This impulse to stab—­with no desire to kill, or even in most cases to give pain, but only to draw blood and so either stimulate or altogether gratify the sexual impulse—­is no doubt the commonest form of sanguinary sadism.  These women-stabbers have been known in France as piqueurs for nearly a century, and in Germany are termed Stecher or Messerstecher (they have been studied by Naecke, “Zur Psychologie der sadistischen Messerstecher,” Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie, Bd. 35, 1909).  A case of this kind where a man stabbed girls in the abdomen occurred in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in 1819 or 1820 there seems to have been an epidemic of piqueurs in Paris; as we learn from a letter of Charlotte von Schiller’s to Knebel; the offenders (though perhaps there was only one) frequented the Boulevards and the Palais Royal and stabbed women in the buttocks or thighs; they were never caught.  About the same time similar cases of a slighter kind occurred in London, Brussels, Hamburg, and Munich.

Stabbers are nearly always men, but cases of the same perversion in women are not unknown.  Thus Dr. Kiernan informs me of an Irish woman, aged 40, and at the beginning of the menopause, who, in New York in 1909, stabbed five men with a hatpin.  The motive was sexual and she told one of the men that she stabbed him because she “loved” him.

Gilles de Rais, who had fought beside Joan of Arc, is the classic example of sadism in its extreme form, involving the murder of youths and maidens.  Bernelle considers that there is some truth in the contention of Huysmans that the association with Joan of Arc was a predisposing cause in unbalancing Gilles de Rais.  Another cause was his luxurious habit of life.  He himself, no doubt rightly, attached importance to the suggestions received in reading Suetonius.  He appears to have been a sexually precocious child, judging from an obscure passage in his confessions.  He was artistic and scholarly, fond of books, of the society of learned men, and of music.  Bernelle sums him up as “a pious warrior, a cruel and keen artist, a voluptuous assassin, an exalted mystic,” who was at the same time unbalanced, a superior degenerate, and morbidly impulsive. (The best books on Gilles de Rais are the Abbe Bossard’s Gilles de Rais, in which, however, the author, being a priest, treats his subject as quite sane and abnormally wicked; Huysmans’s novel, La-Bas, which embodies a detailed study of Gilles de Rais, and F.H.  Bernelle’s These de Paris, La Psychose de Gilles de Rais, 1910.)

The opinion has been hazarded that the history of Gilles de Rais is merely a legend.  This view is not accepted, but there can be no doubt that the sadistic manifestations which occurred in the Middle Ages were mixed up with legendary and folk-lore elements.  These elements centered on the conception of the werwolf, supposed