had it. Complicated with
another disorder, it manifested itself in the Marquis de Sade. It was that
which affected Gilles de Retz.

Actuated by it, he lured alchemists to Tiffauges. With them from the
confines of the Sabbat, magicians came. Conjointly it is not improbable
that they succeeded then in really evoking Satan, whose response to any
summons consists, perhaps, not in a visible apparition, but in making men
as base as they have conceived him to be.

In the horrible keep something of the kind must have occurred. Gilles de
Retz became actually obsessed. His soul turned a somersault. Where the
scholar had been, a vampire emerged. Satan was believed to enjoy the blood
of the young. To minister to the taste, Gilles killed boys and girls. For
fourteen years he stalked them. How many he bagged is conjectural. He had
omitted to keep tally.

His first victim was a child whose heart he extracted, and with whose
blood he wrote an invocation to Satan. Then the list elongated
immeasurably. That lair of his echoed with cries, dripped with gore,
shuddered with sobs. The oubliettes were turned into cemeteries, the halls
reeked with the odor of burning bones. Through them the monster prowled,
virtuoso and vampire in one, determining how he might destroy not merely
bodies but souls, inventing fresh repasts of flesh, devising new tortures,
savoring tears as yet unshed, and, with them, the spectacle of helpless
agony, of unutterable fear, the contortions of little limbs simultaneously
subjected to hot irons and cold steel. Witnesses deposed that some of the
children cried very little, but that the color passed from their eyes.[57]

There is a limit to all things earthly. Precisely as no one may attain
perfection, so has infamy its bounds. There are depths beneath which there
is nothing. To their ultimate plane Gilles de Retz descended. There,
smitten with terror, he tried to grope back. It was too late. Leisurely,
after fourteen years of Molochism, the echo of the cries and odor of the
calcinated reached Nantes, with, for result, the besieging of Tiffauges,
the taking of Gilles, his arrest, trial, confession--a confession so
monstrous that women fainted of fright, while a priest, rising in horror,
veiled the face on a crucifix which hung from the wall--a confession
followed by excommunication and the stake.[58]

In this super-Neronian story Bluebeard is not apparent. Yet he is there.
It is he that is Gilles de Retz. Years ago a