FAQs #3

Did you really translate the trial record yourself? And why do I keep reading that your book was responsible for the 1992 retrial?

This is quite embarrassing. These strange misapprehensions first appeared on an otherwise-impeccable web article that I cannot now find. If there had been a comments section, I would have corrected the errors. There wasn't. I should have contacted the author, and I intended to. I forgot. I didn't think it would make much difference. I, of all people, should have known better:, I'm fully aware of how myths start and how easily they spread. Of course, others picked up on these mistakes. "What I tell you three times is true". Now it's the truth and I have to go round stamping on the pesky errors wherever they pop up. 

These are the facts. No, I didn't translate the trial record. I did, however, compare all the French and English translations available, & check them against the Old French and Latin of René Maulde's redacted transcription. As far as I know, I'm the first to do this. 

Obviously I had nothing to do with the unofficial retrial. It was twenty-five years before my book was completed! (Yes, the anniversary was kind of deliberate). The prime mover there was the glorious Gilbert Prouteau, and I have written about him often. I feel mortified to have stolen his thunder. However, I can't help feeling that the naughty old enfant terrible would find all this uproariously funny. I picture him cackling "Mort de rire!" and falling off his cloud in his hilarity. Sorry, M. Prouteau...

Further reading:
A vexing, perplexing, vital book: my review of Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup
Qui veut innocenter Barbe-Bleue?

Some web pages have Gilles de Rais performing sex acts on severed heads. Surely that isn't mentioned in the trial record?

No, it certainly is not! This is one of the silliest of the fantasies that have been circulating recently. I first saw it in 2016, on Twitter, in the rococo form of Gilles biting a hole in the child's neck and using it instead of the more usual orifices. I wondered at the time who could have come up with such a sick notion and why they would think the supposed confessions needed any such embellishment. Later I saw it a few times in its more usual form, with the "hole" where the neck had been severed forming the locus of gratification. Hole? 


Eventually, it was a most unusual podcast that helped me to understand where this strange notion had its origins. On Episode 144 of the 13 O'Clock Podcast, Jenny Ashford and Tom Ross puzzle their way through the story of Gilles de Rais, trying and failing to make the evidence cohere, as any intelligent person must. The odd story about the severed heads is mentioned and sourced, as I might have suspected, to Wikipedia, that fount of all ignorance.  At best  the Gilles de Rais page is a jigsaw of fact and fiction. Like all Wiki pages, it is a muddle of repeated and clumsy c&p and slapdash editing by many hands. At one point somebody  had deleted, or simply forgotten to add, the details of the sexual perversion Gilles had been accused of, a jejune if rather confusing form of frottage, in the correct place. The sentence skipped from the severing of heads to the phrase: According to Poitou, Rais disdained the victims' sexual organs, and took "infinitely more pleasure in debauching himself in this manner ... than in using their natural orifice, in the normal manner." The article did mention the perversion Gilles was supposed to have favoured, but earlier on. Anybody skim-reading might easily miss it. Nature abhors a vacuum, so somebody filled the hiatus with something that seemed to make sense. Chinese Whispers took over and a new myth was born. 

Further reading:
Bluebeardery and copypasta

You've read the blog, now buy the book

I never meant to write a biography of Gilles de Rais. All I intended to do was bring the ideas of Reinach, Fleuret, Bayard and Prouteau to an English-speaking audience. I assumed there were plenty of decent biographies out there and all I would need to do was provide an outline of his life.

Then I read (in some cases re-read) those biographies, both English and French... Oh, dear. Even the best were inaccurate, the worst were compendiums of myth and fiction. This is what I said back in spring 2014: "There is no one book about Gilles de Rais, either in English or French, that gives all the known facts free of myth and with no agenda. All accept Bossard as an authority, and Bossard knowingly used the forged trial account by "The Bibliophile Jacob", Paul Lacroix, and invented a Bluebeard folklore that simply did not exist at that time. Also, there is no revisionist biography in English."

I touched upon the works of Prouteau and his predecessors and issued the first hint of what I was planning: "However, I do feel that they only scratch at the surface of the case for Gilles' innocence. If this blog is less regular than it might be, that is because there is a book to be written..."

Four years later (and eight years after I began my research) that book is finally complete. I have tried to be as inclusive as possible and to give a taste of various biographers and novelists. There is a detailed chronology, a couple of maps, an appendix that contains all the trial evidence, translations of Bossard's Bluebeard myths (including the lengthy anonymous poem that has never, to my knowledge, been rendered into English), my own version of the tale of Comorre the Cursed, various short essays and much, much more. 

Some of the material first saw daylight in this blog. A lot more is new. If you want to know the identity of the spy in Gilles' household who took bribes from the Duke and was instrumental in spreading the "public rumour", for example, you must either read the book or research it for yourself. Also, it is fascinating how the life of Gilles de Rais takes on a completely new shape if it is not viewed through the filter of an unquestioning belief in his guilt. 

The book tells the story of Gilles de Rais' life and death, but goes beyond that to give an account of his afterlife in fiction, culture and legend. If you want all the truth, plus an examination and debunking of the lies and myths, you need to read it. 

The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais is on sale here, price £12 + P&P.

Portrait of the author
as a much younger woman

And now the book is written, what next? 

Watch this space... 

There will be more developments.