No other person's life, biography, and death from the Dark Ages has been so recorded in such detail and under sworn testimony, witnessed by her friends and enemies. TGS Publishing will keep as many books and materials in print as possible to keep the tragedy of Joan's hideous, religious, persecution and execution on the minds of modern day readers and researchers.
When Wolves Ran Free in Paris
I, THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE, was born in Neufchateau, on the 6th of January, 1410; that is to say, exactly two years before Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. In politics they were Armagnacs--patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with a broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there was the sort he liked, and that was something.
Her life and death is certainly one of those hidden mysteries of history that must be kept alive! What was it about Joan of Arc that famous writers, atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and non-Christians alike would come to admire her?
The life and times of Joan of Arc proves to the world several things:
1. That church and state MUST be kept separate.
2. That the church nor the state should have the power of murder and execution.
3. That Christianity is not capable, or worthy, to enforce any laws of religion or state.
4. It is dangerous to be a Christian with differing views from the fundamentalist heirarchy in a church ruled or church influenced state.
5. That the state and church will perform political executions of innocent people with trumped up charges, trumped up evidence, and false testimony of church or state witnesses.
6. That foreign states should never have the right to try prisoners, due to the kangaroo courts that enemy states create for execution of their enemies, and cover up of their own crimes.
7. That church and state WILL TORTURE, even women, to extract lies, false confessions, to falsely justify their intentions of murder.
8. That the world has been robbed of many great minds and people by the church and states violating the above tenets of truth.
Mark Twain was not a fan of Christianity, perhaps an atheist, probably agnostic. He wrote three complete books on Joan of Arc that TGS has combined into one volume to make it more affordable. Mark Twain also wrote a children's version of the book, which TGS also republishes.
Here's what Mark Twain had to say about his research into Joan of Arc.
And it is the best; I know it perfectly well"
--Mark Twain
**************
He came to a region of comparative quiet; he left behind him a region peopled with furies, madmen, devils, where slaughter was a daily pastime and no man's life safe for a moment. In Paris, mobs roared through the streets nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted. The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings, and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked by thieves, the unholy gleaners after the mob. None had the courage to gather these dead for burial; they were left there to rot and create plagues.
And plagues they did create. Epidemics swept away the people like flies, and the burials were conducted secretly and by night, for public funerals were not allowed, lest the revelation of the magnitude of the plague's work unman the people and plunge them into despair. Then came, finally, the bitterest winter which had visited France in five hundred years. Famine, pestilence, slaughter, ice, snow--Paris had all these at once. The dead lay in heaps about the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured them.
Ah, France had fallen low--so low! For more than three quarters of a century the English fangs had been bedded in her flesh, and so cowed had her armies become by ceaseless rout and defeat that it was said and accepted that the mere sight of an English army was sufficient to put a French one to flight.
When I was five years old the prodigious disaster of Agincourt fell upon France; and although the English King went home to enjoy his glory, he left the country prostrate and a prey to roving bands of Free Companions in the service of the Burgundian party, and one of these bands came raiding through Neufchateau one night, and by the light of our burning roof-thatch I saw all that were dear to me in this world (save an elder brother, your ancestor, left behind with the court) butchered while they begged for mercy, and heard the butchers laugh at their prayers and mimic their pleadings. I was overlooked, and escaped without hurt. When the savages were gone I crept out and cried the night away watching the burning houses; and I was all alone, except for the company of the dead and the wounded, for the rest had taken flight and hidden themselves.
I was sent to Domremy, to the priest, whose housekeeper became a loving mother to me. The priest, in the course of time, taught me to read and write, and he and I were the only persons in the village who possessed this learning.
At the time that the house of this good priest, Guillaume Fronte, became my home, I was six years old. We lived close by the village church, and the small garden of Joan's parents was behind the church. As to that family there were Jacques d'Arc the father, his wife Isabel Romee; three sons--Jacques, ten years old, Pierre, eight, and Jean, seven; Joan, four, and her baby sister Catherine, about a year old. I had these children for playmates from the beginning. I had some other playmates besides--particularly four boys: Pierre Morel, Etienne Roze, Noël Rainguesson, and Edmond Aubrey, whose father was maire at that time; also two girls, about Joan's age, who by and by became her favorites; one was named Haumetter, the other was called Little Mengette. These girls were common peasant children, like Joan herself. When they grew up, both married common laborers. Their estate was lowly enough, you see; yet a time came, many years after, when no passing stranger, howsoever great he might be, failed to go and pay his reverence to those to humble old women who had been honored in their youth by the friendship of Joan of Arc.
These were all good children, just of the ordinary peasant type; not bright, of course--you would not expect that--but good-hearted and companionable, obedient to their parents and the priest; and as they grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and prejudices got at second hand from their elders, and adopted without reserve; and without examination also--which goes without saying. Their religion was inherited, their politics the same. John Huss and his sort might find fault with the Church, in Domremy it disturbed nobody's faith; and when the split came, when I was fourteen, and we had three Popes at once, nobody in Domremy was worried about how to choose among them--the Pope of Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no Pope at all. Every human creature in the village was an Armagnac--a patriot--and if we children hotly hated nothing else in the world, we did certainly hate the English and Burgundian name and polity in that way.
510+ pages - 8¼ x 6¾ softcover