Trial of Gilles De Rais Read Online Free Page A

which the old feudal lord initiated him. He will go even further, much further than the initiator, but only in response to his obsession, to his delirium. He acts feverishly. With Craon’s death, he enters into the hallucinatory series of child murders. Occasionally going beyond the demands of his passion, he also surrenders himself to unprofitable, scandalous acts of violence. But he never knows how to put immorality to his advantage. If he is cruel and unscrupulous, he forgets to attend to his interests, and ignores or neglects them.
    In this respect, the opposition between the grandfather and the grandson is most profound. It is perfect. Finally, the grandfather attempts to instill in Gilles an ambition conforming to his views. The rapacious old man imagines this impetuous young man, who will back down from nothing, becoming an influential man in the realm, augmenting the immense fortune that he is about to leave him. He will counsel him, he will set him on his way. Indeed, under these circumstances, Gilles’ courage and impetuosity will take him to the very top of the heap. In 1429, at twenty-five years old, glorious Marshal of France, companion of Joan of Arc, and liberator of Orléans — these things foretell, it seems, an incomparable destiny. But the success is fragile; it is the annunciation, the beginning of ruin; it introduces the incomparable disaster. What the old man sordidly would have turned to profit Gilles turns to delirium, to disorder. He has in himself a delirium and inordinateness that places him at the antipodes of this insensitive old man and his rational deceit. After the death of his grandfather, he lapses into incredible expenditures that in a matter of years will drain one of the largest fortunes of a period when, the difference between rich and poor being greater, the riches possessed were worth more than today. From the beginning, Gilles de Rais’ opulence is such that the greatest lords and the King were not equal to it. As Marshal of France he receives considerable wages; however, to him this post is above all — such is his propensity — the occasion for excessive expenditures. The need to shine makes his head swim: he cannot resist the possibility of dazzling spectators; he has to astound others through incomparable splendor. Others would have turned the glory that he originally had to their fortune’s advantage. It succeeds, on the contrary, in driving him to his ruin; it plunges him into a state of increased extravagance. At all costs, he must dazzle others; but it is he himself, ahead of the others, that he dazzles. The impulse, which is not so rare, attains a sickly frenzy in Gilles. Gilles de Rais is not only the monstrous criminal, he is the mad prodigal: extravagance is like drunkenness. Jean de Craon had thought that by his becoming a man of the first rank he would know how to sober up, but the status he achieved actually served to intoxicate him more; he gave way without measure to his need to astonish through magnificent fairytale expenditures.
    The conflict between the grandfather and the grandson first breaks out in 1424, when at the age of twenty Gilles demands the administration of all of his assets. The grandfather immediately reacts. It results in a violent tension between the two men.
    Yet Craon cannot maintain a firm stand. How could this harsh grandfather, however indifferent, persist? He lost his only son in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. And if he had hoped, by marrying again, that his wife would give him a direct heir, he must have finally gotten used to the idea that this grandson, with whom he was on bad terms, would inherit his great fortune.
    He assumed responsibility for Gilles after the death of his father, the same year as the death of his son; he gave him a disastrous education. Not only did he give him his own bad example, but he foolishly abandoned him to the idleness and mayhem of childhood.
    We know from the declarations of Gilles himself at the trial