Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/488

 472 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. Rene de la Suze, and his cousin, the Admiral de Loheac, captured and garrisoned the castles of Champtoce and Machecoul, but in 1437 and 1438 Gilles retook them, with the aid of the duke, to whom he had sold the former.* Such was the external life of Gilles de Rais, to all appearance that of a liberal, pious noble, whose worst foible was thoughtless extravagance. Beneath the surface, however, lay an existence of crime more repulsive than anything chronicled -by Tacitus or Suetonius. There are some subjects so foul that one shrinks from the barest allusion to them, and of such are the deeds of Gilles de Rais. For the sake of human nature one might hope that the charges which brought him to the gallows and stake were invented by those who plotted his ruin, but an attentive examination of the evidence brings conviction that amid manifest exaggeration © DO there was substantial foundation of fact. Ordinary indulgence having palled upon the senses of the youthful voluptuary, about the year 1432 he abandoned himself to unnatural lusts, selecting as his victims children, whom he promptly slew to secure their silence. At first their bodies were thrown into oubliettes at the bottom of towers in his ordinary places of residence. When Champtoce was about to be surrendered to the duke, the bones of about forty children were hastily gathered together and carried off; when Rene de la Suze was advancing on Machecoul, the same number were extracted from their hiding-place and burned. Scared by this narrow escape from detection, Gilles subsequently had the bodies burned at once in the fireplace of his chamber and the ashes scattered in the moats. So depraved became his ap- petites that he found his chief enjoyment in the death agonies of his victims, over whose sufferings he gloated as he skilfully man- gled them and protracted their torture. When dead he would criticise their beauties with his confidential servitors, would com- pare one with another, and would kiss with rapture the heads which pleased him most. 2sot Caligula, when, to gain fresh ap- petite for his revels, he caused criminals to be tortured by the side of his banquet-table, or Nero, when enjoying the human torches 72-3, 78-81, 92-116, 173, 269; Pr. pp. cliv.-clv., clvii., clix.— Tres-Ancien Cou- tume de Bretagne c. 83 (Bourdot de Richebourg, IV. 220). — D'Argentre, Comment, in Consuetud. Britann. pp. 1647-55.
 * Bossard et Maulde, Gilles de Rais, dit Barbe-bleue, Paris, 1886, pp. 61-66,