The tale is matchless in its workmanship.  The quaint phrasing of the old Sieur de Conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on Joan’s tomb.  Whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away.  We are within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for Joan—­with him only would we mingle our tears.  It is all bathed in the atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard, sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to no particular class or school—­a creation apart.  Not all of Mark Twain’s tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his Joan that we doubt.  We believe it all happened—­we know that it must have happened, for our faith in the Sieur de Conte never for an instant wavers.

Aside from the personality of the book—­though, in truth, one never is aside from it—­the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes.  The fight before Orleans, the taking of the Tourelles and of Jargeau, all the movement of that splendid march to Rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than these.  Howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in Joan herself.  But Howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as final.  Five years later he wrote: 

“She is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past have been realized in fiction.”

As for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of Joan’s warfare.  It is from the attack on the Tourelles: 

Joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once eager for another assault on the boulevard.  Joan rode straight to the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch the fortress.  Presently he said: 

    “It touches.”

    “Now, then,” said Joan to the waiting battalions, “the place is
    yours—­enter in!  Bugles, sound the assault!  Now, then—­all
    together—­go!”