LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,103)
  • Text Authors (19,448)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), as Mark Twain

[No title]
 (Sung text for setting by E. Vercoe)
 Matches base text
Language: English 
Our translations:  FRE
They call me Jenny in Lorraine. 
In France I am Joan.  
The soldiers call me The Maid.
When I was thirteen I saw a most strange thing, 
for I saw a white shadow come slowly gliding 
along the grass, and the whiteness of the shadow 
was not like any other whiteness that we 
know, except it be the whiteness of the lightnings.  
My breath grew faint with the terror and the awe.

And with the shadow came speech, several saints, 
and they spoke to me.  (They are very dear to me
-- my voices.)

And the voices told me that I, Joan, must go away, 
and that I must come to France and that 
my father must know nothing of my leaving, 
that I should find soldiers and that I should lift the 
siege on the city of Orléans, and that I should 
lead the Dauphin to crown him King of France 
in the city of Reims and that I should 
drive the English from French soil.

I was a child and I was afraid.  But St. Michael 
told me to come to the aid of the king.  And he 
told me the pity that was in the kingdom of France.

Note: this is a prose text. The line-breaks were added to allow translations to appear easily in parallel.

Composition:

    Set to music by Elizabeth Walton Vercoe (b. 1941), no title, 1986 [ mezzo-soprano or soprano and piano ], from stage composition Herstory III: Jehanne de Lorraine, no. 3, confirmed with composer's website

Text Authorship:

  • by Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), as Mark Twain, appears in Recollections of Joan of Arc

Go to the general single-text view

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

  • FRE French (Français) (Guy Laffaille) , copyright © 2019, (re)printed on this website with kind permission


Researcher for this page: Malcolm Wren [Guest Editor]

This text was added to the website: 2019-02-16
Line count: 23
Word count: 200

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris