On the twenty-fifth of February, 1429, a seventeen-year-old French peasant girl walked into the audience hall of the royal château of Chinon. The Dauphin Charles, heir to the throne of France, had disguised himself by exchanging his clothes with a courtier and concealing himself among three hundred members of his court. The peasant girl walked past the disguised courtier. She went directly to the real Dauphin. She had never seen him before. She told him three things that would happen.

Her name was Jeanne d'Arc. She was born in 1412 at Domrémy, a small village in the Duchy of Bar in the north-east of France, to the peasant farmers Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée. She could neither read nor write. From the age of thirteen she had heard, by her own account, the voices of the Archangel Michael, of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and of Saint Margaret of Antioch. From the age of sixteen the voices had told her to go to the Dauphin.

At Chinon she told the Dauphin three things. First, that she would relieve the city of Orléans, then besieged by the English since the previous October. Second, that during the assault on the English bastilles she would be wounded above the breast by an arrow, but would not die. Third, that the Dauphin would be crowned King of France at Reims Cathedral, a city that had been in Anglo-Burgundian hands since 1419. On the afternoon of the seventh of May, 1429, during the assault on the Boulevard des Tourelles at Orléans, she was struck above the left breast by an English longbow arrow that pierced her armour between her neck and shoulder. She removed it herself. She returned to the assault. The Boulevard fell. The English lifted the siege the next morning.

On the seventeenth of July, 1429, ten weeks after the relief of Orléans, the Dauphin Charles was crowned and anointed as King Charles VII of France at the Cathedral of Reims, exactly as Joan of Arc had predicted to him at Chinon five months earlier. Joan of Arc stood in armour beside him at the high altar. The sworn depositions of one hundred and fifteen witnesses at the 1456 Trial of Rehabilitation, including her squire Jean d'Aulon and her confessor Father Jean Pasquerel, are preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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