Dunois, with a following of knights and citizens, came up the river to welcome the convoy. When he approached Joan, she asked him:
"Are you the bastard of Orleans?"
"Yes," he replied, "and I am glad of your coming."
"And did you advise that I should be brought by this side of the river, and not straight to the English?"
He answered that it was so, he and the council having judged it safest.
"In God's name," she said, "my Lord's counsel is safer and wiser than yours. You thought to deceive me, but you have deceived yourselves, for I bring you the best help that ever knight or city had; for it is God's help, not sent for love of me, but by God's pleasure."
At eight that evening she entered Orleans, riding a white horse, her standard carried before her. The people thronged to meet her, wild with joy, "as if she had been an angel of God." "They felt comforted and, as it were, dis-besieged by the divine virtue there was said to be in that simple Maid." They crowded so upon her, that one of their torches set fire to the border of her standard, and when she bent forward and crushed out the flame, the little brave action seemed a miracle to the excited multitude. After returning thanks to God in the cathedral, she rode to the house of Jacques Boucher, treasurer to the Duke of Orleans, and was hospitably received by his wife and his young daughter Charlotte, whom she took to share her chamber during her stay in the city.
The next Sunday, May 1st, Dunois went to fetch the army from Blois. The Maid rode with him a little way, and he and his following passed unmolested by the English forts. The days of his absence were spent by Joan in making friends with the citizens, in attending mass and riding out to reconnoitre the enemy's siege-works. The enthusiastic people followed her everywhere, fearing nothing so long as they were near her. On Tuesday some reinforcements arrived, and news came that the army was on its way.
This time they took the northern side of the river, and on May 4th Joan went a league out of the city to meet them. The whole army passed the line of forts and entered Orleans. The besiegers made no sign, and it is not wonderful that the English soldiers, seeing that strange apathy of their leaders, believed Joan to be a witch, whose arts it would be useless to resist.
The same day, towards evening she lay down to rest, but suddenly she started up and called her squire, saying, "My counsel tells me to go against the English." While he was arming her, she heard voices in the street shouting that the French were suffering loss. She rushed out, and meeting her page on the way: