the annals of crime and folly, they might claim
the highest and worst pre-eminence. Fiction has never invented any thing
wilder or more horrible than his career; and were not the details but too
well authenticated by legal and other documents which admit no doubt, the
lover of romance might easily imagine they were drawn to please him from
the stores of the prolific brain, and not from the page of history.

He was born about the year 1420, of one of the noblest families of
Brittany. His father dying when Gilles had attained his twentieth year, he
came into uncontrolled possession, at that early age, of a fortune which
the monarchs of France might have envied him. He was a near kinsman of the
Montmorencys, the Roncys, and the Craons; possessed fifteen princely
domains, and had an annual revenue of about three hundred thousand livres.
Besides this, he was handsome, learned, and brave. He distinguished
himself greatly in the wars of Charles VII., and was rewarded by that
monarch with the dignity of a marshal of France. But he was extravagant
and magnificent in his style of living, and accustomed from his earliest
years to the gratification of every wish and passion; and this, at last,
led him from vice to vice and from crime to crime, till a blacker name
than his is not to be found in any record of human iniquity.

In his castle of Champtoce he lived with all the splendour of an eastern
caliph. He kept up a troop of two hundred horsemen to accompany him
wherever he went; and his excursions for the purposes of hawking and
hunting were the wonder of all the country around, so magnificent were the
caparisons of his steeds and the dresses of his retainers. Day and night
his castle was open all the year round to comers of every degree. He made
it a rule to regale even the poorest beggar with wine and hippocrass.
Every day an ox was roasted whole in his spacious kitchens, besides sheep,
pigs, and poultry sufficient to feed five hundred persons. He was equally
magnificent in his devotions. His private chapel at Champtoce was the most
beautiful in France, and far surpassed any of those in the richly-endowed
cathedrals of Notre Dame in Paris, of Amiens, of Beauvais, or of Rouen. It
was hung with cloth of gold and rich velvet. All the chandeliers were of
pure gold curiously inlaid with silver. The great crucifix over the altar
was of solid silver, and the chalices and incense-burners were of pure
gold. He had besides a fine organ, w