Durtal raised his eyebrows.

“My, my,” he said, laughing.  “Your remarks prove to me that you are interested in ‘our own, our native land.’  I should never have suspected it of you.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette.  “As has so often been said, ’My own, my native land is wherever I happen to feel at home.’  Now I don’t feel at home except with the people of the North.  But I interrupted you.  Let’s get back to the subject.  What were you saying?”

“I forget.  Oh, yes.  I was saying that the Maid had completed her task.  Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no answer.  What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about her death?  We cannot tell.  We know that he was lurking in the vicinity of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude from that, like certain of his biographies, that he was plotting her rescue.

“At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.

“He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man.  At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.

“For he was almost alone in his time, this baron de Rais.  In an age when his peers were simple brutes, he sought the delicate delirium of art, dreamed of a literature soul-searching and profound; he even composed a treatise on the art of evoking demons; he gloried in the music of the Church, and would have nothing about his that was not rare and difficult to obtain.

“He was an erudite Latinist, a brilliant conversationalist, a sure and generous friend.  He possessed a library extraordinary for an epoch when nothing was read but theology and lives of saints.  We have the description of several of his manuscripts; Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, and an Ovid on parchment bound in red leather, with vermeil clasp and key.

“These books were his passion.  He carried them with him when he travelled.  He had attached to his household a painter named Thomas who illuminated them with ornate letters and miniatures, and Gilles himself painted the enamels which a specialist—­discovered after an assiduous search—­set in the gold-inwrought bindings.  Gilles’s taste in furnishings was elevated and bizarre.  He revelled in abbatial stuffs, voluptuous silks, in the sombre gilding of old brocade.  He liked knowingly spiced foods, ardent wines heavy with aromatics; he dreamed of unknown gems, weird stones, uncanny metals.  He was the Des Esseintes of the fifteenth century!

“All this was very expensive, less so, perhaps, than the luxurious court which made Tiffauges a place like none other.