the army discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of which was full of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate of St. Honoré and its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders back into the city: but their further progress was arrested by that discovery. It was on this occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have seized from a Burgundian in the mêlée, a sword, of which she boasted afterwards that it was a good sword capable of good blows, though we have no certain record that in all her battles she ever gave one blow, or shed blood at all. It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other filled with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her standard at the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and cheer on her soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril, descending into the first fosse, and climbing up again on the second, the _dos d'ane_, which separated them, where she stood in the midst of a rain of arrows, fully exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers and gunners on the ramparts above, testing with her lance the depth of the water. We seem in the story to see her all alone or with her standard-bearer only by her side making this investigation; but that of course is only a pictorial suggestion, though it might for a moment be the fact. She remained there, however, from two in the afternoon till night, when she was forced away. The struggle must have raged around while she stood on the dark edge of the ditch probing the muddy water to see where it could best be crossed, shouting directions to her men in that voice _assez femme_, which penetrated the noise of battle, and summoning the active and desperate enemy overhead. "_Renty! Renty!_" she cried as she had done at Orleans--"_surrender to the King of France!_"