CHAPTER XI
Contrary to his expectations, he slept all night, with clenched fists,and woke next morning quite calm, even gay. The scene of the nightbefore, which ought to have exacerbated his senses, produced exactly theopposite effect. The truth is that Durtal was not of those who areattracted by difficulties. He always made one hardy effort to surmountthem, then when that failed he would withdraw, with no desire to renewthe combat. If Mme. Chantelouve thought to entice him by delays, she hadmiscalculated. This morning, already, he was weary of the comedy.
His reflections began to be slightly tinged with bitterness. He wasangry at the woman for having wished to keep him in suspense, and he wasangry at himself for having permitted her to make a fool of him. Thencertain expressions, the impertinence of which had not struck him atfirst, chilled him now. "Her nervous trick of laughing, which sometimescaught her in public places," then her declaration that she did not needhis permission, nor even his person, in order to possess him, seemed tohim unbecoming, to say the least, and uncalled for, as he had not runafter her nor indeed made any advances to her at all.
"I will fix you," he said, "when I get some hold over you."
But in the calm awakening of this morning the spell of the woman hadrelaxed. Resolutely he thought, "Keep two dates with her. This onetonight at her house. It won't count, because nothing can be done. For Iintend neither to allow myself to be assaulted nor to attempt anassault. I certainly have no desire to be caught by Chantelouve _inflagrante delicto_, and probably get into a shooting scrape and be haledinto police court. Have her here once. If she does not yield then, why,the matter is closed. She can go and tickle somebody else."
And he made a hearty breakfast, and sat down to his writing table andran over the scattered notes for his book.
"I had got," he said, glancing at his last chapter, "to where thealchemic experiments and diabolic evocations have proved unavailing.Prelati, Blanchet, all the sorcerers and sorcerers' helpers whom theMarshal has about him, admit that to bring Satan to him Gilles must makeover his soul and body to the Devil or commit crimes.
"Gilles refuses to alienate his existence and sell his soul, but hecontemplates murder without any horror. This man, so brave on thebattlefield, so courageous when he accompanied Jeanne d'Arc, tremblesbefore the Devil and is afraid when he thinks of eternity and of Christ.The same is true of his accomplices. He has made them swear on theTestament to keep the secret of the confounding turpitudes which thechateau conceals, and he can be sure that not one will violate the oath,for, in the Middle Ages, the most reckless of freebooters would notcommit the inexpiable sin of deceiving God.
"At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces,Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set onfire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethesin tumultuous eruption.
"Now, there are no women in the chateau. Gilles appears to have despisedthe sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds ofthe camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of theprostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminineform came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence isdeteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by thedelicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour offemininity which all sodomists abhor.
"He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose themin the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty,and 'beautiful as angels' they are. They are the only ones he loves, theonly ones he spares in his murderous transports.
"But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The lawof Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must gothe whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles's soul must becomethoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwellat ease.
"The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind overa slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we donot know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearingout the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati's chamber.The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, whoholds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poorremains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them inconsecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.
"Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocationand conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward theMarshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever beensown.
"From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between theMarshal's retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, andBrittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the childrendisappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girlscoming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in thelanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.
"In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, thescribes 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, 'a child whodid go to school and who did apply himself to his book with exceedingdiligence.'
"Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, 'andthis was a poor man and sought alms.'
"Lost, at Machecoul, the son of Georget le Barbier, 'who was seen, acertain day, knocking apples from a tree behind the hotel Rondeau, andwho since hath not been seen.'
"Lost, at Thonaye, the child of Mathelin Thouars, 'and he had been heardto cry and lament and the said child was about twelve years of age.'
"At Machecoul, again, the day of Pentecost, mother and father Sergentleave their eight-year-old boy at home, and when they return from thefields 'they did not find the said child of eight years of age,wherefore they marvelled and were exceeding grieved.'
"At Chantelou, it is Pierre Badieu, mercer of the parish, who says thata year or thereabouts ago, he saw, in the domain de Rais, 'two littlechildren of the age of nine who were brothers and the children of RobinPavot of the aforesaid place, and since that time neither have they beenseen neither doth any know what hath become of them.'
"At Nantes, it is Jeanne Darel who deposes that 'on the day of the feastof the Holy Father, her true child named Olivier did stray from her,being of the age of seven and eight years, and since the day of thefeast of the Holy Father neither did she see him nor hear tidings.'
"And the account of the investigation goes on, revealing hundreds ofnames, describing the grief of the mothers who interrogate passersby onthe highway, and telling of the keening of the families from whose veryhomes children have been spirited away when the elders went to thefields to hoe or to sow the hemp. These phrases, like a desolaterefrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: 'Theywere seen complaining dolorously,' 'Exceedingly they did lament.'Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.
"At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil fairies andmalicious genii are dispersing the generation, but little by littleterrible suspicions are aroused. As soon as the Marshal quits a place,as he goes from the chateau de Tiffauges to the chateau de Champtoce,and from there to the castle of La Suze or to Nantes, he leaves behindhim a wake of tears. He traverses a countryside and in the morningchildren are missing. Trembling, the peasant realizes also that whereverPrelati, Roger de Bricqueville, Gilles de Sille, any of the Marshal'sintimates, have shown themselves, little boys have disappeared. Finally,the peasant learns to look with horror upon an old woman, PerrineMartin, who wanders around, clad in grey, her face covered--as is thatof Gilles de Sille--with a black stamin. She accosts children, and herspeech is so seductive, her face, when she raises her veil, so benign,that all follow her to the edge of a wood, where men carry them off,gagged, in sacks. And the frightened people call this purveyor of flesh,this ogress, 'La Mefrraye,' from the name of a bird of prey.
"These
emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets,tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sirede Bricqueville. Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes tostanding at a window of the chateau, and when young mendicants,attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs anappraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in andthrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being inappetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.
"How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them? He himselfdid not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murdershe had committed. The texts of the times enumerate between, seven andeight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seemsoverconservative. Entire regions were devastated. The hamlet ofTiffauges had no more young men. La Suze was without male posterity. AtChamptoce the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses.A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, "thatone hight Du Jardin hath heard say that there was found in the saidcastle a wine pipe full of dead little children.'
"Even today traces of these assassinations linger. Two years ago atTiffauges a physician discovered an oubliette and brought forth piles ofskulls and bones.
"Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed theatrocious details.
"At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent, enkindled byinflammatory spiced beverages and by 'high' venison, Gilles and hisfriends retire to a distant chamber of the chateau. The little boys arebrought from their cellar prisons to this room. They are disrobed andgagged. The Marshal fondles them and forces them. Then he hacks them topieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them.At other times he slashes the boy's chest and drinks the breath from thelungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges theincision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while hemacerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks overhis shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. Hehimself says afterwards, 'I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures,tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.'
"Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys. An unpublished passage inhis trial proceedings informs us that 'The said sire heated himself withlittle boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congressin the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than actingin nature.' After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them topieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in thefireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and theashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from thetop of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.
"Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rageof his senses with living or moribund beings. He wearies of stupratingpalpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate artist, hekisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims. Heestablishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncatedheads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kissesthe cold lips.
"Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children,appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of thetomb. He even goes so far--one day when his supply of children isexhausted--as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the foetus.After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar tothose heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after hisviolations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the knownphases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexualpervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the mostdelirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by adetail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.
"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longersuffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is nolonger the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing withthe body of a victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; itbecomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body andsoul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupesaffection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of humaninfamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.
"He contrives this: One of the unfortunate children is brought into hischamber, and hanged, by Bricqueville, Prelati, and de Sille, to a hookfixed into the wall. Just at the moment when the child is suffocating,Gilles orders him to be taken down and the rope untied. With someprecaution, he takes the child on his knees, revives him, caresses him,rocks him, dries his tears, and pointing to the accomplices, says,'These men are bad, but you see they obey me. Do not be afraid. I willsave your life and take you back to your mother,' and while the littleone, wild with joy, kisses him and at that moment loves him, Gillesgently makes an incision in the back of the neck, rendering the child'languishing,' to follow Gilles's own expression, and when the head, notquite detached, bows, Gilles kneads the body, turns it about, andviolates it, bellowing.
"After these abominable pastimes he may well believe that the art of thecharnalist has beneath his fingers expressed its last drop of pus, andin a vaunting cry he says to his troop of parasites, "There is no man onearth who dare do as I have done.'
"But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certainsouls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited. In hisexcesses of stupration and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixedpoint. In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slowtortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reachedit--even passed it, with diabolic aid. Insatiable he seethes--there isnothing material in which to express his ideal. He can verify that axiomof demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who givethemselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.
"As he can descend no further, he tries returning on the way by which hehas come, but now remorse overtakes him, overwhelms him, and wrencheshim without respite. His nights are nights of expiation. Besieged byphantoms, he howls like a wounded beast. He is found rushing along thesolitary corridors of the chateau. He weeps, throws himself on hisknees, swears to God that he will do penance. He promises to found piousinstitutions. He does establish, at Machecoul, a boys' academy in honourof the Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself up in a cloister,of going to Jerusalem, begging his bread on the way.
"But in this fickle and aberrated mind ideas superpose themselves oneach other, then pass away, and those which disappear leave their shadowon those which follow. Abruptly, even while weeping with distress, heprecipitates himself into new debauches and, raving with delirium, hurlshimself upon the child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs hisfinger around the bloody, milky socket, then he seizes a spiked club andcrushes the skull. And while the gurgling blood runs over him, hestands, smeared with spattered brains, and grinds his teeth and laughs.Like a hunted beast he flees into the wood, while his henchmen removethe crimson stains from the ground and dispose prudently of the corpseand the reeking garments.
"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrableforests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs ashe walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accosthim. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of theaged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that hisvery presence depraves it. For the first time he understands themotionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.
"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on itsroot-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart,subdivided and re-subdivided into haunches, which again are divided andre-subdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in astationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale frombough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is aphallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, onthe contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossybelly of the earth.
"Frightfu
l images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, thelucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slenderbeeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in thedark and wrinkled envelope of the old oaks. Beside the bifurcations ofthe branches there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark,simulating emunctoria, or the protruding anus of a beast. In the jointsof the branches there are other visions, elbows, armpits furred withgrey lichens. Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread outinto great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.
"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered,into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divideinto buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawnthrough space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, inwhich now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, femininetriangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents.This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunksfrightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers,membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is anarboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.
"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.
"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spatteredby a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusionthat beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with hishands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad,violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.
"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees,and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind aresponse to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk,weeping, until he arrives at the chateau and sinks to his bed exhausted,an inert mass.
"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubricenlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, thecoupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of theleaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the cloudsare resorbed into the grey of the sky; and--in an awful silence--theincubi and succubi pass.
"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return tothe larva state and attack his lower parts. He writhes, with the bloodbursting his veins. He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to thecrucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips tothe feet of the Christ.
"A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whoseconvulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity,supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when,incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in hisown voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers andpleading for mercy."
* * * * *
And Durtal, coming slowly out of the vision he had conjured up, closedhis notebook and remarked, "Rather petty, my own spiritual conflictregarding a woman whose sin--like my own, to be sure--is commonplace andbourgeois."
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