He, along with two others, Edmond Aubrey, usually called by his satirical nickname, "the Paladin", and Noel Rainguesson, end up attending Joan on her incredible journey first to the King then to victory, then to her capture and trial. He is, in effect, country gentry who grows up with Joan in Domremy, as the above opening suggests. Summary: Personal Recollections is the story of Louis de Conte, a quasi-fictional character based on occasional mentions in historical documents of Joan's page. None had the courage to gather these dead for burial they were left there to rot and create plagues. 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. In Paris, mobs roared through the streets nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted. 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. But the political atmosphere there was the sort he liked, and that was something. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with a broken spirit. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. In politics they were Armagnacs-patriots they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. 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.
But this is the first paragraph of Book I, Chapter I: Opening Passage: This is one of those books that has no strict opening passage, since it purports to be a translation of a historical work, and thus has its fictional translator's preface, plus the prefatory material of the quasi-fictional narrator, as well as the work itself.
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