The Trial of Gilles De Rais Read online

  Gilles’ wickedness was boundless. However, even he would have been unable to conceive of the calculations and bad faith of a La Trémoille. In the face of this bad faith and these calculations, he felt no repugnance. But if someone did not calculate in his place, he would not calculate. Under La Trémoille’s aegis, he kept his place in Charles VII’s entourage. Close to Joan of Arc in the decisive and very delicate affair of the liberation of Orléans, he played a primary role, evidently right after that of the Maid. Abbot Bourdeaut has shown that the “particular character” of this role had “not been elucidated”; still, in 1445, “when, at the trial to clear the name of Joan, Dunois gave his deposition in an age when nobody boasted of having rubbed elbows with the Marshal … , he put the sad Gilles at the top of the leaders of battle who had commanded the army of the liberation.”6 But the role of a leader of battle is limited in this period to the great lord’s personal prestige and to the warrior’s valor. Evidently, taking La Jumellière’s advice, Gilles can speak in the councils before the battles. In these battles, above all, he can carry his own and strike.

  La Trémoille pushed Gilles into the highest echelon but retained for himself, so far as calculation is concerned, all that was political. If young Baron de Rais had known how to scheme, La Trémoille would have prevented him from becoming a Marshal.

  Without La Trémoille, the madcap would have never had a place in history. But if he had not been a fool, that madcap whom we know today — La Trémoille would have never made use of him.

  The Foolishness of Gilles de Rais

  Usually one avoids noticing that in Gilles de Rais’ monstrosity there is this strange thing: this Marshal of France is a fool!

  But our character is bewitching.

  At the opposite extreme, Huysmans saw in him one of the most cultivated men of his time!

  Huysmans had one sustaining reason: Marshal de Rais, like him, was mad about church music and hymns. From there he draws foolish conclusions based on appearances that prove nothing.

  But Huysmans only carried a common reaction to its conclusion. Generally the grandeur and, above all, the monstrosity of our character is imposing. There is a sort of majesty in his ease, one that he keeps even during the tears of confession. There is in the evidence of monstrosity a sovereign grandeur which does not contradict the humility of the wretched man proclaiming the horror of crime.7

  Also this grandeur, in a sense, agrees with the foolishness of which I speak. Indeed, from the foolishness of Gilles de Rais to what one usually designates with this term, the difference is great. At its heart there lies a sovereign indifference which caused him to pay double for what pleased him … This indifference, this absence, made others laugh. But Gilles undoubtedly did not deign to know this.

  I have already said how Prelati, who seduced him, took advantage of him. Gilles bore witness that, until the end, he would never withdraw his affection for him. Likewise, with regard to Briqueville, who odiously extorted power of attorney from him (p. 91), he kept a long-lasting loyalty.

  The oddest thing is his relationship with La Trémoille, who mocked him and, without wanting to, deceived him! Who wanted to “encourage him to be bad.”

  But there are very few occasions in which an excessive indifference, a kind of absence followed by violent reactions, does not appear. A stranger to prudence, he seems to be at the mercy of impulses that reflection cannot control; look at the absurdity of the Saint-Étienne affair! In particular, his attitude at the trial is a result of this boyish brusqueness. First he insults the judges, then suddenly (though we are unable to know the reason for the change) he breaks out in tears; he confesses, exposing at length unspeakable infamies.

  He has absolutely no skill in defending himself. He moves about violently from one impulse to another, which destroys him.

  I insist: this is a child.

  But this child had at his disposal a fortune that appeared inexhaustible to him and nearly absolute power.

  Childishness, in principle, has limited possibilities, whereas by reason of this fortune and power, Gilles de Rais’ childishness met with tragic possibilities.

  In his crimes, in fact, Gilles is not fully the child that he is at his very core.

  His foolishness attains, in blood, a tragic grandeur.

  Childishness and Archaism

  With Gilles de Rais, there is no longer a question of what we commonly designate as childishness. In effect, the question is of monstrosity. Essentially this monstrosity is childlike. But it involves the childishness to which the possibilities of adulthood belong and, rather than childlike, these possibilities are archaic. If Gilles de Rais is a child, it is in the manner of savages. He is a child as a cannibal is; or more precisely, as one of his Germanic ancestors, unbounded by civilized proprieties.

  Joined to the god of sovereignty by initiatory rites, the young warriors willingly distinguished themselves in particular by a bestial ferocity; they knew neither rules nor limits. In their ecstatic rage, they were taken for wild animals, for furious bears, for wolves. The Harii of Tacitus augmented the fright provoked by their delirium by employing black shields and, wanting to surprise their enemies, to terrify them, rubbed their bodies with soot. This “funereal army,” in order to augment the terror, chose “pitch-dark nights.” Often the name of Berserkir (“warriors in bear skins”) was given to them. Like the Centaurs of Greece, the Gandharva of India or the Luperci of Rome, they became animals in their delirium. The Chetti, whom Tacitus also describes, indulged in scelera improbissima: they struck, they executed and they skinned. They were slaughterers, and “neither iron nor steel could do anything against them.” The fury of the Berserkir turned them into monsters. Ammien Marcellin, speaking of the Taifali, is indignant when describing their pederastic practices … They gave themselves up to drinking bouts that finally succeeded in taking away whatever humanity they still had.8

  There was nothing in the Germans’ religion that could offset this cruelty and these juvenile debaucheries. There was not, as with the Gauls or the Romans, a priesthood to oppose learning and moderation to drunkenness, ferocity, and violence.

  During the first centuries of the Middle Ages, we should at least consider that something remained of these barbarous customs in the education of knights. In the first place, knighthood was apparently nothing but a continuation of the society of young German initiates. The Christian influence on the education of knights came later. It barely shows before the thirteenth century, the twelfth at a pinch, two or three centuries before Gilles de Rais …

  It may be that nothing precise, nothing that we could speak about clearly, had survived of the distant traditions of which I have spoken. But we cannot imagine that nothing had subsisted. An atmosphere of violence and drinking bouts, the relish for terror, must have subsisted for a long time. As a rule, archaic traits continued to dominate the principles of knighthood and nobility, and these traits correspond precisely to aspects of the life of Gilles de Rais.

  These traits played a much greater role in his life as he was naive, and as he was no more familiar with the implementation of reason than with a rake’s calculations. In fact, as for the formation of Gilles de Rais’ character, the only elements that left traces are, on the one hand, warlike violence, dragging along with it, as in the time of the Germans, extreme courage and the rage of a wild animal; and, on the other hand, a habit of drinking that we have seen could be traditionally linked to the sexual excesses, homosexuality for instance. Apparently the boys of this time, who acquired vicious or cruel habits at an early age, saw themselves supported by tradition, even if those habits belonged only to limited groups. It seems to me, moreover, that certain of their more unspeakable proclivities could be developed and reinforced in common. Neither the distant past, to which the life of these boys gravitated, nor the necessity of brutal training practices could make them wiser. They had every chance to take almost unmerciful advantage of the young serfs, as well as the young female serfs of their parents: there is no
reason to think that Christianity would have sensitively moderated their tendency to pay no more attention to the life of human beings than that of animals.

  The principles of courtly love only slowly erected a barrier against the coarseness of a world of arms. As with Christianity, courtly love was relatively opposed to violence. The paradox of the Middle Ages was that it did not want men of war to speak the language of force and combat. Their parlance often became saccharine. But we ought not to deceive ourselves: the camaraderie of the old French was a cynical lie. Even the poetry for which nobles of the 14th and 15th centuries affected fondness was in all senses a deceit: the great lords chiefly loved war; their attitude differed little from that of the German Berserkir, who dreamed of terror and butchery. The famous poem by Bertrand de Born is, in other respects, a confession of their violent feelings. These feelings could go hand in hand with courtliness, but this poem permits us to see at what point their hunger for carnage and the horror of war continued burning. Gilles de Rais, more than anyone, must have had the sensibility of violence harkening back to the fury of the Berserkir. He also had the habit of drinking; he took strong drinks in order to whet his sexual excitement. For Gillies, as for the barbarians of the past, the goal was in breaking bounds; it was a question of living sovereignly.

  The privilege of the German warrior was to feel himself above the laws, and from there to draw violent consequences. I do not say that all young nobles had the same frenzied outlook — even less traditionally were companions in arms inclined to homosexuality — but whether they became softened or not, the habits of these young men who brandished a sword or battle-axe were probably repugnant in part. I do not doubt that it very often accrued to one’s honor to show oneself more hateful than one’s counterpart. They could not help being hardened; they had one foot in the stirrup. Even though it had doubtless lost the character of ritual, homosexuality, without a doubt, must have facilitated things.

  Sexual Life: War

  It appeared to me possible to situate the vices of Gilles de Rais in an ensemble of traditional cruelties and drinking bouts. Besides, we are informed, albeit imperfectly, on the actual development of his vices.

  I have already spoken of the confessions Gilles de Rais himself made that “iniquitously … since the beginning of his youth,” he had committed “high and enormous crimes.” I have also cited what the trial said afterwards: that the origin of these crimes is attributed by the guilty party “to the bad management he had received in his childhood, when, unbridled, he applied himself to whatever pleased him, and pleased himself with every illicit act.” From here it is difficult to become more explicit. From a vague tradition to begin with (we have to imagine the occasional stories: “this fellow’s son did this, that one did something else”), violent habits, at least of precocious irregularity, could have thus perpetuated themselves. However, two distinct aspects are implicated in the confessions.

  In the first place, during his childhood, inasmuch as it seems on account of the bad management of the grandfather, the grandson must have practiced the various illicit acts that were accessible to him slyly and unchecked. As we have seen, he was eleven years old in September 1415 upon the death of his father (which followed several months after the death of his mother). Still, the tutelage of the grandfather had a sense of total freedom for the child. But it was then a question of reprehensible acts — of unquestionably sexual, perhaps sadistic, perversions — but not of crimes.

  The crimes, properly speaking the “high and enormous crimes,” date from the “beginning of his youth.”

  On this point we cannot be more specific.

  On the date of the first child murders, the trial gives two contradictory indications.

  According to the bill of indictment, it all began around 1426, fourteen years before the trial: invocations of demons and murders of children. But according to the guilty party’s confessions, which coincide with the first testimonies of the victims’ parents, the first murders dated only from the year of the grandfather’s death, that is from 1432.

  The year 1426 would correspond to the beginning of his youth: twenty-two years old. This is the date, moreover, when the campaign into the Maine region begins. Gilles has asked, as of 1424, to take control of the administration of all his goods. In 1426, taking the field, he revels in an increased freedom in addition to his complete personal power.

  One conjecture would resolve the difficulty; the “high and enormous crimes” of the beginning of his youth would be separate from the series of child murders that, as of 1432, must have had a certain continuity and given way to a sort of “fixation”: the same procedure, same ceremony, finally, more and more, the same participants. As early as the “beginning of his youth” there would have only been, regarding the words crime and enormity, the conjury of demons and maybe those cruel brutalities that could then be associated with war.

  It is doubtful in my opinion that this reveler who took so much pleasure in spilling blood would not, from the first campaign, have profited from war.

  We ought not to lose sight of precisely what we know of Gilles de Rais, or what we know of the wars of this period.

  We ought never to forget that in this period of incessant wars, the scenes of slaughter in towns and burning villages had a sort of banality to them. Pillage was then the inevitable means of feeding a voracious soldiery. In every sense, it is certain that war stimulated greed …

  I cannot evoke these fundamental aspects of human life any better than by recalling how the King of Spain, Philippe II, vomited from his horse during the pillage of Saint-Quentin. But far from vomiting, Gilles evidently found some pleasure in watching the wretches be disemboweled. Faced with the spectacles of war, this pederast must have had occasions to bind his sexual excitement to these butcheries.

  As for these butcheries, and the banality of these butcheries, we can refer to the text of the Archbishop of Reims, Juvénal des Ursins (in his Epistles of 1439 and 1440). The prelate contends that not only were such offenses an act of the enemy, but of “no one allied to the King”; locating their indispensable provisions in a village, the soldiers “seized men, women, and children, without distinguishing between age or sex, raping the women and girls; they killed husbands and fathers in the presence of their wives and daughters; they took wet nurses, leaving their babies who died for lack of nourishment; they seized and shackled pregnant women who, in their chains, gave birth to their offspring, which were left to die unbaptized, and they were then going to throw mother and child into the river; they took priests, monks, men of the Church, laborers, shackled them in various manners and thus tormented, beat them, by which certain of them died mutilated, others enraged or out of their senses … They … imprisoned them … , they put them in irons … , in pits, in disgusting places full of vermin, they left them … to die of hunger. Many died of it. And God knows the tyrannies that they did! They roasted one another; they pulled each other’s teeth out, others were beaten with big sticks; they were never set free before having given more money than they possessed …”9 In 1439, one of Gilles de Rais’ captains just missed being hanged for acts of this very nature. But after 1427 Gilles himself probably had very few occasions in which to participate in these sadistic scenes; after the first campaign, he could have only fought two times: first, beside Joan of Arc, who was violently opposed to lawlessness; and second, in 1432 at Lagny, where it is probable that things did not drag on.

  In any case, nothing proves that Gilles took part in actual butcheries. We only know that, at Lude, he insisted on hanging French prisoners who had fought with the English and who could have passed for having betrayed their country. It is likely that other captains, more anxious for money, would have preferred a ransom. In his own way Gilles also appreciated money, but he refused to appear to prize it.

  Whatever the case, it is difficult to believe that, while he was making war in 1427, the “high and enormous crimes” of the “beginning of his youth” were far removed from the bedlam
that the passing men-at-arms brought on. We will see that the sight of human blood and bodies cut open fascinated him. Later he must have only been interested in privileged victims, in children. His curiosity and excitement, however, could have been exhibited earlier on coarser occasions. He would have not spoken of crime, if crime itself had not cruelly intervened; if at that time he had done his killing with a taste for cruelty. It is not certain, but it is believable, and after everything has been said on the subject, it is probable. Doubtless he could have been speaking of crime when referring to invocations of the demon; without a doubt, these began during this period. But the murders which followed from 1432 on, did they have no antecedent? The abuse of children, it seems to me, had a greater chance of degenerating into murder if Rais at some point had had the opportunity to begin amusing himself with blood.

  In speaking of this period (he is speaking of this period, apparently, if he is speaking of his youth), he says that he, “for his pleasure and according to his will, had done whatever evil he could”; he also says that at that time he had put “his hope and intention into the illicit and dishonest acts and things that he did.” The opportunity to take pleasure in butchery was too good to pass up. What later became relatively dangerous was absolutely not inconvenient in the field.

  Sexual Life: The Child Murders

  A description of the monster’s sexual deviations does not, by itself, constitute the hallucinatory aspect of Gilles de Rais’ life; it is, at the same time, the best known aspect. We are familiar with it not only by Lord de Rais’ confessions, but by his valets’ depositions. From various sides, the trial accumulates an abundance of suffocating details. Twice rather than once, what we come to know only rarely — the tastes, the fantasies, the caprices, the preferences of the monster — were noted with a meticulousness which defies decency.