“At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes in tumultuous eruption.

“Now, there are no women in the chateau.  Gilles appears to have despised the sex ever since leaving the court.  After experience of the ribalds of the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine form came over him.  Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of femininity which all sodomists abhor.

“He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority.  He chose them in the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty, and ‘beautiful as angels’ they are.  They are the only ones he loves, the only ones he spares in his murderous transports.

“But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy.  The law of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go the whole way, is once more fulfilled.  Gilles’s soul must become thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell at ease.

“The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over a slaughter house.  The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do not know.  Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati’s chamber.  The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who holds his peace.  Gilles, confounded, flees.  Prelati rolls up the poor remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.

“Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation and conjurements.  It manures a horrible crop.  Not long afterward the Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been sown.

“From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the Marshal’s retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands.  All the children disappear.  Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields.  Little girls coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.

“In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke’s commissioner in these matters, compile interminable lists of lost children.

“Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman Peronne, ’a child who did go to school and who did apply himself to his book with exceeding diligence.’

“Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, ’and this was a poor man and sought alms.’