Read Along:
It is October 26, 1440. The bells in Nantes have not yet rung for prime. The sky over Brittany is the color of wet stone. Three gibbets stand in the meadow at the edge of the Place du Bouffay, and a fire has been laid beneath the tallest of them.
Three men are walked from the prison in irons. The man in the middle is thirty-six years old. He wears the clothes he was arrested in. Six weeks ago he was a Marshal of France. He carried the holy oil at the coronation of a king. He fought beside Joan of Arc at Orléans, at Patay, at the gates of Paris.
Twenty thousand people are reported to be in the crowd. Some of them have come because their children are not coming home.
He climbs the ladder. They tie him to the gibbet. They pull the ladder away. They push the fire close enough to scorch him. And before the body is consumed, four women in veils step out of the crowd. They cut him down. They put him in a coffin. They carry him to the Carmelite monastery and they bury him with honors.
His name was Gilles de Rais.
I want to tell you about him. But before I tell you about him, I want to tell you what was in the tower.
In the year 1438, two years before the execution, Gilles de Rais sells the castle of Champtocé to the Duke of Brittany. Champtocé is the family seat. He was born in a chamber inside it called the Black Tower. He is selling it because he is broke, which is impossible for a man of his rank, and which is true anyway.
Before the Duke’s men arrive to take possession, Rais sends his servants up into one of the towers. They come down with three coffers. Inside the coffers are the bones of children. The men who later confess to the trial will say there were thirty-six skeletons. Or forty-six. They are not sure. They counted them by the heads.
The coffers are loaded on a cart, taken across the river to another castle, the castle at Machecoul, and burned in the great hearths.
That’s the man. That’s the work he did between his twenty-eighth and his thirty-sixth year. We are going to talk about how he became someone capable of that. We are going to talk about the household of silence that hid it for eight years. We are going to talk about the demonologist from Florence, and the priest who recruited him, and the boy lured from his mother with the promise of a position as a page. We are going to talk about a parental testimony given before an ecclesiastical court in October of 1440, in the shadow of a cathedral that Gilles de Rais helped to fund.
And we are going to talk about Bluebeard, which is the wrong story. And about whether he was guilty, which is the question that will not stay buried.
I am A.M. Blackmere. This is the Blackmere Podcast. The episode is called “Bluebeard’s Shadow.”
A note before we begin. The crimes in this episode involve violence against children and sexual abuse. I am going to handle them as the historical record handles them. I am not going to dramatize them, and I am not going to spare them. If that is not what you came for today, this is the place to step away.
Gilles de Montmorency-Laval is born in the autumn of 1404, almost certainly in September or October, at the castle of Champtocé-sur-Loire. His birthplace is a chamber called the Black Tower. The historian Matei Cazacu thinks the year is 1405, owing to legal delays in his parents’ marriage. We don’t know the exact day. We know the room.
His father is Guy de Laval-Rais. His mother is Marie de Craon. Two of the most powerful houses in western France, fused. The boy is the eldest son, and the eldest son in late medieval France is not a child. He is an inheritance walking.
His mother dies young. His father dies in October of 1415, of what the chroniclers call a serious bodily infirmity. Gilles is eleven. He has a younger brother, René. They are now wards of the state. Their father’s will explicitly names a guardian, a man called Jean Tournemine.
That is not what happens.
What happens is that the maternal grandfather, a man named Jean de Craon, walks into the situation with the will of an army. He overrides the father’s instruction. He takes the boys. He takes the estates. He takes everything. There is no one with the standing to stop him.
We need to talk about Jean de Craon. The trial records describe him as domineering and cruel. Cazacu calls him an unscrupulous, politically ambitious autocrat. Whatever the specifics of his cruelty, the documentary record gives us one scene that tells us most of what we need to know.
In 1420, Jean de Craon needs his grandson to be married. He has selected the bride. She is a girl named Catherine de Thouars, an heiress to a fortune on the borderlands of Anjou. She is the boy’s third cousin, which makes the marriage canonically incestuous. Her family does not want it. The Church does not allow it.
So Jean de Craon sends his fifteen-year-old grandson to abduct her.
The marriage is performed in a chapel outside the parish church, without banns. The Church annuls it. Jean de Craon goes to Rome. He buys a dispensation. The marriage is reformalized in 1422. Around that same period, Craon abducts Catherine’s mother and threatens her with death until she relinquishes her dower.
I want you to picture that. A teenage boy is taught, by the man who controls his life, that the way you acquire something is to take it. That the law is a soft border. That the women whose lives you are interrupting are obstacles. That the Church can be paid. By 1422, before Gilles de Rais has done anything in his own name, this is the architecture of his world.
The trial records will later describe his life under his grandfather’s tutelage in a single phrase. They call it unbridled.
He goes to war.
He is a born cavalry commander. He brings his own retinue, twenty-five men-at-arms and eleven archers, and he hires them out to the Dauphin, the man who will later be Charles VII of France. This is the late phase of the Hundred Years’ War. England holds Paris. The Dauphin has lost his nerve and most of his country. France is, by any reasonable accounting, finished.
In April of 1429, a peasant girl from Lorraine arrives at the Dauphin’s court. She tells him she has been sent by God to drive the English from France and to put a crown on his head. She is seventeen years old. Her name is Joan.
Gilles de Rais, age twenty-four, gets attached to her command.
I have to be careful here. The historical record does not give us the deep personal bond between Gilles and Joan that nineteenth-century writers projected onto them. There is no surviving letter. There is no recorded conversation. What we have is a military association at the highest level. He fought under her flag. He stood near her on the day they broke the English at Orléans. He was at the Battle of Patay in June of 1429, the engagement that ended English military supremacy in the Loire Valley.
Then, on July 17, 1429, in the cathedral at Reims, he carried the Sainte Ampoule, the vial of holy oil used to anoint French kings going back to Clovis, into the coronation of Charles VII. He was twenty-four years old. The same day, the king made him a Marshal of France.
Marshal. There is no civilian equivalent. It is the senior rank in the army. He was, on that morning, one of the most decorated young men in Europe.
In September, he and Joan ride together at the gates of Paris. She is wounded by a crossbow bolt. The assault fails. Within seven months, she will be in Burgundian custody. Within thirteen months, she will be ash on the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen.
There is no documentary evidence that Gilles de Rais attempted to rescue her. None.
I want to sit with that, because the romantic version of this story has him devastated by Joan’s death. It has him spiraling into satanism in his grief. The literary tradition, from Bossard through Tournier, leans on it. The historical record does not.
What the historical record gives us is this. Joan dies in May of 1431. Gilles de Rais participates in the relief of Lagny in 1432, a year later. He is still functioning. He is still a commander. And then, in November of 1432, his grandfather Jean de Craon dies, and the last person on earth with any authority over Gilles de Rais is gone.
The murders begin in the spring of 1433. Or possibly the spring of 1432. Some scholars place them earlier. Either way, they begin almost the moment the leash comes off.
I am not telling you that Joan’s death didn’t matter to him. I am telling you we don’t know if it did. What I am telling you is that the wealthiest unsupervised twenty-eight-year-old in France, with a private army of two hundred men, with a network of fortified castles spread across the Pays de Retz, with no living guardian and no legal restraint, was free.
The first thing he did with that freedom was begin killing children.
I want to tell you what the wealth looked like. Because the crimes are unintelligible without it.
His annual income, by the most defensible historical estimate, is around fifty thousand livres tournois. Translated forward into twenty-first-century purchasing power, that is multi-billionaire money. His standing personal guard is two hundred men-at-arms, kept on retainer for display rather than function. He travels with a collegiate chapel. An entire ecclesiastical apparatus on the road, with a chapter of canons, a choir of boys, and a portable organ. The vestments are cloth-of-gold. The candles are beeswax. The wine is unlimited.
In 1435, four years before he is arrested, he sponsors a public theatrical production in Orléans called the Mystery of the Siege of Orléans. He pays for new costumes for every performance. He throws the costumes out after a single use. Hundreds of them. He hands wine and meat to the crowd that came to watch.
By July of 1435 his wealth is so visibly in collapse that his own brother, René, petitions the king. Charles VII issues a royal interdict, the Lettres of Orléans, forbidding Gilles de Rais from selling, mortgaging, or alienating any further part of his patrimony.
He ignores it. The Duke of Brittany, who is buying castles from him at a discount, helps him ignore it.
This is the man. This is the household. And inside that household, somewhere between the spring of 1432 and the spring of 1433, he begins.
The first murders happen at Champtocé. Then more, at La Suze, the Rais townhouse in Nantes. Then more, and more, at the great fortress of Machecoul. Children disappear from villages along the Pays de Retz. The earliest accomplice is a cousin, Gilles de Sillé. Then a knight, Roger de Briqueville, captain of the Machecoul guard. Then two valets, Étienne Corrillaut, called Poitou, and Henriet Griart. And a procurer, a woman named Perrine Martin, called La Meffraye, the Frightener, who walks the roads with a soft face and offers bread.
The methods are not in this script. The method I will give you is the disposal. Bodies were burned. The hearths of Machecoul and Tiffauges burned for hours. The bones were scraped from the ash and dropped into ash heaps and moats. In Champtocé, before the property transfer, they carried the skeletons up out of a tower in coffers and burned them somewhere else.
I want to tell you how this lasted eight years.
It lasted because of the household. Because two hundred men-at-arms answered to one man. Because peasants who saw something were terrified to speak. Because the lord moved between four castles spread across two provinces, and a child taken from the gates of one was burned in the hearth of another, fifty miles away. Because Gilles de Rais was a Marshal of France, and the local civil authorities had no jurisdiction over him, and the bishop at Nantes had not yet been compelled to act.
It lasted because the bishop benefited from the man’s existence. Because the Duke of Brittany was a creditor with property interests. Because his brother René was busy trying to legally restrain the estate sales. Because nobody in any institution that surrounded Gilles de Rais was incentivized to ask hard questions about why peasant children kept disappearing in the Pays de Retz.
A shoemaker testifies, later, that the community knew. That parents had gone to the gates of Machecoul looking for their sons, and that they had been turned away, and that fear of violent reprisal kept everyone else silent.
Peasants near La Mothe-Achard testify, later, that on certain nights you could see red glares coming from a casement high in a castle tower. And that you could hear what sounded like cries.
In September of 1438, in a town called La Roche-Bernard, a woman named Peronne Loessart watches her ten-year-old son walk away with a man called Poitou. Poitou had told the boy he would be taught military skills at the castle. He had given him fine clothes. He had put him on a horse.
Peronne Loessart goes to Gilles de Rais, who is in La Roche-Bernard at the time, and she asks him about her son. Rais says nothing. He turns away. Poitou, beside him, turns to her and says one line. The line survives in her testimony, recorded two years later, before the ecclesiastical court of Bishop Jean de Malestroit.
“He was as beautiful as an angel.”
She never saw him again.
Her son’s name is not in the record. The record gives us his mother’s name, his age, the date he was taken, and the line that the procurer said about him. That is all.
The killings continue. By 1438, Rais’s finances have collapsed completely. He turns to alchemy.
He sends his priest, a man named Eustache Blanchet, to Italy to find someone who can summon a demon. Blanchet returns with a twenty-two-year-old Florentine cleric named François Prelati. Prelati arrives at the castle of Tiffauges in 1438 or 1439. He is there to make Rais rich.
He fails. The demon, whom he calls Barron, does not appear. Prelati explains that the demon is angry. The demon requires offerings. The offerings, Prelati tells Rais, must be the body parts of children.
Rais delivers the offerings. The hand. The heart. Possibly the eyes. Sealed in a glass vessel. Given to Prelati, in the lower halls of Tiffauges, while the candles burn.
The demon never comes. There is no successful conjuration in the historical record. What there is, is a financially ruined Marshal of France, in a castle on a river in the Vendée, performing a ritual that requires the murder of a child.
I want to address something here. The popular image of Gilles de Rais, the one that comes down through Huysmans and through the nineteenth-century occultists, is of a grand satanic priest performing elaborate Black Masses in a candlelit crypt. That image is mostly literary. The historical record gives us a desperate man in failing fortune buying the services of a charlatan who could not actually summon anything. The pacts existed. Rais signed one in his own blood, drawn from his little finger. The demon did not.
What was real was the fact that, when the rituals failed, Rais kept providing the offerings.
Now we come to the end. The end of Gilles de Rais begins, of all places, on a morning in May of 1440, in a parish church in a village called Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte.
Rais has been in a property dispute. He had previously sold the castle of Saint-Étienne to a man named Geoffroy Le Ferron, the treasurer of the Duke of Brittany. He wants the castle back. On May 15, 1440, he and his armed retainers walk into the parish church during the celebration of Mass. They interrupt the priest, who is Geoffroy Le Ferron’s brother, a clergyman named Jean Le Ferron. They drag him out of the church in irons.
It is a violation of ecclesiastical immunity. It is the one crime in 1440 that even a Marshal of France cannot commit without consequence. The bishop, Jean de Malestroit, is forced to act. He opens an investigation. He invites the parents of missing children to come forward.
They do. By the dozens.
On September 15, 1440, the captain of the ducal guard, a man named Jean Labbé, arrives at Machecoul with twenty soldiers. Gilles de Rais offers his sword without resistance. He is taken to Nantes.
The trial that follows is two trials. An ecclesiastical court, presided over by Bishop Malestroit and a Dominican vice-inquisitor named Jean Blouyn, prosecutes the spiritual offenses. Heresy, sodomy, sacrilege, the invocation of demons. A secular court, under Pierre de l’Hôpital, the President of the Parlement of Brittany, prosecutes the temporal one. The murder of children.
The indictment is forty-nine articles. They are read aloud on October 13. Rais initially refuses to recognize the court. He calls the judges simoniacs and ribalds. He is excommunicated for contumacy.
Two days later, he reverses. He apologizes. He accepts the court’s authority. The accomplices, Poitou and Henriet, give detailed confessions that match each other almost word for word. On October 21, when faced with the threat of judicial torture, Rais confesses to everything. On October 22, in open court, weeping, he confesses publicly. He asks the parents present to forgive him. He asks that the confession be read out in the vernacular so that the common people can understand his sins.
His own words on the matter of motive are these.
“Solely for my evil pleasure and evil delight, to no other end and with no other intention, without anyone’s counsel, and only in accordance with my imagination.”
That is a man giving a confession in a torture chamber. We have to hold that. The threat of la question, the formal procedure of judicial torture, was inseparable from his decision to speak. The confessions of Poitou and Henriet were obtained under conditions that would not be admissible in any modern court.
And the confessions corroborate each other in detail that no medieval prosecutor was capable of fabricating. They name the same children, the same locations, the same methods, the same hearths. They describe the layout of castles the prosecutor had not been inside. They produce a coherent eight-year timeline. The peasant testimonies, gathered separately from across multiple villages, match the accomplice confessions on the names and dates of disappearances. There is too much, and too consistent, for a frame.
He was condemned by both courts on October 25.
The next morning, he was walked to the meadow at Place du Bouffay.
We need to talk about Bluebeard.
In 1697, two and a half centuries after Gilles de Rais’s execution, a French civil servant named Charles Perrault publishes a collection of fairy tales. One of them is called “La Barbe bleue.” It is the story of a wealthy nobleman with a strange blue beard who marries young women and forbids them, on pain of death, from entering one specific room in his castle. The young wife, of course, opens the room. She finds the bodies of his previous wives.
You have already met this story, even if you have never read Perrault. It is in Bartók. It is in Angela Carter. It is everywhere. And popular culture has, for two centuries, asserted that the story of Bluebeard is the story of Gilles de Rais.
Modern folklorists are unconvinced.
Perrault’s tale closely resembles a much older Breton legend, the legend of Conomor the Cursed, a sixth-century chieftain who murdered his pregnant wives. Conomor is the better fit. The murdered wives are central to Bluebeard. Gilles de Rais did not murder his wife. He had, as far as the record shows, a stable if unhappy marriage to Catherine de Thouars, who survived him by three decades.
The Bluebeard linkage gets cemented in the nineteenth century. A man named Eugène Bossard publishes the first major modern biography of Gilles de Rais in 1885. Bossard collects local Breton folktales. He argues that the figure of Bluebeard, in popular oral tradition, is Gilles de Rais. The argument is more atmospheric than evidentiary. But it sticks. It is the version that filters into the tourist signage at Tiffauges, into the cultural shorthand, into every quick reference that wants a folkloric handle for him.
I think it sticks because it is, in a way, a kind of relief. Bluebeard is a fairy tale. Bluebeard is the kind of villain you can keep at the distance of a story. To say Gilles de Rais inspired Bluebeard is to translate him into something culturally manageable. It is to make him a folkloric figure rather than a documented one.
The trial records do not allow that translation. They give you peasant names and dates and the testimony of mothers. They give you the line, “He was as beautiful as an angel.” They give you the hearth at Machecoul.
There is one more thing I have to address, because if I don’t, somebody will write to me about it, and they should.
There has been, for over a century, a current of historical revisionism that argues Gilles de Rais was innocent. That he was framed. That the entire trial was a politically motivated land grab orchestrated by Duke Jean V and Bishop Malestroit, both of whom did, in fact, profit materially from his execution. The argument goes back to a French historian of religion named Salomon Reinach in 1902. It was given new life in 1992 by a Vendéen novelist named Gilbert Prouteau, who organized a mock retrial in Luxembourg that delivered an acquittal. It is currently advanced in English by an author named Margot Juby.
The mainstream of medieval scholarship rejects the revisionist case. Heers rejects it. Cazacu rejects it. Bouzy refutes it line by line.
I want to give the revisionists their strongest point, because it is real. The accusers had material motive. Duke Jean V and Bishop Malestroit were creditors who inherited estates. The trial was opened in the aftermath of a property dispute. The confessions were obtained under threat of torture. These are facts. A serious history has to hold them.
But the revisionist case requires you to believe that a coordinated frame-up generated parallel confessions from two illiterate valets that matched each other in granular detail, while also producing dozens of consistent peasant testimonies from villages across the Pays de Retz, while also fabricating a psychosexual narrative so specific and so disturbing that no fifteenth-century churchman had any reason to invent it. The standard charges of heresy and sodomy would have sufficed for the land grab. The Church did not need a confession that included weeping for the parents and a request that the document be read aloud in French.
The political opportunism was real. The crimes were also real. Both are true.
What we are left with is a man who was, by the documentary record, both a Marshal of France and a serial murderer of children. Both a hero of Orléans and the lord of Machecoul. The medieval system that produced him had no language for what he was. We had to invent the language, in the twentieth century, looking back. He sits in our typology with Elizabeth Báthory, with the German werewolf Peter Stumpp, in a small group of pre-modern aristocratic predators whose crimes were documented in court before there was any framework, anywhere, for understanding them.
Gilles de Rais is not the original Bluebeard. He is the original case file.
I want to bring you back to the meadow.
October 26, 1440. The morning after the verdict. The procession from the prison, across the bridge over the Loire, to the Place du Bouffay. Twenty thousand people are reported to be in the crowd. Some of them are praying for him. Some of them are the parents.
Three gibbets. The middle one is his. Henriet Griart and Étienne Corrillaut, called Poitou, are tied to the others. There is a story, recorded in the chronicles, that Gilles de Rais asked to die first. So that his servants would not lose their courage. The judges granted it.
Before he died, he is said to have spoken to his men. The line is recorded in the chronicle of Jean Chartier, the official chronicler of Charles VII.
“We have sinned, all three of us, but as soon as our souls depart our bodies we shall all see God in His glory in Heaven.”
Then they pulled the ladder. Then they set the fire. And before the body burned, four women in veils stepped out of the crowd. They were noblewomen. They had been authorized by the Duke. They cut the body down. They placed it in a coffin. They walked it through the streets of Nantes to the Carmelite monastery, and they buried it with full honors.
The two valets, Henriet and Poitou, were burned to ash. There was no one to retrieve them.
The children in this episode have no graves. There is no monument in the Pays de Retz to a peasant boy lured from his mother in La Roche-Bernard with a promise of soldiering. There is no chapel for the forty-six skeletons in the tower at Champtocé, who were burned in coffers in the hearths of Machecoul to clear the property for sale. The tourist signage at Tiffauges calls it Bluebeard’s Castle. There is no signage, anywhere, that names them.
We have their mothers’ names. We have the date their sons walked away. We have one line, spoken by a procurer at the gate.
It is going to have to be enough.
The question that stays with me, after all the research, is not whether he did it. The record is overwhelming and I think the record is right. The question is what it means, that he did. That the same arrangement of medieval power that built the cathedral at Nantes, that crowned a king at Reims, that put the holy oil into the hands of a twenty-four-year-old Marshal, also gave that man Tiffauges and Machecoul, and two hundred men-at-arms, and eight unsupervised years.
The crimes of Gilles de Rais are not a glitch in the medieval system. They are an outcome of it.
I am A.M. Blackmere. Thank you for listening.
