Even after these earnest words from Joan, the King, although impressed, was not convinced, and with some reluctance allowed her to remain at Chinon. We were afterwards shown the lodgings, which this inhospitable royal host gave to the persistent visitor, in a very thick-walled little tower, and according to our guide, Joan could get in or out of her room, on an upper floor, only when her guards put a ladder up to her small window, permanent stairways being considered unsafe for such guests. The King saw Joan again several times. She did not delude herself as to the doubts he still entertained. "Gentle Dauphin," she said to him one day, "Why do you not believe me? I say unto you that God hath compassion on you, on your kingdom and your people; St. Louis and Charlemagne are kneeling before Him, making prayer for you, and I will say unto you, so please you, a thing which will give you to understand that you ought to believe me." Charles gave her audience on this occasion, in the presence, according to some accounts, of four witnesses, the most trusted of his intimates, who swore to reveal nothing, and, according to others, completely alone. "What she said to him there is none who knows," wrote Alan Chartier a short time after [in July, 1429], "but it is quite certain that he was all radiant with joy thereat, as at a revelation from the Holy Spirit." Archie, who read the most recent life of Joan of Arc, on the steamer, as a preparation for Chinon, reminds us that after much sifting of history and tradition, it has been decided by learned authorities that the revelation of the Maid, which filled the King with joy, was a positive assurance that he was the rightful heir to the throne of France and the true son of his father, Charles VI. It is not strange that Charles VII should have doubted his own paternity with a mother as unnatural and depraved as Isabel of Bavaria, and that with a kingdom chiefly in the hands of the English he should have seriously questioned his right and title to the throne, being himself of a weak and doubting nature. It is said, that in an hour of great despondency, Charles prayed to God from the depths of his heart that if he were the true heir of the house of France, and the kingdom justly his, God would be pleased to help him and defend it for him. This prayer, which he thought known to God alone, the Maid recalled to the mind of the King, thus giving the sign and seal of her mission, and by this revelation she not only caused the King to believe in her, but strengthened his confidence in himself and in his right and title. True to herself and "the voices," for she never spoke as of her own motion, it was always a superior power speaking through her, as the mouthpiece. She said: "I tell thee on behalf of my Lord that thou art the true heir of France and son of the King."