When she sent her answer, the Maid said, she was about to mount her horse, and had told him she would be able better to answer his question when at rest in Paris or elsewhere. The copy of her letter which was now read, Joan said, did not quite agree with that she had sent to Armagnac.
'She had not,' Joan added, 'said in her letter that what she knew was by the inspiration of Heaven.'
Again pressed as to which of the two Popes she believed the true one, she said that the one then in Rome was to her that one.
Questioned regarding her letter to the English before Orleans, she acknowledged the accurateness of the copy produced, with the exception of a slight mistake. She retracted nothing regarding this letter, and declared that the English would, ere seven years were passed from that time, give a more striking proof of their loss of power in France than that which they had shown before Orleans. This prediction was literally carried out when, in 1436, Paris opened its gates to Charles VII., the loss of the capital being shortly after followed by the loss of all the other English conquests, with the exception of the town of Calais—the gains of a century of war being snatched from them in a score of years.
'They will meet,' said Joan of Arc, 'with greater reverses than have yet befallen them.'
When she was asked what made her speak thus, she answered that these things had been revealed to her. The examination again turned upon her voices and apparitions.
'Do they always appear to you in the same dress? Always in the same form, and richly crowned?'
Similar foolish questions were then put to her. Had the saints long hair? She did not know. And what language did they converse in with her?
'Their language,' she replied, 'is good and beautiful.'
'What sort of voices were theirs?'