"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment
Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most
learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men
who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists,
marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians
of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them
than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the
biographers agree to represent--wrongly, I think--as vulgar parasites
and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of
the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they
would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or
pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge
in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed,
the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated
enough to understand them.

"To sum up: natural mysticism on one hand, and, on the other, daily
association with savants obsessed by Satanism. The sword of Damocles
hanging over his head, to be conjured away by the will of the Devil,
perhaps. An ardent, a mad curiosity concerning the forbidden sciences.
All this explains why, little by little, as the bonds uniting him to the
world of alchemists and sorcerers grow stronger, he throws himself into
the occult and is swept on by it into the most unthinkable crimes.

"Then as to being a 'ripper' of children--and he didn't immediately
become one, no, Gilles did not violate and trucidate little boys until
after he became convinced of the vanity of alchemy--why, he does not
differ greatly from the other barons of his times.

"He exceeds them in the magnitude of his debauches, in opulence of