Gilles de Rais 1 was born some time around 1405 to a
wealthy family. His
parents died when he was young (around ten years old), and he and his
younger brother were then raised by his grandfather, a conniver who was
alway trying to fix Gilles up with wealthy women. He finally succeeded
in getting Gilles married to an heiress of La Vendée and Poitou. The
two men got additional wealth after siding with the winniers of
political conflicts that followed the Breton War of Succession.
During the Hundred Years' War, Gilles ended up as a commander in the
Royal Army. It was then that he fought alongside St. Joan in several of
her battles, including at the Siege of Orléans. He was made a Marshal
of France, granted the privilege of adding the fleur-de-lys on an azure
ground to his coat of arms, and, of all the people in the country, he
was one of four chosen to bring to Reims Cathedral for King Charles
VII's coronation the Holy Ampoule containing the chrism
with which kings are anointed.
After his fighting years, his tendency toward profligacy grew
completely ridiculous. He spent money extremely foolishly, even putting
on a great production of a play he wrote about the siege of Orléans --
a play
that had 140 speaking parts and 500 parts for "extras" -- all of whom
were attired in costumes worn only once for each performance. He built
a chapel dedicated ironically, as you'll soon see, to the Holy
Innocents, and there he presided in costly robes.
His family appealed to King and Pope to do something about his
squandering of his fortune, and the King responded by disallowing any
of his subjects to enter into contracts with him. Gilles then fell into
financial troubles and was forced to sell many of his family's
treasures he'd collected over the years.
Gilles decided to turn to occultic forces to regain his wealth, and
here
his story takes an
incredibly dark and macabre turn. He sought out an unfaithful priest,
Eustache Blanchet, to locate for him a priest who understood the
workings of the demonic realm. Through Blanchet, he met François
Prelati, a faithless priest from Florence, and with him began to evoke
a demon named Barron. After not getting what he wanted out of these
summonings, he determined that Barron wanted the sacrifice of children.
From Blanchet's testimony:
Item, that, as
the said Gilles and witness performed several invocations together, at
which the conjured demon did not appear, the said Gilles asked the
witness why it happened thus and for what reason the invoked demon had
not appeared or spoken to them, and he told the witness himself to ask
the same thing of the devil. To find out, the witness made an
invocation, and obtained from the invoked demon the response to the
aforesaid question, which was that the said Gilles promised to give the
conjured demons many things, but did not keep his promises; and that,
if the same Milord Gilles intended the demon to appear and speak to
him, each time he appeared and spoke to him, Gilles would have to give
a cock, hen, dove, or pigeon, provided that the same Gilles did not
solicit from this invoked demon anything considerable, and that if by
chance he solicited something of the sort, he was then obligated to
provide the demon some member of a young boy; and this is what the
witness reported to the aforesaid Gilles.
Item, he said that this being brought to the attention of the said
Gilles, the same Gilles, on one occasion a little later, carried into
the said François’ room the hand, heart, eyes, and blood of a young
boy, kept in a glass, and gave them to him so that, as soon as they
performed an invocation, François could offer and give them to the
demon should he respond to the said invocation; as to whether the said
members were those of the child the witness said he had seen dead in
the said hall at Tiffauges, or those of another, he does not know, as
he affirms.
Item, that not long after the aforesaid, the witness and the said
Gilles, in the aforesaid place, that is, in the hall at Tiffauges,
performed an invocation with the aforesaid ceremonies, with the
intention of offering and giving the hand, heart, eyes, and blood to
the demon if he appeared; at which invocation the demon did not appear,
which is why a little later the witness wrapped the aforesaid hand,
heart, and eyes in a piece of linen and buried them close to Saint
Vincent’s chapel, within the enclosure of the said castle at Tiffauges,
in sacred soil, to the best of his belief.
Item, that not long after the aforesaid, the witness and the
said Gilles, in the aforesaid place, that is, in the hall at Tiffauges,
performed an invocation with the aforesaid ceremonies, with the
intention of offering and giving the hand, heart, eyes, and blood to
the demon if he appeared; at which invocation the demon did not appear,
which is why a little later the witness wrapped the aforesaid hand,
heart, and eyes in a piece of linen and buried them close to Saint
Vincent’s chapel, within the enclosure of the said castle at Tiffauges,
in sacred soil, to the best of his belief.
Item, he said that he practiced several invocations in the
aforesaid hall, placing incense, myrrh, and aloes on the fire lit in
the earthen pot set in the center of the circle. At which invocations
the devil named Barron appeared to him often, and as many as ten or
twelve times, in the form of a handsome young man about twenty-five
years old.
You get the idea.
Gilles began cooperating with these demonic wishes in either 1432 or
1433. Over the next seven or eight years (until May 1440), he sodomized
and otherwise sexually abused, then mudered somewhere between 100 and
600 children, no one knows the number for sure. His modus operandi
included throat-slashing, neck-breaking, decapitation, and
dismemberment.
Most of his crimes took place in his castle -- the Château de
Tiffauges, which still stands in the town of Tiffauges in the Vendée
département of the Pays de la Loire region in western France.
His crimes were discovered after he kidnapped a priest and was
investigated. He confessed to his crimes (no torture was used), was
tried by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities, was found guilty,
and was put to death on October 25, 1440.
In 1793, the
town in which his castle stands became the site of a great battle
during the French
Revolution's War in the Vendée, when Catholic loyalists defeated the
the republican revolutionaries. His castle's become known as "le
Chateau de Barbe-Bleu" -- "Bluebeard's Castle." The Perrault fairy tale
"Bluebeard," though about a wife-killer and not a child-killer, is said
to have been inspired or at least shaped by the doings of the evil
Gilles de Rais.
The story of Bluebeard here, in pdf format
(4 pages).
Footnotes
1 His name is pronounced with a sort of
soft G: "Zseel doo reh", where the "Zs" is pronounced like the Zs in
"Zsa-Zsa Gabor"; the "oo" is pronounced rather like the oo in "foot";
and the "eh" is pronounced somewhere between a short E (as in bet) and
"ay" (as in May).
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