“Enemies,” answered the Sieur Bertrand.

“If one would have a message go sound and ungarbled, does one choose traitors and tricksters to send it by?”

I saw that we had been fools, and she wise.  They saw it too, so none found anything to say.  Then she went on: 

“They had but small wit that contrived this trap.  They thought to get my message and seem to deliver it straight, yet deftly twist it from its purpose.  You know that one part of my message is but this—­to move the Dauphin by argument and reasonings to give me men-at-arms and send me to the siege.  If an enemy carried these in the right words, the exact words, and no word missing, yet left out the persuasions of gesture and supplicating tone and beseeching looks that inform the words and make them live, where were the value of that argument—­whom could it convince?  Be patient, the Dauphin will hear me presently; have no fear.”

The Sieur de Metz nodded his head several times, and muttered as to himself: 

“She was right and wise, and we are but dull fools, when all is said.”

It was just my thought; I could have said it myself; and indeed it was the thought of all there present.  A sort of awe crept over us, to think how that untaught girl, taken suddenly and unprepared, was yet able to penetrate the cunning devices of a King’s trained advisers and defeat them.  Marveling over this, and astonished at it, we fell silent and spoke no more.  We had come to know that she was great in courage, fortitude, endurance, patience, conviction, fidelity to all duties—­in all things, indeed, that make a good and trusty soldier and perfect him for his post; now we were beginning to feel that maybe there were greatnesses in her brain that were even greater than these great qualities of the heart.  It set us thinking.

What Joan did that day bore fruit the very day after.  The King was obliged to respect the spirit of a young girl who could hold her own and stand her ground like that, and he asserted himself sufficiently to put his respect into an act instead of into polite and empty words.  He moved Joan out of that poor inn, and housed her, with us her servants, in the Castle of Courdray, personally confiding her to the care of Madame de Bellier, wife of old Raoul de Gaucourt, Master of the Palace.  Of course, this royal attention had an immediate result:  all the great lords and ladies of the Court began to flock there to see and listen to the wonderful girl-soldier that all the world was talking about, and who had answered the King’s mandate with a bland refusal to obey.  Joan charmed them every one with her sweetness and simplicity and unconscious eloquence, and all the best and capablest among them recognized that there was an indefinable something about her that testified that she was not made of common clay, that she was built on a grander plan than the mass of mankind, and moved on a loftier plane.  These spread her fame.  She always made friends and advocates that way; neither the high nor the low could come within the sound of her voice and the sight of her face and go out from her presence indifferent.