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 (25 page)
(
1440)
October 16 The testimony of Prelati
Hearing of the testimony of Francois Prelati, an Italian alchemist and conjuror in the service of Gilles de Rais from May 1439 to September 15, 1440 (p. 209). The place where this testimony was heard is not indicated.
October 17 The testimonies of Blanchet, Henriet and Poitou
Hearing of the testimonies of the priest Eustache Blanchet and the two valets, Henriet Griart and Étienne Corillaut (called Poitou), all three of them in the service of Gilles de Rais for several years until their arrest (pp. 216, 223 and 233).
It is possible that the hearing of these three witnesses took place in the morning, seeing that the prosecutor and Gilles de Rais were present — the court sits in the afternoon, at the hour of Vespers — in the great upper hall for the presentation and swearing in of fifty witnesses, soon to be heard, in particular, on the subject of the violation of ecclesiastical immunity: Lenano (the Marquis de Ceva), Bertrand Poulein, Jean Rousseau, Gilles Heaume, and Friar Jean de Lanté (pp. 186, 240-241).
October 19
At nine o’clock in the morning the court sits, with Gilles de Rais and the prosecutor in attendance, in the great upper hall of the castle, for the presentation and swearing in of fifteen additional witnesses (pp. 187 and 238).
October 20 The judges consider torture
Still in the great upper hall at nine o’clock in the morning, the prosecutor and Gilles de Rais appear before the Bishop and the Vicar of the Inquisitor (p. 189); these latter, at the prosecutor’s request, want to know what Gilles has to say or object to in the indictment, but the accused responds that he has nothing to say and, upon request, he agrees to the immediate publication of the testimonies that have just been collected. The prosecutor, “in order to shed light on and more thoroughly scrutinize the truth,” nonetheless asks the judges to apply torture; consequently the judges confer with the “experts,” who assist them in deciding that Gilles ought to be submitted to “interrogation and tortures.”
October 21
Sitting on the bench at nine o‘clock in the morning in the lower hall of La Tour Neuve, the judges send for the accused to have him tortured (p. 190). Gilles, brought forward, humbly begs them to defer the session until the following day: he will force himself to speak without the necessity of “interrogation.” He proposes speaking outside the room where the torture has been prepared to the Bishop of Saint-Brieuc, Jean Prégent, the representative of the ecclesiastical court, and to the President of Brittany, Pierre de L’Hôpital, the representative of the secular court. The judges consent to this proposition and accord the necessary delay.
At two o‘clock in the afternoon, the Bishop and the Vicar of the Inquisitor appear in the same lower hall (pp. 191-192); they send the Bishop Jean Prégent and Pierre de L’Hôpital to Gilles de Rais. They send them to the castle’s “high room” where the accused Marshal, who retained the privilege of decent quarters, resides.
First confession “Out of court”
The interrogation takes place with the attendance of Jean Petit, notary of the ecclesiastical court; Jean Labbé, the captain in the Duke of Brittany’s service who proceeded with the Machecoul arrests; his squire, Yvon de Rocerf, who was also at Machecoul; and finally the cleric Jean de Touscheronde, who leads the secular inquest.
These are the circumstances in which Gilles first confessed, that is to say “out of court” (pp. 191-195), independent of the ecclesiastical as well as the secular proceedings. It was noted to have been given “voluntarily, freely, and grievously.”
It is in this first confession that the accused mentions how his first crimes began in the year “his grandfather, Lord de La Suze, died”; in other words, in 1432. He then testifies that, despite Pierre de L’Hôpital’s insistent questioning on this point, 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, and not with any other intention or to any other end.”
The two commissioners then send for Francois Prelati. Gilles and this latter together give a detailed account of the invocations that followed on the arrival of the Italian alchemist, notably the offering of the hand, eyes, and heart of a child, which was prepared but not carried out. Gilles’ farewells to his accomplice follow.
After this interrogation, the two commissioners return to the lower hall of the castle, where they present the confession that they have obtained (p. 192), which must satisfy the judges since there is no more talk of torture after this.
October 22 The great or “in-court confession”
At the hour of Vespers, Gilles de Rais and the prosecutor appear again before the Bishop and the Vicar of the Inquisitor (p. 195) (no doubt in the upper hall of the castle).
(1440)
The judges ask the accused whether he wants to say anything else or object to what has already been said. He says no, but then spontaneously confesses before the judges what he already confessed “out of court.” The records represent him as speaking “with great contrition of heart and great grief, according as it appeared at first sight, and with a great effusion of tears.” Without straying from the first confession, he attempts to complete it, to remedy its faults or insufficiencies. He initially and significantly insists upon the first disorders of his youth, and asks that his confessions be published in French for those present, “the better part of whom did not know Latin.” He urges the strictness of fathers, mothers, and the friends of all children … He specifies the various tortures that he and his accomplices inflicted on their victims. He speaks of choosing the most beautiful heads of the dead children, and goes so far as to say that while watching them die he laughed with his accomplices.
He adds to that which concerns the murders some details on the invocations and his relations with Prelati. He recalls some of the furders in particular: the one at Bourgneuf, those of Jean Hubert and another page. Finally the murder at Vannes, where the body of the decapitated child was dropped into a cesspool.
He supplies some details on the attempts at invocation prior to Prelati’s arrival in 1438, and speaks of the intention he sometimes had of renouncing his wicked life and making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
He finally exhorts “the people,” and above all the numerous “ecclesiastics” attending his trial, to venerate our Holy Mother Church. He urges fathers of families to watch over their children, who ought not to be “too finely dressed,” or live in “laziness.” He expressly incriminates the excesses of eating and drinking, declaring that “laziness, an insatiable desire for delicacies, and the frequent consumption of mulled wine, more than anything else, kept him in a state of excitement that led to the perpetration of so many sins and crimes.”
He implores God’s pardon, then that of the parents and friends of the children whom he “so cruelly massacred … ,” asking all Christ’s faithful and worshipers for the assistance of their devoted prayers.
After this long confession, the text of which is the only conclusive one we have, the prosecutor asks that a day be fixed for “definitive sentences.” Among others, Jean Prégent and Pierre de L’Hôpital attend that hearing.
October 23
The secular court, after having heard their confessions — which sometimes followed almost literally, but at other times were complementary to, their depositions as witnesses before the ecclesiastical court (pp. 275 to 276) — condemns to death Gilles de Rais’ two valets, Henriet and Poitou, who are executed on the same day as their master, immediately after him.
October 25 The condemnation by the ecclesiastical court
The Bishop, Jean de Malestroit, and Friar Jean Blouyn, the Vicar of the Inquisitor, are sitting on the bench in La Tour Neuve castle’s great upper hall at nine o’clock in the morning when the prosecutor asks them for a conclusion of the trial and the promulgation of definitive sentences, with Gilles de Rais “hearing, understanding, and not contradicting” (p. 204). By a double sentence of the ecclesiastical court, the accused is declared, in the first place, “guilty of perfidious apostasy as well as of the dreadful invocation of demons”; in the second place, “guilty of committing and maliciously perpetrating the crime and unnatural vice of sodomy on children of both sexes” (pp. 207-208). He is excommunicated and subject to other lawful punishment. This condemnation of the secular court proceeds from that of the ecclesiastical court, following without delay the same day.
This promulgation once made, the judges immediately propose to reincorporate Gilles de Rais into the Church; Gilles de Rais thereupon begs them “devoutly, on his knees,” “with sighs and moans.” Reincorporated, he asks to be confessed, and immediately the judges instruct a religious of the Carmelite Order, Jean Jouvenel, to hear his private confession.
The religious trial is concluded.
The secular condemnation
Gilles de Rais is then transferred, very close by, to the castle at Bouffay, before the secular court, reunited under the presiding office of Pierre de L‘Hôpital, President of Brittany. Now he confesses to the Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte affair. Pierre de L’Hôpital, having asked the advice of several assistants, declares that, in this affair, the accused has incurred the previously pronounced fine (50,000 gold crowns), to be appropriated in property and paid to the Duke of Brittany; and that for his other crimes he shall be hanged and burned, the sentence to be carried out on the following day at eleven o’clock (pp. 281-284).
Gilles de Rais then asks that his servants Henriet and Poitou, also condemned to death, not be executed until after him, who had been the cause of their crimes; he fears that, if not, they might think that he, the principal guilty party, had gone unpunished. Pierre de L’Hôpital accords him this favor and, moreover, decides that the body of the condemned, rescued in time from the flames, shall be buried in a church of his choice. Gilles de Rais finally asks his judge to ask the Bishop to arrange, for the following morning, “a general procession in order to ask God to maintain in him and his said servants the firm hope of salvation.” Pierre de L’Hôpital agrees.
(1440)
October 26 Death
After the procession, followed by an immense crowd, Gilles de Rais is hanged, then delivered to the flames, but soon pulled from the flames. He is then buried “beside four or five ladies or young women of noble lineage.”
46
46
Henriet and Poitou are executed in turn and reduced to ashes, but Gilles’ remains are carried inside the church of Notre-Dame-du-Cannel of Nantes. His service is celebrated there, and he is placed in a tomb. He lies buried like this alongside other imposing persons of distinction. But the Revolution wreaked a macabre havoc on this church, which no longer exists.
Various Problems and Historical FactsThe question of the number of Gilles de Rais’ victims is unsolvable.
The civil trial is perhaps being reasonable when it says (p. 250): “the said Lord took many young children, and had them taken, not merely ten, nor twenty, but thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, one hundred, two hundred and more, such that the exact number can not be certified.”
The number provided in Article 27 of the ecclesiastical trial’s bill of indictment is a little more precise: Gilles had killed, or caused to be killed, “one hundred and forty, or more, children, boys and girls” (pp. 174-175).
Other figures provided by the trial are no more precise: Poitou and Henriet, by themselves, are said to have taken sixty and up. Elsewhere that figure is reduced to forty. These numbers are troublesome … On the other hand, Henriet is said to have killed twelve by his own hand. He would have killed eleven or twelve in the house of La Suze …
Henriet’s deposition before the ecclesiastical judges (p. 237) perhaps makes more sense. According to Henriet, Gilles “delighted in looking at their severed heads and showed them to him, the witness, and Étienne Corrillaut … , asking them which of the said heads was the most beautiful of those he was showing them, the head severed
at that very moment, or that from the day before, or another from the day before that …”
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It is not impossible to imagine that embellishment has perfected that horrible text; but in principle we are faced with a scene wherein, on one day alone, three children’s heads could be lying together. This inclines us to propose, at least vaguely, the hypothesis of a very large number.
at that very moment, or that from the day before, or another from the day before that …”
47
It is not impossible to imagine that embellishment has perfected that horrible text; but in principle we are faced with a scene wherein, on one day alone, three children’s heads could be lying together. This inclines us to propose, at least vaguely, the hypothesis of a very large number.
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