by Jim Shepard
Chasms opened beneath me, as if the earth would swallow my sin. I wept. I fell to the ground. I regained my feet. One morning I lay in a wheat field and some farmers saw me and were astonished, but said nothing. We were bound to our lord from the crowns of our heads to the soles of our feet. While he looked down from his heights of Pandemonium. And we fell under the spell of the slaughter with its reddish-brown eyes: ushers kept the doors, clerks added the accounts, squires dressed the dishes, and serving maids swept the halls and beat the coverlets, all while our souls, at their own bidding, flew headlong into dreadful extremity.
Our lord announced he was going to take a hand in our education. For two straight nights he appeared in our chambers and read to us from Suetonius. Then without explanation he stopped, growing increasingly agitated and impatient. Henriet in our more private moments explained why: he was spending over fifteen hundred livres per day. His family’s wealth consisted of land and property, but what was needed, perpetually, was accessible money. For him wealth no longer counted as such unless it had wings and admitted of rapid exchange. In Machecoul he had founded his own chapel, the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, with a Collégiale of the finest voices and most beautiful faces he could find. Of the chapel itself it was said that even visitors from Paris had never seen the like: great glittering cascades of ornament engraved and set with precious stones and gold and silver, with all deacons, archdeacons, curates, and choirboys robed in vermilion and white silk with tawny furs and surplices of black satin and hooded capes. One wall was a towering organ, and he additionally commissioned a portable one it took six men to carry so he should not be deprived of music when obliged to travel. When the chapel was completed he had himself named Canon of Saint-Hilaire de Poitiers so he might wear the multihued ecclesiastical robes he himself had designed. He found a boy who resembled him so powerfully that the boy was designated Rais le Héraut, and dressed more magnificently than anyone, and given a place of honor in the cortége whenever the household rode out. So that everywhere our lord went, he could see himself preceding himself: our lord in white, Rais le Héraut in the deepest black.
When we traveled, our procession might take two days to fully pass through a town. When we halted we filled every tavern and lodging house. When we moved on, local innkeepers and tradesmen displayed the stunned and dull-eyed satisfaction of overfed cattle. And in addition to all this he was preparing to mount the mystery play he had commissioned, which at its climax depicted him at his moment of greatest glory. The Mystery of the Siege of Orleans was to be presented in that city upon the tenth anniversary of the raising of the siege, and featured twenty thousand lines of verse, one hundred and forty speaking parts, six hundred extras, and three specially built revolving stages. Each costume was to be made from new material. Even beggars’ rags were to be created by slashing and defacing fine cloth. No costume could be worn twice. And unlimited supplies of food and drink were to be available to all spectators.
It seemed inconceivable that our household would find itself short of gold, but any number of estates and properties were mortgaged. And Henriet and I would be sent to retrieve bodies from our lord’s bedchambers. He mortgaged properties twice and then refused to abandon them. He ransomed merchants and travelers. And finally he had to sell off estates. He sold two great crucifixes of pure silver. He sold his manuscript of Valerius Maximus and his Latin City of God and his parchment Metamorphoses of Ovid bound in emerald leather and secured with a golden lock. He sold the silver reliquary enclosing the head of Saint-Honoré, his most precious relic.
He sold so much that finally his brother and his extended family wrote to the Pope asking His Holiness to disavow the foundation of the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, and to the King requesting an edict forbidding the sale of any further family property. Both petitions were granted. Soon after, word came from his brother that his nephews had discovered a pipe full of dead children in the keep at Chemillé. Nothing came of it. In his family’s eyes, once their property was safe, whatever else our lord did was his affair.
It was logical, then, that our lord would employ someone to manufacture more wealth. Joan had had secret knowledge and had put it, while he watched, to kingdom-shaking use. And now he, too, needed to appeal to secret powers. The world was an epistle and every scholar’s dream was to unlock its hidden instructions. Most did so by searching for the philosopher’s stone, which would transmute base metals to gold. Cold water could when heated be turned to hot air. In the same way other bodies could be similarly transformed. It was a matter of discovering the correct agent of change.
This was explained to us in a meeting convened in the secret room at Tiffauges. While our lord addressed us I looked over at the bed where he first held the jeweled dagger to my throat.
We were being taken into this confidence because we would all be a part of the great search about to begin. The sibyl foretold the future, but the conjurer made it, by recruiting Nature itself to fulfill his designs. There was an old saying in war that our lord had never forgotten: “Is there a chance? Where Prudence says no, the devil says yes.” There were demons who had the power to reveal hidden treasure, teach philosophy, and guide those boldest of men who sought to make their way in the world. Years ago he’d received from a knight imprisoned in Anjou for heresy a book on the arts of alchemy and the evocation of devils. Gerbert, later to be Pope, was said to have studied astrology and other arts in Spain under the Saracens and to have summoned ghostly figures from the lower world, some of whom abetted his ascension to the papacy. Sylvester II was said to have been taught to make clocks and other infernal devices by wraiths he had summoned. We would each now put our energies into locating alchemists. I would accompany Gilles de Sillé, as Henriet would Roger de Briqueville. The latter pair would travel to Italy, the center of alchemic knowledge, accompanied by a priest from Saint-Malo whose presence would make such inquiries less dangerous.
With my lord’s cousin I traversed much of France, without success. We found a goldsmith who claimed he could heal, prophesy, conjure, cast love charms, and transmute silver into gold. We gave him a silver coin and locked him in a room, and he got drunk and fell asleep. Others stepped forward as conjurers. One drowned en route to Tiffauges. Another’s face was of such frightening aspect that our lord refused to be shut in the tower with him. But the other group returned from Italy by the year’s end with a youth named François Prelati who’d received his tonsure from the Bishop of Arezzo, having studied geomancy and other arts and sciences. He had sapphire eyes and ringletted blond hair. He wore shells from Saint James of Compostela and a holy napkin from Rome. He’d been to the East, where he claimed to have witnessed the blasphemous Marriage of the Apes, after which the celebrant cleansed his hands in molten lead. He spoke Latin and French and as a test in Florence had invoked twenty crows in the upper story of his house. He claimed he regularly conjured a demon named Barron who usually appeared as a beautiful young man. Our lord immediately had him installed in the bedchamber across from his own, and provided with everything he needed.
Experiments commenced the night his laboratory was ready. Henriet and I watched from beyond the door and outside a ring drawn into the floor with the point of a sword. Our lord and Gilles de Sillé waited just outside the circle, the latter holding to his chest his figurine of the Blessed Virgin. The conjuror’s face was jacklit by the green glow from his athanor, but it was unclear from the smell what he was burning. He spoke in Latin and when he stopped a cold wind blew through the tall and narrow window behind him. He drew ciphers in the center of each of the four walls. Then he poured a glittering powder into his little fire, from which a stinking smoke drove everyone from the room.
Our presence was commanded throughout the sessions that followed, in the event there was assistance the conjuror might require. The following night our lord brought with him a pact written in his own hand and bearing his signature. When it was burned in the athanor a great clattering rose above us, as though a four-legged animal was
cantering on the roof.
More nights followed with the demon manifesting himself yet not appearing. The conjuror spied him and conversed with him when we could not. This progress made our lord wild with success and impatience. What else did the demon require? A week of conjurings passed before he answered. Then he said, through the conjuror in a changed voice, a soul.
Beside me in the doorway, Henriet’s respiration shifted. This was the awful bargain we’d each expected.
“Well, he can’t have mine,” our lord told the conjuror. And in the silence that followed he added that he would get him the next-best thing.
The next morning I was told to convey a bolt of strong cloth and four loaves of bread and a sester of good milk to Henriet, who was going back to the village after having negotiated that price for an infant. That night our lord passed us in the doorway to the conjuror’s room holding a vessel covered in linen, the way a priest holds a ciborium. He told the conjuror to tell the demon that he had come to offer this holy innocent’s heart and eyes, and the glass when he uncovered it was smeared and the contents inside were ropy and bulbous and filled only the very bottom.
And again the demon did not appear. Henriet and I were charged with wrapping the remains in the linen cloth and burying them before daybreak in consecrated ground near the chapel.
The conjuror suggested a new method of invocation that involved a crested bird and a dyadrous stone. The latter could not be procured. Attempts were made with serpents’ hearts and with the conjuror wearing a thin crown fashioned from pitch and umbilical cords.
Our lord spent more time in solitude. His aspect around those children we produced was more melancholic and distracted. He talked without explanation of his allies’ desertion. He remarked during the disposal of one girl that he had been born under such a constellation that it seemed to him no one would ever comprehend the things he did.
He moved to Bourgneuf, where he stayed in a convent. He had another boy brought to him there. On All Saints’ Day he informed us that Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville had gone abroad without explanation. The Dauphin announced a visit to Tiffauges, and Henriet and I were sent back at a gallop to ensure that all of the conjuror’s vessels and furnaces were hidden or smashed.
In the villages even the poorest parents now flew at our approach. It was openly asserted that the lord de Rais was writing a book on the black arts and using as ink the blood of the children he’d butchered, and that when it was complete he would have the power to take any stronghold he wished. We still managed to deliver two boys, ten and seven, and then two others, fourteen and four. When he was in his cups he would lie back on his bed in the secret room, mottled in gore from the waist down, and lament that his world was disintegrating for yet a third occasion. During the first, the death of his parents, he’d had his grandfather for support; and during the second, the death of his grandfather, he’d had his wealth. Now what did he have? he asked us.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Henriet told him.
He attended Easter service and received the sacraments among the poor, waving them forward to receive before him when they tried to stand aside out of respect for his position. He spent three days alone in his chambers in fasting and prayer. Then he decided to repossess the castle of Saint-Etienne-de-Mer-Morte, which he’d sold to Jean V’s treasurer. Having done so, he held at sword point in the chapel the officiating priest, the new owner’s brother, whom he then pitched into the castle’s dungeon.
He had violated ecclesiastical property, attacked a member of the duke’s household, and transgressed against the rights of familial possession. That night the conjuror and the priest from Saint-Malo did not respond to his summons, and sent no word of where they might be located. He spent the next days consumed with his design for a velvet doublet waisted in silk that was embroidered along its length with Saint John’s Gospel in golden thread, which he presented to a new page whom he then murdered and incinerated before us.
We alone stayed, our only home now the mad ostentation of his cruelty. Perhaps we imagined that since devils were only as active as God suffered them to be, no one would undertake to punish His instruments. I stopped eating. Henriet fell into greater and greater silences. One night he said only that he knew when my upset was at its most extreme, because I then crossed my arms and held my hands to my shoulders. He refused to add to this insight. On another occasion while we lay there on our pallets in the dark, he wondered what there was for us to do, now, but to low and bleat and wait for the culling.
It was not long in coming. On the fifteenth of September a body of men under the command of Jean Labbé, acting in the name of Jean V and Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, presented themselves at Machecoul and demanded that the lord de Rais constitute himself their prisoner so he might answer to the triple charge of witchcraft, murder, and sodomy. Our lord had taken particular care dressing that morning, as though he expected them. We were arrested with him, and taken to Nantes.
We rode together in a covered carriage, Henriet with his head in his hands. The lord de Rais held forth the entire journey. He said he was praying to Saint Dominic, to whose order the powers of the Inquisition had been conferred. He said he had heard of a man in Savenay who, despairing of cure, had amputated his foot and then, having fallen asleep praying to the Virgin, had roused himself to find his foot restored. He said no one, rich or poor, was secure, but waited day to day on the will of the Lord.
Henriet kept his head in his hands. The lord de Rais ignored him and addressed me. He noted that I once again had nothing to offer in response. But he said he’d seen my soul. He knew it by heart. He’d noted my hours of discouragement and been present at my yielding.
I had no response for that, either. The lord de Rais stopped speaking. His single other comment, before we arrived, was that he was glad that his François, the conjuror, had escaped.
. . .
The lord de Rais was summoned to appear before the ecclesiastical judge appointed by the Bishop of Nantes on the Monday following the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 19 September 1440. Our presence was commanded as well. We were seated in a small dock beside the notary public. He was first charged with doctrinal heresy which violated divine majesty and subverted and weakened the faith. He was next charged with sacrilege and violation of the immunity of the Church related to his having threatened with a sword a cleric standing on holy ground. He was then charged with sodomy, the Inquisitor, from the Order of Preaching Brothers, reminding the assembled that the act of depositing semen anywhere other than the vessel for which it was intended was a sin so fundamental that self-abuse was a more serious crime than rape. The Inquisitor cited the prophet who cries out and chides, “Sons of men: how low does your heart sink?”
We were advised that those of us mindful of our salvation should undertake to set forth an extrajudicial confession. When I asked Henriet upon our return to our cell if he intended to attempt such a document, he said that he looked forward to a time when the whole globe was scoured of inhabitants, with houses left vacant, towns deserted, fields too small for the dead, and crows on the highest branches shouldering one another in their solitude. He said we were like those rough countrymen during the years of the plague who were persuaded despite all to carry the corpses to the pits.
He agreed to read my account as I set it down. Having done so to this juncture, he remarked that he found it impossible to assert which was the more astonishing, the author’s memoir or his crimes. When I questioned his response he wondered with some irritation if I’d been struck by the oddity of the author’s having felt so acutely for the raptors, and not their quarry.
“I’ve felt remorse for all of those children,” I told him.
“You wrote that he had this or that person’s throat cut,” he answered. “But you neglected to indicate who sometimes did the cutting.”
At the hour of terce on Saturday, 8 October, the lord de Rais refused to take the oath on the Sacred Scripture and, having de
clined to respond to the articles of indictment, was excommunicated in writing. On 15 October he consented to recognize the court’s jurisdiction and admitted to many of his crimes and misdeeds. On 20 October, in order that the truth might be more fully elucidated, it was proposed that the question of torture be put to the defendant. On 21 October he petitioned that the application of torture be deferred, and on 22 October offered his full and public confession.
He spoke for four full hours. He offered the assembly a diptych of Paradise and Hell with himself as the central figure in both panels, in the former a paragon of the highest ideals of Christian knighthood, and in the latter evil’s conscienceless servant. He said he believed his acts to have been halted by the hand of God, and that by the same hand he expected to be granted salvation. He freely related all of his crimes in luxurious detail and admitted he had offended our Savior because of the bad guidance he had received in his childhood, and he implored with great emotion all parents present to raise their children with good teachings and virtuous examples. He requested that his confession be published in French for the benefit of the common people. He exhorted everyone in the court, especially the churchmen, to always revere Holy Mother Church, and added that without his own love for her he would never have been able to evade the Devil’s grasp. At the end he fell to his knees and tearfully asked for mercy and remission from his Creator and for the support of the prayers of all those, present or absent, who believed in Christ and adored Him.