Someone says that she rode through all this half-delirious joy like a creature in a dream,--fatigue, pain, the happy languor of the end attained, and also the profound pity that was the very inspiration of her spirit, for all those souls of men gone to their account without help of Church or comfort of priest--overwhelming her. But next day, which was Sunday, she was up again and eagerly watching all that went on. A strange sight was Orleans on that Sunday of May. On the south side of the Loire, all those half-ruined bastilles smoking and silenced, which once had threatened not the city only but all the south of France; on the north the remaining bands of English drawn up in order of battle. The excitement of the town and of the generals in it, was intense; worn as they were with three days of continuous fighting, should they sally forth again and meet that compact, silent, doubly defiant army, which was more or less fresh and unexhausted? Jeanne's opinion was, No; there had been enough of fighting, and it was Sunday, the holy day; but apparently the French did go out though keeping at a distance, watching the enemy. By orders of the Maid an altar was raised between the two armies in full sight of both sides, and there mass was celebrated, under the sunshine, by the side of the river which had swallowed Classidas and all his men. French and English together devoutly turned towards and responded to that Mass in the pause of bewildering uncertainty. "Which way are their heads turned?" Jeanne asked when it was over. "They are turned away from us, they are turned to Meung," was the reply. "Then let them go, _de par Dieu_," the Maid replied. The siege had lasted for seven months, but eight days of the Maid were enough to bring it to an end. The people of Orleans still, every year, on the 8th of May, make a procession round the town and give thanks to God for its deliverance. Henceforth, the Maid was known no longer as Jeanne d'Arc, the peasant of Domremy, but as _La Pucelle d'Orléans_, in the same manner in which one might speak of the Prince of Waterloo, or the Duc de Malakoff. (1) Their special mission seems to have been a demand for the return of a herald previously sent who had never come back. As Dunois accompanied the demand by a threat to kill the English prisoners in Orleans if the herald was not sent back, the request was at once accorded, with fierce defiances to the Maid, the dairy-maid as she is called, bidding her go back to her cows, and threatening to burn her if they caught her.