“How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them?  He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed.  The texts of the times enumerate between, seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems overconservative.  Entire regions were devastated.  The hamlet of Tiffauges had no more young men.  La Suze was without male posterity.  At Champtoce the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses.  A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, “that one hight Du Jardin hath heard say that there was found in the said castle a wine pipe full of dead little children.’

“Even today traces of these assassinations linger.  Two years ago at Tiffauges a physician discovered an oubliette and brought forth piles of skulls and bones.

“Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed the atrocious details.

“At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent, enkindled by inflammatory spiced beverages and by ‘high’ venison, Gilles and his friends retire to a distant chamber of the chateau.  The little boys are brought from their cellar prisons to this room.  They are disrobed and gagged.  The Marshal fondles them and forces them.  Then he hacks them to pieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them.  At other times he slashes the boy’s chest and drinks the breath from the lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the incision with his hands, and seats himself in it.  Then while he macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms.  He himself says afterwards, ’I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.’

“Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys.  An unpublished passage in his trial proceedings informs us that ’The said sire heated himself with little boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congress in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting in nature.’  After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.

“Soon his furies become aggravated.  Until now he has appeased the rage of his senses with living or moribund beings.  He wearies of stuprating palpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead.  A passionate artist, he kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims.  He establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses the cold lips.