On the subject of Jeanne's sincerity I have raised no doubts. It is impossible to suspect her of lying; she firmly believed that she received her mission from her voices. But whether she were not unconsciously directed is more difficult to ascertain. What we know of her before her arrival at Chinon comes to very little. One is inclined to believe that she had been subject to certain influences; it is so with all visionaries: some unseen director leads them. Thus it must have been with Jeanne. At Vaucouleurs she was heard to say that the Dauphin held the kingdom in fief (_en commende_).[86] Such a term she had not learnt from the folk of her village. She uttered a prophecy which she had not invented and which had obviously been fabricated for her. [Footnote 86: _Trial_, vol. ii, p. 456.] She must have associated with priests who were faithful to the cause of the Dauphin Charles, and who desired above all things the end of the war. Abbeys were being burned, churches pillaged, divine service discontinued.[87] Those pious persons who sighed for peace, now that they saw the Treaty of Troyes failing to establish it, looked for the realisation of their hopes to the expulsion of the English. And the wonderful, the unique point about this young peasant girl--a point suggesting the ecclesiastic and the monk--is not that she felt herself called to ride forth and fight, but that in "her great pity" she announced the approaching end of the war, by the victory and coronation of the King, at a time when the nobles of the two countries, and the men-at-arms of the two parties, neither expected nor desired the war ever to come to an end. [Footnote 87: Le P. Denifle, _La desolation des eglises, monasteres hopitaux en France vers le milieu du xv'ieme siecle_, Macon, 1897, in 8vo.]