"Lord!" Des Hermies interrupted, "promotion came rapidly in those times. But I suppose warriors then weren't the bemedalled, time-serving incompetents they are now."
"Oh, don't be misled. The title of Marshal of France didn't mean so much in Gilles's time as it did afterward in the reign of Francis I, and nothing like what it has come to mean since Napoleon.
"What was the conduct of Gilles de Rais toward Jeanne d'Arc? We have no certain knowledge. M. Vallet de Viriville, without proof, accuses him of treachery. M. l'abbé Bossard, on the contrary, claims-and alleges plausible reasons for entertaining the opinion-that he was loyal to her and watched over her devotedly.
"What is certain is that Gilles's soul became saturated with mystical ideas. His whole history proves it.
"He was constantly in association with this extraordinary maid whose adventures seemed to attest the possibility of divine intervention in earthly affairs. He witnessed the miracle of a peasant girl dominating a court of ruffians and bandits and arousing a cowardly king who was on the point of flight. He witnessed the incredible episode of a virgin bringing back to the fold such black rams as La Hire, Xaintrailles, Beaumanoir, Chabannes, Dunois, and Gaucourt, and washing their old fleeces whiter than snow. Undoubtedly Gilles also, under her shepherding, docilely cropped the white grass of the gospel, took communion the morning of a battle, and revered Jeanne as a saint.
"He saw the Maid fulfil all her promises. She raised the siege of Orléans, had the king consecrated at Rheims, and then declared that her mission was accomplished and asked as a boon that she be permitted to return home.
"Now I should say that as a result of such an association Gilles's mysticism began to soar. Henceforth we have to deal with a man who is half-freebooter, half-monk. Moreover-"
"Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's intervention was a good thing for France."
"Why not?"
"I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by the very people they came to protect. The Hundred Years' War, in effect, was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition. Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, and customs were alike. On the other hand, the coronation of a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France, separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying us-inseparably, alas!-with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at all, but Spaniards and Italians. In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic, perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race-Devil take it!"
Durtal raised his eyebrows.
"My, my," he said, laughing. "Your remarks prove to me that you are interested in 'our own, our native land.' I should never have suspected it of you."
"Of course you wouldn't," said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette. "As has so often been said, 'My own, my native land is wherever I happen to feel at home.' Now I don't feel at home except with the people of the North. But I interrupted you. Let's get back to the subject. What were you saying?"
"I forget. Oh, yes. I was saying that the Maid had completed her task. Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no answer. What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about her death? We cannot tell. We know that he was lurking in the vicinity of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude from that, like certain of his biographies, that he was plotting her rescue.
"At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
"For he was almost alone in his time, this baron de Rais. In an age when his peers were simple brutes, he sought the delicate delirium of art, dreamed of a literature soul-searching and profound; he even composed a treatise on the art of evoking demons; he gloried in the music of the Church, and would have nothing about his that was not rare and difficult to obtain.
"He was an erudite Latinist, a brilliant conversationalist, a sure and generous friend. He possessed a library extraordinary for an epoch when nothing was read but theology and lives of saints. We have the description of several of his manuscripts; Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, and an Ovid on parchment bound in red leather, with vermeil clasp and key.
"These books were his passion. He carried them with him when he travelled. He had attached to his household a painter named Thomas who illuminated them with ornate letters and miniatures, and Gilles himself painted the enamels which a specialist-discovered after an assiduous search-set in the gold-inwrought bindings. Gilles's taste in furnishings was elevated and bizarre. He revelled in abbatial stuffs, voluptuous silks, in the sombre gilding of old brocade. He liked knowingly spiced foods, ardent wines heavy with aromatics; he dreamed of unknown gems, weird stones, uncanny metals. He was the Des Esseintes of the fifteenth century!
"All this was very expensive, less so, perhaps, than the luxurious court which made Tiffauges a place like none other.
"He had a guard of two hundred men, knights, captains, squires, pages, and all these people had personal attendants who were magnificently equipped at Gilles's expense. The luxury of his chapel and collegium was madly extravagant. There was in residence at Tiffauges a complete metropolitan clergy, deans, vicars, treasurers, canons, clerks, deacons, scholasters, and choir boys. There is an inventory extant of the surplices, stoles, and amices, and the fur choir hats with crowns of squirrel and linings of vair. There are countless sacerdotal ornaments. We find vermilion altar cloths, curtains of emerald silk, a cope of velvet, crimson and violet with orpheys of cloth of gold, another of rose damask, satin dalmatics for the deacons, baldachins figured with hawks and falcons of Cyprus gold. We find plate, hammered chalices and ciboria crusted with uncut jewels. There are reliquaries, among them a silver head of Saint Honoré. A mass of sparkling jewelleries which an artist, installed in the château, cuts to order.
"And anyone who came along was welcome. From all corners of France caravans journeyed toward this château where the artist, the poet, the scholar, found princely hospitality, cordial goodfellowship, gifts of welcome and largesse at departure.
"Already undermined by the demands which the war had made on it, his fortune was giving way beneath these expenditures. Now he began to walk the terrible ways of usury. He borrowed of the most unscrupulous bourgeois, hypothecated his châteaux, alienated his lands. At times he was reduced to asking advances on his religious ornaments, on his jewels, on his books."
"I am glad to see that the method of ruining oneself in the Middle Ages did not differ sensibly from that of our days," said Des Hermies. "However, our ancestors did not have Monte Carlo, the notaries, and the Bourse."