inevitable ruin with it, he had loved for its own sake when he was rich.
It was in fact toward the year 1426, when his coffers bulged with gold,
that he attempted the 'great work' for the first time.

"We shall find him, then, bent over his retorts in the château de
Tiffauges. That is the point to which I have brought my history, and now
I am about to begin on the series of crimes of magic and sadism."

"But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of
piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar
into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."

"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together
the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been
narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be
precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He
witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown.
Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the
divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step.
In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the
territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of
sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by
whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."

"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for
his career of evil?"

"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for
anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.