Gilles appears to have despised
the sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds of
the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the
prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine
form came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is
deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the
delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of
femininity which all sodomists abhor.

"He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose them
in the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty,
and 'beautiful as angels' they are. They are the only ones he loves, the
only ones he spares in his murderous transports.

"But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The law
of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go
the whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles's soul must become
thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell
at ease.

"The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over
a slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do
not know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing
out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati's chamber.
The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who
holds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poor
remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in
consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.

"Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation
and conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward the
Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been
sown.

"From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the
Marshal's retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, and
Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the children
disappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girls
coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the
lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.

"In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the
scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke's commissioner in these matters,
compile interminable lists of lost children.

"Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman Peronne, '