The Trial of Gilles De Rais Read online

  From 1432 on, each of Rais’ residences had a room worthy of the cruel imaginings of Sade, where pleasure was fused to the jerks of dying bodies. There was such a room reserved for horror in the enormous fortress at Champtocé. Maybe his grandfather had just died there? Maybe he finished dying a little later on? The practice of murdering began the year that this grandfather died. Right from the start, surrounded by his companions, Gilles abandoned himself to sensual pleasure. Things were arranged so that if he wanted to do the killing, he could do so himself. Or if he preferred, he prevailed upon Guillaume de Sillé or Roger de Briqueville, his accomplices and cousins, who came from noble families ruined by the war. Often Gilles did the killing himself, in the presence of Sillé and Briqueville; but if it was needed, one of these brigands would lend a hand. All of them lived at the master’s expense; the master paid, but first they procured for him that which he desired.

  To begin with, the company gave themselves up to excess; they gorged themselves on fine food and strong drink — but it seems the fanatics never abandoned Gilles to the solitude of blood.

  After 1432, Champtocé probably had stopped being used; the house of La Suze at Nantes, the castles at Tiffauges and at Machecoul very quickly took over. Later the participants of these feasts were also completely changed; others entered into the secrets. At first there apparently were singers from the chapel: André Buchet from Vannes and Jean Rossignol of La Rochelle, both of whom apparently had the voices of homosexual angels, and both of whom Gilles made into canons of Saint-Hilaire-de-Poitiers. There was Hicquet de Brémont and Robin Romulart (or “Petit Robin”), who apparently died at the end of 1439. Finally, two valets going by the names of Poitou and Henriet made it into these bloody barracks. Other, younger singers, spared by the master, were used on the days when new victims could not be found; persuaded to keep quiet, they were probably introduced into the secrets … These libidinous abodes at Machecoul and Tiffauges were terrifying … Filled with people, they were terrifying. Even if we forget the frivolity of sorcerers who sought the Devil and priests who sang the Office, they were terrifying … These fortresses had the feeling of diabolical traps. They closed around those children imprudently waiting for alms at their portal. The greatest number of the juvenile victims were taken by this trickery. In this monstrous lawlessness was a suffocating preparation for the worst. Occasionally Gilles himself chose, sometimes he requested Sillés or others to choose. Once the child was brought into Gilles’ room, things abruptly began. Taking his “virile member” in hand, Gilles “rubbed” it, “erected” it, or “stretched” it on the belly of his victim, introducing it between his thighs. He rubbed himself “on the bellies of the … children … , he took great delight, and got so excited that the sperm, criminally and in a way it ought not, spurted onto the bellies of the said children.” With each child Gilles only came once or twice, whereupon “he killed them or had them killed.”

  But it was rare for the orgy to begin without the child first being abused. To begin with, there was a sort of strangling: the poor wretches were put on an abominable apparatus. Gillies wanted to “prevent their cries” and avoid their being heard. “Sometimes he suspended them by his own hand, sometimes he had others suspend them by the throat with cords and rope, in his room, on a peg or small hook.” Thus, with their necks extended, they were reduced to death rattles.

  At this moment, a comedy could intervene. Gilles, halting the suspension, had the child let down; then he caressed and cajoled him, assuring him that he had not wanted to “harm” him or “hurt him,” but that, on the contrary, he only wanted “to have fun” with him. If he had at last silenced him, he could then have his way with him, but the appeasement did not last.

  Having drawn violent pleasure from the victim, he killed him or had him killed. But often Gilles’ enjoyment combined with the child’s death. He might cut — or cause to be cut — a vein in the neck; when the blood spurted, Gilles, would come. Occasionally, at the decisive moment, he wanted the victim to be in the languor of death. Or further, he had him decapitated; from then on the orgy lasted “as long as the bodies were warm.” Occasionally, after decapitation, he sat on the belly of the victim and delighted in watching him die like this; he sat at an angle, the better to see his last tremblings.

  He occasionally varied the method of killing. Here is what he himself said on the subject: — Sometimes he inflicted, sometimes the accomplices inflicted “various types and manners of torment; sometimes they severed the head from the body with dirks, daggers, and knives, sometimes they struck them violently on the head with a cudgel or other blunt instruments.” He specifies that the punishment of suspension was added to these torments. When interrogated, the valet Poitou enumerates the manner of killing as follows: “Sometimes beheading or decapitating them, sometimes cutting their throats, sometimes dismembering them, and sometimes breaking their necks with a cudgel.” He said also that there was a “sword dedicated to their execution, commonly called a braquemard” (p. 226).

  But we are not at the end of this voyage to the limits of the worst.

  Here is what we know from Henriet the valet. Gilles boasted in his presence of taking “greater pleasure in murdering the … children, in seeing their heads and members separated, in seeing them languish and seeing their blood, than he did in knowing them carnally” (p. 237). Thus he expressed, before the Marquis de Sade, the principle of libertines inured in vice.

  What we know of the search for the “most beautiful heads” leads us to the aberration. We learn of it from the monster himself: when at last the children were lying dead, he embraced them, “and he gave way to contemplating those who had the most beautiful heads and members, and he had their bodies cruelly opened up and delighted at the sight of their internal organs” (p. 196). Henriet, who, of the two valets, reports it with the minutest of details, is for his own part not ignorant of this delirious aspect.

  According to him, Gilles “delighted” in looking at the severed heads, and he showed them to him, the witness, and to 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, and he often kissed the head that pleased him most, and delighted in doing so” (p. 237). In Gilles’ eyes, mankind was no more than an element of voluptuous turmoil; this element was entirely at his sovereign disposal, having no other meaning than a possibility for more violent pleasure, and he did not stop losing himself in that violence.

  No sexual confession is more pathetic, as it exceeds all bounds in the will to horrify.

  The following words do away with the possibility of not trembling:— “And very often,” he said, “when the said children were dying, he sat on their bellies and delighted in watching them die thus, and with the said Corrillaut and Henriet he laughed at them …” (p. 196).

  Finally, Lord de Rais — who in order to excite his senses as much as possible had gotten drunk — went out like a light. The servants cleaned the room, washing up the blood, and while the master slept, burned the cadaver in the fireplace. Long logs and a quantity of faggots allowed them to rapidly reduce it to ashes. They took pains to burn the clothes one by one, wanting, as they said, to avoid the stench.

  The whole order of the feast had taken place according to plan: it did not correspond to the impulses of passion. Designed to serve the sensual pleasure of one sole man, it passed without anguish: these children of seven to twenty died with no more fuss than a kid goat.

  If there was tragedy, it was not unceasing. Rather, what is the more remarkable in these horrors is the indifference of the participants.

  They could not have conceived of the feeling that this unbending severity assumes for us: terror and indignation beyond bounds … In his day, Gilles de Rais was a very important man, and the little beggars whose throats he cut were worth no more than the horses.

  It is difficult for us to evaluate the distance that then s
eparated the man (magnified by birth and fortune) who did the crushing from the insect crushed between two stones.

  More than a century later in Hungary, an eminent lady was killing her servants with no more difficulty than Gilles had killing children. This great lady, Erszebeth Bathory, was related to royalty, and she was not pursued until after having yielded to a desire to kill daughters of the lesser nobility. Gilles de Rais himself was not distressed until after a long pause, and that was not until after absurd blunders; probably public rumor finally grew to such a point that one could not easily close one’s eyes. Without friends, without support, Gilles was unable to shake off the hostility and the general weariness. But with skill and moderation, his crimes would not have been profoundly shocking; without any other reason, one’s first impulse might have been to close one’s eyes.

  The High Rank of Gilles de Rais

  In this blood-filled drama, we cannot forget what determines Rais’ prominence more than anything else: he is not just any man in this world, but a noble; this man of war, this ogre who violated and killed little children, is primarily a privileged man. His fortune moreover is not his only privilege. His existence in itself is privileged; his existence itself, in itself, is fascinating. It radiates, it is glorious by itself; because of his birth, it is glorious as luxury and war are glorious.

  Rais’ prominence, of itself, is a force that seduces and dominates. It goes without saying that there is nothing seductive about cutting children’s throats. But Rais’ nobility is not noble in an adulterated sense. Rais is noble in the sense of the German warriors. His nobility has the ardor of a violence respecting nothing, and in the presence of which there is nothing that does not give way; like that of the Berserkir, such a violence places him whom it inspires outside this world. The nobility of Gilles de Rais is the distinguishing mark of the monster.

  Occasionally his inherent nobility no longer distinguished itself from his terrifying aspect; it ends up possessing itself of the allure of night and the fear that night gives. One need only recall the German Harii and the soot with which they covered themselves, the better to belong to the terror of the night. Violence involves an ambiguity between seduction and terror. The noble warrior, the great lord, he who fascinates, is terrifying.

  At the same time, Gillies de Rais trembled before the Devil. But the Devil fascinated him; indeed, he solicited an alliance with that which terrified him. Fundamentally, the supernatural world, that of the Devil or Gold, was — like him — of noble essence, of sovereign essence if one likes. The existence of God or the Devil had but one aim, what a noble held as an aim for the entire world of the nobility: a diurnal or nocturnal enchantment, similar to those very beautiful paintings that dazzle and fascinate the viewer. These tableaux can include bloody battles, they can include martyrs (sexual themes having necessarily been transposed … ). But terror is always intimately joined to enticement.

  On this level, Lord de Rais at least has this merit. He represents in a pure state the impulse that tends to subordinate the activity of men to enchantment, to the game of the privileged class. Men, on the whole, produce; they produce every kind of good. But in 15th-century society, these goods were destined for the privileged class, for those who among themselves can devour each other, but to whom the masses are subordinate. For the mass of men it is necessary to work so the privileged class can play, even if they also sometimes play at devouring themselves to their ruin. The goods that represent work to the masses mean nothing but a sense of game for the privileged class. The work that entered into the product cannot be noticed by them, because the noble, the privileged man, does not work and never ought to.

  One often forgets, but the very principle of the nobility, what it is in essence, is the refusal to suffer degradation or disgrace — which would be the inevitable effect of work!

  For an earlier society work was shameful in a fundamental way. It is the task of the slave or serf, one who, at the same time in his own mind, has lost his dignity; the free man could not work without falling from grace.

  This is related to the fact that work could not be interesting in itself; it is a subordinate activity, a servile activity, which serves something other than itself. He who wants to escape the servile life cannot as a rule work. He must play. He must amuse himself freely, like a child; free from his duties, the child amuses himself. But the adult cannot amuse himself like the child if he is not privileged. Those who have no privilege are reduced to working. By contrast, the privileged man must make war. Just as the unprivileged man is reduced to working, the privileged man must make war.

  War itself has the privilege of being a game. It is not, like others, a reasonable activity; it has no other meaning than the anticipated result. War indeed can be seen from the angle of utility: a city or a country can be attacked and must be defended. But without the turbulence of countries or cities which assail their neighbors without necessity, men could avoid war. War is, from the start, the effect of a turbulence, even if it is true that it is occasionally the inevitable result of the impoverishment of a region whose inhabitants must seek the means to survive elsewhere.

  Most often, those who take the initiative of war were led to it by an exuberant, explosive impulse. That is why war for so long was able to have the feeling of a game; a terrifying game, but a game.

  In Gilles de Rais’ time, war is always the game of lords. If this game devastates populations, it exalts the privileged class. It has for the privileged class the ultimate meaning that work could never have for the poor folk. The interest of work is subordinated to its result; the interest of war is nothing but war. It is war itself which fascinates and which terrifies. Those who are like Gilles de Rais, who live in the expectation of these terrible battles leaving death, cries of horror, and suffering behind them, know nothing else that gives them this violent excitement. Present generations no longer know practically anything about the exaltation, even though death was the basis of it, that formerly was the least ridiculous meaning and aim of war, a fact that is likely to abandon us to a feeling of our powerlessness in the world. Are we not blinded at the very moment when the mad truth of another time is hidden from us?

  Faced with as vain a question, what can we do, if not hide?

  But we must continue the paradoxical quest, as given in the questions that his life and the world of his time posed for Gilles de Rais …

  The Tragedy of the Nobility

  The fact that Gilles de Rais lived in a world of war linked to privilege does not prevent us from seeing that the world was changing at this time. In Gilles’ eyes, war was truly a game. But this manner of seeing is less and less truthful, to the extent that it ceased to be even that of the majority of the privileged class. More and more, war is then a general misfortune; it is, at the same time, the work of many people. The general situation deteriorates and becomes more complex; misfortune reaches even the privileged class, who are less and less eager for war, and for play, who finally see that the moment has come to give way to the problems of reason. At this time, the technical and financial means of war involve such machinery that personal impetuosity and exaltation are limited. The heavy cavalry, essentially those arms that made war a luxurious game, succeeded during Gilles de Rais’ lifetime in losing a great part of its importance to the advantage of infantry and archers, arrows and pikes. Likewise, armed bands and pillagers take the upper hand over prestigious combats of costumed horses and knights; the need follows to substitute regular and hierarchical armies for companies of old hands without discipline. Only hierarchy and discipline could maintain part of the place that the privileged class had in war.

  Indeed, something subsists of the game that war is in its essence. In a strict sense, something subsists of it in our day. But discipline, strict orders, and scientific command stamp war with an essentially rational character, which has caused us to forget — in the fundamental debate between game and reason — that it has been very recently, and as a secondary consequence, that war moved to di
stinguish itself from individual impetuosity and violence, which had been the truth and heart of war, to the advantage of cold reason.

  Things evolve slowly: one does not arrive right away at this enormous build-up of modern arms that has ultimately suffocated the violent spirit of play that transfigured war. But in the years following the death of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, remaining Marshal of France, had ceased to be at home in the armies of his day, which were condemned to become regular. Since Constable Richemont had prevailed over La Trémoille in 1434, there was an embryo of the royal administration which resulted in the Estates General of Orléans in 1439.

  Gilles de Rais still held the title of Marshal of France in 1434. But after La Trémoille’s disgrace, he was no longer anything. He had been a “gallant knight of arms”; he knew how to mount an assault, to line up magnificent horses and superb knights. He knew how to drink, and evidently he enjoyed the worst confusion. Above all, he loved to fight, and beside Joan of Arc, he covered himself in glory at Tourelles, at Patay, and, even after the heroine’s death in 1432, at Lagny.

  The administration, being organized after the time when no rake was assuring him the favor of the King, saw to it that his military valor suddenly no longer held meaning. He was nothing on his own but a bungler; from this moment all that he was, his state of mind and his reactions, no longer suited the spirit of new necessities.

  From 1432 on, from the day he abandons himself to the obsession of cutting children’s throats, Gilles de Rais is nothing but a failure. Everything gets mixed up. In August 1432 at Lagny, he figures again as the glorious captain. His grandfather dies in November. The disappearance of this brutal force must free him, relieve him, and unhinge him at the same time. He is bound to badly handle a too complete, too sudden freedom, and a wealth that has become staggering. That following summer, La Trémoille falls. It must not be imagined that Rais took his disgrace lightly. I have spoken of his foolishness … But what I said of the game he played helps us see how he lived it, and how this game was confused with his life. The deprivation must have affected him all the more as he had just yielded to frightful habits …