"Which are of no interest," remarked Des Hermies.

"Evidently, since the name of Gilles de Rais would have perished four
centuries ago but for the enormities of vice which it symbolizes. I am
coming to the crimes now. The great difficulty, you see, is to explain
how this man, who was a brave captain and a good Christian, all of a
sudden became a sacrilegious sadist and a coward."

"Metamorphosed over night, as it were."

"Worse. As if at a touch of a fairy's wand or of a playwright's pen.
That is what mystifies his biographers. Of course untraceable influences
must have been at work a long time, and there must have been occasional
outcropping not mentioned in the chronicles. Here is a recapitulation of
our material.

"Gilles de Rais was born about 1404 on the boundary between Brittany and
Anjou, in the château de Mâchecoul. We know nothing of his childhood.
His father died about the end of October, 1415, and his mother almost
immediately married a Sieur d'Estouville, abandoning her two sons,
Gilles and René. They became the wards of their grandfather, Jean de
Craon, 'a man old and ancient and of exceeding great age,' as the texts
say. He seems to have allowed his two charges to run wild, and then to
have got rid of Gilles by marrying him to Catherine de Thouars, November
30, 1420.

"Gilles is known to have been at the court of the Dauphin five years
later. His contemporaries represent him as a robust, active man, of
striking beauty and rare elegance. We have no explicit statement as to
the rôle he played in this court, but one can easily imagine what sort