This rehabilitation school, today all-powerful, exasperated Durtal.  In writing his study of Gilles de Rais he was not going to fall into the error of these bigoted sustainers of middle-class morality.  With his ideas of history he could not claim to give an exact likeness of Bluebeard, but he was not going to concede to the public taste for mediocrity in well-and evil-doing by whitewashing the man.

Durtal’s material for this study consisted of:  a copy of the memorial addressed by the heirs of Gilles de Rais to the king, notes taken from the several true copies at Paris of the proceedings in the criminal trial at Nantes, extracts from Vallet de Viriville’s history of Charles VII, finally the Notice by Armand Gueraut and the biography of the abbe Bossard.  These sufficed to bring before Durtal’s eyes the formidable figure of that Satanic fifteenth century character who was the most artistically, exquisitely cruel, and the most scoundrelly of men.

No one knew of the projected study but Des Hermies, whom Durtal saw nearly every day.

They had met in the strangest of homes, that of Chantelouve, the Catholic historian, who boasted of receiving all classes of people.  And every week in the social season that drawing-room in the rue de Bagneux was the scene of a heterogeneous gathering of under sacristans, cafe poets, journalists, actresses, partisans of the cause of Naundorff,[1] and dabblers in equivocal sciences.

[Footnote 1:  A watchmaker who at the time of the July monarchy attempted to pass himself off for Louis XVII.]

This salon was on the edge of the clerical world, and many religious came here at the risk of their reputations.  The dinners were discriminately, if unconventionally, ordered.  Chantelouve, rotund, jovial, bade everyone make himself at home.  Now and then through his smoked spectacles there stole an ambiguous look which might have given an analyst pause, but the man’s bonhomie, quite ecclesiastical, was instantly disarming.  Madame was no beauty, but possessed a certain bizarre charm and was always surrounded.  She, however, remained silent and did nothing to encourage her voluble admirers.  As void of prudery as her husband, she listened impassively, absently, with her thoughts evidently afar, to the boldest of conversational imprudences.

At one of these evening parties, while La Rousseil, recently converted, howled a hymn, Durtal, sitting in a corner having a quiet smoke, had been struck by the physiognomy and bearing of Des Hermies, who stood out sharply from the motley throng of defrocked priests and grubby poets packed into Chantelouve’s library and drawing-room.