You Think That's Bad

Classical Scenes of Farewell

As a child who could barely hold myself upright without tottering, I was steeped in my mother’s belief that our tumbledown farm was serried about and tumid with devils. In my mind’s eye they stood in a ring and clasped one another’s taloned hands and leered in at me while I slept. My fourth summer was the year that Sophie, the stonemason’s daughter, was seized with a helplessness in her limbs until her father conceded her diabolic possession and took her to the Church of Our Savior, where the priest found five devils residing inside her, whose names were Wolf, Lark, Dog, Jolly, and Griffin. The devils confessed they’d conjured hailstones through her by beating the surface of well water with her hands and that they’d additionally concocted the tinctures and ointments she’d used to blight her neighbors’ apple trees. They said they’d requested, and been denied, a special grease that would have turned her into a werewolf. When asked of whom they’d made their appeal, they said only “The Master.”

When I was twelve, the man from whom we rented our pastureland — a lifelong bachelor whose endless mutterings were his way of negotiating his solitude, and whose imagination extended only to business; the sort who milled his rye without sifting it, so it might last longer — was found in the middle of our lane one winter morning, naked, his feet and lips blue. He said a demon had appeared to him on a pile of wood under his mulberry tree, in the likeness of a corpulent black cat belonging to the house next door. With its front paws the cat had gripped him by the shoulders and pushed him down, and then had fastened its muzzle on the man’s mouth and would not be denied. The man claimed that for nearly an hour he’d remained that way, swooning, speechless, and open to the cat’s searching jaws, unable to make even the Sign of the Cross and powerless to diminish the urgings of its tongue. He had no memory of where his clothes had gone, or how he’d ended up in the lane.

My mother had long since taken to enfolding a crucifix in the bedcovers when she turned down my poor linens for the night. My chamber was in our barn’s loft, attached to the back of the house, and from this, the highest point on the hill, I could view the Delorts’ farm to the west. Their daughter, Katherine, was the continual object of my confused nightly agitations as well as the focus of my joy.

And then one sunstruck August afternoon when we were passing through the village, my mother and I investigated a disturbance on the church steps, a crowd squabbling over who had sufficient schooling to interpret the document posted on the doors before them. A sacristan emerged to provide assistance and to read aloud what he declared to be a juridical confession lately obtained through the harrowing of some of our neighbors. Said neighbors had been identified to the ecclesiastical investigators by other neighbors.

The confession stated that Marie Delort along with her daughter had for three years been giving herself over to a pair of demons, from Friday midnight through to Saturday dawn, and had assisted at a series of conjurings in the company of others. According to the deacon Katherine had testified that her association began when one evening, washing her family’s linen outside of town, she saw before her a man with a curved back and pointed ears whose eyes were like emeralds in an ash pit. He called for her to give herself to him and she answered that she would. He then gentled her cheeks with both hands, his palms softly furred, and flooded her mouth with his breath, and from then on each Friday night she was carried to a gathering from her own bed, simply by willing herself free. At the gathering place she shed her night-dress and was approached, every time having been made to wait for a period alone in the darkness, by the same man leading a gigantic he-goat, which knelt before her, and to both apparitions she abandoned herself.

The sacristan then read her mother’s corroboration of this account, which further detailed the strange trance during which she was also transported from her bed, and their mutual adoration of the goat and the man, and their not only bathing in but also taking in all sorts of offensive liquids, with satiation being the object of their every clutch and gesture.

I was born Etienne Corillaut of Pouzauges, in the diocese of Luçon, and am known as Poitou, and I am now of twenty-two years of age, and here acknowledge to the best of my abilities the reasons for those acts that have made this name along with my master’s the object of hatred throughout the region. I here also address the questions that my kinsmen hear from every stable hand, every innkeeper, every farmer in his field: What transpired in his mind that allowed a young person to have acted in such a manner and then to have lived apparently untroubled among his fellows? What enabled him to have stepped forward into the sunlight and Nature’s bounty for six years of such iniquity?

My master is Gilles de Rais, whom I have served as page and then bodyservant for these last six years; and for the past three, since he first offered access to the full chamber of his secrets, he and I with five others I will name have been responsible for the entrapment and mutilation and dismemberment and death of one hundred and forty-two children between the ages of five and fifteen. Coming in the Year of Our Lord 1440, this admission dates the full vigor of my offenses back to the winter of 1437. But even before he chose to sweep back the curtain on the full extent of his ferocity, I knew myself to be already standing outside the ring of salvation, having failed so signally as a neighbor and a brother and a Christian and a son.

My father failed no one, having been brought up in honesty and industry with a mild and peaceable disposition, and my first memory of my mother is of the two of us gathering into her basket rue and southernwood in bright sunlight. I remember her saying one sweltering morning that the forest, our edge of pastureland, and a hive of bees were our only livelihood. I remember her tears. Later there was a shed and a little tower with a dovecote. We raised rye and beans and pot-herbs. As I grew stronger I was given suitable responsibilities, my first being light weeding during the day and laying the table and filling the hand basin after sunset. Before that my contributions had been limited to fanning the wasps out of my little sister’s sweet milk.

At that time I was devout. I retired each morning to pray and refused refreshment for a quarter of an hour afterward. And I displayed other singularities. My brother and sister avoided me, which I attributed to acts of stupidity that somehow had discredited me forever. I played alone, chopping at roadside weeds with my special stick. “Still fighting your cabbages?” my brother asked one day, having seen me thrash some wild collards.

My mother liked to claim that all she brought to the marriage was a bench, bed, and chest, and I first registered their sadness while hiding in the fields watching my father cut clover. My mother brought him soup, ladling it out in the shade of an elm, and he said, “Will you kiss me?” and she answered, “We all have our needs.” He then told her to take back her soup, for he didn’t want it, and scythed all the clover without eating and returned hungry to the house.

He complained later that it was as if his accounts were tallied small coin by small coin. She confided in my brother, her favorite, that she lived in dread of bad weather, during which his father would pass the hours in the kitchen, his resentment turning from the weather to her. We slept with pounding hearts when they fought.

And during a rainy October the day after my eleventh birthday my brother fell sick of a malady of the brain. We moved him to a room off the kitchen with a hearth that backed on to our stove, where during sickness or bloodletting or weaning, a greater warmth could be maintained. My mother made him an egg dish into which she chopped dittany, tansy, marjoram, fennel, parsley, beets, violet leaves, and pounded ginger. He was seized with convulsions and his writhing was such that she couldn’t stay in the room. He died at cock’s crow two mornings after he was first afflicted.

She afterward seemed so bereft and storm-tossed that our neighbors called her “the Wind’s Wife.” November imprisoned the farm with its load of ice, sheathing both sickle and hoe. In our little pond fish hung motionless and petrified with cold. My mother kept to herself in the kitchen, puzzled and drained by our questions, her smile gloomy and terrible in its simplicity. Our father sat on a stool drawn up near the door, a hermit paying his visit to a sister hermit.

And even after the winter seemed well ended it suffered a relapse, piling snow deeper atop our work. My sister and I offered ourselves to our mother without success. On this side and that, she seemed to find only sore constraint and bitter captivity. Her blood turned thin as water and she developed scrofulous complaints. When at her angriest, she wiped my nose, violently, and said it was oppressive to be looked at so reproachfully by children. If we asked for too much, her panicked response frightened us further.

Her own presence seemed to distress her. She fell endlessly behind in her work. She was found at all hours bent in half and rubbing her back. She couldn’t warm her hands. One palm on the table would quiver, and, seeing us notice, she’d cover it with the other.

Our animals sickened as if bewitched. Our cat died of hunger. When the weather permitted my mother sat in the field as far as possible from the house. When storms drove us inside, on occasion I glimpsed her before she had composed her expression. One sleeting morning she taught my sister a game, based on the stations of a woman’s life, that she called Tired, Exhausted, Dying, and Dead.

At night when I was visited by strange dreams and pleaded for her company, she told me she’d seen witches lying in the fields on their backs, naked up to the navel. She fixed on a story from a neighboring town of a man who’d confessed that he’d killed seven successive boys in his wife’s womb by means of his magic, and that he’d also withered the offspring of his father-in-law’s herd. She told us that lost girls were cooked in a cauldron until the flesh entire came away from the bone, from which the witches made an unguent that was a great aid to their arts and pleasures. She followed closely the sensational story of de Giac, the king’s favorite, who confessed he had given one of his hands to the Devil, and who asked when condemned that this hand be severed and burned before he was put to death.

She took her life with a series of plants that my father said she had gathered from the most sinister localities. We discovered her early one bright morning. I remained in place near her bed, remembering her hand slipping off my inhospitable arm the evening before when she’d been trying to negotiate some ice on our doorstep.

I was fourteen. My sister was nine. We discussed what had happened as though it all belonged to a period now concluded. Our day-to-day world having fallen away, something else would take its place.

After that I paid only distracted attention to the ordinary round of life. If others came too close, I made signs with my hands as if to repair the harm I’d done them. At times during chores I would halt as if seized by my own vacancy. I saw very well how people looked upon me. I despised in my heart those who despised me. And when my father saw me in such torments, he thought: he loved her so much he’s still weeping.

All I desired, morning in and evening out, was a love with its arms thrown wide. But the contrary is the common lot, everyone’s family telling him furiously that everything hurts, always. The nest makes the bird.

This potter’s wheel of futility and despair would have continued had our parish priest not singled out my voice for his choir, and detected in me what he claimed were aptitudes, especially for the sciences. What he offered as appreciation I took to be pity. It was suggested to my father that I be turned over to the monastic school at Pont-à-Sevre. But even before that decision could be made, Henriet Griart, having heard the choir, brought me to his lord de Rais’s attention. He was then seventeen, and quick-eyed and enterprising in his service as steward.

Thus does this chronicle turn, harsh and bleak as it is, from one misfortune to another. I was presented at Tiffauges, which was so tall that its towers were cloud-capped when I first saw them, and orange in the setting sun. Out of its windows summer had never been so mild, dusk so vivid, or the surrounding hills so shady in their grateful abundance of streams and gardens. My sponsor, who’d refused converse during the carriage ride, provided some instruction on etiquette while we waited in the great hall, adding that if I behaved he’d see that my promotion was advanced with great ingenuity.

His kindness moved me. And when the doors opened for the castle’s master and his retinue, tears sprang to my eyes. My interview was conducted through that blur of weeping. This was the lord whom even I knew to be one of the richest in France. Who’d fought side by side with Joan the year our country had pulled herself from her knees. Who’d drawn the bolt from the Maid’s shoulder and in her vanguard had raised the siege of Orleans.

The sun was fully set. Boys in special surplices moved from candelabra to candelabra with delicate, whiplike tapers. All of the wall tapestries featured hunting scenes. His first words, seeming to come from somewhere behind him, were that I was a little angel. He had reddish hair and a trimmed red beard. A blue satin ruff. His face in the candlelight was like a half-veiled lamp.

Henriet was told to prepare me. I was pulled into an antechamber where my clothes were stripped from me and burned on a grate. I was fitted with a doublet of green and brown velvet and loose-fitting breeches and shoes, then taken through a small passageway bolted with an iron gate on either end and set with chevrons along its length to what looked like a side-chapel arranged with painted screens. Above the screens loomed the worked canopy of a gigantic bed. In the firelight the embroidered tigers flexed and clawed their mates. Benches with saw-tooth serrations above the headrests lined the walls. This seemed a secret room constructed where roof trusses converged from the projecting base.

A boy near the door was identified by Henriet as the aquebajulus: custodian of the holy water. He held before him a small bronze bowl. Upon entering, each of the lords dipped two fingers in it and made the Sign of the Cross, and then the boy departed.

Those present in that chamber besides myself, Henriet, and the lord de Rais were his lord’s cousins Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville. That night while they took their ease on those benches and drank hippocras from a silver beaker that the steward had fetched, I was made to shed the doublet I had just donned and to lie across the billowy down of the bed’s snowy comforter and to receive onto my belly the ejaculate of his lord’s member. He knelt above me, having finished, attentive to my face with his head cocked as though listening for something, and then Roger de Briqueville handed him a jeweled dagger, the tip of which he pressed to my Adam’s apple, and the sting caused me to squint before his other cousin cleared his throat and reminded him of my uncommon beauty, suggesting I be retained as a page. The lord de Rais turned his gaze to Henriet, who looked at me. In his eyes I saw my mother’s gloomy and drained consideration. He shrugged, and nodded. With that shrug his lord returned his attention to my features. He set the dagger on the coverlet between us, touched his semen with a fingertip, and drew a line to my throat with it. Then he dismounted the bed. I was ignored through the conversation that followed.

Lying there, not yet having been granted leave to move, I experienced the ongoing impression that all this was inexplicably directed at me. The lord remarked that when he was three, his brother, René de la Suze, was born, upsetting the entire household, and that relations between them had never been cordial. He added that when at eleven he’d lost both parents, his father gored by a boar and his mother carried off by an inflammation of the brain. That same autumn had brought the disgrace of Agincourt, with the loss of his maternal grandfather’s lone son and heir.

When he stopped the only sounds were the logs on the fire. Henriet caught my eyes with his but I couldn’t tell what he hoped to communicate. And the lord de Rais, as though he’d already asked more than once, bade everyone to leave. When I rose, he instructed me to stay.

The firelight shimmered because I was weeping with terror. He asked my age in a gentle voice and, when answered, exclaimed “Fifteen!” with a kind of graciousness, as if at an unexpected gift.

He asked if I had heard of the emperor Nero. When I could not stop my tears, he went on to inform me that Nero never wore the same clothes twice. That he almost never traveled with a train of less than one thousand carriages. That his mules were shod with silver and his muleteers wore coats of Carnusian wool.

He said that at my age he knew already the men who were to influence the entire course of his life. That these great souls had taught him that to venture little was to venture much, and the risk the same.

He returned to the bed and eased himself down beside me, sympathetic to my shivering and heaving. While touching me he explained that balked desire, seeing itself checked as if by a cruel spell, undergoes a hideous metamorphosis. And steep and slippery then became the slope between voluptuous delight and rage. He said he was still undecided as to whether he was of a mind to let me rest and that only a straw turned the scale which kept me there. He lay beside me in silence for some moments while I regained custody of my emotions. Then he made me swear I would reveal none of the secrets about to be entrusted to me, prefatory to the oath administered a few hours later before the altar in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity. In swearing so I understood I was gathering to my heart the secrets of sins both committed and to come. This oath was taken in the presence of the same gathering that had witnessed the initial events in the secret room. And following the oath I was seated at the lord de Rais’s right hand for a dinner of roast goose with sausages, a stew of hares, white leeks with capons, plovers, dressed pigs, a fish jelly, bitterns, and herons in claret, with rice in milk and saffron afterward.

My account proceeds by gaps, not unlike my life. The castle at Champtocé was an apparition out of a fairy story: black and grave, sprouting crooked tall towers with battlements like broken teeth. Grimly flattened fields surrounded it. But everything inside was transformed by braziers of light and furniture of gold leaf, by statues and bound manuscripts of worked silver. My sponsor explained the tumult of passing men-at-arms by informing me that our lord kept a personal army of two hundred and fifty, each equipped with the finest mounts and armor, as well as complete new liveries three times a year. He traveled, Henriet explained, from residence to residence and kept an open house at each, so that anyone, high-born or low, could stop for food and drink. As for the low, it was well-known that this invitation was extended only to young and beautiful children, either unaccompanied or, if not, left behind to dine at their leisure.

He unlocked a curved black grate guarding access to a spiral stairwell ascending the north tower, and led me up the stone steps and at the top we paused before a room, also locked. The smell was startling. Henriet held a small cloth soaked in cloves over his nose and mouth. He did not offer to share it. Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, was to take possession of the castle in forty-eight hours, he said, so this work had to be completed by then. We were joined by Gilles de Sillé and another servant who did not give his name. Inside the room we found the skeletons, heaped in a colossal faggot-box set near the hearth, of forty-two children. The skin was shrunken and dried about the bones and flaked off to the touch. The box was the height of our chins and the jumble of bones inside as high as our chests. A stool was brought to help Henriet and myself climb up and in, each of us using a staff to clear space for our legs. This disturbed the beetles and flies and other insects to which the bones had been abandoned, as well as a kind of powdery dust that settled in our mouths and eyes. No one spoke except about how best to bundle the loads into large coffers bound with iron and already waiting in the middle of the room. When filled, each was to be double-bound with rope as a proof against the failure of the iron bands. Eight in all were required. I distinguished the number of children by counting the skulls. Our purchase on everything was increasingly complicated by hands turned white and greasy with a slimy ash.

We became aware of noises at the door’s peephole, though none of my co-workers seemed troubled. I heard a woman’s soft laughter. Henriet warned me to keep guardianship of my eyes. He later explained that Roger de Briqueville at times invited noble ladies of the district to watch such operations in progress.

We swept the last bits into the faggot-box, and a layer of resin-wood and ground aromatics was spread to mask the smell. The coffers were carried down the spiral steps at nightfall to waiting wagons, which were driven to a quay on the Loire and loaded onto barges to be poled down to Machecoul. There, before sunrise, they were hauled up to what Henriet revealed was our lord’s own bedroom. And there they were emptied and the bones burned in his presence. And when each pyre cooled, it was our task to dump the ashes into the moat.

Henriet lost patience with my periodic torpor. When I complained about his anger, he widened his eyes and affected a fool’s expression as though imitating someone. I was quartered near his wash basin and chamber-pot stand, and told not to touch his things. We took our meals together. After some weeks we began conversing at night once our chambers were dark. He said that from his earliest childhood he’d felt himself an affliction to those around him and had banished himself to the woods, where he couldn’t be spied and only answered after having been called many times. Sometimes he hid in caves. He remembered asking his father if a hermit could live on plants and roots. One day during the harvest they found him looking in the hedges and hayfields for wild saffron bulbs to eat. He’d made a bow with which to kill birds, but hadn’t managed to hit any. He was nothing like his younger brother, who in January ran beside the plow with a goad until he was hoarse from the cold and the shouting. At my age he had frightened his mother by pointing into the fireplace and claiming to have seen old Mourelle grinding her teeth. Mourelle was their mare, and of her he was deeply afraid. He also feared hens. But he was a lesson, he thought, for at some point he had applied himself diligently to discover what he should do to cease being reclusive and live among men.

He was given charge of my instruction. I learned to bear my head upright and to keep my eyelids low and my gaze four rods ahead without glancing right or left. To scatter our lord’s room with alder leaves for the fleas. We set out bowls of milk and hare’s gall for the flies. We strewed the floor around his bed with violets and green herbs. We cared for the smaller birds in his aviaries, prepared sand for his hourglasses, dried roses to lay among his clothing, and found boys to replace the boys who continued to disappear in his secret rooms.

Girls were sometimes accepted if slender and beautiful and as red-haired and fair-skinned as our lord. Each of his castles was thronged about by children made homeless by a hundred years of war and brigandage, begging where they could and stealing where they couldn’t. Henriet and I spent an hour each morning sheltered in our aerie above the portcullis, selecting from those at the gate. For children of particular beauty we roamed the villages and churches. If a boy was of more respectable means, Gilles de Sillé or Roger de Briqueville would ask the father to lend the child to take a message to the castle. And later, if asked what had become of the boy, they said they didn’t know, unless he’d been sent on to another of the lord de Rais’s residences, or thieves had taken him.

Children were also provided by an old woman who came to be known along the Loire as “the Terror.”

One Sunday after Mass we were cornered by a mother so agitated she refused to let us pass. Her husband was embarrassed by her fervor. Her other children shrank from her voice. Henriet told her he had seen her boy helping our lord’s cook, Cherpy, prepare the roast, and that perhaps he’d since been apprenticed elsewhere. She answered that she’d been told twenty-five male children had been provided as ransom to the English for Messire Michel de Sillé, captured at Lagny. Henriet pointed out that she knew more than he, then, and forced his way past. She tore my sleeve as I sought to follow.

We were summoned to the secret room to meet a boy named Jeudon, indentured to the local furrier. He curtsied before us, comically, and steadied himself. He breathed over us the sour wine and cinnamon smell of the hippocras. He had beautiful, hay-colored hair and a fondness for candied oranges. He seemed happily confused by our little gathering.

His face changed when the lord de Rais, standing some feet away, took his member from his breeches and stroked it until it was erect. Henriet and I were instructed to hold the boy’s arms until the lord de Rais, moving closer, lifted the boy’s shirt and took his pleasure upon his belly. Then he looped a silken cord around the boy’s neck, whispering assurances all the while, and hung him from a lantern-hook high on the wall.

The boy kicked and thrashed and spun on the cord. The sound he made was like someone spitting. The lord de Rais released the knot and slid him to the floor, savoring his expressions of panic and relief. He had the boy carried to the bed and freed from his clothing but bade us not release his limbs. “Please,” the boy said to me, and then to Henriet. The lord de Rais sat without his breeches on his naked chest, leaned close again to whisper something soothing and, with the boy’s eyes on his, produced his jeweled dagger from the bedclothes and carved a line across the center of his throat. The fissure welled and then fountained with blood. The boy’s hand jerked in mine. The lord de Rais, spattered, pulled back and then leaned forward in his work, again taking the boy’s gaze in his own eyes and sawing with a drowsy languor through windpipe and bone and then into the bedding.

The blood pooled faster than the bedding could receive it, so when he finally shifted his weight from the boy’s chest a stream filled the indentation formed by his knee.

That night neither of us spoke until it was nearly dawn. Then Henriet used the chamber pot and, laying himself down again, claimed that even the pillars of heaven were based in the abyss. When he received no response, he wondered angrily who among us had not had the poisoned air lay its dead hand upon him. What did I know of Original Sin? He had to repeat the question. I finally told him I knew nothing of Original Sin. He said he believed in it, this dogma that taught all were lost for one alone, not only punished but also deserving of punishment, undone before they were born.

Was he weeping? I asked him, after debating the question myself. By way of answer he rose from his bed and struck me.

The disappearances whenever the lord de Rais was in residence were no secret, but there were always orphans, and parents to bring their children forward in the hopes of making their fortune in a great noble’s service. Some sent their children in pairs that they might be safer in one another’s care. If such a pair was to our lord’s taste he had the more beautiful one’s throat cut first so he or she might not pine overlong for the other. At all inquiries the herald of arms was to say that peradventure the boy was now with some upstanding gentleman elsewhere, who would see that he got on. Now in the secret room heads would line the window seat and the lord de Rais, once they were thus arranged, would ask each of us to choose the most comely. He had us each kiss the mouth of the head we chose, and then he hoisted his favorite, lowered it to his gaze, and kissed it with abandon, as though initiating it into the pleasures of the flesh.

The heads were kept for two or three days. Then they followed the bodies into the great fireplace, their ashes ferried from there to the cesspits or the moat.

Much is forgotten, and much will fall out of this account. My education in language and figures, set in motion by the parish priest, was continued under the auspices of one of the teaching friars responsible for the pages. I invited Henriet every so often to test my newfound knowledge, and he refused.

The seasons pulled us through our shifting duties while the fields around us displayed the lives from which we’d been plucked. March was for breaking clods. August was for reaping. December was for threshing and winnowing. The freemen brought their rents, their three chickens and fifteen eggs, to the tenants’ tables for their accounting. Courtyard cats feigned sleep before blinking half-shut eyes at them. For a little while longer, the world of treasures that consoled us and softened woe seemed in place. But like toads crossing our path in the dark, the balance reasserted itself.

We saw a girl of seven on her back, shod only in one stocking, her head bare, some of her spread hair pulled out and lying at her feet. We saw a five-year-old with beautiful eyes and a filthy face whom I at first held and then released at Tiffauges’s gates, watching her disappear like a bolt from a crossbow. We witnessed our lord beheading poppies with a rod and heard him remark that the world had been empty since the Romans. He spoke also of Joan, and how she entered Orleans armored in white at all points and carrying a standard depicting two angels holding a fleur-de-lis over an Annunciation. We heard him marvel at the magical world in which she lived, and the way, just like that, English resistance collapsed before her. As the months went on, he took an increased interest in selecting boys himself. He came to favor kneeling on the torso after the head had been removed but while some warmth still remained in the body. Henriet said that I developed so gloomy, wrought, and unforthcoming an aspect that passersby sometimes drew him aside and wondered if I was his lord’s imbecile. I asked what I should do and he said that he hauled his necessities about with him, like someone shipwrecked. The world had abandoned him and he had returned the favor. His claim frightened me. I took to closing my throat with my hand as I lay beside him in the darkness, experimenting with various pressures. One night he took my hand from my neck and reminded me that insanity was a master’s privilege. Later he emptied three full basins trying to clean his eyes after a boy’s brains had bespattered them. Afterwards he lay on his pallet unmoving, and I was sorry for someone so young and so far from his father and mother and brothers, and for whom all comfort was a bed of stones when compared with his home.

Chasms opened beneath me, as if the earth would swallow my sin. I wept. I fell to the ground. I regained my feet. One morning I lay in a wheat field and some farmers saw me and were astonished, but said nothing. We were bound to our lord from the crowns of our heads to the soles of our feet. While he looked down from his heights of Pandemonium. And we fell under the spell of the slaughter with its reddish-brown eyes: ushers kept the doors, clerks added the accounts, squires dressed the dishes, and serving maids swept the halls and beat the coverlets, all while our souls, at their own bidding, flew headlong into dreadful extremity.

Our lord announced he was going to take a hand in our education. For two straight nights he appeared in our chambers and read to us from Suetonius. Then without explanation he stopped, growing increasingly agitated and impatient. Henriet in our more private moments explained why: he was spending over fifteen hundred livres per day. His family’s wealth consisted of land and property, but what was needed, perpetually, was accessible money. For him wealth no longer counted as such unless it had wings and admitted of rapid exchange. In Machecoul he had founded his own chapel, the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, with a Collégiale of the finest voices and most beautiful faces he could find. Of the chapel itself it was said that even visitors from Paris had never seen the like: great glittering cascades of ornament engraved and set with precious stones and gold and silver, with all deacons, archdeacons, curates, and choirboys robed in vermilion and white silk with tawny furs and surplices of black satin and hooded capes. One wall was a towering organ, and he additionally commissioned a portable one it took six men to carry so he should not be deprived of music when obliged to travel. When the chapel was completed he had himself named Canon of Saint-Hilaire de Poitiers so he might wear the multihued ecclesiastical robes he himself had designed. He found a boy who resembled him so powerfully that the boy was designated Rais le Héraut, and dressed more magnificently than anyone, and given a place of honor in the cortége whenever the household rode out. So that everywhere our lord went, he could see himself preceding himself: our lord in white, Rais le Héraut in the deepest black.

When we traveled, our procession might take two days to fully pass through a town. When we halted we filled every tavern and lodging house. When we moved on, local innkeepers and tradesmen displayed the stunned and dull-eyed satisfaction of overfed cattle. And in addition to all this he was preparing to mount the mystery play he had commissioned, which at its climax depicted him at his moment of greatest glory. The Mystery of the Siege of Orleans was to be presented in that city upon the tenth anniversary of the raising of the siege, and featured twenty thousand lines of verse, one hundred and forty speaking parts, six hundred extras, and three specially built revolving stages. Each costume was to be made from new material. Even beggars’ rags were to be created by slashing and defacing fine cloth. No costume could be worn twice. And unlimited supplies of food and drink were to be available to all spectators.

It seemed inconceivable that our household would find itself short of gold, but any number of estates and properties were mortgaged. And Henriet and I would be sent to retrieve bodies from our lord’s bedchambers. He mortgaged properties twice and then refused to abandon them. He ransomed merchants and travelers. And finally he had to sell off estates. He sold two great crucifixes of pure silver. He sold his manuscript of Valerius Maximus and his Latin City of God and his parchment Metamorphoses of Ovid bound in emerald leather and secured with a golden lock. He sold the silver reliquary enclosing the head of Saint-Honoré, his most precious relic.

He sold so much that finally his brother and his extended family wrote to the Pope asking His Holiness to disavow the foundation of the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, and to the King requesting an edict forbidding the sale of any further family property. Both petitions were granted. Soon after, word came from his brother that his nephews had discovered a pipe full of dead children in the keep at Chemillé. Nothing came of it. In his family’s eyes, once their property was safe, whatever else our lord did was his affair.

It was logical, then, that our lord would employ someone to manufacture more wealth. Joan had had secret knowledge and had put it, while he watched, to kingdom-shaking use. And now he, too, needed to appeal to secret powers. The world was an epistle and every scholar’s dream was to unlock its hidden instructions. Most did so by searching for the philosopher’s stone, which would transmute base metals to gold. Cold water could when heated be turned to hot air. In the same way other bodies could be similarly transformed. It was a matter of discovering the correct agent of change.

This was explained to us in a meeting convened in the secret room at Tiffauges. While our lord addressed us I looked over at the bed where he first held the jeweled dagger to my throat.

We were being taken into this confidence because we would all be a part of the great search about to begin. The sibyl foretold the future, but the conjurer made it, by recruiting Nature itself to fulfill his designs. There was an old saying in war that our lord had never forgotten: “Is there a chance? Where Prudence says no, the devil says yes.” There were demons who had the power to reveal hidden treasure, teach philosophy, and guide those boldest of men who sought to make their way in the world. Years ago he’d received from a knight imprisoned in Anjou for heresy a book on the arts of alchemy and the evocation of devils. Gerbert, later to be Pope, was said to have studied astrology and other arts in Spain under the Saracens and to have summoned ghostly figures from the lower world, some of whom abetted his ascension to the papacy. Sylvester II was said to have been taught to make clocks and other infernal devices by wraiths he had summoned. We would each now put our energies into locating alchemists. I would accompany Gilles de Sillé, as Henriet would Roger de Briqueville. The latter pair would travel to Italy, the center of alchemic knowledge, accompanied by a priest from Saint-Malo whose presence would make such inquiries less dangerous.

With my lord’s cousin I traversed much of France, without success. We found a goldsmith who claimed he could heal, prophesy, conjure, cast love charms, and transmute silver into gold. We gave him a silver coin and locked him in a room, and he got drunk and fell asleep. Others stepped forward as conjurers. One drowned en route to Tiffauges. Another’s face was of such frightening aspect that our lord refused to be shut in the tower with him. But the other group returned from Italy by the year’s end with a youth named François Prelati who’d received his tonsure from the Bishop of Arezzo, having studied geomancy and other arts and sciences. He had sapphire eyes and ringletted blond hair. He wore shells from Saint James of Compostela and a holy napkin from Rome. He’d been to the East, where he claimed to have witnessed the blasphemous Marriage of the Apes, after which the celebrant cleansed his hands in molten lead. He spoke Latin and French and as a test in Florence had invoked twenty crows in the upper story of his house. He claimed he regularly conjured a demon named Barron who usually appeared as a beautiful young man. Our lord immediately had him installed in the bedchamber across from his own, and provided with everything he needed.

Experiments commenced the night his laboratory was ready. Henriet and I watched from beyond the door and outside a ring drawn into the floor with the point of a sword. Our lord and Gilles de Sillé waited just outside the circle, the latter holding to his chest his figurine of the Blessed Virgin. The conjuror’s face was jacklit by the green glow from his athanor, but it was unclear from the smell what he was burning. He spoke in Latin and when he stopped a cold wind blew through the tall and narrow window behind him. He drew ciphers in the center of each of the four walls. Then he poured a glittering powder into his little fire, from which a stinking smoke drove everyone from the room.

Our presence was commanded throughout the sessions that followed, in the event there was assistance the conjuror might require. The following night our lord brought with him a pact written in his own hand and bearing his signature. When it was burned in the athanor a great clattering rose above us, as though a four-legged animal was cantering on the roof.

More nights followed with the demon manifesting himself yet not appearing. The conjuror spied him and conversed with him when we could not. This progress made our lord wild with success and impatience. What else did the demon require? A week of conjurings passed before he answered. Then he said, through the conjuror in a changed voice, a soul.

Beside me in the doorway, Henriet’s respiration shifted. This was the awful bargain we’d each expected.

“Well, he can’t have mine,” our lord told the conjuror. And in the silence that followed he added that he would get him the next-best thing.

The next morning I was told to convey a bolt of strong cloth and four loaves of bread and a sester of good milk to Henriet, who was going back to the village after having negotiated that price for an infant. That night our lord passed us in the doorway to the conjuror’s room holding a vessel covered in linen, the way a priest holds a ciborium. He told the conjuror to tell the demon that he had come to offer this holy innocent’s heart and eyes, and the glass when he uncovered it was smeared and the contents inside were ropy and bulbous and filled only the very bottom.

And again the demon did not appear. Henriet and I were charged with wrapping the remains in the linen cloth and burying them before daybreak in consecrated ground near the chapel.

The conjuror suggested a new method of invocation that involved a crested bird and a dyadrous stone. The latter could not be procured. Attempts were made with serpents’ hearts and with the conjuror wearing a thin crown fashioned from pitch and umbilical cords.

Our lord spent more time in solitude. His aspect around those children we produced was more melancholic and distracted. He talked without explanation of his allies’ desertion. He remarked during the disposal of one girl that he had been born under such a constellation that it seemed to him no one would ever comprehend the things he did.

He moved to Bourgneuf, where he stayed in a convent. He had another boy brought to him there. On All Saints’ Day he informed us that Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville had gone abroad without explanation. The Dauphin announced a visit to Tiffauges, and Henriet and I were sent back at a gallop to ensure that all of the conjuror’s vessels and furnaces were hidden or smashed.

In the villages even the poorest parents now flew at our approach. It was openly asserted that the lord de Rais was writing a book on the black arts and using as ink the blood of the children he’d butchered, and that when it was complete he would have the power to take any stronghold he wished. We still managed to deliver two boys, ten and seven, and then two others, fourteen and four. When he was in his cups he would lie back on his bed in the secret room, mottled in gore from the waist down, and lament that his world was disintegrating for yet a third occasion. During the first, the death of his parents, he’d had his grandfather for support; and during the second, the death of his grandfather, he’d had his wealth. Now what did he have? he asked us.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Henriet told him.

He attended Easter service and received the sacraments among the poor, waving them forward to receive before him when they tried to stand aside out of respect for his position. He spent three days alone in his chambers in fasting and prayer. Then he decided to repossess the castle of Saint-Etienne-de-Mer-Morte, which he’d sold to Jean V’s treasurer. Having done so, he held at sword point in the chapel the officiating priest, the new owner’s brother, whom he then pitched into the castle’s dungeon.

He had violated ecclesiastical property, attacked a member of the duke’s household, and transgressed against the rights of familial possession. That night the conjuror and the priest from Saint-Malo did not respond to his summons, and sent no word of where they might be located. He spent the next days consumed with his design for a velvet doublet waisted in silk that was embroidered along its length with Saint John’s Gospel in golden thread, which he presented to a new page whom he then murdered and incinerated before us.

We alone stayed, our only home now the mad ostentation of his cruelty. Perhaps we imagined that since devils were only as active as God suffered them to be, no one would undertake to punish His instruments. I stopped eating. Henriet fell into greater and greater silences. One night he said only that he knew when my upset was at its most extreme, because I then crossed my arms and held my hands to my shoulders. He refused to add to this insight. On another occasion while we lay there on our pallets in the dark, he wondered what there was for us to do, now, but to low and bleat and wait for the culling.

It was not long in coming. On the fifteenth of September a body of men under the command of Jean Labbé, acting in the name of Jean V and Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, presented themselves at Machecoul and demanded that the lord de Rais constitute himself their prisoner so he might answer to the triple charge of witchcraft, murder, and sodomy. Our lord had taken particular care dressing that morning, as though he expected them. We were arrested with him, and taken to Nantes.

We rode together in a covered carriage, Henriet with his head in his hands. The lord de Rais held forth the entire journey. He said he was praying to Saint Dominic, to whose order the powers of the Inquisition had been conferred. He said he had heard of a man in Savenay who, despairing of cure, had amputated his foot and then, having fallen asleep praying to the Virgin, had roused himself to find his foot restored. He said no one, rich or poor, was secure, but waited day to day on the will of the Lord.

Henriet kept his head in his hands. The lord de Rais ignored him and addressed me. He noted that I once again had nothing to offer in response. But he said he’d seen my soul. He knew it by heart. He’d noted my hours of discouragement and been present at my yielding.

I had no response for that, either. The lord de Rais stopped speaking. His single other comment, before we arrived, was that he was glad that his François, the conjuror, had escaped.

. . .

The lord de Rais was summoned to appear before the ecclesiastical judge appointed by the Bishop of Nantes on the Monday following the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 19 September 1440. Our presence was commanded as well. We were seated in a small dock beside the notary public. He was first charged with doctrinal heresy which violated divine majesty and subverted and weakened the faith. He was next charged with sacrilege and violation of the immunity of the Church related to his having threatened with a sword a cleric standing on holy ground. He was then charged with sodomy, the Inquisitor, from the Order of Preaching Brothers, reminding the assembled that the act of depositing semen anywhere other than the vessel for which it was intended was a sin so fundamental that self-abuse was a more serious crime than rape. The Inquisitor cited the prophet who cries out and chides, “Sons of men: how low does your heart sink?”

We were advised that those of us mindful of our salvation should undertake to set forth an extrajudicial confession. When I asked Henriet upon our return to our cell if he intended to attempt such a document, he said that he looked forward to a time when the whole globe was scoured of inhabitants, with houses left vacant, towns deserted, fields too small for the dead, and crows on the highest branches shouldering one another in their solitude. He said we were like those rough countrymen during the years of the plague who were persuaded despite all to carry the corpses to the pits.

He agreed to read my account as I set it down. Having done so to this juncture, he remarked that he found it impossible to assert which was the more astonishing, the author’s memoir or his crimes. When I questioned his response he wondered with some irritation if I’d been struck by the oddity of the author’s having felt so acutely for the raptors, and not their quarry.

“I’ve felt remorse for all of those children,” I told him.

“You wrote that he had this or that person’s throat cut,” he answered. “But you neglected to indicate who sometimes did the cutting.”

At the hour of terce on Saturday, 8 October, the lord de Rais refused to take the oath on the Sacred Scripture and, having declined to respond to the articles of indictment, was excommunicated in writing. On 15 October he consented to recognize the court’s jurisdiction and admitted to many of his crimes and misdeeds. On 20 October, in order that the truth might be more fully elucidated, it was proposed that the question of torture be put to the defendant. On 21 October he petitioned that the application of torture be deferred, and on 22 October offered his full and public confession.

He spoke for four full hours. He offered the assembly a diptych of Paradise and Hell with himself as the central figure in both panels, in the former a paragon of the highest ideals of Christian knighthood, and in the latter evil’s conscienceless servant. He said he believed his acts to have been halted by the hand of God, and that by the same hand he expected to be granted salvation. He freely related all of his crimes in luxurious detail and admitted he had offended our Savior because of the bad guidance he had received in his childhood, and he implored with great emotion all parents present to raise their children with good teachings and virtuous examples. He requested that his confession be published in French for the benefit of the common people. He exhorted everyone in the court, especially the churchmen, to always revere Holy Mother Church, and added that without his own love for her he would never have been able to evade the Devil’s grasp. At the end he fell to his knees and tearfully asked for mercy and remission from his Creator and for the support of the prayers of all those, present or absent, who believed in Christ and adored Him.

The civil court found him guilty of homicide, but the canonical court condemned him for heresy and sodomy alone, the latter being known as the cause of earthquakes, plagues, and famine. On 25 October he received pronouncement of sentence: he would be hanged, and then burned. His two accomplices, Henriet and myself, would be burned and then hanged. Afterward the Inquisitor asked if he wished to be reincorporated into the Church and restored to participation in the Sacraments. He answered in the affirmative. He requested of the court that since he and his servants together had committed the crimes for which they were condemned, they might be permitted to suffer punishment at the same hour, so that he, the chief cause of their perfidy, could console and admonish them and provide an example of how to die well, and perhaps thereby be a partial cause of their salvation. This request was granted. He further asked for a general procession, that the public might view their contrition, and, when this was agreed, that on the sides of the wagon transporting them would be hung paintings he’d commissioned of late, depicting classical scenes of farewell. And the court, in concluding its proceedings, was pleased to grant this final request.

We ask all who read this to judge us with the charity we might not otherwise deserve. We were brushed by our lord’s divine impatience and, like driven horses, risked in his wagers. Now our share is only the lash. Tomorrow’s morning has been chosen for the consummation of our sentences, the site a meadow close above the main bridge over the Loire, where the trees are often adorned with the hanged.

Where is the region of that law beyond the law? No one makes his way there with impunity. I’ve filled sheet after sheet in a box at my feet. I conclude a final page by candlelight while Henriet weeps and will not speak and refuses my consoling touch. He rubs his back as my mother did. He will not read any further pages I put before him.

But I write this for him. And my eyes will be on only him as our arms are lashed around the heavy stakes to our back, and his gaze remains on lord de Rais. He will hang his head and close his eyes as he does when the greatest extremity is upon him. And lord de Rais’s final moments will manifest themselves before us. He will die first, and in view of his contrition the court has decreed that his body be taken from the flames before it bursts and buried in the church he has chosen. In his last moments he will be a model of piety, exhorting us to keep faith throughout what follows. Barely burned, his body will be laid out on the finest linen by four noble ladies, two of whom watched us through that peephole so many months ago, and carried in solemn procession to his interment. We will watch the procession go. We will be isolated in our agonies as the bundles are lit below us. We will be burned to cinders and our ashes scattered.

And God will come to know our secrets. At our immolation He’ll appear to us and pour His gold out at our feet. And His grace that we kicked away will become like a tower on which we might stand. And His grace will raise us to such a height that we might glimpse the men we aspired to be. And His grace like the heat of the sun will burn away the men we have become.