Near the end of the One Hundred Years War between France and England nearly 600 years ago; when the English King, Henry VI, claimed the French throne; when English forces and their Burgundian allies controlled Paris and all of France north of the Loire; when the superiority of English armies had been accepted as fact by the French ever since Agincourt nearly a generation earlier; when the uncrowned King of France, Charles VII, the Dauphin, rightful heir to the French throne, refused to be crowned or to lead his people against the English invaders — along came a miracle.

The miracle was a 17-year-old, illiterate peasant girl from the tiny hamlet of Domremy named Jeanne D'Arc (Joan of Arc), who managed to convince the Dauphin to do something that had never been done before and has never been done since. She convinced him and his generals to turn over command of his armies to her. Never before, and not since then, has anyone so young — regardless of their sex or station in life — ever held supreme command of the armies of a nation.

Even more implausible, the ignorant peasant girl, who knew nothing of warfare or military strategy when she set out on her mission to save France, turned out to be a military genius. She raised the English siege of Orleans, which had defied the might of France for seven months, in only 10 days. She broke the back of the English Army in France at the battle of Patay. And her campaign along the Loire was so successful that it was eventually characterized by English forces abandoning their garrisons in fear of the "Maid of Orleans."

What set her in motion? She said she was on a mission from God. She saw visions and heard the voices of Sts. Catherine and Margaret and the Archangel Michael, all of whom told her that it was her divine mission to free her country from the English and help the Dauphin gain the French throne.

In order to do this she had first to go to the veteran commander of the French garrison at Vaucouleurs, where she demanded an escort to take her past the English to the Dauphin, who was about 400 miles distant at the castle of Chinon. When she explained why she needed the escort, the commander reasonably assumed she was mentally unstable — and sent her home.

But Joan was nothing if not persistent. She kept on returning until finally the French commander reluctantly provided an escort for her trip to Chinon, where, upon her arrival, she was introduced to an imposter dressed up as the Dauphin. Although she had never seen the Dauphin she was able to quickly identify the imposter as an imposter and one of the courtiers who surrounded the imposter as the real Dauphin. She was then summoned to an inquisition at the University of Poitiers to prove that she had been sent by God and not Satan — which she did, successfully. After months of delay and vacillation by the French court, she was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French army, a decision that ultimately led to the restoration of the French throne and the end of the One Hundred Years War. It also led to her betrayal by the French court, and a mock trial that ended in her martyrdom.

Most Americans, whether Catholic or not, are familiar with the story of Joan of Arc. It's been dramatized many times, in the theatre, on television and in the movies. It's a story I've never really understood, primarily because the character portrayed as Joan of Arc has almost always been portrayed as hysterical, borderline crazy. Why anyone would follow her unto battle was a question that always left me somewhat befuddled — until recently.

Last year I was introduced to a book about Joan of Arc that was written by the 19th-century American humorist and author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. It was written under the alias Jean Francois Alden. Clemens was afraid that if he published it under his own name or as Mark Twain, no one would take the book seriously. And he wanted this book to be taken seriously because he had spent 12 years of his life researching the project, he believed that it was the most important book he had ever written and that Joan herself was unique in history.

To research the book, Clemens went to the National Archives of France and read through the transcripts of the trial that ended in Joan's martrydom, as well as the inquisition — held 25 years after her death — that cleared her name. He studied both English and French accounts of the French heroine, and concluded, in an essay he wrote in 1904 that Joan was the "Wonder of the Ages," an individual "stainlessly pure, in mind and heart, in speech and deed and spirit."

In his book, published now by Ignatius Press as Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, Clemens presented Joan not as the hysterical visionary so often portrayed elsewhere, but as an extraordinarily gifted and intelligent young woman whose presence, poise and intellect commanded both respect and attention, an exceptional young woman through whom God worked a miracle.

Speaking of miracles, it is more than interesting to note that this profound work about Joan of Arc, who in 1920 would become St. Joan of Arc, was written by a man who not only was not Catholic, but also had little regard for organized religion. As Mark Twain, he frequently ridiculed it: "It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

Yet, for reasons unexplained, the man who in his public utterances detested religious authority, spent 12 years of his life researching and writing a book about a young woman who accepted that authority to the point of her own martyrdom. And when he was done researching and writing, he considered the book to be his most important work, and the subject of that book to be the "most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced."