On June 9th, Alençon and the Maid entered Orleans with their army, about two thousand strong. The people flocked about her with joyous greetings and offers of provisions and munitions; they could not do enough to show their enduring gratitude to the saviour of their beloved city. Beside this, it must be confessed that they felt the proverbial "lively sense of future favors." Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency, were still in English hands; from these sentinel towns up and down the Loire the enemy kept strict watch over Orleans, and there could be no freedom of coming or going. These towns, it appeared, must be taken before the cry 'To Paris!' could be raised in good earnest.
Very well! let them be taken, said the Maid; Jargeau first, then the others. On June 11th[52] she and Alençon set forth, with about three thousand troops and a large following of citizens and country people. All were eager to follow her banner, to share in her labors and her victory.
Before telling the story of the "Week of Victories," let us see what her brothers-in-arms, the knightly captains of France, thought of the Maid of Domrémy. They had fought at her side through an arduous campaign; they were entering, with joyful ardor, on another. Andrew Lang has carefully selected three passages from the mass of contemporaneous evidence; the judgment of three notable military experts, De Termes, Dunois, and Alençon. De Termes speaks first.
"At the assaults before Orleans, Jeanne showed valor and conduct which no man could excel in war. All the captains were amazed by her courage and energy, and her endurance.... In leading and arraying, and in encouraging men, she bore herself like the most skilled captain in the world, who all his life had been trained to war."
Then comes Alençon, her "gentle Duke," with: "She was most expert in war, as much in carrying the lance as in mustering a force and ordering the ranks, and in laying the guns. All marveled how cautiously and with what foresight she went to work, as if she had been a captain with twenty or thirty years of experience."
Finally Dunois says: "She displayed (at Troyes) marvelous energy, doing more work than two or three of the most famous and practised men of the sword could have done."
Lang, summing these things up, concludes that[53] "her skill is a marvel, like that of the untutored Clive, but nobody knows the limits of the resources of nature."
It is easier to begin upon quotations than to cease from them. I may fitly close this chapter with a passage from Boucher de Molandon:
"All those to whom it has been given to kindle the nations, have cared much less to be in advance of their time than to make use of the exciting elements of the time itself. Such is Jeanne d'Arc, whose merit and power alike it was not to innovate upon, but to draw from her epoch the best that it contained. Skilful above all others in finding happy expressions, the ringing note that roused to action, when she speaks of the blood of France, it is because the word has a meaning for all; she wakes a great echo. She sounds the ancient trumpet blast, and the illustrious dead, from Clovis to Du Guesclin, stir in their tombs, and cause the soil of France to tremble under their discouraged descendants."