My very respected ladies and mothers, I pray the blessed son of God to give you a good life and a long one, and we both of us also send our remembrances to our brother Louis. Written at Selles this Wednesday the 8th of June. And this vespers there came here my lord of Vendôme, my lord of Boussac, and others, and La Hire is close to the army, and soon they will get to work. God grant that we get our wish. Your humble sons, GUY and ANDREW OF LAVAL.[51] On June 9th, Alençon and the Maid entered Orleans with their army, about two thousand strong. The people flocked about her with joyous greetings and offers of provisions and munitions; they could not do enough to show their enduring gratitude to the saviour of their beloved city. Beside this, it must be confessed that they felt the proverbial "lively sense of future favors." Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency, were still in English hands; from these sentinel towns up and down the Loire the enemy kept strict watch over Orleans, and there could be no freedom of coming or going. These towns, it appeared, must be taken before the cry 'To Paris!' could be raised in good earnest. Very well! let them be taken, said the Maid; Jargeau first, then the others. On June 11th[52] she and Alençon set forth, with about three thousand troops and a large following of citizens and country people. All were eager to follow her banner, to share in her labors and her victory. Before telling the story of the "Week of Victories," let us see what her brothers-in-arms, the knightly captains of France, thought of the Maid of Domrémy. They had fought at her side through an arduous campaign; they were entering, with joyful ardor, on another. Andrew Lang has carefully selected three passages from the mass of contemporaneous evidence; the judgment of three notable military experts, De Termes, Dunois, and Alençon. De Termes speaks first. "At the assaults before Orleans, Jeanne showed valor and conduct which no man could excel in war. All the captains were amazed by her courage and energy, and her endurance.... In leading and arraying, and in encouraging men, she bore herself like the most skilled captain in the world, who all his life had been trained to war." Then comes Alençon, her "gentle Duke," with: "She was most expert in war, as much in carrying the lance as in mustering a force and ordering the ranks, and in laying the guns. All marveled how cautiously and with what foresight she went to work, as if she had been a captain with twenty or thirty years of experience." Finally Dunois says: "She displayed (at Troyes) marvelous energy, doing more work than two or three of the most famous and practised men of the sword could have done." Lang, summing these things up, concludes that[53] "her skill is a marvel, like that of the untutored Clive, but nobody knows the limits of the resources of nature."