“He had a guard of two hundred men, knights, captains, squires, pages, and all these people had personal attendants who were magnificently equipped at Gilles’s expense.  The luxury of his chapel and collegium was madly extravagant.  There was in residence at Tiffauges a complete metropolitan clergy, deans, vicars, treasurers, canons, clerks, deacons, scholasters, and choir boys.  There is an inventory extant of the surplices, stoles, and amices, and the fur choir hats with crowns of squirrel and linings of vair.  There are countless sacerdotal ornaments.  We find vermilion altar cloths, curtains of emerald silk, a cope of velvet, crimson and violet with orpheys of cloth of gold, another of rose damask, satin dalmatics for the deacons, baldachins figured with hawks and falcons of Cyprus gold.  We find plate, hammered chalices and ciboria crusted with uncut jewels.  There are reliquaries, among them a silver head of Saint Honore.  A mass of sparkling jewelleries which an artist, installed in the chateau, cuts to order.

“And anyone who came along was welcome.  From all corners of France caravans journeyed toward this chateau where the artist, the poet, the scholar, found princely hospitality, cordial goodfellowship, gifts of welcome and largesse at departure.

“Already undermined by the demands which the war had made on it, his fortune was giving way beneath these expenditures.  Now he began to walk the terrible ways of usury.  He borrowed of the most unscrupulous bourgeois, hypothecated his chateaux, alienated his lands.  At times he was reduced to asking advances on his religious ornaments, on his jewels, on his books.”

“I am glad to see that the method of ruining oneself in the Middle Ages did not differ sensibly from that of our days,” said Des Hermies.  “However, our ancestors did not have Monte Carlo, the notaries, and the Bourse.”

“And did have sorcery and alchemy.  A memorial addressed to the king by the heirs of Gilles de Rais informs us that this immense fortune was squandered in less than eight years.

“Now it’s the signories of Confolens, Chabanes, Chateaumorant, Lombert, ceded to a captain for a ridiculous price; now it’s the fief of Fontaine Milon, of Angers, the fortress of Saint Etienne de Mer Morte acquired by Guillaume Le Ferron for a song; again it’s the chateaux of Blaison and of Chemille forfeited to Guillaume de la Jumeliere who never has to pay a sou.  But look, there’s a long list of castellanies and forests, salt mines and farm lands,” said Durtal, spreading out a great sheet of paper on which he had copied the account of the purchases and sales.

“Frightened by his mad course, the family of the Marshal supplicated the king to intervene, and Charles VII,’sure,’ as he said, ’of the malgovernance of the Sire de Rais,’ forbade him, in grand council, by letters dated ‘Amboise, 1436,’ to sell or make over any fortress, any chateau, any land.