off. Felix
manifested no remorse, and in the ensuing investigation proved himself
to be intelligent and atrocious. Dr. Legrand Du Saule and other
specialists kept him under vigilant surveillance for months, and could
not discover the slightest pathological symptom. And he had had fairly
good rearing and certainly had not been corrupted by others.

"His behaviour was like that of the conscious or unconscious
demonomaniacs who do evil for evil's sake. They are no more mad than the
rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good's sake.
Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the
desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul. In the
fifteenth century these extremes were represented by Jeanne d'Arc and
the Marshal de Rais. Now there is no more reason for attributing madness
to Gilles than there is for attributing it to Jeanne d'Arc, whose
admirable excesses certainly have no connection with vesania and
delirium.

"All the same, some frightful nights must have been passed in that
fortress," said Durtal. He was thinking of the chateau de Tiffauges,
which he had visited a year ago, believing that it would aid him in his
work to live in the country where Gilles had lived and to dig among the
ruins.

He had established himself in the little hamlet which stretches along
the base of the abandoned donjon. He learned what a living thing the
legend of Bluebeard was in this isolated part of La Vendee on the border
of Brittany.

"He was a young man who came to a bad end," said the young women. More
fearful, their grandmothers crossed themselves as they went along the
foot of the wall in the evening. The memory of the disembowelled
children persisted. The Marshal, known only by his surname, still had
power to terrify.

Durtal had gone every day from the inn where he lodged to the chateau,
towering over the valleys of the Crume and of the Sevre, facing hills
excoriated with blocks of granite and overgrown with formidable oaks,
whose roots, protruding out of the ground, resembled monstrous nests of
frightened snakes.

One might have believed oneself transported into the real Brittany.
There was the same melancholy, heavy sky, the same sun, which seemed
older than in other parts of the world and which but feebly gilded the
sorrowful, age-old forests and the mossy sandstone. There were the same
endless stretches of broken, rocky soil, pitted with ponds of rusty
water, dotted