ent, a mad curiosity concerning the forbidden sciences.
All this explains why, little by little, as the bonds uniting him to the
world of alchemists and sorcerers grow stronger, he throws himself into
the occult and is swept on by it into the most unthinkable crimes.

"Then as to being a 'ripper' of children--and he didn't immediately
become one, no, Gilles did not violate and trucidate little boys until
after he became convinced of the vanity of alchemy--why, he does not
differ greatly from the other barons of his times.

"He exceeds them in the magnitude of his debauches, in opulence of
murders, and that's all. It's a fact. Read Michelet. You will see that
the princes of this epoch were redoubtable butchers. There was a sire de
Giac who poisoned his wife, put her astride of his horse and rode at
breakneck speed for five leagues, until she died. There was another,
whose name I have forgotten, who collared his father, dragged him
barefoot through the snow, and calmly thrust him into a subterranean
prison and left him there until he died. And how many others! I have
tried, without success, to find whether in battles and forays the
Marshal committed any serious misdeeds. I have discovered nothing,
except that he had a pronounced taste for the gibbet; for he liked to
string up all the renegade French whom he surprised in the ranks of the
English or in the cities which were not very much devoted to the king.

"We shall find his taste for this kind of torture manifesting itself
later on in the chateau de Tiffauges.

"Now, in conclusion, add to all these factors a formidable pride, a
pride which incites him to say, during his trial, 'So potent was the
star under which I was born that I have done what no one in the world
has done nor ever can do.'

"And assuredly, the Marquis de Sade is only a timid bourgeois, a
mediocre fantasist, beside him!"

"Since it is difficult to be a saint," said Des Hermies, "there is
nothing for it but to be a Satanist. One of the two extremes.
'Execration of impotence, hatred of the mediocre,' that, perhaps, is one
of the more indulgent definitions of Diabolism."

"Perhaps. One can take pride in going as far in crime as a saint in
virtue. And that expresses Gilles de Rais exactly."

"All the same, it's a mean subject to handle."

"It certainly is, but happily the documents are abundant. Satan was
terrible to the Middle Ages--"

"And to the modern."

"What do you mean?"

That Satanism