Trial of Gilles De Rais

by George Bataille

  Bossard did his job so well that since his work, we can say that wherever he lived, Gilles de Rais was identified with Bluebeard. It is striking, even in a sense troubling, that such a diabolical memory would have found so suitable a popular countenance. Is history effectively incommensurate with legend, which alone has the power to evoke that which, in crime, is not reducible to the limits of the familiar world? In attaching significance to the horror and excess in the figure of Gilles de Rais, we cannot do better than to attribute it to the name of Bluebeard, as the poor country folk did. I will not return to the specific facts before having insisted on one aspect which I should like to reveal as a primary truth: what interests us in the character of Gilles de Rais is gender-ally what binds us to the monstrosity that a human being harbors since tender infancy under the name of nightmare. I spoke, to begin with, of the “sacred monster,” but formerly and more simply, the poor folk called him Bluebeard …

  Here is what Abbot Bossard was able to gather around 1880, methodically enough, from local tradition: “There is neither a mother nor a wet nurse,” he tells us, “who, in their account, mistakes the places where Bluebeard dwelled: the ruins of the castles at Tiffauges, Champtocé, La Verrière, Machecoul, Pornic, Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte, and Pouzauges, all of which belonged to Gilles de Rais, are noted as the spots where Bluebeard lived.”3 Abbot Bossard occasionally shows his naïveté, but on this point he wanted to proceed attentively. “Numerous are the old people we interrogated in the proximities of Tiffauges, Machecoul, or Champtocé; their accounts are unanimous; it is indeed the lord of Tiffauges, or the lord of Machecoul, or the lord of Champtocé, who was or is still for everyone the real Bluebeard.” He finally says: “With the secret intention of shaking their conviction and troubling their belief, how many times did we try to confuse their memories and make them adopt an opinion that was not our own! ‘You’re mistaken,’ we said, ‘Bluebeard wasn’t lord of Champtocé, nor lord of Machecoul, nor lord of Tiffauges.’ To some we said, ‘He dwelled in Mortagne or Clisson’; to others, ‘Champtoceaux’ ; to others finally, some well-known ruin in the area. Everywhere, it was the same surprise at first, followed by the same air of disbelief and same response: that Bluebeard dwelled, for the people of the Vendée, at Tiffauges; for the people of Anjou, at Champtocé; for the people of Brittany, at Machecoul … We have listened to people over ninety years old; they affirmed that their accounts came from old people before them. In speaking only of the region of Tiffauges, whose traditions we are familiar with above all, the terrible baron lives there still; no longer, it is true, with the original features of Gilles de Rais, but with the somber and legendary physiognomy of Bluebeard. One day, while walking among the ruins of the castle on the broken dike of the pond of La Crûme, at the foot of the big tower, we came upon a group of tourists sitting on the grass, in the middle of which was an old, native woman talking about Bluebeard. This woman is still alive; she was born within the walls of the fortress, where her family dwelled for three centuries, until 1850, at which point she retired to the village. Her sister, even older than she, has since confirmed all the information that we received that day, even the most precise details … Bluebeard had been the lord of this castle; her parents had always told her so and on the faith of their immediate ancestors — ‘And hold on,’ she suddenly added, ‘let me take you to the very room where he usually cut the infants’ throats.’

  “We climb the formerly steep hill, diminished today by the rubble of collapsed towers; she leads us directly to the foot of the dungeon and points with her finger to a small door very high up in the corner of two immense stretches of wall: ‘There’s the room,’ she says. — ‘But once again, who told you?’ — ‘My old parents always said so, and they knew it well. A stairway led up to it in the old days, and I’d often climb it when I was young; but today the stairway is collapsed and the room itself is almost filled by the walls and vault caving in.’”

  It thus seems that in the people’s memory, Marshal de Rais existed in the form of a monster called Bluebeard. Sometimes this Bluebeard is a Gilles de Rais whose name alone has changed. Sometimes the Bluebeard of the most common legend bleeds onto Gilles: “The people of the Vendée,” Abbot Bossard repeats, “imagine that the funereal room where the seven wives of Bluebeard were hanged still exists in a hidden spot of the castle at Tiffauges; only the steps of the stairway leading to it have collapsed with time, and woe to the curious tourist who stumbles upon the ruins by accident! He’d fall instantly into a deep abyss where he’d die miserably. In the evening, the common folk avoid these fatal ruins, haunted as on the worst days by Bluebeard’s restless and evil shadow.” Nevertheless, the classic legend seems only secondarily associated with this tradition in which essentially only the name of the character was changed. “At Nantes,” Abbot Bossard says again, “the little expiatory monument piously erected by Marie de Rais at the place of the execution of her father was known and designated only as Bluebeard’s monument. The old people in proximity of Clisson have told us how, while passing before this little edifice during their childhood, their parents would tell them, ‘this is where Bluebeard was burned’; they did not say ‘Gilles de Rais.’” As if so excessive a story was unable to have anything but a monster as its protagonist, a being outside common humanity for whom the only appropriate name was one charged with legendary miasmas. Bluebeard could not have been one of our own, only a sacred monster unbound to the limits of ordinary life. Better than the name of Gilles de Rais, that of Bluebeard lengthened the shadow that the poor folk’s imagination harbored.4

  Glaring Truth …

  In accordance with the peoples of the Vendee and Brittany, who quickly stopped seeing what it was in Gilles de Rais that distinguished him from Bluebeard and naïvely confused the two, I at first wanted to describe the legend, the legendary monster, the fantastic being who exceeded accepted bounds.

  It is time to go beyond these first considerations which, depicting things in their unity, represent them as the popular imagination and most attentive stories have done. There are also the pure details — more precise and more concrete, having little meaning in themselves — which permit us to understand this troubling figure a little less vaguely. I would like to evoke them successively, just as the documents specify them; I imagine that their truth is occasionally glaring, but they never contradict the “sacred monster” who has imposed himself from the beginning in every fashion with so much force.

  Between Vannes and Nantes, in the little town of La Roche-Bernard, Gilles de Rais leaves the house where he has just passed the night. He is accompanied by a child whose mother, Peronne Loessart, made the mistake of entrusting him to one of the great lord’s valets the day before. Occasionally Gilles de Rais is affable, he can be friendly, but Peronne Loessart’s testimony at the trial depicts him at a moment of superb calm. He left with the child who was no doubt happy to have left the poverty of his home. Having seen them exit, the mother quickly overtakes them; perhaps she is devastated. She appeals to the man who will soon cut the throat of the small ten-year-old boy following them. Not deigning to respond to the mother’s humble plea, and addressing himself to the servant who beats back the prey, Gilles de Rais speaks simply, tranquilly: the child, he says, is “well chosen”; he adds: “He is as beautiful as an angel.” A few moments later, bobbing up and down on a pony, the innocent victim leaves in the ogre’s escort, in the direction of the castle at Machecoul …

  We would misunderstand the monster whose violence will soon be unleashed if we did not notice in him this apparent insensitivity, this nonchalant indifference, which to begin with places him well above the feelings of the average man. This calm in expectation of the worst, which Peronne Loessart’s testimony illustrates with most genuine naïveté, would it have anything to do with what follows? The accumulation of blood, the violence of a wild animal! — it links blood to the truth and violence to the sovereign monstrosity of Rais, whose grandeur tramples those who confront him, who now and then naiv
ely laughs at seeing the jolts and contortions of children, their throats cut. Is there anything more glaring than this “beautiful as an angel,” pronounced in front of the mother, and in front of the child who shall die — this boy of ten — pronounced by a man who, soon to be sitting on the belly of his victim, will lean forward the better to see, to bring to climax the joy drawn from his agony?

  The murder of Peronne Loessart’s child took place at Machecoul in September 1438. At this moment Gilles de Rais was not completely the tracked animal that he became a little bit more every day. But by the spring of 1440 he has no more money, the resources that remain are removed; public rumor grows, accusing him with deafening insistence. He is very much indeed the tracked animal who is blinded and attempts to forge his destiny: by force of arms he retakes the castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte from the man to whom he had sold it. This aberrant behavior is bound to attract dangerous reprisals, and any meaning it has descends from chaos and powerlessness.

  Gilles de Rais, from then on having no other outlet for escape than death, loses his footing. He lets himself founder blindly. On the same day, he hides a company of sixty men-at-arms in the forest; at the close of High Mass, he brandishes a combat-axe and brutally enters the church with several of them. He hurls himself screaming on the buyer’s brother, a clergyman charged with guarding the castle. Gilles de Rais is an energumen, a loose cannon in the church who roars: “Ha, ribald, you beat my men, and extorted from them; come outside the church or I’ll kill you on the spot!”

  The denouement of this tragedy is captured with almost perfect precision in the clerk-of-the-court exactitude of the trial record, reporting for us in this form, in French rather than Latin, the decisive aberrational outburst of this moment. We are unable to discover what triggered this abrupt anger in Gilles de Rais, suddenly refusing to tolerate the situation that resulted in the liquidation of his castles. But, violating the sanctity of the church, disdaining the ecclesiastic immunity of then-officiating Jean le Ferron, finally flouting the authority of the Duke of Brittany — the only support that he had left — he guaranteed his own ruin: his trial and execution follow shortly after the scene at Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte. Gilles de Rais believed he had one trump; he imprisoned Jean le Ferron in a dungeon; first at Saint-Étienne, then at Tiffauges. But only his naivete permitted him to see a way out where evidently he barely had a chance to catch his breath. Indeed, the Duke of Brittany was forced to run to the Constable of France, who alone had the power to act outside Brittany, at Tiffauges in Poitou. But this constable, Arthur de Richemont, was the Duke’s own brother: the madman had bought himself a few weeks. The Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte affair having occurred on May 15, 1440, Lord de Rais was executed on October 26th. Crimes that kept multiplying, desperate appeals to the Devil, finally the most foolish prank of all — there was nothing that did not work towards his rapid ruin.

  One knows that at first he was disdainfully insolent in the presence of his judges. His attitude has nothing calculated, nothing cunning in it; he passes from rudeness to collapse without transition. But he is a fool in his insolence. And if he reveals a grandeur beyond his baseness, it is in the calm of collapse. The courage and audacity with which he defies punishment and death are opposed to the panicked fear he has of the Devil. His courage and daring were proved in battle. But this tragic fear stands out if death alone is not in question, as it simply is in war: if crime and expiation call into play that which signifies tragedy, that which makes tragedy the very expression of destiny. In this sense the dialogue between judge and criminal, Pierre de L’Hôpital and Gilles de Rais, attains a rare degree of intensity. Dimly, the grandeur of this dialogue must have appeared from the shadows; that is why the scribe gives it in French, as he does every time that the proceedings, often encumbered with judicial pedantry, suddenly assume pathetic value.

  Interrupting the ecclesiastical proceedings with an extraordinary interrogation, only decided upon at the last instant in front of a prepared torture rack, the high secular magistrate Pierre de L’Hôpital insists that Gilles tell “from what motives, with what intent, and to what ends” he had his victims killed. The latter had only just specified how he committed his crimes “according to his imagination and idea, without anyone’s counsel, and following his own feelings, solely for his pleasure and carnal delight.” Gilles is disconcerted and tells him, in response:

  — Alas! Monsignor! you torment yourself and me along with you.

  Pierre de L’Hôpital’s retort is itself given in French:

  — I don’t torment myself in the least, but I’m very surprised at what you’ve told me and simply cannot be satisfied with it: I desire and would like to know the absolute truth from you for the reasons I’ve already told you often.

  — Truly, there was no other cause, no other end nor intention, if not what I’ve told you: I’ve told you greater things than this and enough to kill ten thousand men.

  What the secular magistrate is asking for is simple. It is what any man governed by reason wants to know. Why did Gilles kill? Following which instigations, which examples, why did he proceed in this manner, and in no other? The explanation of crime matters to a judge … Conversely, Gilles understood only a tragic, monstrous truth, of which he was the blind expression. This fatal need to kill, to kill without reason, which no words could clarify, which had possessed him as a gallop possesses an overexcited horse … It was not important to the guilty party to learn or reveal the origin of his crimes. These crimes had been what he himself inherently was, what he was deeply, tragically, so much so that he thought of nothing else. No explanation whatsoever. Nothing appears commensurate with the immense delirium that he experienced except for expiation, which he is going to experience. Expiation then is the only word that corresponds, in Rais’ mind, to what the judge would have wanted to know: “Enough to kill ten thousand men!” It is illogical, but it carries the spirit that is the life of the criminal; to the end this man must, I do not say live, but be drowned, immersed, in crime. The moment that the possibility of murder is taken away from him, in prison, confession binds him to what he does before everyone; and expiation, exposing his crimes to the crowd that is attracted by their enormity and the spectacle of his execution — confession, expiation, would continue to be his to the end. To the very last breath, he will live in crime and in the forgiveness that he will tearfully supplicate God to bestow on him while dying.

  “Enough to kill ten thousand men!”

  How could anyone display more pride or more humility?

  In tears, Lord de Rais renews his remorse: what he cannot do is stop being monstrous. It is a monster who cries and a monster’s repentance that he manifests. We must not deceive ourselves here. It is common to be moved by the piety of his last days. But these several words to follow, which the clerk of the court records, are troubling. They were addressed, at the end of a confrontation, to his young Florentine sorcerer, François Prelati. It is necessary to say here, without delay, that this Prelati was a cunning, cultivated comedian, but a lout; without a doubt, he seduced his master (by appearance, he was homosexual himself) and, to be sure, devoured him. To the end, he took advantage of Gilles’ naivete; one day he feigned having been mercilessly beaten with a stick by the Devil, howling and reappearing with wounds. But in the judges’ presence, when the accused was before him again, at the moment when Prelati left the hall, he said to him between sobs:

  — Goodbye! François, my friend! never again shall we see each other in this world; I pray that God gives you plenty of patience and understanding, and be sure, provided you have plenty of patience and trust in God, we will meet again in the great joy of paradise! Pray to God for me, and I will pray for you!

  Few human beings have left behind traces permitting them, after five centuries, to speak thus! to cry thus! Such scenes are not the work of an author. They happened: somehow we have the stenography of them. But we cannot be surprised at being left in uncertainty: the tragedy of this farewell does not dim
inish its ridiculousness. And if we look for coherence in the story, in this character, and in the whole affair, we have the premonition of a primary truth: this monster who, however, is quite the legendary monster, the Bluebeard of those countrysides over which the ruins of feudal walls and towers at night spread terror, this monster before us is like a child.

  We cannot deny the monstrosity of childhood. How often children would, if they could, be Gilles de Raises! Let us imagine the practically limitless power that he had at his disposal. Reason alone defines monstrosity, which we justifiably call monstrous from the fact that it belongs to man, to that being of reason. At bottom, neither the tiger nor the child are monsters, but in this world where reason rules, their apparent monstrosity is fascinating; they escape the necessary order.

  But I would now be induced to say in what fashion, and to what degree, the monster who — under the name of Gilles de Rais, then Bluebeard, and who haunted the mournful land of Rais — was a child.

  I cannot be content with the aspects that I have just now attributed to him. These aspects correspond to the power of fascination that permits me to evoke the figure after five hundred years. These aspects are relatively the most famous. This is not so with that foolishness, with that childishness, which I would like chiefly to render perceptible: foolishness and childishness have the habit of escaping attention. Wanting to illustrate the misunderstood aspects of Gilles de Rais, I must now link them to his whole life.

  The Heir of Great Lords

  Gilles de Rais, who became in 1429 Marshal de Rais, is the great-grand-nephew of Constable Guesclin, the grandson of Jean de Craon, and the son of Guy de Laval. The house of Laval-Montmorency, from which his father comes; that of Craons, from which his maternal grandfather comes; or that of Rais, from which, indirectly, he received the heritage and name, number among the noblest, richest, and most influential houses of feudal society of their time.