Joan wondered whether it could possibly be that God permitted such excesses and disasters.

In 1425, on a summer's day, at noon, she was in her father's little garden.

She heard a voice calling her, at her right side, in the direction of the church, and a great brightness shone upon her at the same time in the same spot.

At first she was frightened, but she recovered herself on finding that "it was a worthy voice;" and, at the second call, she perceived that it was the voice of angels.

"I saw them with my bodily eyes," she said, six years later, to her judges at Rouen, "as plainly as I see you; when they departed from me I wept, and would fain have had them take me with them." The apparitions came again and again, and exhorted her "to go to France for to deliver the kingdom." She became dreamy, rapt in constant meditation.