Carried away by the throng of frightened soldiers, Joan was among the last to leave the field, and to those who cried to her to make her escape she answered that all might yet be saved, and urged her men to rally.  Nevertheless, she was forced back towards the bridge, across which fugitives were making their escape into the town.  In a few seconds Joan could have been safe across the drawbridge, and under shelter of the towers which defended it.  At this instant, whether intentionally to exclude the heroine from safety, or through panic and fear of the Burgundians and English entering the town along with the French, the drawbridge was lifted, and Joan, with a handful of the faithful few who were ever at her side in time of peril, was surrounded by a sea of foemen.  In a moment half a dozen soldiers secured her horse and seized her on every side, trying to drag her out of the saddle.  The long skirts which the heroine wore were soon torn off by these rough hands.  An archer of Picardy, belonging to the army of John of Luxembourg, wrenched her from her horse and made her prisoner.  Her brother Peter, her faithful squire d’Aulon, and Pothon de Xaintrailles were all captured at the same time.

Thus fell Joan of Arc into the hands of her enemies, and the question whether through treachery or not has never been settled.

According to an old work published early in the sixteenth century, called Le Miroir des Femmes Vertueuses, Joan of Arc had taken the communion in the Church of Saint James at Compiegne, and was standing leaning against a pillar of that church; a large number of citizens with many children stood around, to whom she said:  ’My children and dear friends, I bid you to mark that I have been sold and betrayed, and that I shall be shortly put to death.  So I beseech you all to pray to God for me, for never more shall I be able to be of service to the King or to the kingdom of France.’

This story, which, whether authentic or not, is surely a touching one, is full of the spirit of the heroine.  It rests upon the testimony of two persons, one eighty-six and the other eighty-eight years of age, by whom the author was told the tale in 1498, both affirming that they had been in the church when Joan of Arc spoke of her betrayal.  There can be but little doubt that Joan had had for some time before she went to Compiegne a presentiment of her soon falling into her enemies’ power.  On the eve of the King’s coronation at Rheims she said to her friends that what she alone feared was treason—­a foreboding too soon, alas! to come true.  She never, however, seems to have fixed on any particular period when the treason she dreaded would occur; and during her trial she acknowledged that, had she known she would have been taken prisoner during the sortie on the 24th of May, she would not have undertaken that adventure.