instantly, without goodbyes.

It happened in the spring of 1774. The king died after a horrific two week siege of smallpox, professional bleeding, and finally it seems gangrene. Madame du Barry lived most of the next two years in a local exile, put under house arrest in a convent because the new king and especially his queen, Marie Antoinette, took a high moral line about the former Favorite's purpose at the former court. Once forgiven and released, however, she next entered into what was perhaps the happiest part of her life. King Louis XV's settlements on her had been generous and she still owned a fortune in jewels as well as her lovely and famous home of Louveciennes, not far from Versailles. She had many friends, a busy and elegant social life such as only the eighteenth century French aristocracy ever enjoyed, and a long and happy love affair with the handsome and noble duc de Brissac.

Then came the Revolution. A few years into the turmoil, Madame du Barry's house was broken into, and almost all her jewelry stolen. Her lawyer made the mistake of circulating a kind of "reward" poster throughout Paris, inventorying the hoard in great detail. The virtuous revolutionaries who wanted everyone to be equal got a new look therefore at "the woman DuBarry's" lifestyle. And when the jewels turned up in London she made the mistake -- if it was a mistake -- of traveling there not once but four times in the next few years, ostensibly to recover her property and settle lawsuits about it. While there, she happened to make large donations to exiled French aristocrats and churchmen allied with the foreign powers ready to surround and destroy republican France. Most of the stolen jewelry seems never to have been found.

On her fourth return home, she found her house confiscated. The last months of her life were spent battling a mysterious figure, an Englishman named George Greive who had turned up at Louveciennes and its local village, and had set about agitating the populace and Madame's own servants against her. In those days when revolutionary violence had become the norm and its scythe had in turn put government into the hands of less and less experienced men, anybody could bring death to a neighbor by publishing any article in any broadsheet accusing him of "aristocratic tendencies" -- or simply by calling him an aristocrat. Greive pursued Madame du Barry with "wolfish ferocity." She evaded him for a while by carefully defending her legal rights under the new legal systems of the country, but when in September of 1793 the government was captured by the Jacobin party -- the left-est of the left -- she found herself doomed. Greive asked for her arrest on grounds of aristocratic leanings, and the Committee of General Safety agreed. In her letters written from prison, she hints that Greive raped her when he took her into custody.

She was tried and condemned to death, along with her bankers, in December of 1793. Her shrieks of terror and her struggles on the guillotine have often stood in marked contrast to the " 'icy disdain' " (more likely the shocked stupor, the author thinks) of other victims. But in her very last hours Madame du Barry had tried to save herself by telling her jailers the locations of buried treasure at her chateau, in exchange for her life. She believed she had succeeded in the bribe, up until the executioner came to her cell to cut off her hair and bind her arms. "The merciful drug of resignation did not have time to paralyze her senses," Loomis writes. "Neither emotionally nor physically did she go to the guillotine a dying woman." She was fifty.

It's an excellent book filled with what must be some of Loomis' best prose. The passage describing "the last of the great Versailles receptions," on the occasion of the wedding of the Dauphin to Marie Antoinette in 1770, is especially beautiful. Historians of the ancien regime are always at pains, and usually at a loss, to fully convince us of the incomprehensible sophistication of this civilization. " 'Of their kind they were perfect,' " -- he quotes Taine -- " 'there was not a gown, not a turn of the head, not a voice or turn of phrase which was not a masterpiece of worldy culture and the distilled quintessence of everything exquisite which the social art has ever elaborated.' "

The very fact that we need to have this explained to us -- good grief, they were people, how otherworldly can they have been? -- probably shows how divorced we are from any real understanding of it. For me it finally comes through, faintly, in excerpts from Madame du Barry's letters. She writes to her friends with a calm simplicity on all sorts of occasions, each word a simple pulse beat of meaning, whether she is announcing a party or saying "I love you." She writes to her lover's daughter, with whom she is of course on good terms: "No one has felt more than I the great loss which you have just suffered. I hope you will understand the reason for my delay in mingling my own tears with yours. The fear of adding to your grief prevents me from speaking to you of it. Mine is complete ...."

This was a few days after the duc de Brissac had been murdered outside her chateau by a mob, his body mutilated and partly eaten, and his head thrown through a window into her living room where it rolled to her feet. " 'One does not die of grief,' " she wrote, simply, a little later.

In the end, I am surprised by one thing, and that is the last two paragraphs of Loomis' book. After writing a lyrical and sympathetic biography, he nevertheless regretfully but officially condemns Madame du Barry on behalf of his modern reader. She slept with the king for money, he says, and also she was unforgivably rich when others were poor.

True. But that is not the same thing as hurting other people. Even the king was a widower when she met him. It's a tricky thing to judge whether it was criminal of her to, perhaps, aid the enemies of her country, when her country had transformed politically and legally into something entirely new and continually free-forming. And fantastically, officially violent. It was the cusp of a new world; which explains why an upcoming monarch of France's future would be "king of the French," not king of France. Loomis does not explore this in his last two paragraphs. He only acknowledges: in the end, "she was kind."

More importantly, since we live now under a deep-dyed leftist President whose disciples are legion, who also hates bankers and wants everyone to be equal, I can't help but read La Du Barry's story with a certain funny chill. A new and free-forming government is not particularly a good thing. Under the veneer of any civilization, human beings are all alike. But surely it can't happen here.

King Henry IV, part I

It may have been a help or a hindrance to have seen Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V years before reading, to give it its long title, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The film is interlarded with specially created flashback-style scenes lifted from this latter play, so that the viewer of all the action leading up to the battle of Agincourt, involving all those kings and dukes, can understand what is going on with un-noble characters like Bardolph, Pistol, and Hostess Quickly as well. And Falstaff.

It may have been a help because it ensured that some of Falstaff's lines from 1 Henry IV were already in my mind, as the actor playing him delivered them. It helps to be able to recall a professional making sense of Shakespeare's language. "Do thou amend thy face, and I'll amend my life;" "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world." (As a matter of fact the actor was Robbie Coltrane, later of Hagrid fame in the Harry Potter movies. And the newest Batman, Christian Bale, showed up then as the Boy. Yes, this movie is twenty years old.)

Remembering the droll meet-the-peasantry scenes in Henry V may have been a hindrance to reading Henry IV, however, because those scenes in their vividness prepared me to descry one particular theme in the play, and that is the theme of legitimacy. Those same droll scenes become tragic, when mighty Prince Hal abandons his peasant friends, as he must do in order to take up his father's crown and simply to become completely what he is -- king, in fate and in soul. He hangs Bardolph for theft on the road to Agincourt ("Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief" -- "No. Thou shalt"). He goes nowhere near Falstaff's deathbed (Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world -- "I do. I will."). Branagh may have played fast and loose with the niceties of Shakespeare's meanings in these flashbacks, but they do stay in the mind either because they are filled with a human sorrow that remains true, or because we modern little democratic types are so appalled by the sixteenth century's definitions of nobility that we fixate on them. Either way, they obstruct our view of other possible themes. Or do they? Are there other themes in 1 Henry IV besides legitimacy -- besides who belongs where?

What other themes could there be? Legitimacy seems to trump all. The action in the play shifts rhythmically between noble and commoner. We see the king and his court in palaces, then Falstaff and Prince Hal and their cronies in inn yards and taverns. Then back to king and dukes, then back to Eastcheap. After a while, this firm switching in scenery and action seems nearly pedestrian, as if we are reading a young playwright who has been told to mix it up and not bore people, but also to remember to tie his characters together somehow. They are tied by the Prince and Falstaff -- who, after all, is Sir John Falstaff, and therefore himself a titled link between Hal and the commoners -- but the Prince in his very first soliloquy announces his distance ("I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness"), while Falstaff is only permitted to enter Hal's world in the fifth act and even then, is told to be quiet in the presence of majesty ("Peace, chewet, peace"). Who belongs where may not even have been a question that sixteenth-century playgoers would have asked, as they watched a Prince of Wales and a happy sack-swiller pal about together. They knew that was temporary. They were probably far more exercised by the question of who belongs on the throne in the first place.

The storyline of 1 Henry IV concerns this more important legitimacy, that of the king, Hal's father, and his right to the crown he usurped from King Richard II. As the play opens, rebellion is underway, among other powerful lords of course, not among the common folk. The Earl of Northumberland and his son, Harry Percy (Hotspur), are at the head of a confederation including Scots and Welsh nobles and no less a magnate than the Archbishop of York, angry at the death of a brother in battle. We learn that one of these lords, Mortimer, had been proclaimed next in line to the throne by the deposed Richard before he was, it seems, murdered by the present king Henry himself; the reader can either read history or read Richard II or both in order to get all the details, but suffice it to say that this noble confederation has it in for Henry IV. All have grievances, but fundamentally all think they can do better as king, and that they deserve the position more.

The story wends its way to the battle of Shrewsbury (July 21, 1403), where the rebel lords will meet the forces of the king, his two sons Prince Hal (a refugee from the taverns) and John of Lancaster, and the loyal Earl of Westmoreland. We see almost nothing of the common soldiers who are the fighting forces there, except through the eyes of Falstaff. He is ordered by the Prince to raise a levy of men, and of the one hundred and fifty "rag-of-muffins" he presses into service, "not three are left alive" at the end (V., iii.). As it happens, three important rebel lords don't come to Shrewsbury in time, and so treason fails. The prince kills his opposite number, Hotspur, in single combat, after having rescued his father from assassination. The play ends mid-story. The king sends his two sons in opposite directions, to fight the barons who missed the battle but who still stand in defiance of his rule.

Never having seen 1 Henry IV performed, I can't say what it looks like, but Falstaff must be great fun to watch ("Go hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters!" he shouts at his future sovereign). Hostess Quickly's shrieking arguments with him about the safety of her inn not only make the reader smile, but make him cheer for her as she holds her own against him and in the presence of the Prince, too. There is a part for Mortimer's wife, the "Lady" who speaks only Welsh but whose words are not set down. How is this handled? And it seems, theater troupes must know and carry on the tradition that Bardolph has some sort of disgusting skin problem; he is the butt of all sorts of jokes about his face being fiery or lamp-like. What is supposed to be wrong with him?

And above all, who, what, is legitimate and what is not? Prince Hal is the son of a man who should not necessarily be king, yet we are to understand that he is a magnificent person not only in his own right, but also because this is natural in the son of a king. He is gentle, brave, chivalrous, and quiet. When noble circumstances arise, like insurrection and war, he behaves nobly amid them. Falstaff is a commoner, loud, drunken, witty, good-hearted. When noble circumstances arise, he behaves like an ordinary man who wants to stay alive. Before the battle, he and his royal friend have a simple exchange:

FALSTAFF: I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.
PRINCE: Why, thou owest God a death. [Exit.]
FALSTAFF: 'Tis not due yet ....

The Prince loves honor, and is not afraid of that simple thing he owes God. He will stake his life honorably, royally, on defending and possessing power. Falstaff, the common man, expresses the simple wish of all common men who have ever gone into battle for the sake of their betters -- or their own, to be fair ("every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head" -- Henry V, IV., i). When it comes to mortal combat, he fakes his own death and then rises up happily a moment later, bragging that he has killed Hotspur himself after a fight lasting an hour.

PRINCE: Why, Percy I killed myself, and saw thee dead!
FALSTAFF: Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying.

For all the space and fun given to Falstaff, the reader can't help but think, as soon as Hal speaks in his own voice (that first soliloquy is in blank verse, of course) -- this man is not your friend. You're not legitimate, not enough. Of course, the reader with memories of watching Henry V knows the road these characters are taking, and it's especially the modern, democratic reader who finds Hal's abandonment of the people at Eastcheap to be almost the heart of all the action. Sixteenth-century readers, or theater-goers, may have known better. Perhaps to them it was Shrewsbury and Agincourt that mattered, and perhaps they couldn't wait for Hal to do what was right, and for everyone's sake get there.



Battlefield at Shrewsbury. Photo from englishmonarchs.co.uk

The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy

I had hopes of enjoying this book. As I flip through it now, it still looks interesting and erudite. I am glad to learn that dreams and visions were popular subjects of Florentine art, "where the great fresco cycles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries drew chiefly on the Golden Legend of Jacopo della Voragine and the life of Saint Francis." I am glad to know also that perspective in navigation and perspective in art are linked: "Toscanelli, who taught Brunelleschi, also advised Columbus and the king of Portugal. ... Many of the landscapes of the quattrocento, especially Baldovinetti's, have the character of aerial maps; the bare Tuscan hills ... are now shown furrowed by husbandry." Interesting. Maybe it would be best to flip through the book backward.

Read forward, properly, The Stones of Florence unfortunately becomes annoying in a hurry. The author begins with the obligatory chapter announcing what Florence is really like, circa 1963 -- hot, drab, and unwelcoming -- and insulting tourists essentially for not knowing what she knows. Why do intellectuals hate tourists? Is this a Western phenomenon, or do Japanese tourists, for example, also hate fellow Japanese tourists abroad, and write books about how dumb they look?

By page 49, I had reached this, after wading through a short discussion on the popularity of the classic Greek look in Renaissance sculpture -- "Naturally, in none of this statuary, which was once a la mode (nor in the graceful Cellini either), is there a grain of that local tender piety, religious or civic, that appears in its purest, most intense concentration in Donatello ...." And my brain now up and spoke of its own accord. Woman, it asked, who has told you all this? You are not a native Florentine, no more than the tourists. And what in blazes is "local tender piety"?

After that, I did a bit more skimming, forward, but then gave up. The book has no theme or story of any kind to tell, and the author herself seems to have no voice. If she was aiming for the cool detachment that the reviewers quoted on the back of the book praise her for, then I suggest she succeeded too well. She has many wonderful facts at her disposal, and I can vaguely tell that the chapters are meant to cover certain topics -- painting here, history there, at the end art restoration, and how wrong Ruskin was about the essential Giottos he thought he saw -- but reading the book only inspired me to ask that dread, necessary question which all writers should ask themselves, many times, and then forestall in others by the quality of their answering performance. So what? For me, and despite her obvious abilities, she had no answer.

Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph and Frances Gies

About ten years ago, Commentary published an article on the demise of the secondary source intellectual. It was too bad, the author wrote, that standards in the publishing world had become not so much very professional, as so very professorial. Nowadays, anyone with a book to write on some topic or other, anyone who wanted a prayer of being taken seriously, had first to do what historians looking for a Ph.D. and tenure at a university do: go and unearth primary sources and write from original research, even though the resulting book might develop the same theme and reach the same conclusions as it would have done from the support of secondary sources only, bound and ready in good public libraries. Oh, and to have a prayer of being taken seriously, it was best to already have a Ph.D., before getting to work.

Indeed, it was too bad. Secondary source intellectuals, urbane and entertaining writers whose "Acknowledgements" used to be profuse in thanks to librarians and typists, had often produced delightful, unusual stuff which amused and educated the general reader. And they did, even if only for the satisfaction of their own muse, what I suppose could be called the Lord's work. (The muse's work?) Look at the flyleaf of an older book, and see the long variegated lists of topics "By the same author." A biography of Disraeli might precede a book on gardening and follow a personal travel journal or a history of Dutch art. The muses were wonderfully busy.

Life in a Medieval Castle is an example of the kind of secondary source history whose demise Commentary's author regretted. Its bibliography contains nothing like the Calendars of State Papers that all of today's "real" professionals consult. In it we also find those entrancing old references that the secondary source writer takes seriously, but that the professional today would either ignore or eagerly set aside to explore at some later time in order to write a new, original source monograph dissecting that source for its own sake. Who on earth, for instance, was Ella Armitage, and why did she write and publish Early Norman Castles in 1912? No matter. Joseph and Frances Gies found her worthwhile, and not as a specimen.

The Gieses were a married couple who concentrated on medieval history in their long and, let me say speedily, respected professional career. It may be that in all their other books they worked from original sources, and only relaxed a bit with this one. It's a good book, but is essentially a compilation of good, secondary source information lacking that new theme or major conclusion, exclamation point, with which a scrabbler-through of state papers would want to astonish the world. It's the kind of book that an advanced high school student or undergraduate would use if he needed information on "A Day in the Castle" (chapter VI), "The Villagers" (chapter VIII), or "The Castle at War" (chapter X).

Having said all this, let me assert that this deceptively brief book is packed with information, including long passages from other people's translations of primary medieval sources, that teaches the reader anew about the complexity and sophistication of the medieval world. Sometimes we are so anxious not to romanticize a glamorous-looking former time and place that we fail to do it justice -- we muddy it up with truthful assertions about its misery and filth and disease, forgetting that not everybody was miserable and sick all the time. The chapter on falconry alone raised my respect for this society and what it had the patience and passion to accomplish, merely for amusement. Then castles with stone walls twenty-four feet thick for a start, and the intricate workings of laws and rights governing village life and the common people's relation to authority, the hard labor of pre-industrial farming and the hard play of pagan-tinged holidays, -- all are recorded here and all combine to make the modern person feel he is skating along on the froth of life, held up by a web of blessed technology but completely ignorant of what survival, medieval-style, really meant. Electro-magnetic pulse attack, anyone? No, it's not the name of a rock group.

There are a few small surprises here. Little things, bits of information that we would think someone would have explained to us by now. (Perhaps this is why the Gieses are respected professionals.) The castle, the authors write, served a specific purpose. It was a private fortress sheltering a lord, his family and servants, and his small private army against larger outside forces during troublous times. Castles were first built by Byzantine Greeks campaigning in isolation in North Africa in the sixth century A.D. Adapted by the Muslim conquerors of medieval Spain and perfected by the barons and kings of northern Europe, the castle was the supremely powerful piece of medieval military technology as long as medieval conditions, military, economic, and social, obtained. It was nothing if not rural, nothing if not in command of rural life. Farm and village needed the castle's protection; the castle needed the farms' food and the villagers' labor and occasional service in war. When those conditions changed, when cities and merchants amassed more wealth in coin than the countryside could produce in kind and when centralized government took up the reins of power, the rural private fortress became obsolete. The introduction of gunpowder and cannon also helped batter it to pieces.

One more small surprise among all this professional information concerns the seemingly bizarre nature of European farming in the middle ages. I declare I will never understand this. Northern Europe is startlingly far north. Paris lies at about the same latitude as the Canadian-U.S. border, farther north than Lake Superior. The famed castles of Wales lie still farther north, at the same latitude as Newfoundland. Yet Chapter XI, "The Castle Year," describes an agricultural cycle by which crops were sown in "the winter," from late September to Christmas, and then different crops sown from Christmas to Easter, "the spring." Summer came after Easter week, and lasted till the first of August. The harvest, autumn, fell from August 1st to the end of September. Then a new agricultural year started with the winter planting.

I can certainly understand harvesting crops in September, and I understand that our American, continental climate is far harsher in general than Europe's, but I still stand in amazement at records showing that ground could be worked and seeds planted in December, January, or February. Yea verily, it almost sounds like evidence of global warming. If so, I would think the more of it, the better.

And where are today's equivalents of the Gieses, hardworking scholars who produced reliable, enjoyable secondary-source stuff for the erudition and enjoyment of the general reading public? Have they been driven out of the publishing world by gatekeepers competing for scarce dollars, and unwilling to offer the public, for those dollars, anything that seems unoriginal -- relaxed, unastonishing, unprofessorial? The author of Commentary's article compared the breed, if memory serves, to a butterfly, bright and lovely while it lived but evidently too fragile to survive. Too bad. The approved professionals nowadays sometimes seem all so uniformly moth-ish.