The day but one after this deliverance, Joan set out to go and rejoin the king, and prosecute her work at his side.  She fell in with him on the 13th of May, at Tours, moved forward to meet him, with her banner in her hand and her head uncovered, and bending down over her charger’s neck, made him a deep obeisance.  Charles took off his cap, held out his hand to her, and, “as it seemed to many,” says a contemporary chronicler, “he would fain have kissed her, for the joy that he felt.”  But the king’s joy was not enough for Joan.  She urged him to march with her against enemies who were flying, so to speak, from themselves, and to start without delay for Rheims, where he would be crowned.  “I shall hardly last more than a year,” said she; “we must think about working right well this year, for there is much to do.”  Hesitation was natural to Charles, even in the hour of victory.  His favorite, La Tremoille, and his chancellor, the Archbishop of Rheims, opposed Joan’s entreaties with all the objections that could be devised under the inspiration of their ill will:  there were neither troops nor money in hand for so great a journey; and council after council was held for the purpose of doing nothing.  Joan, in her impatience, went one day to Loches, without previous notice, and tapped softly at the door of the king’s privy chamber (chambre de re-trait).  He bade her enter.  She fell upon her knees, saying, “Gentle dauphin, hold not so many and such long councils, but rather come to Rheims, and there assume your crown; I am much pricked to take you thither.”  “Joan,” said the Bishop of Castres, Christopher d’Harcourt, the king’s confessor, “cannot you tell the king what pricketh you?” “Ah!  I see,” replied Joan, with some embarrassment:  “well, I will tell you.  I had set me to prayer, according to my wont, and I was making complaint for that you would not believe what I said; then the voice came and said unto me, ‘Go, go, my daughter; I will be a help to thee; go.’  When this voice comes to me, I feel marvellously rejoiced; I would that it might endure forever.”  She was eager and overcome.

Joan and her voices were not alone in urging the king to shake off his doubts and his indolence.  In church, and court, and army, allies were not wanting to the pious and valiant maid.  In a written document dated the 14th of May, six days after the siege of Orleans was raised, the most Christian doctor of the age, as Gerson was called, sifted the question whether it were possible, whether it were a duty, to believe in the Maid.  “Even if (which God forbid),” said he, “she should be mistaken in her hope and ours, it would not necessarily follow that what she does comes of the evil spirit, and not of God, but that rather our ingratitude was to blame.  Let the party which hath a just cause take care how, by incredulity or injustice, it rendereth useless the divine succor so miraculously manifested, for God, without any change of counsel, changeth the upshot