"And did have sorcery and alchemy. A memorial addressed to the king by the heirs of Gilles de Rais informs us that this immense fortune was squandered in less than eight years.
"Now it's the signories of Confolens, Chabanes, Châteaumorant, Lombert, ceded to a captain for a ridiculous price; now it's the fief of Fontaine Milon, of Angers, the fortress of Saint Etienne de Mer Morte acquired by Guillaume Le Ferron for a song; again it's the châteaux of Blaison and of Chemille forfeited to Guillaume de la Jumelière who never has to pay a sou. But look, there's a long list of castellanies and forests, salt mines and farm lands," said Durtal, spreading out a great sheet of paper on which he had copied the account of the purchases and sales.
"Frightened by his mad course, the family of the Marshal supplicated the king to intervene, and Charles VII,'sure,' as he said, 'of the malgovernance of the Sire de Rais,' forbade him, in grand council, by letters dated 'Amboise, 1436,' to sell or make over any fortress, any château, any land.
"This order simply hastened the ruin of the interdicted. The grand skinflint, the master usurer of the time, Jean V, duke of Brittany, refused to publish the edict in his states, but, underhandedly, notified all those of his subjects who dealt with Gilles. No one now dared to buy the Marshal's domains for fear of incurring the wrath of the king, so Jean V remained the sole purchaser and fixed the prices. You may judge how liberal his prices were.
"That explains Gilles's hatred of his family who had solicited these letters patent of the king, and why, as long as he lived, he had nothing to do with his wife, nor with his daughter whom he consigned to a dungeon at Pouzauges.
"Now to return to the question which I put a while ago, how and with what motives Gilles quitted the court. I think the facts which I have outlined will partially explain.
"It is evident that for quite a while, long before the Marshal retired to his estates, Charles had been assailed by the complaints of Gilles's wife and other relatives. Moreover, the courtiers must have execrated the young man on account of his riches and luxuries; and the king, the same king who abandoned Jeanne d'Arc when he considered that she could no longer be useful to him, found an occasion to avenge himself on Gilles for the favours Gilles had done him. When the king needed money to finance his debaucheries or to raise troops he had not considered the Marshal lavish. Now that the Marshal was ruined the king censured him for his prodigality, held him at arm's length, and spared him no reproach and no menace.
"We may be sure Gilles had no reason to regret leaving this court, and another thing is to be taken into consideration. He was doubtless sick and tired of the nomadic existence of a soldier. He was doubtless impatient to get back to a pacific atmosphere among books. Moreover, he seems to have been completely dominated by the passion for alchemy, for which he was ready to abandon all else. For it is worth noting that this science, which threw him into demonomania when he hoped to stave off inevitable ruin with it, he had loved for its own sake when he was rich. It was in fact toward the year 1426, when his coffers bulged with gold, that he attempted the 'great work' for the first time.
"We shall find him, then, bent over his retorts in the château de Tiffauges. That is the point to which I have brought my history, and now I am about to begin on the series of crimes of magic and sadism."
"But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent-wrongly, I think-as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them.
"To sum up: natural mysticism on one hand, and, on the other, daily association with savants obsessed by Satanism. The sword of Damocles hanging over his head, to be conjured away by the will of the Devil, perhaps. An ardent, a mad curiosity concerning the forbidden sciences. All this explains why, little by little, as the bonds uniting him to the world of alchemists and sorcerers grow stronger, he throws himself into the occult and is swept on by it into the most unthinkable crimes.
"Then as to being a 'ripper' of children-and he didn't immediately become one, no, Gilles did not violate and trucidate little boys until after he became convinced of the vanity of alchemy-why, he does not differ greatly from the other barons of his times.
"He exceeds them in the magnitude of his debauches, in opulence of murders, and that's all. It's a fact. Read Michelet. You will see that the princes of this epoch were redoubtable butchers. There was a sire de Giac who poisoned his wife, put her astride of his horse and rode at breakneck speed for five leagues, until she died. There was another, whose name I have forgotten, who collared his father, dragged him barefoot through the snow, and calmly thrust him into a subterranean prison and left him there until he died. And how many others! I have tried, without success, to find whether in battles and forays the Marshal committed any serious misdeeds. I have discovered nothing, except that he had a pronounced taste for the gibbet; for he liked to string up all the renegade French whom he surprised in the ranks of the English or in the cities which were not very much devoted to the king.
"We shall find his taste for this kind of torture manifesting itself later on in the château de Tiffauges.
"Now, in conclusion, add to all these factors a formidable pride, a pride which incites him to say, during his trial, 'So potent was the star under which I was born that I have done what no one in the world has done nor ever can do.'
"And assuredly, the Marquis de Sade is only a timid bourgeois, a mediocre fantasist, beside him!"
"Since it is difficult to be a saint," said Des Hermies, "there is nothing for it but to be a Satanist. One of the two extremes. 'Execration of impotence, hatred of the mediocre,' that, perhaps, is one of the more indulgent definitions of Diabolism."
"Perhaps. One can take pride in going as far in crime as a saint in virtue. And that expresses Gilles de Rais exactly."