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The land of Fancy is in a sense more real than our real world because it is more like the realest world.

But again, this vale of tears is the one that will disappear, while the new heaven and new earth, which has already begun, in which there is neither death nor mourning nor crying, is the one that will remain. Meanwhile, according to all the authorities up to the authority of faith, this world is a vale of tears. In the land of Fancy, the sun shines every day and any adventure, no matter how daunting, ends in triumph and laughter. Yet, it is a disservice, because it is not true, really speaking.

It is necessary because there is a difference, practically speaking. The result is the story of one of the great women in history told by one of history’s great storytellers.We do a necessary disservice to children when we explain to them the difference between the land of Fancy and the Real World. Twain has the fictional de Conte grow up with Joan, and so he is able to tell her story from her early childhood all the way through the trial and execution. To tell Joan’s story, Twain invented a memoirist, Louis de Conte, a fictionalized version of her real-life page, Louis de Contes. Although a work of fiction, Twain’s research was time well spent: the known facts of Joan’s life, and especially the trial, are very accurate in their depiction. It was, in his words, “the best of all my books,” and became his last finished novel. When he finally decided to write a book about her, he researched it for a dozen years and spent two more years writing it.

Twain first became fascinated with Joan as a teenager. After an ill-advised and short-lived truce, Joan is captured by the Burgundians-French nobility who have aligned themselves with the English-and they try her for heresy and burn her at the stake. That army promptly lifts the siege of Orléans, throws the English out of the Loire valley, hands them another significant defeat at Patay, and marches all the way to Reims, where the dauphin is crowned King Charles VII. She manages to take her message to the dauphin, who after some persuasion places her at the head of his army. A young teenage girl hears voices that tell her she will deliver France from England’s oppression during the Hundred Years War. The essential facts regarding Joan of Arc are well known.