Jeanne threw herself into the mêlée and gave chase to a detachment of fleeing Burgundians. She did not listen to those who begged her not to risk going further into enemy terrain. When at last she decided to turn back, it was too late. Her retreat was cut off. She fought bitterly to carve out a passage to the drawbridge. The fortress commander, Guillaume de Flavy, seeing how many Burgundians and English were approaching, ordered the drawbridge to be raised and the gates shut. An archer seized Jeanne by her cloth-of-gold cape and pulled her off her horse. The great adventure was over. It had lasted less than eighteen months. There now began a passion of tears, mud and blood that was to end on Wednesday 30 May 1431 at the stake in Rouen.

Gilles, however, retired to his estates in the Vendée. He didn’t care a fig for the marshal’s baton that the King had given him in recognition of his services. Neither war nor politics held his interest. All that mattered to him now was that personal, mystical adventure that had begun on the day that he had met Jeanne. But since the failure of the assault on Paris, the state of grace in which Jeanne had lived and which she had got him to share seemed to have come to an end. This was a tribulation indeed, for his life was bound up with hers and he would follow her to hell if necessary. Meanwhile, he soothed his sorrows by doing what the King ― and most of the lords of that time ― did: he travelled in great state from one fortress or residence to another. The astounded peasants and woodcutters stood and watched this sumptuous procession of officers and prelates followed by an impressive train of carts . No, it was not a military expedition. It was simply the Seigneur de Rais, his retinue and household on the road from Champtocé to Machecoul or from Tiffauges to Pouzauges. So vast were the Seigneur de Rais’s possessions and so numerous his residences that he could certainly continue such journeys for a very long time before coming back to the same place.

But one day these movements came to a stop. News came by word of mouth, from Compiègne to the Vendée, leaving a single image imprinted on Gilles’s feverish brain: Jeanne pulled from her horse by an archer clinging to her silk cape, trodden underfoot by the Burgundian rabble.

Gilles could no longer remain idle. Where was the court of France at that time? At Sully-sur-Loire, whose castle belonged to Georges de La Trémouille, who was in great favour with Charles, but had always resented Jeanne’s success. Gilles hastened there and first asked for an audience with Yolande of Aragon, the King’s mother-in-law. She was an imposing lady. She treated with playful familiarity this marshal of France who allowed himself the luxury of preferring the loneliness of his moors to court intrigue.

‘Seigneur de Rais!’ she simpered. ‘What a surprise! It’s a year now since you disappeared. We were talking about you only yesterday evening. We imagined you lying low in one of your forests, like a wild boar. What have you been doing all this time? What has brought you out of your hole?’

‘Madame, what has brought me out of my hole,’ Gilles replied, ‘is the sad news that has reached me concerning Jeanne.’

Now we are getting to it, thought Yolande. Still sticking together, those two ruffians!

‘Poor little Jeanne!’ she cried.

‘She will not be given a fair trial at Rouen. The whole thing will be rigged to bring about her downfall.’

‘What a dreadful mistake that expedition to Compiègne was!’ the King’s mother-in-law lamented. ‘But you know, Jeanne undertook it without orders from Charles, with men that she had recruited herself. Charles didn’t want to leave her in command any more. You understand, Marshal de Rais, a shepherdess obeying heavenly voices!’

‘Nevertheless it was by answering those voices that she delivered Orléans and had Charles crowned at Rheims,’ Gilles reminded the old lady, somewhat tactlessly.

‘No doubt, no doubt, but you can’t base a policy on miracles.