While Jeanne and her army thus played with the unmoving English, advancing and retiring, attempting every means of drawing them out, the enemy took advantage of one of these seeming withdrawals to march out of their camp suddenly and return to Paris, which all this time had been lying comparatively defenceless, had the French made their attack sooner.  At the same time Charles moved on to Compiegne where he gave himself up to fresh intrigues with Philip of Burgundy, this time for a truce to last till Christmas.  The Maid was grievously troubled by this step, moult marrie, and by the new period of delay and negotiation on which the Court had entered.  Paris was not given up, nor was there any appearance that it ever would be, and to all the generals as well as to the Maid it was very evident that this was the next step to be taken.  Some of the leaders wearied with inaction had pushed on to Normandy where four great fortresses—­greatest of all the immense and mysterious stronghold on the high cliffs of the Seine, that imposing Chateau Gaillard which Richard Coeur-de-lion had built, the ruins of which, white and mystic, still dominate, like some Titanic ghost, above the course of the river—­had yielded to them.  So great was the danger of Normandy, the most securely English of all French provinces, that Bedford had again been drawn out of Paris to defend it.  Here then was another opportunity to seize the capital.  But Charles could not be induced to move.  He found many ways of amusing himself at Compiegne, and the new treaty was being hatched with Burgundy which gave an excuse for doing nothing.  The pause which wearied them all out, both captains and soldiers, at last became more than flesh and blood could bear.

Jeanne once more was driven to take the initiative.  Already on one occasion she had forced the hand of the lingering Court, and resumed the campaign of her own accord, an impatient movement which had been perfectly successful.  No doubt again the army itself was becoming demoralised, and showing symptoms of falling to pieces.  One day she sent for Alencon in haste during the absence of the ambassadors at Arras. “Beau duc,” she cried, “prepare your troops and the other captains. En mon Dieu, par mon martin,(3) I will see Paris nearer than I have yet seen it.”  She had seen the towers from afar as she wandered over the country in Charles’s lingering train.  Her sudden resolution struck like fire upon the impatient band.  They set out at once, Alencon and the Maid at the head of their division of the army, and all rejoiced to get to horse again, to push their way through every obstacle.  They started on the 23d August, nearly a month after the departure from Rheims, a month entirely lost, though full of events, lost without remedy so far as Paris was concerned.  At Senlis they made a pause, perhaps to await the King, who, it was hoped, would have been constrained to follow; then carrying with them all the forces that could be spared from that town, they spurred on to St. Denis where they arrived on the 27th:  St. Denis, the other sacred town of France, the place of the tomb, as Rheims was the place of the crown.