Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/497

 GILLES DE RAIS. % 481 demanded that Gilles should do the same, as prescribed by legal form, but the latter obstinately refused, though summoned four times and threatened with excommunication. The only notice he would take of the proceedings was to denounce all the charges as false.* It was worse at the hearing of the 13th, when the accusations had been reduced to writing in a formidable series of forty-nine articles. When the bishop and inquisitor asked him what he had to say in defence, Gilles haughtily retorted that they were not his judges; he had appealed from them and would make no reply to the charges. Then, giving rein to his temper, he stigmatized them as simoniacs and scoundrels, before whom it was degradation for him to appear; he would rather be hanged by the neck than acknowledge them as his judges ; he wondered that Pierre de l'Hopital, president or chief judicial officer of Brittany, who was present, would allow ecclesiastics to meddle with such crimes as were alleged against him. In spite of his reclamations the indict- ment was read, when he simply denounced it as a pack of lies and refused to answer formally. Then, after repeated warnings, the bishop and inquisitor pronounced him contumacious and excom- municated him. He again appealed, but the appeal was rejected as frivolous, and he was given forty-eight hours in which to frame a defence, f The charges formed a long and most elaborate paper, showing by its detail of individual cases that by this time Gilles's servitors must have been induced to make full confessions. For the first time there appear in it the sacrilege and violation of clerical im- munity committed at Saint -fitienne, and the charge of child- murder only figures as an accessory to the other crimes to which it was connected. Everything, however, that could be alleged against him was gathered together, even to inordinate eating and drinking, which were assumed to have led to his other excesses. His transient fits of repentance and vows of amendment were utilized ingeniously to prove that he was a relapsed heretic and thus deprived of all chance of escape. In the conclusion the prosecutor apportioned the charges between the two jurisdictions. The bishop and inquisitor conjointly were prayed to declare him III.— 30*
 * Bossard et Maulde, Pr. pp. xi -xii. t Ibid. Pr. pp. xiii.-xiv.