“I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality.  To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic.  He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown.  Association with Jeanne d’Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine.  Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step.  In the Beyond all things touch.  He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy.  He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges.”

“You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?”

“To a certain point.  Consider.  She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.

“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 chateau 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.