Joan rode out of Blois bearing her pennon in her hand, and as she rode she chanted the ‘Veni Creator.’  The sacred strain was taken up by those who followed, and thus passed the Maid forth on her first great deed of deliverance.

During the whole of the first night Joan remained, as was her custom when she had no women about her, in her armour.

It was the Maid’s wish to enter Orleans from the northern side, but the officers with her thought this would be a great imprudence, and followed the opposite bank of the river.  Passing through Beaugency and Meung, they went on by Saint Die, Saint Laurent, and Clery, without meeting with any attack from the enemy who occupied these places.  On arriving at a place called Olivet, they were within the neighbourhood of the beleaguered city.  Below them rose the English bastille towers; beyond, the walls, towers, and steeples of Orleans.

Joan had hoped that the city could have been entered without further difficulty; she now found that not only the river lay between her and the town, but that the English were in force on all sides.  She wished that the nearest of these bastilles, at Saint Jean le Blanc, should be stormed, and the river forded there; but this scheme was judged by her companions-in-arms to be too perilous, and Joan had again to comply with the opinion of the officers.

Riding to the eastwards, and skirting the river some four miles below the town, she and her knights forded it at a spot where some low long islands, or ‘eyots’ as we call them on the Thames, lay in this part of the Loire.  On one of these, called l’Isle aux Bourdons, the provisions and stores for the beleaguered city were shipped and transhipped, and carried down to Orleans when the wind lay in that quarter.

It was at Reuilly that Dunois met the Maid, still chafing from her thwarted plan of attacking the English in their stronghold at Saint Jean le Blanc, and she appears to have shown him her displeasure.  While this interview took place the wind changed, and the provision boats, which, owing to the wind being contrary, had not been able to make the islands, were now enabled to leave the city.  They soon arrived, were laden with provisions, corn, and even cattle embarked on them, and, when thus provisioned, returned to Orleans by the canal on the left bank of the Loire, and successfully arrived at the city end of the broken bridge, whence the provisions and live stock were passed into the town.

The river was too much in flood to allow of the army being taken across, nor could a bridge of boats be made, owing to the height of the waters.  Joan, however, was determined to enter Orleans, flood or no flood, for she knew what the moral effect of her appearing to the townspeople would be.  Accompanied by Dunois, La Hire, and some two hundred lances, just after darkness had hidden her movements from the enemy, she left Reuilly and entered the city.