Why Joan, about five o'clock in the evening of May 23. rode out with her little force, crossed the bridge, galloped down the causeway, and rode through and through the Burgundians at Margny, we do not know. Her Voices seem to have ceased to give her advice, only saying that she would certainly be captured. Perhaps she only meant to take Margny; though it is not easy to understand how she expected to hold it, when the whole Burgundian and English armies came up to recover it, as they would certainly do. If she aimed at more, her charge was very brave but very ill-judged. Joan said that her Voices did not tell her to make her desperate sally; it was her own idea.
Nearly seventy years afterwards, two very old men said that, when they were young at Compiègne, they heard Joan tell a crowd of children, before she rode out, that "I am betrayed, and soon will be delivered to death. Pray God for me, for I shall never again be able to help France and the King." One of the men was ninety-eight, so he would be quite twenty-eight when he heard Joan say this; if he really did hear her But, long before men are ninety-eight, or even eighty-six, line the other man, they are apt to remember things that never happened. But Joan may have told children, of whom she was very fond, that she knew she was soon to be taken.
Her enemies declared that she said she would take the Duke of Burgundy himself, but as he was several miles away, in the middle of a large army, while she had only three hundred of her own men, this cannot be true. Probably she only meant to break up the Burgundians at Margny, and show that she was there, to encourage the people at Compiègne.
Her own account is that she charged the Burgundians at Margny, the nearest village, and drove them twice back to Clairoix, where they were reinforced by the great Burgundian army there, and thrust her back to the middle of the causeway, where she turned again, charged them, and made them retreat. But then the English came up from Venette, on her flank, and came between her and the bridge of Compiègne, and she leaped her horse off the raised causeway into the meadow, where she was surrounded, and pulled off her horse and taken, though she would not surrender. No doubt she hoped that, as she refused to surrender, she would be killed on the spot. When they cried to her to yield she said, "I have given my faith to another than you, and I will keep my oath to Him," meaning Our Lord.