Gilles de Rais

Gilles de Rais is a fascinating historical figure. He is described as proud, rich, handsome, devoutly Christian, brave, young, skillful in battle, patron of the arts, and having a fine ear for music. As the Marshal of France, he was the celebrated wartime companion of Joan d'Arc. He was a scholar, soldier, courtier, and fashion plate.

But he was also a serial killer...

On September 13 anno 1440, Jean the Bishop of Nantes signed a legal citation which brought Gilles de Rais to trial. Baron de Rais was brought up on charges that he had

killed, strangled, and massacred many innocent children in inhuman fashion and committed with them the abominable and execrable sin against nature sodomy in various fashions and unheard of perversities which may not be enlarged upon here by reason of their horror but which will be declared in Latin in an appropriate place and time.... He has frequently practiced the horrible evocation of demons . . . and that he has sacrificed and made offerings to these demons and concluded pacts with them and has wickedly perpetrated other crimes and sins.

Over a ten-year period, with the aid of his servants, de Rais lured as many as two hundred children to his bedroom. These children ranged between six and eighteen years of age. De Rais was fascinated with the beauty of children and the pain they were capable of experiencing. Although de Rais did not hesitate in making girls his victims, he was partial to boys. If a boy was blessed with an excellent singing voice, he might be lucky enough to escape with his life.

Rather than be put to the Question, de Rais chose to confess everything. Only a full confession would spare him the torture he was so familiar with. His tearful confessions were so repugnant that one of the judges was moved to pull a curtain over a nearby painting of Jesus. In court, de Rais proved his obsession with the serial killing of children by describing their agonies in great detail.

He confessed to having wallowed in the elastic warmth of their intestines. He confessed that he had ripped out their hearts through wounds enlarged and opening like ripe fruit. And with the eyes of a somnambulist he looked down at his fingers and shook them as if blood were dripping from them.

It was said that he had once dismembered a pregnant woman to make sport with the foetus. His deposition reads:

He says and deposes that the said Gilles de Rais, in order to accomplish with the aforesaid children - boys and girls - his unnatural debauches, and his libidinous ardors, first took his rod or his virile member into one or another of his hands, rubbed it, caused it to rise or pulled it, then he placed it between the thighs and the legs of the said boys and girls, avoiding the natural orifice of the said females; rubbing his said rod or virile member against the belly of the said boys and girls with great delight, with ardour, and libidinous concupiscence until the sperm was emitted on their bellies.

He says and deposes that before perpetrating these debauches on the said boys and girls, in order to prevent their cries, and to avoid their being heard, the said Gilles de Rais sometimes hung them with his own hands, sometimes had others hang them by the neck, with ropes or cords from a rod or a hook in his chamber; then he lowered them, or caused them to be lowered, comforting them, assuring them that he did not mean to harm or to wound them, that, on the contrary, he was only playing with them. And in this manner, he stopped them from crying.

After the said Gilles de Rais committed his horrible debauches and his sins of the flesh with the said boys and girls, he killed them at once or caused them to be killed . . . sometimes they were decapitated, sometimes their throats were cut, sometimes they were dismembered and sometimes their necks were broken with a cudgel...

Furthermore, he says and deposes that the said Gilles de Rais sometimes committed his pleasures with the said boys and girls before wounding them, but that was rare; at other times, and often, it was done after hanging or before other wounds; at other times after cutting or causing to be cut, the veins in the neck or the throat, and the blood spurting; and at other times when they were in the langour of death; at other times after their death with their throats cut - so long as there was any warmth in their bodies.

Baron de Rais was wracked by alternating pangs of desire and contrition. According to Thomas Mann, de Rais embodied "the religious greatness of the damned; genius as disease, disease as genius, the type of the afflicted and possessed, where saint and criminal become one." In his agonies of guilt (and perhaps self-justification), he said to the families of the murdered,

You who are present - you, above all, whose children I have slain - I am your brother in Christ. By Our Lord's Passion, I implore you, pray for me. Forgive me with all your hearts the evil I have done you, as you yourselves hope for God's mercy and pardon.

His plea worked. When de Rais was theatrically executed, the children's parents, his judges, and hundreds of spectators, gave way to floods of tears. De Rais was the first to be put to death. His fellow criminals followed soon after. But before he died, he sang the De Profundis in a voice louder than all the rest while standing under the gibbet. He urged his henchmen to "thank God with him for a manifest sign of His love," and to continue praying for a little while longer. He prayed on his knees, and the hundreds of spectators prayed with him.

This time he was seated on a stool, his hands tied and the noose slipped over his neck. In a nice bit of stage business which he probbly had no time to appreciate, the faggots at his feet were lighted just as the stool was snatched away from under him. The flames leaped up, the rope twitched, and the pièce de théâtre was accomplished.