my head was stounding as if it would burst.  It was late and nigh sunset or ever we won the gates of Compiegne, having lost, indeed, but thirty men slain, but having wholly failed in our onfall.  For I heard in the monastery whither I was borne that, when the Maid and Xaintrailles and their men had won their way within the walls, and had slain certain of the English, and were pushing the others hard, behold our main battle was fallen upon in the rear by the English from Noyon, some two miles distant from Pont l’Eveque.  Therefore there was no help for it but retreat we must, driving back the English to Noyon, while our wounded and all our munitions of war were carried orderly away.

As to the pains I bore in that monastery of the Jacobins, when my broken bones were set by a very good surgeon, there is no need that I should write.  My fortune in war was like that of most men-at-arms, or better than that of many who are slain outright in their first skirmish.  Some good fortune I had, as at St. Pierre, and again, bad fortune, of which this was the worst, that I could not be with the Maid:  nay, never again did I ride under her banner.

She, for her part, was not idle, but, after tarrying certain days in Compiegne with Guillaume de Flavy, she rode to Lagny, “for there,” she said, “were men that warred well against the English,” namely, a company of our Scots.  And among them, as later I heard in my bed, was Randal Rutherford, who had ransomed himself out of the hands of the French in Paris, whereat I was right glad.  At Lagny, with her own men and the Scots, the Maid fought and took one Franquet d’Arras, a Burgundian “routier,” or knight of the road, who plundered that country without mercy.  Him the Maid would have exchanged for an Armagnac of Paris, the host of the Bear Inn, then held in duresse by the English, for his share in a plot to yield Paris to the King.  But this burgess died in the hands of the English, and the echevins {34} of Lagny, claiming Franquet d’Arras as a common thief, traitor, and murderer, tried him, and, on his confession, put him to death.  This was counted a crime in the Maid by the English and Burgundian robbers, nay, even by French and Scots.  “For,” said they, “if a gentleman is to be judged like a manant, or a fat burgess by burgesses, there is no more profit or glory in war.”  Nay, I have heard gentlemen of France cry out that, as the Maid gave up Franquet to such judges as would surely condemn him, so she was rightly punished when Jean de Luxembourg sold her into the hands of unjust judges.  But I answer that the Maid did not sell Franquet d’Arras, as I say De Luxembourg sold her:  not a livre did she take from the folk of Lagny.  And as for the slaying of robbers, this very Jean de Luxembourg had but just slain many English of his own party, for that they burned and pillaged in the Beauvais country.