Meanwhile, Sister Anne, left to her own devices on the roof of the tower and not daring to come down, had removed her veil, to make signals of distress at chance. They were answered by two cavaliers accompanied by a posse of armed men, who were riding towards the castle; they proved to be her two brothers who, on learning the spurious departure of the marshal for Palestine, had come to visit and console Madame de Raiz. Soon after they arrived with a clatter in the court of the castle, whereupon Gilles de Laval suspended the hideous ceremony and said to his wife: “Madame, I forgive you, and the matter is at an end between us if you do now as I tell you. Return to your apartment, change your garments and join me in the guest-room, whither I am going to receive your brothers. But if you say one word, or cause them the slightest suspicion, I will bring you hither on their departure; we shall proceed with the Black Mass at the point where it is now broken off, and at the consecration you will die. Mark where I place this knife.”
He rose up, led his wife to the door of her chamber and subsequently received her relations and their suite, saying that his lady was preparing herself to come and salute her brothers. Madame de Raiz appeared almost immediately, pale as a spectre. Gilles de Laval never took eyes off her, seeking to control her by his glance. When her brothers suggested that she was ill, she answered that it was the fatigue of pregnancy, but added in an undertone: “Save me; he seeks to kill me.” At the same moment Sister Anne rushed into the hall, crying: “Take us away; save us, my brothers: this man is an assassin”—and she pointed to Gilles de Laval. While the marshal summoned his people, the escort of the two visitors surrounded the women with drawn swords; and the marshal’s people disarmed instead of obeying him. Madame de Raiz, with her sister and brothers, gained the drawbridge and left the castle.
On the morrow, Duke John V invested Machecoul, and Gilles de Laval, who could count no longer on his men-at-arms, yielded without resistance.[210] The parliament of Brittany had decreed his arrest as a homicide, the ecclesiastical tribunal preparing in the first place to pronounce judgment upon him as a heretic, sodomite and sorcerer. Voices of parents, long silenced by terror, rose upon all sides, demanding their missing children: there was universal dole and clamour throughout the province. The castles of Machecoul and Chantocé were ransacked, resulting in the discovery of two hundred skeletons of children; the rest had been consumed by fire.
Gilles de Laval appeared with supreme arrogance before his judges.[211] To the customary question: “Who are you? “he answered: “I am Gilles de Laval, Marshal of Brittany, Lord of Raiz, Machecoul, Chantocé and other fiefs. And who are you that dare to question me?” He was answered: “We are your judges, magistrates of the Ecclesiastical Court.”—“What, you my judges! Go to, I know you well, my masters. You are simoniacs and obscene fellows, who sell your God to purchase the joys of the devil. Speak not therefore of judging me, for if I am guilty, it is you, who owed me good example, that are my instigators.”—“Cease your insults, and answer us.”—“I would rather be hanged by the neck than reply to you. I am surprised that the president of Brittany suffers your acquaintance with matters of this kind. You question that you may gain information and afterwards do worse than you have done.”
But this haughty insolence was demolished by the threat of torture.[212] Before the Bishop of Saint-Brieuc and the President Pierre de l’Hôpital, Gilles de Laval made confession of his murders and sacrileges. He pretended that his motive in the massacre of children was an execrable delight which he sought during the agony of these poor little beings. The president found it difficult to credit this statement and questioned him anew. “Alas,” said the marshal abruptly, “you torment both yourself and me to no purpose.” “I do not torment you,” replied the president, “but I am astonished at your words and dissatisfied. What I seek and must have is the pure truth.” The marshal answered: “Verily there was no other cause. What more would you have? Surely I have admitted enough to condemn ten thousand men.”
That which Gilles de Laval shrank from confessing was that he sought the Philosophical Stone in the blood of murdered children, and that it was covetousness which drove him to this monstrous debauchery. On the faith of his necromancers, he believed that the universal agent of life could be suddenly coagulated by the combined action and reaction of outrage on Nature and murder. He collected afterwards the iridescent film which forms on blood as it turns cold;[213] he subjected it to various fermentations, digested the product in the philosophical egg of the athanor, combining it with salt, sulphur and mercury. He had doubtless derived his recipe from some of those old Hebrew Grimoires which, had they been known at the period, would have been sufficient to call down on Jewry at large the execration of the whole earth. Persuaded, as they were, that the act of human impregnation attracts and coagulates the Astral Light in its reaction by sympathy on things subjected to the magnetism of man, the Israelitish sorcerers had plunged into those enormities of which Philo accuses them, as quoted by the astrologer Gaffarel.[214] They caused trees to be grafted by women, who inserted the graft while a man performed on their persons those acts which are an outrage to Nature. Wherever Black Magic is concerned the same horrors recur, for the spirit of darkness is not one of invention.
Gilles de Laval was burned alive in the pré de la Magdeleine, near Nantes; he obtained permission to go to execution with all the pageantry that had accompanied him during life, as if he wished to involve in the ignominy of his punishment the ostentation and cupidity by which he had been so utterly degraded and lost so fatally.[215]
CHAPTER VII
SUPERSTITIONS RELATING TO THE DEVIL
We have borne witness to the sobriety of decisions pronounced by the Church respecting the genius of evil; she has recommended her children not to be in fear concerning him, not to be preoccupied about him and not even to pronounce his name. This notwithstanding, the propensity of diseased imaginations and weak minds towards the monstrous and the horrible lent, during the evil days of the middle ages, a formidable importance and most portentous forms to the darksome being who deserves nothing but oblivion, because he has rejected truth and light for ever. This seeming realisation of the phantom expressing perversity was an incarnation of human frenzy; the devil became the nightmare of cloisters, the human mind fell a prey to its own fear and, though supposed to be reasonable, trembled at the chimeras which it had evoked. A black and deformed monster spread its batwings between heaven and earth, to prevent youth and life from trusting in the promises of the sun and the still peace of the stars. This harpy of superstition poisoned all things with its breath, infected all by its contact. There was dread over eating and drinking lest the eggs of the reptile should be swallowed; to look upon beauty was to court perhaps an illusion begotten of the monster; to laugh suggested the sneer of the eternal tormentor as a funereal echo; to weep pictured him insulting the mourner’s tears. The devil seemed to keep God imprisoned in heaven while he imposed blasphemy and despair upon men on earth.
Superstitions lead quickly into absurdity and mental alienation; nothing is more deplorable and more irksome than the multitudinous accounts with which popular writers on the history of Magic have burdened their compilations. Peter the Venerable beheld the devil leering in lavatories; another maker of chronicles recognised him under the form of a cat, which, however, resembled a dog and skipped like a monkey; a certain lord of Corasse was served by an imp named Orthon, which appeared as a sow, but exceedingly emaciated and indeed almost fleshless. The prior of St. Germain des Prés, named William Edeline, testifies that he saw him in the form of a sheep which, as it seemed to him must be kissed below the tail, as a mark of reverence and honour.