The situation was embarrassing.  How could the town be taken without a siege train and artillery?  But to leave it in the rear, with its strong garrison, would be madness.  The King’s men were in favour of retiring and abandoning the expedition to Rheims.  There happened to be within the town of Troyes at this time a famous monk of the preaching kind, named Father Richard.  Father Richard had been a pilgrim, and had visited the Holy Land, and had made himself notorious by interminable sermons, for he was wont to preach half-a-dozen hours at a time.  Crowds had listened to him in Paris and other places.  The English, who probably thought his sermons insufferably long, or too much leavened with French sympathies, drove him out of Paris, and he had taken refuge at Troyes.  The monk had heard much of Joan of Arc, and was eager to see and speak with her, but his enthusiasm was mixed with a religious and even superstitious fear in regard to the heroine.  He was allowed to enter the royal precincts, and approached the Maid of Orleans with many a sign of the cross, and with sprinkling of holy water.  Seeing the good man’s terror, Joan told him to approach her without fear.

‘Come forward boldly!’ she said to the monk.  ‘I shall not fly away!’

And after convincing him that she was not a demon in any way, she made him the bearer of a letter from her to the people in the town.  The negotiations between the army and the burghers lasted five days; the town refusing to admit the King, and the King unwilling to pass the town, but unable to take it by force.  Charles was on the point of giving up the attempt to reach Rheims when one of his Council pointed out that as the expedition had been undertaken at the instigation of Joan of Arc, it was only fair her judgment should now be followed, and not that of any one else.  Joan was summoned before the Council, when she solemnly assured the King that in three days’ time the place would be taken.

‘If we were sure of it,’ said the Chancellor, ’we would wait here six days.’

‘Six days!’ said the Maid.  ‘You will enter Troyes to-morrow.’

Mounting her horse, the Maid rode into the camp, and ordered all to prepare to carry out a general assault on the next morning.  Anything that could be used in the shape of furniture and fagots, to make a bridge across the town ditches, was collected.  Joan, who had now her tent moved up close to the moat, worked harder, says an eye-witness, than any two of the most skilful captains in preparing the attack.  She directed that fascines should be thrown into the moat, across which the troops were to pass to the town.