Trial of Gilles De Rais (22 page)
Read Trial of Gilles De Rais Online
Authors: George Bataille
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Cultural Anthropology, #Psychology, #True Crime, #European History, #France, #Social History, #v.5, #Literary Studies, #Medieval History, #Amazon.com, #Criminology, #Retail, #History
The life of a Siquenville evokes the world where Gilles, during his last years, led the battle against his neighbor, the castellan of Montaigu, Jean de Harpedenne,
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or against the captain of Palluau (pp. 200 and 215). But we know practically nothing of the circumstances or episodes of those feudal battles at a time when, little by little, their anachronism is becoming flagrant.
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or against the captain of Palluau (pp. 200 and 215). But we know practically nothing of the circumstances or episodes of those feudal battles at a time when, little by little, their anachronism is becoming flagrant.
Around the beginning of December The public rumor
Jean Mercier, castellan of La Roche-sur-Yon, traveling to Mortagne, stays at the hotel of Blanchet’s landlord; this latter asks him for news in the regions of Nantes and Clisson. Here is what Blanchet reports: according to Mercier, public rumor in these regions accuses Gilles de Rais of killing, and causing to be killed, a large number of children … he was writing a book in his own hand with their blood. This book finished, he expects to seize all the fortresses he wants … From then on nobody will be able to harm him (p. 218).
Lord de Rais’ emissary, the goldsmith Jean Petit, then working at Tiffauges with Prelati, arrives at Mortagne on the following day. He is charged with leading Eustache Blanchet back, but Blanchet refuses. Blanchet is supposed to have told Petit that Gilles and the Italian should stop: it was not good to commit these crimes, and public rumor was growing against them. According to Blanchet, Gilles threw the goldsmith into the prison of Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte on his return. He is supposed to have stayed there a long time … (p. 218).
Around the end of the year
It is without a doubt around this period that Gilles, caught in Prelati’s grasp, contemplates the worst. Why couldn’t the gift of dead children’s members have appeased this devil, whose silence and hostility overwhelm him? In his incoherence, the shady, fearful, and versatile Eustache Blanchet himself suggested to Henriet and Poitou that their master could not accomplish what he had begun without offering the feet, hands, or other members of the slaughtered children to the Devil (pp. 229 and 237).
Each day Gilles is a little more impatient to see the Devil and Prelati, who will vouch for it later, tells him that if he wanted the Devil to appear and speak to him, he ought to offer a cock, hen, dove, or pigeon … , and if he really wanted what he was asking for, then it would be necessary to offer a child’s member (p. 212).
Blanchet could be repeating Prelati’s words. Gilles’ testimony indicates that Prelati himself had affirmed that the Devil required the gift of a certain number of dead children.
In fact, Prelati reports having seen in the large hall at Tiffauges, where the invocations occurred (and not in Lord de Rais’ room), a dead, outstretched child. He saw him in the presence of Gilles de Sillé, who Prelati thinks had just killed him (p. 212).
This dead child would have been seen by him a year before his deposition, consequently around October 16, 1439. But he does not tell us that he was offered to the Devil. Gilles would not have yielded so quickly; it is possible that, corrupt as he was, he was not of such a temperament as to be able to sacrifice children to the Devil without trembling. We can surmise that by mentioning members, particularly the hand, heart, or eyes, Prelati wanted to scare him. He was not ignorant of Gilles’ anguish. It was possible for him to gain time by this trick.
In the end — but in what a state of terror — this killer, trembling before the Devil, makes his promise!
Offering of a child’s hand and heart to the devil
One day in his room, in Poitou’s presence, he puts a child’s hand (Poitou does not know whether it was the right or the left) and heart in a glass that he covers with a piece of fine linen. Then he inserts the glass into his sleeve (sleeves were long and large then), forming a large enough pocket. He goes like this into Prelati’s room. Perhaps the glass also contains the child’s eyes and blood. It seems that there was only one offering: various versions differ, but no important contradiction in detail exists among them. François Prelati presents the horrible offering to the invoked demon, but the demon does not appear; a little while later he himself buries these human remains in sacred soil, close to the castle’s chapel (pp. 176, 198, 212, 239-240, and 280).
(1439)
December
The Viennese Dauphin, Charles VII’s son, the future Louis XI, is sent into Poitou “to put an end to the pillages, and expel the warring men who were in that region.” Accomplishing his mission, he is led to visit two of the fortresses where Gilles de Rais garrisons his troops, Pouzauges and Tiffauges. A brigand chief like Marshal de Rais was expressly targeted on this visit and, as we have already said (p. 118), one of the captains under the castellan of Tiffauges, Jean de Siquenville, is arrested; this Jean de Siquenville is thrown into the prisons of the castle at Montaigu, where the Dauphin had fixed his residence. Sensing the imminent hanging, Gilles’ captain escapes from that prison; this is why he must consequently procure letters of pardon, which we possess and in which the incident is related to us.
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The Dauphin’s passage through Tiffauges has other consequences. First of all, Gilles hastens to have the alchemical ovens that he had installed in the fortress demolished (pp. 182-183). But, the Dauphin gone, Gilles is still afraid and decides to leave the royal domain and stay in Brittany, where the deceptive friendship of Duke Jean reassures him. He is at Machecoul at least toward the end of December. He cannot do without Prelati; if the conjuror’s presence is noted in the vicinity of the castle (p. 122), it is because the master is staying there.
Around December 10
About fifteen days before Christmas, Jeannette, Eustache Drouet’s wife, of Saint-Léger, sends two of her sons, aged seven and ten, to ask for alms at Machecoul, “because she had heard that Lord de Rais had them distributed there, and that, moreover, the men in that village willingly gave charity.” Several people told her of seeing her children in the following days, but when she went there she could not find them, nor learn what became of them, even after she herself and her husband made several inquiries. Maybe Gilles had actually returned to Machecoul. But it is not certain (p. 266).
Around December 20
Gilles — disquieted by the knowledge that Eustache Blanchet is out of his control, whose hostility, not to mention his wicked tongue, he is now familiar with — sends a certain number of his servants, including Gilles de Sillé, Poitou and Henriet, to Mortagne with the order to bring Blanchet back forcibly or voluntarily. They bring him to Roche-Serviére by the road leading from Mortagne to Machecoul. They are principally charged with imprisoning him in the castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte, where, in his terror, he thinks Lord de Rais will leave him to die. Apparently it is only to frighten him; in any case, he makes so many vows that they lead him to Machecoul, where he lives freely until his arrest on September 13, 1440 (p. 218).
At any rate, the solution of Machecoul explains itself by the fact that, for the moment, Lord de Rais is living there again.
Around December 25 Murder of two children
Ysabeau, Guillaume Hamelin’s wife, living in Fresnay, sends two of her children, aged fifteen and seven, to buy bread. They do not return;. since then, she is unable to find out what became of them. However, François Prelati and the Marquis de Ceva, both of whom she says she knows well and she knows stay with Gilles de Rais, visit her the following day. The Marquis poses strange questions and interrogates her on the subject of a son and daughter she has at home; he asks her whether they are hers, and finally whether she does not have others; she answers that she does have others, but dares not tell him that they have disappeared. When they leave, she hears the Marquis say to François that two children left that house.
Eight witnesses from Fresney confirm the disappearance of two children.
Eight days before that disappearance, Ysabeau heard talk of the disappearance of Micheau Bouer’s son (pp. 263-264), who left for Machecoul as well but eight months earlier, this time to ask for alms and coming from Saint-Cyr-en-Rais (p. 263).
End of December Prelati’s brutality
Clement Rondeau of Machecoul is dying and receives extreme unction. His wife Perrine, in tears and lamentations, is installed toward evening in the highest room of the castle, where both Prelati and the Marquis de Ceva sleep. Having returned for supper, these latter, furious to see her there, take her by the shoulders and feet to throw her down the stairs. Prelati finishes by kicking her in the lower back, but at the last moment Perrine’s nurse catches hold of her robe, saving her (p. 261).
1440January-February
In the period when Eustache Blanchet resides at Machecoul, the Marquis de Ceva procures for Prelati to serve him as page “a young, very beautiful child, saying that he was from the Dieppe region and that he was of a good family.” This page ought to have been fifteen or sixteen then. He remains two weeks with Prelati, then vanishes. The hostess of the place asks him what happened to the child. Prelati responds that the child cheated him; he left, he insists, with his two crowns.
(1440)
Henriet tells us that he had the child’s throat cut; according to his first confession, he had him “struck down at Machecoul”; in his second, he does not know who cut his throat, he was not there, but he knows Gilles abused him just like the others (pp. 218-219, 227, 235-236, 259, 276-277 and 281-282).
The page of a certain Daussy is about the same age as Prelati. Like the last one, he is put to death at Machecoul in the period when Blanchet, who reports it, lived there at the beginning of 1440, or maybe a little later (pp. 200 and 219). Gilles de Rais, who speaks of him as a “little” page, mentions him at the same time as Prelati’s page or the young Jean Hubert (pp. 105-107), but this latter was killed close to June 26, 1438.
Jean de Lanté, the prior of Chéméré, a priory within the order of Saint-Benoît, entrusts his nephew to a fellow named Tabard, intending to have him learn to read and write. As with the pages of Prelati and Daussy, he is fourteen or fifteen years old, and like them he is put to death at Machecoul in the period when Blanchet lives there (pp. 218-219 and 275).
February
The convocation as witness of Jean de Lanté will be required at the ecclesiastical trial at the same time as that of the Marquis de Ceva, Bertrand Poulein, Jean Rousseau, and Master Gilles Heaume (p. 186). André Barbe, a cobbler living at Machecoul, says that “he heard a man complaining in the church of the Trinité at Machecoul, whom he did not know, who was asking whether anyone had seen his child, whom he claimed was seven years old; and this about eight months earlier”: basically, it is a question of February 1440 (p. 257). This testimony is, in principle, dubious.
March
A poor man from Touvois named Mathelin Thouars laments and anguishes, around March 1440, over the disappearance of his twelve-year-old child; he is clueless as to what may have happened to him. Four witnesses from Touvois profess to have heard his complaining. Testimony like this obviously adds nothing to that which merits our attention (p. 259).
February
The Dauphin, the Count d’Alençon, and Dunois meet at Niort; the Duke of Bourbon, the Count de Vendôme, and La Tremoillé meet at Blois; they each enter into rebellion against the King; the Duke of Brittany, Jean V, supports the rebels, but the Constable de Richemont subdues the movement; by July 17th the affair is completely terminated.
Nobody asked for Gilles de Rais’ help. Nobody henceforth pays the slightest attention to him.
Before March 27 Murder of Guillaume Le Barbier
One morning before Easter (March 27th) at Machecoul, Blanchet is said to have seen Poitou arriving at the castle, accompanied by the son of the pastry-cook, Georget Le Barbier. This child, Guillaume, ought to have been approximately sixteen then. Georget Le Barbier lives in front of the entrance to the castle. Her son is placed with a certain Jean Péletier, the tailor of Lady de Rais, as well as several of the men in Lord de Rais’ household. The child and his master, the tailor, regularly come to eat at the castle. According to Blanchet, who basically knows what to expect, the lad’s entrance into the castle was answered with his death.
According to the father’s testimony, the child supposedly did not disappear until Saint Barnabas’ Day (June 11). But we know that the father was managing badly. And two of our testimonies speak of sometime around Easter (pp. 220, 257, 258 and 281-282).
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