imes of magic and sadism."

"But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of
piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar
into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."

"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together
the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been
narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be
precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He
witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown.
Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the
divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step.
In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the
territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of
sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by
whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."

"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for
his career of evil?"

"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for
anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.

"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment
Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most
learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men
who frequented the chateau de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists,
marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians
of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them
than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the
biographers agree to represent--wrongly, I think--as vulgar parasites
and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of
the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they
would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or
pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge
in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed,
the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated
enough to understand them.

"To sum up: natural mysticism on one hand, and, on the other, daily
association with savants obsessed by Satanism. The sword of Damocles
hanging over his head, to be conjured away by the will of the Devil,
perhaps. An ard