Scott Alexander (author/host)

After a meal, I went to my king who was in the castle.

When I entered my king's room, I knew him among the others by the counsel of my voice which revealed him to me.

I told my king that I wanted to go and make war against the English."

So if she's to be trusted, her voices did indeed point him out.

But if we're a cynic, she could have been guessing by his body language.

Still, it's enough so that we can see the story growing from there.

Either way, Charles was initially sceptical, but Joan addressed him as the true and rightful heir to the Kingdom of France, and then took him aside and gave him some sign.

And this deeply rattled him.

we aren't sure what the sign was.

Joan told her interrogators that she had sworn an oath to keep the details secret, and so she couldn't swear another one to tell the truth on this matter, and that if the English wanted to know, they could ask the king.

And when they pressed her repeatedly to tell them the sign she gave her king, she switched to making sarcastic comments like, the sign you need is for God to deliver me out of your hands, the most certain sign he could show you.

Nor did any of her other contemporaries write down what the sign was.

Footnote.

Warning, this footnote is kind of boring.

Not every writer is Joan.

But if you want our best guess to what the sign was, the chronicler Pierre Salat, writing a couple generations later, writes that a man who had served Charles in his youth told him that, quote, "...in the time of the great adversity of this King Charles VII, he found himself brought so low that he no longer knew what to do."

The king, being in this extremity, entered one morning alone into his oratory, and there he made a humble petition and prayer to our lord in his heart, without utterance of words, in which he petitioned devoutly, that if so it was that he was true heir descended from the noble house of France, and that the kingdom should rightly belong to him.

that it please him to keep and defend him, or at worst, to grant him the mercy of escaping death or prison, and that he might fly to Spain or to Scotland, which were from time immemorial brothers in arms and allies of the kings of France, wherefore had he there chosen his last refuge.

A little time afterwards it came about that the maid was brought to him, who, while watching her ewes in the fields, had received divine inspiration to go and comfort the good king."

she did not fail, for she had herself taken and conducted by her own parents even before the king, and there she gave her message at the sign aforesaid, or desudi, which the king knew to be true, and thenceforth he took counsel of her, and great good it did him.