So great was the number appearing the next day in response to this notification that the court was unable to proceed with the trial, and consumed the 11th and 12th in its inquest, hearing and recording complaints of the many witnesses. As we have seen, these witnesses were presented before the judges, interrogated, and their statements taken down in the form of depositions, to the end that they might be included in the information against the prisoner. On October 13th, having finished this work, the court had the prisoner brought before it. The session of the court was held in public; the bench appears to have been filled with ecclesiastical dignitaries, many of them bishops from the neighbouring dioceses, with judges and lawyers; while below, an immense pressing, pushing, exasperated crowd of bereaved parents and friends, filled with emotion, added much to the excitement by their declarations of the losses they had sustained by the abduction of their dear children, and who filled the room with their cries against the perpetrator of the crimes by which they had been robbed of their loved ones.
The hour for opening was, as usual, nine o’clock. The first business was a return to the question of the plea to be filed by the accused. Gilles refused with greater hauteur than before, and pushed his refusal disdainfully, ending by becoming abusive of the judges and officers of the court, and conducting himself in a highly improper and insulting manner. The following extracts are from Procès-verbal of the audience (translated):
“Thursday, October 13, 1440.
“On the above-mentioned Thursday, the 13th day of October, there appeared in the court before the Lord Bishop of Nantes, etc., etc....
“Then the same Lord Bishop and the Vice-inquisitor and the aforesaid promoter, asked the aforesaid Egidius [Gilles], the accused, whether he wished to reply to the positions and articles against him, or whether he wished to say anything against them or to take any exception to them. He answered with pride and haughtiness that he wished to give no answer to the positions and articles, asserting that the aforesaid lords, the Bishop and Vice-inquisitor, were not his judges, and that he appealed from them, speaking irreverently and improperly.
“Moreover, the aforesaid Egidius, accused, then said that the aforesaid lords, the Bishop of Nantes and brother Jean Blouyn the vicar of the aforesaid Inquisitor, and all other ecclesiastical men were guilty of simony and were ribalds, and that he would rather be hanged by the neck than to answer before such ecclesiastics and judges, feeling it a grievance to have to appear before them, ... and finally addressing the lord Bishop, he said in the vernacular, ‘Je ne feroye rien pour vous comme évesque de Nantes.’ ... Then under pain of excommunication he was asked to reply to the charges made against him, but he refused, saying that he wondered how it was that Petrus de l’Hospital, the President of Brittany, could have permitted that the ecclesiastics should be present at the accusation of such crimes against him, stating that he was a Christian and a Catholic, and that he was aware that such crimes would have been against faith.
“Then he was formally excommunicated, and it was decided to proceed with the trial, paying no attention to his declaration that he had appealed, since such appellation was merely in verbal declaration and not in writing, and since the enormity of the crimes of which he was accused demanded immediate attention.”
No progress was made during the day, and the court was adjourned until the morrow, when the information would be completed and formally lodged against the accused.
The criminal proceedings in France, while different from those under the common law, yet still have some analogy therewith. There is no grand jury, but in its stead is an officer now called juge d’instruction. In this court no such special officer seems to have existed, but the duty of examining the witnesses, as done by the grand jury in the United States, was performed by the court itself, aided by the prosecutor. Instead of an indictment charging the crime as under the common law, an information is filed. The information is signed and presented in court by the prosecutor, and while being prepared is entirely within his control. He has, under the law, the power of our grand jury of charging, or refusing to charge, crimes; therefore the indictment is his. This information, instead of simply charging the crime directly, and in legal language, sets forth the history of the case, the jurisdiction of the court, the attending circumstances of the crime charged, and ends with the usual prayers for conviction and punishment.
The information against Gilles de Retz contained forty-nine articles, and charged him with three distinct crimes: (1) the crimes of abduction, violation, and murder of the infants named; (2) the crimes of magic and sorcery; (3) sacrilege in having violated the ecclesiastic immunity of the chapel of Saint Étienne-de-Mer-Morte. The information was divided into three parts. The first fourteen of the forty-nine articles were occupied with stating the jurisdiction of the court, that is to say, that Jean de Malestroit was the Bishop of Nantes, that he was properly and legally appointed as such, that he was under his superior, the archbishop, whose ecclesiastical province or cathedral was located at Tours; then followed the power, authority, and right to sit, of Jean Blouyn, the Vice-Inquisitor; then the declaration of the nativity of Gilles de Retz, his residence in the diocese of, and duty owed to, the Bishop of Nantes; a declaration of the ecclesiastical authority of the Bishop within his diocese over the château of Machecoul and the chapel of Saint Étienne-de-Mer-Morte and, in fine, a complete statement of all necessary authority over the accused, and this part finished with the declaration that all things herein set forth were true, notorious, manifest, and within the knowledge of all and every person.
The second part of the information comprised articles fifteen to forty-one. Article fifteen was a general statement of all the crimes charged against Gilles and his accomplices. The names of the accused were first stated: Gilles de Retz, Gilles de Sillé, Roger de Briqueville, Henriet Griart, Étienne Corrillaud, alias Poitou, Andrea Bouchet, Jean Rossignol, Robin Romulart, called Spadin, Huguet de Bremont, and the crimes charged were the murder of infants, killed, dismembered, burned, treated in an inhuman manner. Then there were the immolation damnable of the bodies of these infants offered to the demon as a sacrifice; consultation with the demon, odious conduct, frightful abomination, brutal debauches, and, taken together, a catalogue of crimes, a luxury of offences that exhausted the prosecutor to qualify in proper terms, and which, before a mixed assembly, could only be pronounced decently in Latin and not in vulgar language.
He told of the excitement, dread, fear, of the people; the public clamour that had sprung up from one end of the country to the other; how it at last settled around the château of Machecoul, and that every time an abduction took place some one of the accomplices of Gilles had been discovered in the neighbourhood. In making this part of his accusation, the prosecutor became filled with emotion, excited in his address, and eloquent in his words. He described the conduct and feelings of the people, and especially of the stricken parents, of their cries (clamosa, for his first presentation and reading of the information was in Latin), the loud lamentations (lamentabile), the immense sorrow (plurimum dolorosa), the accusing insinuations of the people; he showed the innumerable persons of both sexes and all conditions, both in the cities and in the diocese of Nantes, (præcedentibus vocibus quam plurimarum personarum utriusque sexus), who, bowed down by the weight of their grief and fright, had appealed to justice and to heaven with howls and cries (ululantium), and had presented their complaints together before the seat of justice, their visages bathed in tears (conquerentium et plangentium), for the loss of their sons and daughters, bringing to the Bishop, the commissioners, and the prosecutors the authority of their tears and their griefs in support of this accusation.
Article sixteen commenced with the charge of the crime of conjuration and invocation of demons. Over this the prosecutor also became eloquent. His accusation was of an infraction of ecclesiastical law, and he dealt largely with the law of the Church; his charges abounded in quotations from the Bible (Fourth and Thirty-ninth Psalms), adjurations from holy men, and was filled with many brave and eloquent words in description and denunciation of the abominable crime of black magic, conjuration, and sorcery. He takes up the Italian priests from their respective places in their native country, and brings them along until they are joined to Gilles in Brittany. In the articles alleging crimes against infants, in article twenty-seven, the accusation says, “and the number of victims is upward of one hundred and forty, and possibly more. The articles of the accusation following set forth the details of all these horrors; the action, conduct, and aid of the familiars of Gilles and his accomplices; when, where, for whom, and by whom the infants were taken, and their respective fates. These were all set forth in great detail and with great particularity, and article forty-one closes with the words: “These are the crimes which make Gilles de Retz infamous, a heretic, an apostate, an idolate, and a relaps.”
Articles forty-two to forty-seven were occupied with a recapitulation of the crimes committed by Gilles and his accomplices, and in article forty-nine he concludes with the assurance that by such crimes and by such offences the accused had incurred the sentence of excommunication and all other pains which follow the punishment to be assessed against such culpable of being auruspex et ariolus, the doers of evil deeds, the conjurors of evil spirits, their aiders and abettors, their friends, their dependants, and, finally, all those who have delivered themselves over to magic and the prohibited art. That the accused had fallen into heresy, that they were guilty of relaps, that they had offended the majesty of God, which was infinitely worse than the offence against the priests; they had incurred, consequently, the penalties for crimes against His Majesty Divine; they had broken the commands of the Decalogue, the laws of the Church; they had sown among the faithful Christians the most dangerous errors; finally, that they were rendered culpable of crimes as enormous as they were hideous, all of which were in the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Nantes. And in the closing sentences the prosecutor demands that he shall be admitted now to make proof of what he has advanced, and this he will do, so he promises, without further superfluity, reserving only the right to add, to correct, to change, to diminish, to interpret, and to put in order and produce any new matters if they shall be necessary at the time and place convenient; and he demands the application of the punishment due for this crime. The prosecutor admitted that certain of the crimes set forth in the information were not within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical court, and that they would have to be remitted to the secular court if punishment was expected.