Gilles de Rais alias Blue Beard

After the years of glory, Gilles seemed to have found life unbearably dull. During the course of the following year, according to his later confession, he committed his first sex murder, that of a boy. His grandfather willed his sword and cuirass to the younger brother René but died in the following year. Gilles was suddenly able to do what he liked.

One day, a young boy dubbed Poitou was brought to the château and raped, after which Gilles prepared to cut his throat. At this point, Gilles de Sille pointed out that Poitou was such a handsome boy that he would make an admirable page. So Poitou was allowed to live, and become one of Gilles’ most trusted mignons.

Gilles’ attacks of sadism seem to have descended on him like an epileptic fit, and turned him into a kind of maniac. A boy would be lured to the castle on some pretext, and once inside Gilles’ chamber, was hung from the ceiling on a rope or chain. But before he had lost consciousness, he was taken down and reassured that Gilles meant him no harm. Then he would be stripped and raped, after which Gilles, or one of his cronies would cut this throat or decapitate him (they had a special sword called a braquemard for removing the head).

But Gilles was still not sated; he would continue to sexually abuse the dead body, playing with the head in grotesque manner, sometimes cutting open the stomach, then squatting in the entrails and masturbating. When he reached a climax he would collapse in a faint, and be carried off to his bed, where he would remain unconscious for hours.

His accomplices would meanwhile dismember and burn the body. On some occasions, he later confessed, two children were procured, and each obliged to watch the other being raped and tortured.

Gilles was not merely sexually deranged; he was also a reckless spendthrift. He surrounded himself with a retinue of two hundred knights, for whom he provided. He loved to give banquets and fêtes; in 1435, when the city of Orléans celebrated its deliverance by Joan of Arc, Gilles presented a long mystery play about the siege, with enormous sets and a cast of hundreds, playing, of course, the leading role himself. He also provided food and wine for the spectators. Like a Roman emperor he must have felt that he was virtually a god.

In a mere three years he had spent what would now be the equivalent of millions of dollars. Back at Machécoul, he had to sell some of his most valuable estates. His brother was so alarmed that he persuaded the king to issue an interdict forbidding any further sales of land. For a man of Gilles’ unbridled temperament, this was an intolerable position. He went into a gloomy and self-pitying retirement.

Years before, when he first went to court, he had borrowed a book on alchemy from an Angevin knight who had been imprisoned for heresy. Alchemy was prohibited by law, and for a man with Gilles’ romantic craving for “the forbidden,” this must have been an additional incentive to learn more about it. Now, ten years later, with his coffers empty, he realised that black magic might be the answer to his problems.

Gilles then asked a priest named Eustache Blanchet to find him a magician. Several were tried, but the results were poor until one of them, a man named Fontanelle, succeeded in conjuring up twenty crows whereas the others were not even able to conjure up a few birds. But Fontanelle also claimed he had conjured up a demon called Barron; Gilles was then advised that his only way of learning to make gold was to agree to sell his soul to the Devil. Despite his taste for killing children, Gilles remained a devout Catholic; so deciding to invoke the Devil must have seemed a far more frightening step than murder.

But finally, he and his cousin Gilles de Sille locked themselves in the basement of his castle at Tiffauges, together with Fontanelle, and prepared to converse with demons. The magician warned them solemnly not to make the sign of the cross, or their lives would be in great danger. Sille stayed by the window, prepared to jump out; Gilles ventured fearfully into the magic circle and watched the beginning of the conjuration. The legend says that the three men were brutally ejected from the donjon before the roof collapsed. Fontanelle disappeared, either killed or escaped.

However, Gilles needed money so badly that there seemed no other way than continuing with his magical experiments. In 1439, he sent the priest Blanchet to Italy to search for a more skilled magician; Blanchet returned with a “clerk in minor orders” called François Prelati, a young man of great charm–and also, apparently, a homosexual. It is hard to know whether he was simply a confidence trickster or whether he had some genuine knowledge of the magic arts; but Gilles found him immensely attractive and trusted him completely.

Prelati told him that they would have to offer a child’s blood and parts of its body as a sacrifice to the Devil; Gilles agreed but still refused to take the final step, of selling his soul to the Devil. Prelati told him that in that case, he would have to continue the conjurations alone. During one of these sessions, Gilles and his cousin heard loud thumps from inside the room; they looked in and found Prelati “so hurt that he could hardly stand up.” He explained that he had been beaten by the demon Barron, and had to take to his bed for several days, during which time Gilles nursed him tenderly.

On another occasion, he rushed out to tell Gilles that he had finally conjured up a heap of gold. Gilles rushed back to see it, but Prelati was there first; as he opened the door, he staggered back and shouted that a huge green serpent guarded it. Gilles fled. When he returned, the gold had vanished, leaving only piles of dust…