“Vampirism satisfies him for months.  He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb.  He even goes so far—­one day when his supply of children is exhausted—­as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the foetus.  After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave.  But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.

“As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin.  It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim.  His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual.  He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul.  By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love.  At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.

“He contrives this:  One of the unfortunate children is brought into his chamber, and hanged, by Bricqueville, Prelati, and de Sille, to a hook fixed into the wall.  Just at the moment when the child is suffocating, Gilles orders him to be taken down and the rope untied.  With some precaution, he takes the child on his knees, revives him, caresses him, rocks him, dries his tears, and pointing to the accomplices, says, ’These men are bad, but you see they obey me.  Do not be afraid.  I will save your life and take you back to your mother,’ and while the little one, wild with joy, kisses him and at that moment loves him, Gilles gently makes an incision in the back of the neck, rendering the child ‘languishing,’ to follow Gilles’s own expression, and when the head, not quite detached, bows, Gilles kneads the body, turns it about, and violates it, bellowing.

“After these abominable pastimes he may well believe that the art of the charnalist has beneath his fingers expressed its last drop of pus, and in a vaunting cry he says to his troop of parasites, “There is no man on earth who dare do as I have done.’

“But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited.  In his excesses of stupration and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixed point.  In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slow tortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reached it—­even passed it, with diabolic aid.  Insatiable he seethes—­there is nothing material in which to express his ideal.  He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.