nged,
ticketed, and mounted their sensational gleanings in logical sequence,
rejecting, of course, everything that did not advance the case they were
trying to make. They denied themselves imagination and enthusiasm and
claimed that they did not invent. True enough, but they did none the
less distort history by the selection they employed. And how simply and
summarily they disposed of things! It was discovered that such and such
an event occurred in France in several communities, and straightway it
was decided that the whole country lived, acted, and thought in a
certain manner at a certain hour, on a certain day, in a certain year.

No less than Michelet they were doughty falsifiers, but they lacked his
vision. They dealt in knickknacks, and their trivialities were as far
from creating a unified impression as were the pointillistic puzzles of
modern painters and the word hashes cooked up by the decadent poets.

And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers. The depilators!
taking all the hair off a real man's chest. They wrote ponderous tomes
to prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler. Somebody had deloused Villon
and shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but an
inn sign. Pretty soon they would be representing the poet as a
priggishly honest and judicious man. One would say that in writing their
monographs these historians feared to dishonour themselves by treating
of artists who had tasted somewhat fully and passionately of life. Hence
the expurgation of masterpieces that an artist might appear as
commonplace a bourgeois as his commentator.

This rehabilitation school, today all-powerful, exasperated Durtal. In
writing his study of Gilles de Rais he was not going to fall into the
error of these bigoted sustainers of middle-class morality. With his
ideas of history he could not claim to give an exact likeness of
Bluebeard, but he was not going to concede to the public taste for
mediocrity in well-and evil-doing by whitewashing the man.

Durtal's material for this study consisted of: a copy of the memorial
addressed by the heirs of Gilles de Rais to the king, notes taken from
the several true copies at Paris of the proceedings in the criminal
trial at Nantes, extracts from Vallet de Viriville's history of Charles
VII, finally the _Notice_ by Armand Gueraut and the biography of the
abbe Bossard. These sufficed to bring before Durtal's eyes the
formidable figure of that Satanic fifteenth century