which made Tiffauges a place like none other.

"He had a guard of two hundred men, knights, captains, squires, pages,
and all these people had personal attendants who were magnificently
equipped at Gilles's expense. The luxury of his chapel and collegium was
madly extravagant. There was in residence at Tiffauges a complete
metropolitan clergy, deans, vicars, treasurers, canons, clerks, deacons,
scholasters, and choir boys. There is an inventory extant of the
surplices, stoles, and amices, and the fur choir hats with crowns of
squirrel and linings of vair. There are countless sacerdotal ornaments.
We find vermilion altar cloths, curtains of emerald silk, a cope of
velvet, crimson and violet with orpheys of cloth of gold, another of
rose damask, satin dalmatics for the deacons, baldachins figured with
hawks and falcons of Cyprus gold. We find plate, hammered chalices and
ciboria crusted with uncut jewels. There are reliquaries, among them a
silver head of Saint Honoré. A mass of sparkling jewelleries which an
artist, installed in the château, cuts to order.

"And anyone who came along was welcome. From all corners of France
caravans journeyed toward this château where the artist, the poet, the
scholar, found princely hospitality, cordial goodfellowship, gifts of
welcome and largesse at departure.

"Already undermined by the demands which the war had made on it, his
fortune was giving way beneath these expenditures. Now he began to walk
the terrible ways of usury. He borrowed of the most unscrupulous
bourgeois, hypothecated his châteaux, alienated his lands. At times he
was reduced to asking advances on his religious ornaments, on his
jewels, on his books."