ore
she went to war (April 1429); and to her deadly foes at Rouen. No man
can read her answers to them and doubt that she spoke what she believed.
And she died for this belief. Unluckily the book that was kept of what
she said at Poictiers is lost. Before her enemies at Rouen there were
many things which she did not think it right to say. On one point, after
for long refusing to speak, she told her foes a kind of parable, which
we must not take as part of her real story.

When Joan was between twelve and thirteen (1424), so she swore, 'a
_Voice came to her from God for her guidance_, but when first it came,
she was in great fear. And it came, that Voice, about noonday, in the
summer season, she being in her father's garden. And Joan had not fasted
the day before that, but was fasting when the Voice came.[4] And she
heard the Voice on her right side, towards the church, and rarely did
she hear it but she also saw a great light.' These are her very words.
They asked her if she heard these Voices there, in the hall of judgment,
and she answered, 'If I were in a wood, I should well hear these Voices
coming to me.' The Voices at first only told her 'to be a good girl, and
go to church.' She thought it was a holy Voice, and that it came from
God; and the third time she heard it she knew it was the voice of an
angel. The Voice told her of 'the great pity there was in France,' and
that one day she must go into France and help the country. She had
visions with the Voices; visions first of St. Michael, and then of St.
Catherine and St. Margaret.[5] She hated telling her hypocritical judges
anything about these heavenly visions, but it seems that she really
believed in their appearance, believed that she had embraced the knees
of St. Margaret and St. Catherine, and she did reverence to them when
they came to her. 'I saw them with my bodily eyes, as I see you,' she
said to her judges, 'and when they departed from me I wept, and well I
wished that they had taken me with them.'

What are we to think about these visions and these Voices which were
with Joan to her death?

Some have thought that she was mad; others that she only told the story
to win a hearing and make herself important; or, again, that a trick was
played on her to win her aid. The last idea is impossible. The French
Court did not want her. The second, as everyone will admit who reads
Joan's answers, and follows her step by step from childhood to victory,
to captivi