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
Trial of Gilles De Rais (10 page)
The conjuror, a physician named Jean de La Rivière, entered alone into the woods. He was armed. He had a sword and other arms, and he wore white armor. The participants suddenly heard a loud noise, as if La Rivière were fighting. Blanchet thinks that he was striking his sword against his armor with all his might. Upon his return, he had a “frightened and terrified” air. He said that he had seen in the woods “the Devil in the guise of a leopard.” The demon had passed by him without saying a word, avoiding him. Gilles believed the conjuror without checking.
He paid him twenty gold royals on the spot. Everyone then returned to Pouzauges, where they held a feast and passed the night. Afterwards, La Rivière said that he was going to look for something he needed and would return as soon as possible, but he kept the twenty gold pieces and no one heard from him again.
Apparently it was around 1436 that this invocation took place. The business of the goldsmith from Angers might have taken place during the same period. The fact remains that Gilles must have passed through Angers that year. He attacks his ex-tutor there, who had made the mistake of taking sides with his family against him. Gilles could have been staying at the Lion d’Argent then, where Blanchet says he sent a goldsmith who professed to know alchemy. Gilles pays him a silver mark “to work.” But, locking himself in a room, the goldsmith starts drinking. Gilles was indignant when he found him sleeping … He chased him, but the drunkard kept the silver.
However, the drunkard was perhaps honest as others were not: he was not a conjuror, but an alchemist. And alchemy — which the Church does not persecute as resolutely as sorcery or conjury, which occasionally it even tolerates — is basically the origin of chemistry … A little later, an alchemist in Rais’ service is evidently honest. Like the one from Angers, he is a goldsmith; work with metals was preparation for alchemy, being in accord with it. We do not know when he came to Tiffauges to lodge with Lord de Rais, but he was there on May 14, 1439, when Prelati arrived; Prelati and Blanchet, arriving from Italy, were put in the same room with him on this day. We know just about everything we can say of him from Blanchet’s testimony (p. 218); likewise, we have to think that the latter brought him to Gilles de Rais as he had brought the one from Angers. The second goldsmith was from Paris and answered to the name of Jean Petit.
He was still in Gilles’ service in December 1439 when his master sent him to Mortagne in order to convince Blanchet, who had just escaped from Tiffauges, to return. But Blanchet refused. He told Jean Petit to repeat to Gilles and Prelati that public rumor was against them, that they ought to renounce their criminal life. When Jean Petit told him, Gilles, beside himself, had him led to the castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte, where he was thrown in prison; there he “remained a long time,” according to Blanchet. We do not know the date on which he left Gilles’ service, but he must have no longer been in it as of September 15, 1440, the date of the arrest. If on this date he had been at Machecoul, he would have been arrested, as was Prelati, with whom he had shared daily tasks for a long time. Prelati worked with him at the ovens that he evidently had installed before, perhaps even well before, the arrival of the Italian.
Such other alchemists as the Italians, Antoine de Palerne and Prelati, were not just alchemists but conjurors too. Antoine de Palerne seems to have been in Gilles’ service early on, but he did not remain long; and when Gilles speaks of experiments with mercury, it is probable that Jean Petit was the initiator (the Italians devoted themselves principally to conjury). Gilles was certain of succeeding at the transmutation of metals one day or another with Petit or Prelati, particularly with the both of them; he seriously believed that he was going to make gold. He remained convinced; if the unexpected visit of the future Louis XI, then Viennese Dauphin, had not obliged him to destroy his ovens (because an ordinance by Charles V prohibited alchemy) in December 1439, he would have fabricated gold! He would have regained his colossal fortune, and he would have been in possession of unlimited power and inexhaustible riches!
Prelati, Final Euphoria, and CatastropheIn fact the arrival of François Prelati, whom Blanchet brought back from Florence in the spring of 1439, ended by ruining him. Young, adorned with the marvels of magic, literature, and Italy, Prelati literally seduced Lord de Rais; his actual attainments and his charlatanic eloquence dazzled him.
Gilles no longer expected anything but the aid of the demon. He received this brilliant man like a savior who seemed to him, as no other, versed in knowledge that was going to return him to his former state of fortune. Insolent, audacious, coming from a city where homosexuality was rampant, Prelati appeared to come marvelously to terms with a master who himself must have seduced the unscrupulous — in addition, prodigiously corrupt — ambitious man. Gilles must have seduced him inasmuch as he continued to generously command a still appreciable wealth despite an actual fall from grace. Treated as a friend, maybe as a lover (though we cannot be certain), François Prelati escalated the number of invocations from the beginning, without concerning himself in the least with the obstinateness of a devil determined not to show. Easy lies, occasionally clumsy comedies, succeeded in passing off the deceptions. As an earlier conjuror had already done, he resorted to the simulated attack of a demon, and was given credit for having vigorously beaten him in the room in which he had taken the trouble to lock himself. Frightened, imagining his friend already dead, Gilles found him wounded; he intended to take charge of caring for him himself, not letting anyone else approach. But if the devil refused to appear to Gilles, he did not fail to provide François with reasons. In fact, when the latter was alone his personal demon, named Barron, sometimes graced the young and charming charlatan with his presence … It was easy to maintain his master’s terrors and superstitions in this way. The lies of Prelati, in other respects, could demonstrate nothing: there managed to exist between the two men a sort of friendship, evidenced by Gilles’ sublime goodbyes to François at the trial (p. 194), of which we have already spoken. Apparently these wayward souls stopped at nothing … Despite their excessive corruption, it was possible for each of them to have certain sentimental capacities … the imbroglio of their feelings would have been constructed between one’s deceit and the other’s foolishness. We ought to recall no less the scene wherein the young comedian brutally landed a kick on the behind of his landlady who, crying over her dying husband, had disturbed him (p. 161). The kick would have made the miserable woman fall from her ladder if an old nurse had not caught her by the robe … This is the image with which it is appropriate to respond to the emotion that might have been warranted by the goodbyes that, on the threshold of the other world, the monster addressed his mystifier before the judges.
I will later provide in full (pp. 111 to 125) the details of what Gilles’ confessions and Henriet’s, Poitou’s, and Blanchet’s, not to mention Prelati’s, testimonies permit knowing of the invocations that followed one another from the spring of 1439 to the arrest in September 1440. From rather numerous, rather precise descriptions we get a rich idea of the ritual of conjury of this period … I should only like to depict without further delay the atmosphere that was created in the castle at Tiffauges by these appeals to infernal powers. Prelati discovered, at the same time that he learned of his master’s superstitious piety, the cruel murders that were impossible to do without; he was therefore going to make him live in the paradox that came from a vain expectation of a savior-devil and the demonic atmosphere that sprang from the children whose throats had been cut. To the evasions of this devil, for whom Rais kept waiting in the marvelous euphoria of inexhaustible gold … was answered only by the nightmare of bloody heads and the threat of final catastrophe, which it was each day a bit more childish to ignore.
In the first place, Prelati had his master drop the habit he had of participating at invocations. He attributed the devil’s hesitation to some dissatisfaction or another; the devil, on the other hand, appeared each time the scrupulous Italian operated alone! From April to December 1439, the latter was able to maintain a kind of enchantment over this bloody man who was blindly forging ahead. But the situation became graver. Around July-August, Gilles went to Bourges, where he stayed long enough to have news and even a present sent to him from the devil: a “black powder on a slate stone” given to Rais by Barron, Prelati’s personal demon. The Italian wrote to his master regularly at this time. At first Gilles carried the powder around his neck in a silver box. But after several days he admitted that it was not doing him any good … Probably after his return to Bourgneuf from Bourges, where Rais had encountered the Duke Jean V of Brittany, he must have forced Prelati to let him attend an invocation conducted on the premises, with the intention of obtaining from Barron the Duke’s good graces. In vain. Deceived and depressed, Gilles immediately yields to his thirst for blood: a fifteen-year-old child, Bernard Le Camus, loses his life on this day. But nothing does the trick; the criminal, apparently, cannot find appeasement: terror and remorse oppress him. Even at Bourgneuf he dreams of reforming himself, of going to cry before the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is probably after this setback, which the crisis followed, that Prelati, divining the need to take his master in hand, proposes what could be a last resort: the irritated demon asked Gilles for a sacrifice! It was time to sacrifice an infant to the Devil. At first this proposition seems to have left Gilles in anguish. Prelati must have known in advance that this superstitious man would tremble; he knew the reticence of the criminal who never ultimately abandoned the hope and anxiety to save his soul; Gilles could not dissemble what was impardonable and repugnant in the sacrifice of an innocent, of a miserable child to the “unclean spirit.” However, at bay, at all costs wanting to save, as with his soul and life, what was left of his riches, he appeared one evening carrying the hand, heart, and eye perhaps, of a child. He was so eager to see the devil! During the night, the Italian presented the horrible offering, but the devil did not come …
We can easily imagine Rais’ state of mind during the period that followed. Spattered with blood, it is possible that this man was feverish. Would Prelati have been able from then on to maintain the spell under which he had attempted to keep him? Everything ought to have terrified him. His only outlet, it seemed, was in anger, violence … On Blanchet’s request, Jean Petit had conveyed to him the public rumor that was mounting; he had requested that he not persevere in crime: the goldsmith went moaning into one of those terrifying prisons, from which, in order not to die, he needed to leave pretty quickly …
What ought to have put the finishing touch on Gilles’ distress was the sudden visit of the future Louis XI, then the Viennese Dauphin. This sinister character was sent into Poitou by his father with the mission of putting an end to the mayhem of wars that had not stopped reigning in these regions. He came to Tiffauges, where it seems that Rais had just enough time to have the alchemical ovens destroyed. An old ordinance by Charles V prohibited, in effect, the practice of alchemy. The ovens being gone, the Dauphin — with whom so shabby a marshal as Lord de Rais in 1439 held no prestige — restricted himself to arresting the captain of men-at-arms at Tiffauges, guilty of pillages and “requisitions” in the countrysides of that region. The arrest was in response to the fact that Rais’ men-at-arms often lived off the land … This hostile visit actually had a disastrous result: the destruction of the ovens announced to the criminal that he simply would not soon get his hands on that gold, which he sought in anguish for the possibility of avoiding ruin. It is true: by alchemy, if he had so desired, the demon would have granted his zealous servant the object of his request! But obstinately the demon refused to appear! For Gilles, Prelati’s illusion and quackery were merely good for a few month’s respite. The euphoria announced the catastrophe; the burst of life precipitated the definitive fall.
By the beginning of the year 1440, everything is theoretically played out. The Marshal’s fortune and moral credit are at an all-time low. Everything fails at the same time. The Devil mocks him. If Prelati’s seduction had not bewitched him, he might have sent packing the braggart who had succeeded at nothing. But Gilles could not have endured being alone in his misery. Prelati’s company was precious. They could speak Latin together and, at any rate, the Italian’s conversation was refined. Gilles’ French companions were probably louts, cruel killers like Sillé; Briqueville was a vulgar profiteer; Henriet and Poitou, younger, perhaps had some charm: their depositions are lively …, and we know above all that Poitou, who had been Gilles’ lover, was handsome. But these boys were bumpkins, and it is logical to suppose that Prelati, who perhaps on his own behalf offered himself to his master’s embrace, granted him the satisfaction that came of his education. Growing tired of one orgy after another, it was impossible for Gilles to pass up on this handsome braggart. For lack of having saved his master by means of the Devil, Prelati at least knew how to amuse and distract him at a moment when his life was ending up sinking into the nightmare which his thirst for blood had confined him.
He came so far short of these last hopes; the sinister Marshal was now nothing more than flotsam. For a long time he was living in a hell, intersected by excessive joys, that is the eroticism of one who has abandoned a reasonable life.
In his depressed state an impulse of exasperation, of anger, blinded him. He had sold to Geoffroy Le Ferron, the Treasurer of Brittany, one of his last remaining castles, one of his castles in the Rais domain, Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte. He learned that Lord de Vieillevigne, one of his cousins, would have voluntarily bought this castle because it had once been part of his family’s endowment. Rais thought that Geoffroy Le Ferron would accept going back on the transaction. He was wrong. We do not know why Rais persisted. But he could not accept the treasurer’s refusal. Against all wisdom, he decided to forcibly reseize the castle that had been sold. There was no garrison at Saint-Etienne-de-Mermorte. The treasurer had only installed his brother Jean, who was of the Church and who was protected by ecclesiastical immunity.
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