The Trial of Gilles De Rais Page 20

  The number provided in Article 27 of the ecclesiastical trial’s bill of indictment is a little more precise: Gilles had killed, or caused to be killed, “one hundred and forty, or more, children, boys and girls” (pp. 174-175).

  Other figures provided by the trial are no more precise: Poitou and Henriet, by themselves, are said to have taken sixty and up. Elsewhere that figure is reduced to forty. These numbers are troublesome … On the other hand, Henriet is said to have killed twelve by his own hand. He would have killed eleven or twelve in the house of La Suze …

  Henriet’s deposition before the ecclesiastical judges (p. 237) perhaps makes more sense. According to Henriet, Gilles “delighted in looking at their severed heads and showed them to him, the witness, and Étienne Corrillaut … , asking them which of the said heads was the most beautiful of those he was showing them, the head severed at that very moment, or that from the day before, or another from the day before that …”47 It is not impossible to imagine that embellishment has perfected that horrible text; but in principle we are faced with a scene wherein, on one day alone, three children’s heads could be lying together. This inclines us to propose, at least vaguely, the hypothesis of a very large number.

  No exact count of the number of victims can emerge any longer from the apparently serious, precise testimonies. Still, a logically drawn total could pass for the minimum. It is then possible to say that thirty-five victims represent that minimum; a figure, in any event, well below probability …

  As for age, I noted precise indications of two children seven years old, four eight, three nine, two ten, two twelve, one fourteen, two fifteen, one eighteen, and one twenty.

  One knows that the children’s sex varied. Without a doubt Gilles preferred boys, but in their absence resorted to girls. Let us only say that among the victims cited in the testimonies, not one was a girl. However, it is possible to think that if Lord de Rais did kill girls it was by exception, when the procurers or procuresses were unable to find young boys.

  Henriet’s confession before the secular court describes with a certain precision his master’s relations with girls (pp. 278-279): “… occasionally the said Lord chose little girls, whom he had sex with on their bellies in the same way as he did with the male children, saying that he took greater pleasure in doing so, and had less pain, than if he had enjoyed them in their nature; thereafter these girls were put to death like the said male children.”

  THE HEIRS AND LEGACY OF GILLES DE RAIS

  1. Catherine de Thouars, Gilles de Rais’ wife.

  Abbot Bourdeaut states clearly that we know nothing, absolutely nothing, about Gilles de Rais’ wife. This is what he says about this woman, Catherine de Thouars, and Marie de Rais, the child she had — or is recorded to have had — by Lord de Rais: “They pass and repass before us, effaced shadows, with not so much as a gesture or a feature that might permit us to fix their moral physiognomy.”48 We know that Catherine de Thouars must not have opposed the abduction whereby Gilles de Rais married her and acquired her legacy. But it is clear that her husband quickly stopped bothering with her; she was a negligible quantity for his whole life. However that might be, it is difficult to imagine that she didn’t know about the crimes that the trial of 1440 succeeded in revealing.49

  When Gilles de Rais was gone, she married as soon as possible Jean de Vendôme (also his second marriage), the vidame of Chartres, who in 1441 became the Duke of Brittany’s chamberlain.

  Catherine de Thouars retained Pouzauges, Tiffauges., and generally all the possessions she had brought into her previous marriage. She also had the tutelage of Marie in 1440. But this latter’s possessions were so important that she quickly escaped the control of Catherine, herself a minor personage, whose husband was content to personally take charge over Jean V of Brittany’s interests.

  2. Marie de Rais, Gilles de Rais’ daughter; fiancée, then bride, to Admiral Prégent de Cöetivy (1442-1450).

  Gilles de Rais’ daughter was about ten years old when he died. She inherited all those properties of his that did not come from his wife. Her interests conflicted with the rapacity of Jean V, who urgently pronounced a confiscation. But in principle such a confiscation was then incapable of suppressing the rights of innocent inheritors. Gilles’ family and the court — always ready to frustrate the Breton Duke — considered entrusting those rights and important residences to Admiral Prégent de Cöetivy, a high-ranking personage, one of the most brilliant and able men then gravitating around Charles VII. The King will later declare that he himself married Marie de Rais to the Admiral.50 If anything, a marriage of convenience. Prégent de Cöetivy was a farsighted shark of Breton origin. An enemy of La Trémoille (he participated in the 1434 plot), he must have also been an enemy of Gilles de Rais. The marriage was arranged, but not celebrated, in the spring of 1442.

  From then on the Admiral acted as a businessman, ready to draw the greatest advantage from his position. He was unscrupulous and relatively inattentive to honor (obviously he was chosen because of these traits; it was a question of marrying the daughter of a man condemned to death).

  As early as 1443 he renounces an attempted lawsuit to clear the name of his father-in-law, who in a prepared but later abandoned text was declared to have been convicted erroneously. He renounces it and obtains the right not to bear Rais’ arms, as he had originally agreed. Apparently he believed at first in the possibility of clearing his name, maybe even in Lord de Rais’ innocence, which the French court would have been interested in maintaining; he did well to profit by whatever could discredit the Duke of Brittany. But it is certain that after 1443 nobody expected anything of this kind. It seemed a foregone conclusion that by then the evidence was apparent everywhere.

  The important part of the game, in fact, concerns the Champtocé and Ingrandes fortresses. On March 25, 1443, Cöetivy obtains from René d’Anjou the titles to these two essential manors. Then he has Charles VII pronounce their confiscation. The two places belonged to Jean V’s son, Gilles, known by the name of Gilles de Bretagne, who was in league with the English. A proof of treason justified an act that, additionally, at the same time as he pronounced the confiscation, conferred their possession on Admiral Cöetivy.51

  One year later he married young Marie; she was then fourteen years old. In this way, the protégé of Charles VII played a game in France’s, but above all in his own, best interests; he won it with the help of a trump card in his greedy hands, the daughter of a child murderer. At any rate the sequel to Gilles de Rais’ life, though less tragic than his murders, is no less sordid.

  But the legacy of the criminal Marshal was unlucky for the Admiral. The very day he could boast to his friends of finally being Lord of Champtocé, he was fighting in the Siege of Cherbourg (a garrison the English still held July 20, 1450), and a harquebus-shot to the head killed him.

  3. Marie de Rais, wife, by a second marriage, to her cousin André de Laval-Lohéac (1451-1457).

  For whoever would have the chance to marry her, the widow Marie de Rais remained the major trump she had been for Cöetivy. She was taken by her cousin André de Laval-Lohéac, who had fought on the side of René de Rais, or La Suze, for the rights of the Laval family in the face of Gilles de Rais’ extravagance (p. 97 and passim). The marriage took place at Vitré in February 1451. Abbot Bourdeaut underlines the fact that this marriage occurred on the same day André’s brother Guy de Laval XIV married Françoise de Dinan, the widow of Gilles de Bretagne, whom her brother (Duke Francois II) had left dying at the bottom of a deep pit half-full of water. “The two women,” we read,52 “made their solemn entry together into the town of Laval.”

  Marie de Rais spent all of her second marriage in a lawsuit over Champtocé, which the Cöetivy family persisted in claiming as their own by reason of her marriage contract with the Admiral.

  Marie de Rais died at thirty-seven, without children, on November 1, 1457. “She was buried in the choir of Notre-Dame at Vitré, where mothers still show their children the tomb
of Bluebeard’s daughter.”53

  4. René, Gilles de Rais’ brother (1457-1473).

  With the death of Marie, her father’s legacy passed to his brother, René de La Suze, now Baron de Rais.

  In order to justify his claims on Champtocé, which he seized immediately, René de Rais was induced to demonstrate his brother’s extravagance; and it is on account of his efforts that the Mémoire des héritiers was published.

  René maneuvered among different powers but failed, dying in 1473 and leaving a daughter, Jeanne, married to Francois de Chauvigny. This Jeanne, who died in 1481, had a son and daughter, but these latter had no children.

  Champtocé was a continued object of litigation while René de Rais was alive; the Cöetivy family sought funds for indemnification. The fortress’ destiny was determined during the course of Louis XI’s reign. In the war against Brittany he had it partially razed, then had it seized after contending with René d’Anjou.

  However, the seizure was lifted in 1483; whereupon the Duke of Brittany gave one of his bastards the castle from which Gilles de Rais had left in 1429 for Chinon, from there to the Siege of Orléans, and where, in 1432, he is supposed to have cut the throat of the first of his victims.

  ROGER DE BRIQUEVILLE AFTER GILLES DE RAIS’ DEATH

  When Gilles de Rais’ arrest seemed near and inevitable, his trusted men (and occasionally his accomplices), Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville, fled. We do not know what became of Sillé, but Briqueville entered into the service of Prégent de Cöetivy, who could apparently familiarize himself with many of the details of his father-in-law’s affairs through him.

  Briqueville, whose rich and noble father had been chased out of Normandy by the English, was related to Gilles and consequently to Marie de Rais. It was in this capacity that the Admiral hired and protected him. Marie de Rais even watched over his children. But Briqueville feared trouble for having participated in the father-in-law’s crimes. Cöetivy must have needed the services — no doubt base services — that such a miserable man might provide; he obtained for him letters of pardon. These letters have a definite interest for us. They constitute the only official document, independent of the justice of Jean de Malestroit and Jean V, that mentions the murder of children, of which Briqueville was an accomplice. They are letters of pardon, but they record the crimes Gilles’ noble servant was guilty of: he was “nourished” by his master, and “he was then a young squire of little understanding”; however, that master had the children “killed and put to death,” and Briqueville says he was forced to send them to him. It appears in the trial documents that he participated in the murders themselves, but what he acknowledges in the letters of pardon is limited. First of all, he knew nothing about the homicides; later, as soon as he began to suspect them, “he left the company and service of that Lord de Rais, who, five years after the fact, was taken and punished with his accomplices.” We have seen (p. 91) that this Briqueville was, in the most deplorable sense, a man for hire. This is no place to linger on his denials, but rather on his admissions, which give the thesis of Gilles’ culpability much more support than Admiral Cöetivy originally could have believed possible, as we have mentioned, in proving the innocence and clearing the name of his father-in-law. Did he not agree to bear the family arms? But he quickly assumes the right to renege. His ultimate attitude is expressed, in black and white, in the letters he obtained from the King, which are dated from Sazilly, near Chinon, in the month of May 1446.

  FRANCIS PRELATI AFTER GILLES’ DEATH (1440-1445)

  Salomon Reinach drew the argument for his thesis (see below) from the fact that the magician Prelati was not condemned. But this argument is based on error. The Inquisitor slapped him with a sentence of life in prison.54 It was, according to Abbot Bourdeaut, the “only punishment that could have been inflicted on him, as he had not been immersed in the homicides committed by Baron de Rays.” When imprisoned, Prelati’s skills at sleight of hand and his gift of gab without a doubt facilitated his escape. They even permitted him to gain the favor of René d’Anjou, who believed, like Gilles, that the Italian could make gold. Moreover, the “good King René” made him captain of La-Roche-sur-Yon, where we also find our old friend the priest, Etienne Blanchet, and, according to Bourdeaut, “a swarm of ancient servitors of Baron de Rais.” But Prelati, who recalled having been arrested September 15, 1440, has Geoffroy Le Ferron arrested in turn, as he was passing through La Roche. However, on his release, Le Ferron soon proves to be the stronger; he has the Italian hanged.

  Up to the end he thus pursued the career of an impostor and adventurer: he was in every respect undeserving of the scene on October 21st (pp. 193- 194). He helped himself to some blank checks that Geoffroy Le Ferron had on his person to forge others that compromised noble persons.55 This is what did him in.

  SALOMON REINACH’S THESIS OF GILLES DE RAIS’ INNOCENCE

  Every now and again somebody doubts Gilles de Rais’ culpability. A sentence by Voltaire56 indicates a certain bias: “In Brittany they killed Marshal de Rais, accused of magic and having cut the throats of children to do so-called magic spells with their blood.” Other authors in the same period follow the same line, but it was not until the 20th century that someone proposed the thesis of innocence based on a perhaps superficial but nevertheless genuine study of the documents. In 1902, Salomon Reinach undertook the case of Gilles de Rais …

  To tell the truth, his thesis57 — at least on the whole58 — has fallen by the wayside. Practically nobody picks it up anymore. Similarly, nobody today returns to the ideas on totemism by the same Salomon Reinach … I do not speak of Saïtapharnès’ all-too-famous tiara, or Glozel’s59 excavations, which certainly did not add to his credit …

  At any rate, it is easy to demonstrate how this indisputable though naive scholar came to think that Marshal de Rais’ trial had been fabricated.

  In 1902, on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair, it was natural to suspect the authenticity of a trial. This was, moreover, a trial under the Inquisition barely ten years after that of Joan of Arc, who was condemned like Gilles de Rais and had been her companion-in-arms.

  Unfortunately, the theoretician of totemism elaborated his thesis before attaining a sufficient understanding of the trial against which he had inscribed himself. He advanced his arguments before having read the civil trial, contenting himself with the ecclesiastical trial, just published in 1902. Consequently he had to contest Noel Valois’ argument, which was based on the precise testimonies received by the secular court. He should have been able to see his mistake when his principal arguments fell apart, but honesty is sometimes difficult, and evidently he became sincerely entangled. Let us recognize, on the other hand, that the hesitation of an authorized historian 60 could have encouraged him. But he did not have the experience that familiarity with the documents would have given him. It seems pointless to me to enter into too-detailed of an argument here. It is difficult while reading the testimonies and confessions below not to be seized by emotions that a hoax could hardly provide. That emotion is compounded by a multitude of lively, striking, overwhelming details … Of course, it is not immediately conclusive; it is always possible to imagine a fabrication. But the reader, who can henceforth even here refer to the documents, will be the judge; if the testimonies provided in this publication are fabricated, the author or authors of the fraud merit admiration. In a nutshell, Salomon Reinach’s argument does not hold up in the light. It implies a sketchy familiarity, an ignorance, or a lack of prolonged contact. The texts and detailed analyses of the present publication were considered beforehand in such a manner that the opinion of the guarantor of Saïtapharnès’ tiara can finally — decisively — be forgotten.

  I will only insist on one argument, in view of illuminating one surprising aspect of the documents provided here. We read on pages 277-278 of Salomon Reinach’s study: “The two most damaging depositions for the prosecution, those by Henriet and Poitou, Gilles’ servants, bear on facts already several year
s removed from very complex crimes; but they agree in the minutest details; there is not a single important contradiction among them; there is not, not in the one nor the other, any of the omissions which one would naturally expect.”

  Let us add that Reinach could not have produced evidence at the moment he was writing these lines (when he had formed his opinion he was not aware, as we have said, of the civil trial documents): at least one of the confessions by these same Henriet and Poitou that the civil court received — Poitou’s — comes close, if not literally then just short of that, to the deposition before the ecclesiastical court. That this is bizarre, shocking even, goes without saying. But without going further, is it sensible to draw from such facts the proof of falsification? Would it be impossible to imagine that the interrogation of the two witnesses, known in advance to have witnessed the same scenes together, being conducted by the same judges — these judges proceeding in a patently censurable manner by framing the question according to the preceding deposition — theoretically in order to confirm? Likewise, to speed things up, the secular interrogation of Poitou must have proceeded with responses he had made earlier to the ecclesiastical judges. Salomon Reinach insists on one point in particular. Not only in Poitou and Henriet’s depositions before the ecclesiastical judges (dated October 17th: pp. 232 and 234), but in Gilles’ own confession (dated October 22nd: p. 196), it is told how Gilles, sitting on the bellies of the victims while they were dying, delighted in watching them die. The trouble taken by the same judge to repeat the question on such a point after the first response does not seem so strange to me. And that he would have reproduced the phrases he had before his eyes is explainable: could he have not helped himself to the phrases already put down, being satisfied with the respondent’s consistency in answering, and neglecting to find any new or different expression? The fact that the Latin phrases of the documents indirectly translate the responses made personally and directly in French suffices to account for Salomon Reinach’s surprise to the point of his writing: “… suspicion becomes (under these conditions) the certitude of fraud … !”