“Gilles de Rais was born about on the boundary between Brittany and Anjou, in the château de Mâchecoul. We know nothing of his childhood. His father died about the end of , and his mother almost immediately married a Sieur d’Estouville, abandoning her two sons, Gilles and René. They became the wards of their grandfather, Jean de Craon, ‘a man old and ancient and of exceeding great age,’ as the texts say. He seems to have allowed his two charges to run wild, and then to have got rid of Gilles by marrying him to Catherine de Thouars, .
“Gilles is known to have been at the court of the Dauphin five years later. His contemporaries represent him as a robust, active man, of striking beauty and rare elegance. We have no explicit statement as to the role he played in this court, but one can easily imagine what sort of treatment the richest baron in France received at the hands of an impoverished king.
“For at that moment Charles VII was in extremities. He was without money, prestige, or real authority. Even the cities along the Loire scarcely obeyed him. France, decimated a few years before, by the plague, and further depopulated by massacres, was in a deplorable situation.
“England, rising from the sea like the fabled polyp the Kraken, had cast her tentacles over Brittany, Normandy, l’Île-de-France, part of Picardy, the entire North, the Interior as far as Orléans, and crawling forward left in her wake towns squeezed dry and country exhausted.
“In vain Charles clamoured for subsidies, invented excuses for exactions, and pressed the imposts. The paralyzed cities and fields abandoned to the wolves could afford no succour. Remember his very claim to the throne was disputed. He became like a blind man going the rounds with a tin cup begging sous. His court at Chinon was a snarl of intrigue complicated by an occasional murder. Weary of being hunted, more or less out of harm’s way behind the Loire, Charles and his partisans finally consoled themselves by flaunting in the face of inevitable disaster the devil-may-care debaucheries of the condemned making the most of the few moments left them. Forays and loans furnished them with opulent cheer and permitted them to carouse on a grand scale. The eternal qui-vive and the misfortunes of war were forgotten in the arms of courtesans.
“What more could have been expected of a used-up sleepy-headed king, the issue of an infamous mother and a mad father?”
“Oh, whatever you say about Charles VII pales beside the testimony of the portrait of him in the Louvre painted by Foucquet. That bestial face, with the eyes of a small-town ursurer and the sly psalm-singing mouth that butter wouldn’t melt in, has often arrested me. Foucquet depicts a debauched priest who has a bad cold and has been drinking sour wine. Yet you can see that this monarch is of the very same type as the more refined, less salacious, more prudently cruel, more obstinate and cunning Louis XI, his son and successor. Well, Charles VII was the man who had Jean Sans Peur assassinated, and who abandoned Jeanne d’Arc. What more need be said?”
“What indeed? Well, Gilles de Rais, who had raised an army at his own expense, was certainly welcomed by this court with open arms. There is no doubt that he footed the bills for tournaments and banquets, that he was vigilantly ‘tapped’ by the courtiers, and that he lent the king staggering sums. But in spite of his popularity he never seems to have evaded responsibility and wallowed in debauchery, like the king. We find Gilles shortly afterward defending Anjou and Maine against the English. The chronicles say that he was ‘a good and hardy captain,’ but his ‘goodness’ and ‘hardiness’ did not prevent him from being borne back by force of numbers. The English armies, uniting, inundated the country, and, pushing on unchecked, invaded the interior. The king was ready to flee to the Mediterranean provinces and let France go, when Jeanne d’Arc appeared.
“Gilles returned to court and was entrusted by Charles with the ‘guard and defence’ of the Maid of Orleans. He followed her everywhere, fought at her side, even under the walls of Paris, and was with her at Rheims the day of the coronation, at which time, says Monstrelet, the king rewarded his valour by naming him Marshal of France, at the age of twenty-five.”
“Lord!” Des Hermies interrupted, “promotion came rapidly in those times. But I suppose warriors then weren’t the bemedalled, timeserving incompetents they are now.”
“Oh, don’t be misled. The title of Marshal of France didn’t mean so much in Gilles’s time as it did afterward in the reign of Francis I, and nothing like what it has come to mean since Napoleon.
“What was the conduct of Gilles de Rais toward Jeanne d’Arc? We have no certain knowledge. M. Vallet de Viriville, without proof, accuses him of treachery. M. l’abbé Bossard, on the contrary, claims—and alleges plausible reasons for entertaining the opinion—that he was loyal to her and watched over her devotedly.
“What is certain is that Gilles’s soul became saturated with mystical ideas. His whole history proves it.
“He was constantly in association with this extraordinary maid whose adventures seemed to attest the possibility of divine intervention in earthly affairs. He witnessed the miracle of a peasant girl dominating a court of ruffians and bandits and arousing a cowardly king who was on the point of flight. He witnessed the incredible episode of a virgin bringing back to the fold such black rams as La Hire, Xaintrailles, Beaumanoir, Chabannes, Dunois, and Gaucourt, and washing their old fleeces whiter than snow. Undoubtedly Gilles also, under her shepherding, docilely cropped the white grass of the gospel, took communion the morning of a battle, and revered Jeanne as a saint.
“He saw the Maid fulfil all
