that the place could be taken if they but held on.  But when night came Alencon and some other of the captains overcame her resistance, and there being clearly no further possibility for the moment, succeeded in setting her upon her horse, and conveyed her back to the camp.  While they rode with her, supporting her on her charger, she did nothing but repeat “Quel dommage!” Oh, what a misfortune, that the siege of Paris should fail, all for want of constancy and courage.  “If they had but gone on till morning,” she cried, “the inhabitants would have known.”  It is evident from this that she must have expected a rising within, and could not yet believe that no such thing was to be looked for. “Par mon martin, the place would have been taken,” she said in the hearing one cannot but feel of the chronicler, who reports so often those homely words.

Thus Jeanne was led back after the first day’s attack.  Her wound was not serious, and she had been repulsed during one of the day’s fighting at Orleans without losing courage.  But something had changed her spirit as well as the spirit of the army she led.  There is a curious glimpse given us into her camp at this point, which indeed comes to us through the observation of an enemy, yet seems to have in it an unmistakable gleam of truth.  It comes from one of the parties which had been granted a safe-conduct to carry away the dead of the English and Burgundian side.  They tell us, among other circumstances,—­such as that the French burnt their dead, a manifest falsehood, but admirably calculated to make them a horror to their neighbours,—­that many in the ranks cursed the Maid who had promised that they should without any doubt sleep that night in Paris and plunder the wealthy city.  The men with their safe-conduct creeping among the dead, to recover those bodies which had fallen on their own side, and furtively to count the fallen on the other—­who were delighted to bring a report that the Maid was no longer the fountain of strength and blessing, but secretly cursed by her own forces—­are sinister figures groping their way through the darkness of the September night.

Next morning, however, her wound being slight, Jeanne was up early and in conference with Alencon, begging him to sound his trumpets and set forth once more.  “I shall not budge from here, till Paris is taken,” she said.  No doubt her spirit was up, and a determination to recover lost ground strong in her mind.  While the commanders consulted together, there came a band of joyful augury into the camp, the Seigneur of Montmorency with sixty gentlemen, who had left the party of Burgundy in order to take service under the banner of the Maid.  No doubt this important and welcome addition to their number exhilarated the entire camp, in the commotion of the reveille, while each man looked to his weapons, wiping off from breastplate and helmet the heavy dew of the September morning, greeting the new friends and brothers-in-arms who had come in, and arranging,