No sexual confession is more pathetic, as it exceeds all bounds in the will to horrify.
The following words do away with the possibility of not trembling:
— “And very often,” he said, “when the said children were dying, he sat on their bellies and delighted in watching them die thus, and with the said Corrillaut and Henriet
he laughed at them …”
(p. 196).
Finally, Lord de Rais — who in order to excite his senses as much as possible had gotten drunk — went out like a light. The servants cleaned the room, washing up the blood, and while the master slept, burned the cadaver in the fireplace. Long logs and a quantity of faggots allowed them to rapidly reduce it to ashes. They took pains to burn the clothes one by one, wanting, as they said, to avoid the stench.
The whole order of the feast had taken place according to plan: it did not correspond to the impulses of passion. Designed to serve the sensual pleasure of one sole man, it passed without anguish: these children of seven to twenty died with no more fuss than a kid goat.
If there was tragedy, it was not unceasing. Rather, what is the more remarkable in these horrors is the indifference of the participants.
They could not have conceived of the feeling that this unbending severity assumes for us: terror and indignation beyond bounds … In his day, Gilles de Rais was a very important man, and the little beggars whose throats he cut were worth no more than the horses.
It is difficult for us to evaluate the distance that then separated the man (magnified by birth and fortune) who did the crushing from the insect crushed between two stones.
More than a century later in Hungary, an eminent lady was killing her servants with no more difficulty than Gilles had killing children. This great lady, Erszebeth Bathory, was related to royalty, and she was not pursued until after having yielded to a desire to kill daughters of the lesser nobility. Gilles de Rais himself was not distressed until after a long pause, and that was not until after absurd blunders; probably public rumor finally grew to such a point that one could not easily close one’s eyes. Without friends, without support, Gilles was unable to shake off the hostility and the general weariness. But with skill and moderation, his crimes would not have been profoundly shocking; without any other reason, one’s first impulse might have been to close one’s eyes.
The High Rank of Gilles de Rais
In this blood-filled drama, we cannot forget what determines Rais’ prominence more than anything else: he is not just any man in this world, but a noble; this man of war, this ogre who violated and killed little children, is primarily a privileged man. His fortune moreover is not his only privilege. His existence in itself is privileged; his existence itself, in itself, is fascinating. It radiates, it is glorious by itself; because of his birth, it is glorious as luxury and war are glorious.
Rais’ prominence, of itself, is a force that seduces and dominates. It goes without saying that there is nothing seductive about cutting children’s throats. But Rais’
nobility
is not noble in an adulterated sense. Rais is noble in the sense of the German warriors. His nobility has the ardor of a violence respecting nothing, and in the presence of which there is nothing that does not give way; like that of the
Berserkir,
such a violence places him whom it inspires outside this world. The nobility of Gilles de Rais is the distinguishing mark of the monster.
Occasionally his inherent nobility no longer distinguished itself from his terrifying aspect; it ends up possessing itself of the allure of night and the fear that night gives. One need only recall the German Harii and the soot with which they covered themselves, the better to belong to the terror of the night. Violence involves an ambiguity between seduction and terror. The noble warrior, the great lord, he who fascinates, is terrifying.
At the same time, Gillies de Rais trembled before the Devil. But the Devil fascinated him; indeed, he solicited an alliance with that which terrified him. Fundamentally, the supernatural world, that of the Devil or Gold, was — like him — of noble essence, of sovereign essence if one likes. The existence of God or the Devil had but one aim, what a noble held as an aim for the entire world of the nobility: a diurnal or nocturnal enchantment, similar to those very beautiful paintings that dazzle and fascinate the viewer. These tableaux can include bloody battles, they can include martyrs (sexual themes having necessarily been transposed … ). But terror is always intimately joined to enticement.
On this level, Lord de Rais at least has this merit. He represents in a pure state the impulse that tends to subordinate the activity of men to enchantment, to the game of the privileged class. Men, on the whole, produce; they produce every kind of good. But in 15th-century society, these goods were destined for the privileged class, for those who among themselves can devour each other, but to whom the masses are subordinate. For the mass of men it is necessary to work so the privileged class can play, even if they also sometimes play at devouring themselves to their ruin. The goods that represent work to the masses mean nothing but a sense of game for the privileged class. The work that entered into the product cannot be noticed by them, because the noble, the privileged man, does not work and never ought to.
One often forgets, but the very principle of the nobility, what it is in essence, is the refusal to suffer degradation or disgrace — which would be the inevitable effect of work!
For an earlier society work was shameful in a fundamental way. It is the task of the slave or serf, one who, at the same time in his own mind, has lost his dignity; the free man could not work without falling from grace.
This is related to the fact that work could not be interesting in itself; it is a subordinate activity, a servile activity, which serves something other than itself. He who wants to escape the servile life cannot as a rule work. He must play. He must amuse himself freely, like a child; free from his duties, the child amuses himself. But the adult cannot amuse himself like the child if he is not privileged. Those who have no privilege are reduced to working. By contrast, the privileged man must make war. Just as the unprivileged man is reduced to working, the privileged man must make war.
War itself has the privilege of being a game. It is not, like others, a reasonable activity; it has no other meaning than the anticipated result. War indeed can be seen from the angle of utility: a city or a country can be attacked and must be defended. But without the turbulence of countries or cities which assail their neighbors without necessity, men could avoid war. War is, from the start, the effect of a turbulence, even if it is true that it is occasionally the inevitable result of the impoverishment of a region whose inhabitants must seek the means to survive elsewhere.
Most often, those who take the initiative of war were led to it by an exuberant, explosive impulse. That is why war for so long was able to have the feeling of a game; a terrifying game, but a game.
In Gilles de Rais’ time, war is always the game of lords. If this game devastates populations, it exalts the privileged class. It has for the privileged class the
ultimate
meaning that
work
could never have for the poor folk. The interest of work is subordinated to its result; the interest of war is nothing but war. It is war itself which fascinates and which terrifies. Those who are like Gilles de Rais, who live in the expectation of these terrible battles leaving death, cries of horror, and suffering behind them, know nothing else that gives them this violent excitement. Present generations no longer know practically anything about the exaltation, even though death was the basis of it, that formerly was the least ridiculous meaning and aim of war, a fact that is likely to abandon us to a feeling of our powerlessness in the world. Are we not blinded at the very moment when the mad truth of another time is hidden from us?
Faced with as vain a question, what can we do, if not hide?
But we must continue the paradoxical quest, as given in the questions that his life and the world of his time posed for Gilles de Rais …
The Tragedy of the Nobility
The fact that Gilles de Rais lived in a world of war linked to privilege does not prevent us from seeing that the world was changing at this time. In Gilles’ eyes, war was truly a game. But this manner of seeing is less and less truthful, to the extent that it ceased to be even that of the majority of the privileged class. More and more, war is then a general misfortune; it is, at the same time, the
work
of many people. The general situation deteriorates and becomes more complex; misfortune reaches even the privileged class, who are less and less eager for war, and for play, who finally see that the moment has come to give way to the problems of reason. At this time, the technical and financial means of war involve such machinery that personal impetuosity and exaltation are limited. The heavy cavalry, essentially those arms that made war a luxurious game, succeeded during Gilles de Rais’ lifetime in losing a great part of its importance to the advantage of infantry and archers, arrows and pikes. Likewise, armed bands and pillagers take the upper hand over prestigious combats of costumed horses and knights; the need follows to substitute regular and hierarchical armies for companies of old hands without discipline. Only hierarchy and discipline could maintain part of the place that the privileged class had in war.
Indeed, something subsists of the game that war is in its essence. In a strict sense, something subsists of it in our day. But discipline, strict orders, and scientific command stamp war with an essentially rational character, which has caused us to forget — in the fundamental debate between game and reason — that it has been very recently, and as a secondary consequence, that war moved to distinguish itself from individual impetuosity and violence, which had been the truth and heart of war, to the advantage of cold reason.
Things evolve slowly: one does not arrive right away at this enormous build-up of modern arms that has ultimately suffocated the violent spirit of play that transfigured war. But in the years following the death of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, remaining Marshal of France, had ceased to be at home in the armies of his day, which were condemned to become regular. Since Constable Richemont had prevailed over La Trémoille in 1434, there was an embryo of the royal administration which resulted in the Estates General of Orléans in 1439.
Gilles de Rais still held the title of Marshal of France in 1434. But after La Trémoille’s disgrace, he was no longer anything. He had been a “gallant knight of arms”; he knew how to mount an assault, to line up magnificent horses and superb knights. He knew how to drink, and evidently he enjoyed the worst confusion. Above all, he loved to fight, and beside Joan of Arc, he covered himself in glory at Tourelles, at Patay, and, even after the heroine’s death in 1432, at Lagny.
The administration, being organized after the time when no rake was assuring him the favor of the King, saw to it that his military valor suddenly no longer held meaning. He was nothing on his own but a bungler; from this moment all that he was, his state of mind and his reactions, no longer suited the spirit of new necessities.
From 1432 on, from the day he abandons himself to the obsession of cutting children’s throats, Gilles de Rais is nothing but a failure. Everything gets mixed up. In August 1432 at Lagny, he figures again as the glorious captain. His grandfather dies in November. The disappearance of this brutal force must free him, relieve him, and unhinge him at the same time. He is bound to badly handle a too complete, too sudden freedom, and a wealth that has become staggering. That following summer, La Trémoille falls. It must not be imagined that Rais took his disgrace lightly. I have spoken of his foolishness … But what I said of the game he played helps us see how he lived it, and how this game was confused with his life. The deprivation must have affected him all the more as he had just yielded to frightful habits …
I have spoken of his childishness. It is, in fact, in a childish manner — consequently the most entirely, the most madly — that he incarnates this spirit of feudal society that with all its vivacity originated with the game that the
Berserkir
had played; he was riveted to war by an affinity that marked a taste for cruel pleasures. He had no place in the world, if not that which war gave him. A society steeped in feudal war alone could provide what it expected of this privileged man, who could do nothing other than drink to the dregs of privilege. Not only his vanity was affected, but his passion was hurt by the disfavor that caught up with him. This worn-out feudal world put him on the shelf. Under the appearance of wealth, what he had as yet to live was, in advance, blighted. However, one thing opposed him to these miserable lords, all ready to possess what remained: this privileged man could never, in the face of death, accept a life that would no longer fascinate him.
In the tragedy of Gilles de Rais, there was at first a suffocation. There could be no question of admiring the wretch, or pitying him. But the tragedy took place upon the disappearance of the acquired conditions on which the life of the privileged class rested. What the feudal world had lived on disappeared. At the same moment, his castles began to smell of death. At Champtocé and Machecoul, bodies were drying up or putrefying at the bottom of certain towers (pp. 101 and 102). These castles were enormous masses of stone, inside of which the nooks could have been or very nearly were inaccessible, as deeply buried as burial vaults. These fortresses were the outward signs — or the sanctuaries — of ancient feudal wars, of which these lords were still gods. These wars insisted on drunkenness, they insisted on the vertigo and giddiness of those whom birth had consecrated to them. They insisted on rushing them into assaults, but occasionally suffocated them in dark obsessions. The game that these castles externalized was expected to be played to the hilt; possessing them, whoever resided in them could not have easily escaped. He could only do so if he rejected the spirit that these high, thick walls embodied. Whoever was effectively occupied with his interests — like Craon, managing his fortune with a bourgeois’ calculation and greed — was able to stop playing this game if he wanted. But he who is dominated by his interests is compromised: he works in some way, he is enslaved. In contrast, it was Gilles de Rais’ passion — far from giving in to the event — to be stubborn, to be obstinate to the point of ruin.