Sublime above all these loomed the Church and its tremendous message. And so, from current history and fable and folk-lore, Jeanne’s imagination was fed, while her soul was ready to receive any mandate which the Lord of all things might deign to signify. She was thirteen years old when the first message came to her. The Archangel Michael, as she states, appeared, and she was struck with great fear; but afterwards she longed for his coming and his words. He admonished her to be pure and holy and religious, and she determined to be so. Later on St. Catherine (the Virgin) and St. Margaret appeared to her, and told her that the Lord ordered her to go into France and relieve Orleans. In her examination she tells these things with great particularity, meeting all questions as to age, size, voice, dress, language, and surroundings of the angels, with a simple directness which carries conviction of her absolute truthfulness. Her doubts and misgivings as to her own unfitness she put aside as impertinences, when assured of her divine mission. No shadow of spiritual inflation or egotism is to be seen in all these things. Rather she held by the belief that her very unworthiness in the world’s eye was the cause of her being chosen as a simple instrument in the hands of the Lord. Her uncle led her to Vaucouleurs in 1428; Robert de Baudricourt, whom she believed she was told to see, declined to give ear to her stories; but Jean de Metz, whose evidence is of absorbing interest, tells us how he was overcome and won over to her by her compelling earnestness and faith. She came to Chinon with a small escort, and she and her guard had to travel mostly by night to avoid the Burgundians. “At Chinon,” says Jean de Metz, “she had to submit to long inquiries.”