"All the modern theories of the followers of Maudsley and Lombroso do not, in fact, render the singular abuses of the Marshal comprehensible. Nothing could be more just than to class him as a monomaniac, for he was one, if by the word monomaniac we designate every man who is dominated by a fixed idea. But so is every one of us, more or less, from the business man, all whose thoughts converge on the one idea of gain, to the artist absorbed in bringing his masterpiece into the world. But why was the Marshal a monomaniac, how did he become one? That is what all the Lombrosos in the world can't tell you. Encephalic lesions, adherence of the pia mater to the cerebrum, mean absolutely nothing in this question. For they are simple resultants, effects derived from a cause which ought to be explained, and which no materialist can explain. It is easy to declare that a disturbance of the cerebral lobes produces assassins and demonomaniacs. The famous alienists of our time claim that analysis of the brain of an insane woman disclosed a lesion or a deterioration of the grey matter. And suppose it did! It would still be a question whether, in the case of a woman possessed with demonomania, the lesion produced the demonomania, or the demonomania produced the lesion… Admitting that there was a lesion! The spiritual Comprachicos have never resorted to cerebral surgery. They don't amputate the lobes-supposed to be reliably identified-after carefully trepanning. They simply act upon the pupil by inculcating ignoble ideas in him, developing his bad instincts, pushing him little by little into the paths of vice; and if this gymnastic of persuasion deteriorates the cerebral tissues in the subject, that proves precisely that the lesion is only the derivative and not the cause of the psychological state.
"And then, and then, these doctrines which consist nowadays in confounding the criminal with the insane, the demonomaniac with the mad, have absolutely no foundation. Nine years ago a lad of fourteen, Felix Lemaîre, assassinated a little boy whom he did not know. He just wanted to see the child suffer, just wanted to hear him cry. Felix slashed the little fellow's stomach with a knife, turned the blade round and round in the warm flesh, then slowly sawed his victim's head off. Felix manifested no remorse, and in the ensuing investigation proved himself to be intelligent and atrocious. Dr. Legrand Du Saule and other specialists kept him under vigilant surveillance for months, and could not discover the slightest pathological symptom. And he had had fairly good rearing and certainly had not been corrupted by others.
"His behaviour was like that of the conscious or unconscious demonomaniacs who do evil for evil's sake. They are no more mad than the rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good's sake. Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul. In the fifteenth century these extremes were represented by Jeanne d'Arc and the Marshal de Rais. Now there is no more reason for attributing madness to Gilles than there is for attributing it to Jeanne d'Arc, whose admirable excesses certainly have no connection with vesania and delirium.
"All the same, some frightful nights must have been passed in that fortress," said Durtal. He was thinking of the château de Tiffauges, which he had visited a year ago, believing that it would aid him in his work to live in the country where Gilles had lived and to dig among the ruins.
He had established himself in the little hamlet which stretches along the base of the abandoned donjon. He learned what a living thing the legend of Bluebeard was in this isolated part of La Vendée on the border of Brittany.
"He was a young man who came to a bad end," said the young women. More fearful, their grandmothers crossed themselves as they went along the foot of the wall in the evening. The memory of the disembowelled children persisted. The Marshal, known only by his surname, still had power to terrify.
Durtal had gone every day from the inn where he lodged to the château, towering over the valleys of the Crume and of the Sèvre, facing hills excoriated with blocks of granite and overgrown with formidable oaks, whose roots, protruding out of the ground, resembled monstrous nests of frightened snakes.
One might have believed oneself transported into the real Brittany. There was the same melancholy, heavy sky, the same sun, which seemed older than in other parts of the world and which but feebly gilded the sorrowful, age-old forests and the mossy sandstone. There were the same endless stretches of broken, rocky soil, pitted with ponds of rusty water, dotted with scattered clumps of gorse and fruze copse, and sprinkled with pink harebells and nameless yellow prairie flowers.
One felt that this iron-grey sky; this starving soil, empurpled only here and there by the bleeding flower of the buckwheat; that these roads, bordered with stones placed one on top of the other, without cement or plaster; that these paths, bordered with impenetrable hedges; that these grudging plants; these inhospitable fields; these crippled beggars, eaten with vermin, plastered with filth; that even the flocks, undersized and wasted, the dumpy little cows, the black sheep whose blue eyes had the cold, pale gleam that is in the eyes of the Slav or of the tribade; had perpetuated their primordial state, preserving an identical landscape through all the centuries.
Except for an incongruous factory chimney further away on the bank of the Sèvre, the countryside of Tiffauges remained in perfect harmony with the immense château, erect among its ruins. Within the close, still to be traced by the ruins of the towers, was a whole plain, now converted into a miserable truck garden. Cabbages, in long bluish lines, impoverished carrots, consumptive navews, spread over this enormous circle where iron mail had clanked in the tournament and where processionals had slowly devolved, in the smoke of incense, to the chanting of psalms.
A thatched hut had been built in a corner. The peasant inhabitants, returned to a state of savagery, no longer understood the meaning of words, and could be roused out of their apathy only by the display of a silver coin. Seizing the coin, they would hand over the keys.
For hours one could browse around at ease among the ruins, and smoke and daydream. Unfortunately, certain parts were inaccessible. The donjon was still shut off, on the Tiffauges side, by a vast moat, at the bottom of which mighty trees were growing. One would have had to pass over the tops of the trees, growing to the very verge of the wall, to gain a porch on the other side, for there was now no drawbridge.
But quite accessible was another part which overhung the Sèvre. There the wings of the castle, overgrown with ivy and white-crested viburnum, were intact. Spongy, dry as pumice stone, silvered with lichen and gilded with moss, the towers rose entire, though from their crenelated collarettes whole blocks were blown away on windy nights.
Within, room succeeded glacial room, cut into the granite, surmounted with vaulted roofs, and as close as the hold of a ship. Then by spiral stairways one descended into similar chambers, joined by cellar passageways into the walls of which were dug deep niches and lairs of unknown utility.
Beneath, those corridors, so narrow that two persons could not walk along them abreast, descended at a gentle slope, and bifurcated so that there was a labyrinth of lanes, leading to veritable cells, on the walls of which the nitre scintillated in the light of the lantern like steel mica or twinkling grains of sugar. In the cells above, in the dungeons beneath, one stumbled over rifts of hard earth, in the centre or in a corner of which yawned now the mouth of an unsealed oubliette, now a well.
Finally, at the summit of one of the towers, that at the left as one entered, there was a roofed gallery running parallel to a circular foothold cut from the rock. There, without doubt, the men-at-arms had been stationed to fire on their assailants through wide loopholes opening overhead and underfoot. In this gallery the voice, even the lowest, followed the curving walls and could be heard all around the circuit.