It has been said that the Bishop, for a considerable length of time, had been receiving and hearing complaints and charges against Gilles de Retz, and that especially during the last month he had been investigating their truth. In this he was aided by the aforesaid William Chapeillon, who would thus have been entirely familiar with the charges against Gilles de Retz. It was, therefore, eminently proper that he should be appointed prosecutor. Whether the Bishop had the full power under either the civil law or the ecclesiastical law, to make the foregoing appointments of colleagues on his own motion and according to his own will, is not here determined, nor does it appear, in making these appointments, whether the accused was consulted or whether he gave his consent, nor does it appear that he either took or had the right to take exception to them or any of them and by such exception deprive them of the right to act in his case. As to one aid to the Bishop, Gilles’s consent was asked and obtained before he was allowed to sit, that was Brother Jean Blouyn, of the Order of Frères-Prêcheurs at the Convent at Nantes. He had been appointed as Vice-Inquisitor for the diocese of Nantes by the authority of the Grand Inquisitor of France, B. N. Medici, who had been appointed to that office by the Pope. Great stress is laid, throughout the process wherever this appointment came in question, on the fact that Gilles de Retz had consented to it before the priest took his seat on the bench. Jean Blouyn was a man of about forty years of age, who seemed to have commended himself for his moderation in making a decision, and for his firmness in adhering to it. Abbé Boussard classes him as digne de tout éloge et apprécié de tout le monde.
Another tribunal represented the civil law, and it was by this that the secular sentence of execution was passed.
In France, as in all countries under the civil or Roman law, and in some of the countries under the common law, there has been a separate jurisdiction of certain offences for the ecclesiastical court. As a matter of course, and necessary for the continuance and good administration of justice, there would be some controversies of which these two courts would have concurrent jurisdiction. It is quite impossible in such a work as the present to go into this question. Those who are interested in the subject are respectfully referred, for France, to the Histoire du droit criminel en France (pp. 74 and 85) by Du Boys; to Faustin-Helie’s Traité de l’instruction criminelle; Fornier’s Les officialités au moyen âge; Esmien’s Histoire de la procédure criminelle en France, et spécialment de la procédure inquisitoriale depuis le XIIIme siècle jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1882); and for the general criminal procedure and jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical tribunal, to Beiner’s Beitrage zu der Geschichte der Inquisition, prozesses (pp. 16–78). For a general history of these subjects as applied to England, one should consult the great work on the History of Common Law, by Sir Henry Maine.
The record of the process against Gilles de Retz in the archives of the Department of Loire-Inférieure has been adverted to. We now come to a point where it is almost the entire evidence. It consists of the records of the two courts, one the ecclesiastical court, kept by the clerks before-mentioned, and to which the names of some one or all of three are signed for each day, either Jean Delaunay, Jean Petit, Guillaume Lesne, or Nicholas Giraud. This record, made each day, apparently was supervised and made official by the prosecutor, William Chapeillon, and it seems that more than one copy was made of it at that time. This was in Latin, though French was interjected occasionally. The other record was of the civil tribunal, the record of the day’s proceedings being reduced to writing and signed by Touscheronde as Commissioner of the civil court, or by one of his aids, or, as they call them, assesseurs, who signed, alternating with Touscheronde. Their names were, Nicholas Chatau, Michael Eveillard, and Jean Coppegorge. This record was kept in French, the vulgar tongue, and very bad French and a very vulgar tongue it was. It would be interesting to philologists to note the changes during the last five hundred and fifty years in the spelling and, doubtless, pronunciation of the words of the French language.
These two records of the trial, the ecclesiastical and the civil, are treated as one, and their originals are filed together in the archives of the Department of Loire-Inférieure in the locality designated as Coté E, 189. Four copies of this record have been made, two in the year 1530, one of which was at the request of Gilles de Laval, the other for the Sire de la Tremoille. The copy given to the family of Laval has disappeared and no trace of it is known; the other for Tremoille was placed in the château of Thouars which, it is to be remembered, was the family name of the wife of Gilles de Retz.
This copy has taken its name from this château and is known in history as the Manuscrit de Thouars. It was left in this château until its existence was forgotten. When the château was bought by the State and became part of the national domain, all papers and documents belonging to the family were transported to the château of Serrant in Anjou, of which one of the ladies of the family of Tremoille was mistress. This copy of the record was in a pile of documents, tossed pell-mell and without order, and here Monsieur Marchegay, the archivist of the Department of Maine-et-Loire, discovered it. The Duke de la Tremoille immediately took steps for its preservation. This record was on parchment like the original, and comprises four hundred and twenty pages, of which three hundred and three, in Latin, are the record of the ecclesiastical trial; the last hundred and eight pages constitute the record of the civil tribunal, and are in French.
Two other copies have been made in modern times, one for the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, made under the Second Empire, and one for the Public Library at Carpentras, both of which have been certified as true. The author procured a photograph of an open page from the original ecclesiastical record in the archives at Nantes. It was made on his personal application while he was Consul of the United States at Nantes. These records will be explained in this work, and upon their foundation rests the entire history of Gilles de Retz. Without this record or its copies, the true story of Bluebeard could not be written.
Michelet (Histoire de France, vol. v., pp. 208 et seq.), in his description of the arrest and trial of Gilles de Retz, depends on two manuscript copies which he mentions in a note; one in the Bibliothèque Royale (No. 493 F)—the other communicated to him by M. Louis Du Bois.
The warrant of arrest of Gilles de Retz was signed by the Bishop on the 13th of September, 1440, it was executed the next day, the 14th, and on that day Gilles was thrown in prison. On the 19th, five days after, he was brought before the Bishop in the great hall of the Tour Neuve, in the château of Nantes. No information had been prepared, and no indictment filed. The prosecutor informed Gilles that he was charged with the crime of heresy and asked if he was willing to be tried before the ecclesiastical court, to which he consented, and added, with a defiant air full of assurance, that he would recognise in advance any other ecclesiastical judges, as he had great desire to clear himself of such accusation in the presence of any inquisitor, n’ importe lequel. It was on this occasion that the Bishop of Nantes called to his aid as an auxiliary judge, Jean Blouyn of the Order of Frères-Prêcheurs, the Vice-Inquisitor of the faith for the diocese of Nantes, and then, this business having been brought to a close, the session of the court was adjourned until the 28th of September, when the witnesses would be heard.
The record of this session is rendered in Latin, a translation of which is here given: