tale, 'Pudd'nhead
Wilson', soon completed and on its way to America.

With this work out of his hands, Clemens was ready for his great new
undertaking. A seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was
ready to bloom. He would write the story of Joan of Arc.

CLXXXIII

THE SIEUR DE CONTE AND JOAN

In a note which he made many years later Mark Twain declared that he was
fourteen years at work on Joan of Arc; that he had been twelve years
preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it.

There is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that
he contemplated the story of Joan as early as the eighties; but there is
a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably compiled
for him not much later than 1880, for the latest published work of the
list bears that date. He was then too busy with his inventions and
publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast
preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed
that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf
from that tragic life into his own. Joan of Arc, by Janet Tuckey, was
apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for
this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still
exists, is filled with his marginal notes. He did not speak of this
volume in discussing the matter in after-years. He may have forgotten
it. He dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug
out and put into modern French by Quicherat; the 'Jeanne d'Arc' of J.
Michelet, and the splendid 'Life of the Maid' of Lord Ronald Gower, these
being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[The book of Janet
Tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are credited
as "authorities examined in verification" on a front page of his
published book. In a letter written at the conclusion of "Joan" in 1895,
the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he used one
French and one English authority, while in the last third he had
constantly drawn from five French and five English sources.]

"I could not get the Quicherat and some of the other books in English,"
he said, "and I had to dig them out of the French. I began the story
five times."

None of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe they
were wisely put aside, for no story of the Maid could begin more
charmingly, more rarely, than