ther times he slashes the boy's chest and drinks the breath from the
lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the
incision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while he
macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over
his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. He
himself says afterwards, 'I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures,
tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.'

"Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys. An unpublished passage in
his trial proceedings informs us that 'The said sire heated himself with
little boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congress
in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting
in nature.' After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to
pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the
fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the
ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the
top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.

"Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rage
of his senses with living or moribund beings. He wearies of stuprating
palpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate artist, he
kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims. He
establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated
heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses
the cold lips.

"Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children,
appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the
tomb. He even goes so far--one day when his supply of children is
exhausted--as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the foetus.
After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to
those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his
violations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the known
phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual
pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most
delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a
detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.

"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer
suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no
longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the