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

FAQs #2

Well, if Gilles de Rais didn't kill the children, who did?

Nobody did. There is no evidence to indicate that more children than might be expected went missing in his vicinity. The country was in a state of upheaval, with bands of soldiers living off the land, and the years when Gilles was supposedly pursuing his murderous career were a kind of mini Ice Age, with long and bitter winters. The attrition rate would have been high, especially among homeless beggars. Around forty children over eight years in a wide area would not have been an alarming or unusual number. A close examination of the evidence shows that children were going missing from areas he had no reason to visit, from Machecoul when he is recorded as living at Tiffauges, and that many of the children had no link to Gilles or his entourage at all. The attempt to explain this by positing the existence of two or more female procurers ranging the countryside is unconvincing, especially as none of Gilles' friends mentions them, not even Poitou and Henriet.

Further reading:
The Beast of Extermination: a numbers game
La Meffraye

So was it all a plot by the Church?

Now that the theory of Gilles' innocence has reached a wider audience, it is quite common for internet commentators to blame the Catholic Church. But this popular scapegoat was not responsible in his case, although the ecclesiastical court was certainly weaponised against him. His judge, Jean de Malestroit, was Bishop of Nantes but he plotted against Gilles in his capacity as Chancellor of Brittany. He was a lifelong Anglophile and felt that the Duchy would be more likely to keep its independence if it allied with England rather than with France. Ironically, in 1488 Brittany was handed over to French governance by the Lavals, Gilles' family.

The Church did not profit from Gilles' demise: his estates went to the sons of Jean V.

Further reading:
L'évêque diabolique - ?

A likely story #5

Guillaume le Barbier, eighteen years old and therefore an unlikely victim, is one of a mere dozen vanished boys who is given a full name. The details of his case are contradictory, however. His father was Georget, a tailor – or, according to Blanchet, a pastrycook.  The former seems more likely, as the lad was apprenticed to Jean Peletier, the tailor to Lady de Rais and the rest of the household. A minor oddity is that the presence of her tailor implies that Catherine, who supposedly lived apart from her husband, was in residence at Machecoul while he was engaged on a murder spree. Although we are consistently told that his wife and daughter lived at Pouzauges, Abbé Bourdeaut calmly asserts that young Marie was brought up at Tiffauges où Gilles de Rais et sa femme demuraient habituellement. The presence of his family at both his favourite castles would rather mar their testosterone-soaked Sadean splendour.

The only suspicious circumstance surrounding this particular disappearance was that Blanchet saw the boy entering the castle of Machecoul – where, after all, he was employed – in the company of the automatically sinister Poitou. Nor is the date of his disappearance clear-cut; his father was firm that it was St Barnabas' Day, June 11th, whereas two other witnesses mentioned Easter. Both dates clash with Blanchet's evidence; he claimed that it happened while he was lodging with Etienne Ferron, but he only stayed there briefly and left in late February or early March. Poitou, however, affirmed before the civil court that Guillaume le Barbier was among the victims.

Blanchet asserted that the boy's possessions, including a silver coin, were returned to his father, which seems to indicate that he had died a natural death, since this would hardly have been done if he had been murdered. Although he must have come and gone from the castle at will, the descriptions of  his disappearance imply that he was abducted, which would hardly have been necessary. Even here, accounts clash: his father said that he vanished while playing with a ball of thread; the omnipresent witness André Barbe had him picking apples, which is a good trick in June, let alone at Easter.

Talking Sh*t

The penultimate alleged murder, that of an anonymous boy in Vannes, should have been vivid in the minds of all concerned, since it happened only a few months earlier and the circumstances were exceptional. For some reason, however, there was no agreement about such crucial points as where exactly the murder took place and whether the head was severed and burned, although a burning head in a private house would surely have been memorable. André Buchet provided the child and was present throughout, so he might have been a useful person to ask, since he was living in the Duke of Brittany's household at the time of the trial. However, Buchet was quietly removed from the list of suspects halfway through the trial and never held accountable.

Wherever the boy was killed, all are in agreement that his body (with or without head) was disposed of in the latrines. The story we are told at the trial is that the corpse failed to sink into the sludge of human waste and therefore Poitou descended into the cesspool to push it out of sight. It was only with some difficulty that Gilles' other accomplices (including Buchet) pulled him out again. The episode is presented as broad farce.

Nobody has ever remarked upon the obvious dangers of this operation. The latrines would have been full of sewer gases – hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, methane, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides – which would have been released in greater quantities when the body was thrown in and pushed under. These gases are extremely toxic and would have been present in high concentrations; at the highest level, one breath would be enough to cause unconsciousness. The latrines were deep enough that he needed a rope to get into them and required help to get out, so he must have been there for several minutes. He would have been dead.

This is merely one of many impossibilities in the trial of Gilles de Rais which have gone unchallenged for nearly 600 years.





[Illustration is a plaque available from this site].

A likely story #4

Of all the likely stories presented as evidence, this may be the most startling. There is a strong implication in Jean Jenvret’s testimony that Gilles was in two places at once.

In June 1438, Jenvret's nine-year-old son disappeared. Modern writers, taking their cue from Georges Bataille, aver oxymoronically that the boy “sometimes frequented” the Hôtel de la Suze. In fact, the text says that he never at any time went there; the error seems to be with the translator, Klossowski, replacing aucune fois with parfois, an indication of how little respect has ever been shown to the original text. Obviously, if he had been a regular visitor, no intervention would have been necessary; he would simply not have come home one day. As it was, one of the mysterious procuresses was apparently involved.

According to the testimony of the child's parents, the conveniently dead Perrine Martin was supposed to have admitted to leading the child from Nantes to Machecoul; Poitou, on the other hand, said that he “could have” killed him at La Suze. Bataille gamely tries to reconcile the clear contradiction by theorising that perhaps she took the boy's dead body to Machecoul for disposal.

The most glaring error, however, is the suggestion that Gilles was in residence at La Suze when young Jenvret vanished, yet La Meffraye took him to Machecoul where she handed him over to – Gilles. If not bilocation, this is confused and confusing testimony.

Be that as it may, M and Mme Jenvret attested to their son's loss and several local witnesses confirmed that they had heard the couple lamenting and never saw the boy again thereafter.

Hangin' round...

Page from a French bande dessinée, title unknown.
[Click on the picture to enlarge]

A few details of the so-called confessions, low key in the testimony, have stood out vividly to posterity and are always emphasised and elaborated on by biographers. These are invariably the most Grand Guignol elements. One of the most notorious of these details is the partial hanging of a child before the attack began in earnest. According to Henriet and Poitou's evidence, a child would sometimes be suspended from a hook, either by Gilles or one of his assistants, in order to silence any cries for help. Gilles would then take the boy down and reassure him that it was only a game, a reassurance that one can hardly imagine being effective on a terrified and half-strangled child. Writers have had a field day with this scenario, hypothesising that Gilles got a certain perverse thrill out of calming and caressing a child that he was about to kill. However, the valets are quite clear and prosaic: the hanging was done to silence the child. Of course, this was one way in which the prosecution sought to explain why no member of the household was alerted to the bizarre goings-on in the master's rooms: hanging would damage the vocal cords and make the slightest sound impossible. Gilles himself, in his various confessions, does not even go as far as his servants; he merely mentions hanging from a hook as one of several methods of killing. If the sadistic charade of hanging and rescuing had been a favourite pastime of his, one might reasonably expect him to mention it.

In fact, this is yet another example of the way in which writers have ignored contemporary documents and invented their own ogreish Gilles de Rais.

Note, please, that the cartoonist has placed the potence, or gallows, outside. Obviously nobody would have an instrument of torture in their bed chamber, the idea is ridiculous! In fact, it is the only part of the episode that is supported by the trial records: the children were supposedly hung from a hook in Gilles' room...

The Ostrich Position

Bluebeard: Brave Warrior, Brutal Psychopath by Valerie Ogden: a review

It is a red-letter day when a new English language biography of Gilles de Rais appears; the last was Leonard Wolf's serious and largely accurate, but entirely soulless, effort over a third of a century ago. Valerie Ogden's book promised so much, notably a sympathetic fresh interpretation of Gilles' life, but it is a sad disappointment. Like so many biographers before her, she has been led down the primrose path that leads to the ubiquitous Bibliophile Jacob and his “more circumstantial” copy of the trial record. Ogden does not list him among her sources, but it is not necessary to read the Bibliophile, Paul Lacroix, to be seduced by him. Bossard, for his own transparent reasons, accepted this obvious forgery as a genuine text; most biographers and novelists since have been strongly influenced by the Bibliophile, either by reading him directly or via Bossard and his imitators.

Ironically, the fatal flaw of this Bluebeard book is a lack of curiosity, specifically about sources. Ms Ogden dismisses Prouteau's radical biography as a “novel”, which indeed it is in parts, but is happy to cite Huysmans' novel Là-Bas and even Tragedy in Blue by Richard Thoma, which is nothing but a short story. Huysmans, like the Bibliophile, has much to answer for when it comes to muddying the waters of Raisian studies. The life of Gilles de Rais has long been obscured by myths, mostly created by these two writers and retailed unthinkingly by almost all subsequent biographers. Ms Ogden is no exception. So Gilles is arrested by Labbé and makes his witty pun, as invented by Lacroix; only here the joke is botched because “abbé ” is mistranslated as “priest”. And of course the Bishop of Nantes veils the crucifix, just as Huysmans had him do in an elaboration of a less dramatic moment in Lacroix.

Really, this is a book out of its time. It would be wrong to criticise it for failing in something it never set out to do, and I am fully aware that I come at it from an opposing camp. However, it must be said that slowly public opinion has shifted in favour of a revisionist stance, and it seems impossibly quaint in the 21st century to read a text that fully accepts the validity of an Inquisition trial with the use of torture. Ogden never fully faces the twentieth century movement towards rehabilitating Gilles de Rais; the only revisionist writer she addresses is Reinach, who is easy to discredit. Fleuret, Bayard and Prouteau, who make a more detailed case, are ignored. In particular, she cannot bring herself to mention the 1992 retrial that resulted in his unofficial acquittal. The ostrich position is never a good look; a writer can accept the verdict of the modern tribunal or argue against it, but to simply pretend it never happened is a wilful denial of reality.

Gilles is a difficult topic for a modern writer in any case. Roland Villeneuve could happily wallow in sodomy and black magic in the Satanism-obsessed 1970s; in the 21st century, sodomy is a taboo word and nobody believes in magic. Leaving only murder, repositioned as a response to that fashionable diagnosis Post Traumatic Shock Disorder. “Somehow he became a homicidal sexual psychopath”. There is a world of evasion in that word “somehow”. The psychology is vague and fails to gel. Because Ogden has fallen for some rather bizarre, novelettish fantasies about Gilles' childhood and youth, he is presented as a latent psychopath from his earliest days. He is then traumatised by some unknown event, possibly the death of Jehanne d'Arc, resulting in PTSD. However, since the primary trait of a psychopath is lack of human feelings, it seems unlikely that this could happen. The PTSD theory is a good one, but it remains a theory; there is no evidence at all to back it up. It is one more author attempting to explain away the complete transformation of Gilles' character which supposedly took place in 1432.

The errors are manifold. At one point we are told, wrongly, that brother René de la Suze was born the year before his parents died, in 1414. In the chronology, the date is correctly given as 1407; but this is said to be the same year as Jehanne, who was famously not yet twenty when she died in 1431. She was actually born in 1412. At another point, a horrible mistranslation has Henriet suggesting the idea of killing children by cutting their throats, as if this would never have occurred to a serial killer in the five years or so before his valet was initiated. This is not merely a mistranslation; it is a strong indication, and not the only one,  that Ogden is not at all familiar with the trial record, which is her only primary source, either in French or in English. She also conflates the two exhumations that allegedly took place at Champtocé and Machecoul; in her account, Roger de Bricqueville arranges his peep-show at the former and the latter never takes place. This is simply sloppy reading of the text, or possibly an ill-judged attempt to simplify the story by removing a confusing duplication. What it is not is a serious attempt at writing history.

A thread that runs through the book is Gilles' apparent obsession with the “black planet” that ruled his destiny. Several times Ms Ogden stresses that he mentioned it more than once, that both his valets heard him talk about it, that Gilles himself hinted at it in his out-of-court confession. Not so. It is mentioned once only, by Henriet at the ecclesiastical tribunal; this is one of the few points on which his and Poitou's evidence differs. Neither is there any implication that this was a regular theme with his master; he said it once. Allegedly.

This biography occupies an uneasy no-man's-land between genuine history and novel. There are impossible descriptions that seem to come from works of fiction and at every turn we are told what Gilles is wearing – at one point, “rose-pink tights”. Some of this comes from the Bibliophile Jacob, who has Gilles wearing first white and then black before the court at symbolic moments; though  here the details are elaborated upon, Gilles is seen in five different shades of white and later in three shades of black, including “corbeau-damask”. There is a lurid and completely uncanonical description of Poitou's initiation, involving hanging from a hook and a “serrated” dagger, and also one of Ms Ogden's not-infrequent lapses of tone which has this young boy described as “sinewy and stunning” and “this loopy young man”.  Almost all of the missing boys have a couple of words of description, which would be perfectly justifiable in a novel but has no place in a historical work. It also makes this section of the book conspicuously formulaic and adjective-heavy. More worryingly, the murders are dealt with in a manner that is gleefully gruesome (“slashing and bashing”) and not wholly accurate – that Gilles squatted in the entrails of his victims was an exaggeration by Huysmans, and there is no mention of “violated anuses” in the trial record; sodomy is not necessarily buggery. On a lighter note, the poor people are said to decorate their hovels with henbane flowers – of all the flowers they could have chosen, this is possibly the least likely, as henbane is poisonous in all parts and even its scent is intoxicating. A sceptic might remark that this is one explanation for some of the more outré testimony.

It would be tedious to continue. Inaccuracy, minimal grasp of the facts as related in the trial documents, a fatal weakness for a well-turned myth, poor translations from the French (Memory of the Heirs is clunking as well as incorrect) numerous verbal infelicities (“ominous omens” should never have made it past the first draft), and most of the accents missing from the names, which does not add to the authority of the book. At the end, Valerie Ogden explains how she came to be interested in Gilles de Rais; she is related by marriage to a family who claim descent from him, although they “run away” when she tries to question them. One can hardly blame them at this point. It is tempting to wonder if her in-laws were playing a joke on her, since de Rais had only one daughter, who was childless, and the family died out completely in 1502. As she would have known if she had read Bossard attentively. Although Ms Ogden has dutifully parroted the Abbé's official myth that Gilles was named “Bluebeard” because of his war-horse, or barbe, which was bluish-black, she clearly clings mutinously to the Bibliophile's description of him as literally blue-bearded, since these self-styled descendants have “cobalt-blue hair”...

Read a sample of the book here
Not just me - another bad review here

The Algebra of Need: was Gilles an alcoholic?

According to Prouteau in Gilles de Rais ou la gueule du loup, Gilles was an alcoholic who drank five litres of hippocras per day. This was wine fortified with spices and herbs and, at 20% by volume, twice the strength of ordinary wine. When he was imprisoned, his supply of alcohol was cut off and he was given nothing but water to drink, thus precipitating him into an attack of delirium tremens and rendering him highly susceptible to suggestion. It also meant that the court had in its gift the two things that Gilles could not live without: alcohol and the consolation of the Church. As soon as he admitted to the offences he had been charged with, he would be given hippocras and his excommunication would be revoked.

This is a seductive theory; if Gilles was an addict deprived of his drug, he would have admitted to anything to have it restored to him. As William S Burroughs described the Algebra of Need: "In the words of total need: 'Wouldn't you?' Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way."  Also, a man in the throes of the DTs and hallucinating would be easy to convince that he had, in fact, done the most outrageous things. However, one has to treat it with caution. Apart from the script that Gilles was made to read about the excesses of his life and the exaggerations of the Mémoire des Héritiers, both highly suspect documents, there is no real indication that Gilles was dependent on alcohol. He may have been a fairly heavy drinker who suffered from forced abstinence in prison, but there is no proof that his gaolers deliberately withheld wine from him in order to break his will, although they certainly would have done if they had thought it would help to brainwash him.

This theory has to be regarded as unproven, but it is hardly needed to explain why Gilles de Rais, after refusing for so long to submit to the will of the court, underwent a complete change of character overnight. He had seen the evidence against him. He knew that it had been extracted by torture and that, subjected to the same torture, he would inevitably break and recite the same litany of atrocities. He knew that he would be condemned and executed. He believed that if he went to his death contumacious and excommunicate, he would be plunged into Hell forever. And so he took the only option that would minimise his pain both in this world and the next; he ate humble pie and read the confession that had been prepared for him and that is so clearly based on the forced testimony of Henriet and Poitou, even though that would inevitably lead to shame and death, because shame and death were infinitely preferable to torment on earth that would continue for eternity in Hell.

Illustration from La trilogie Gilles de Rais by Jacques Martin/Jean Pleyer.

(Interestingly, although it is not too difficult to find images of Gilles feasting, representations of him drinking are vanishingly rare.) 

.

The Bibliophile Jacob

Anybody who has read about Gilles de Rais in a biography or on a website and later gone on to read the trial records will have wondered why the latter seem so pallid in comparison. The small details that so enliven other accounts are simply absent. In particular, anybody who has read The Bloody Countess by Valentine Penrose, with its counterpointed story of Gilles de Rais, will have marvelled at the first person quotes and the colourful anecdotes and descriptions.

The reason is that Penrose and other biographers leaned heavily upon a "more circumstantial" record of the trial, penned by Paul Lacroix, The Bibliophile Jacob, in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a very strange document, entirely bogus. M. Lacroix claimed to have had access to a far more detailed copy of the record than the one kept in the archive at Nantes. Instead of being written in a distancing third person, he uses first person speech throughout. Henriet and Poitou come out best in this account, they are clearly distinguished as personalities and their motives for confessing are explained. These do not include torture, the Bibliophile is far from a revisionist. On the down side, we do lose Prelati's testimony as he has unfortunately died before coming to trial. There is a prototype for the veiling of the cross, but it is done by Pierre de l'Hôpital before Henriet gives his evidence; J-K Huymans much improved upon and dramatised the scene.

It is, in short, a piece of fantasy loosely based on Gilles' trial. But it is highly entertaining and of interest, so a link to the full text is given here. Only in French, unfortunately, but not difficult to decipher if you have a little French from school days. If not, you can get the flavour of it from Penrose's book (which deals mainly with Elisabeth Bathory) or from the extracts from that book in Dark Star: the Satanic Rites of Gilles de Rais, edited by Candice Black.

And is the Bibliophile Jacob's work of fiction relevant to our theme? Yes, because it is so obviously and consistently in error throughout that anybody reading it in parallel with a genuine account of the trial would immediately realise that it is unreliable. Yet several reputable biographers, including Bossard, borrow from it to add a bit of colour to their story; and that is how Gilles de Rais has come to be surrounded by myths and untruths, and why a truly authoritative biography does not exist. 

Alias Poitou

Considering that their forced confessions put the rope round both Gilles de Rais' neck and their own, Henri Griart and Etienne Corillaut (alias Poitou) are given short shrift in most accounts. If they are distinguished at all, Henriet was possibly Gilles' librarian and Poitou possibly his lover.

Their evidence is identical in almost every respect, a sure sign that they were tortured into telling the story that the prosecution wanted to hear. Poitou, however, is distinct from Henriet in one crucial respect. He had, he said, survived Gilles' allegedly murderous sexual attentions once. Or twice...

The story he told the ecclesiastical tribunal was that he was assaulted as soon as he came to be Gilles' page, at the age of ten. He was threatened with a dagger, he said, but spared because of his good looks. This would be around 1427, which accords perfectly with the prosecution case that the murders began in 1426, when Gilles was still Jehanne's companion and protector. This timing was critical to Jean de Malestroit's plot to smear the Pucelle by implying that she knowingly consorted with a sodomite and murderer.

Gilles' confession, given under threat of torture and excommunication, not surprisingly follows the template of his servants' statements in every detail - except one. For whatever reason, he insisted that his supposed crimes began in the year of Jean de Craon's death, that is around 1432, five years after Poitou claimed to have been assaulted and almost killed. The discrepancy is glaring.

Apparently the judges were content to let this pass. Magnanimously, they allowed Gilles de Rais to decide the exact timing of the crimes he never committed. An obvious attempt to tidy the matter up was made, however, at the civil trial. Under interrogation for the second time, Poitou once more divulged that he had been raped and threatened. This time, however, it was not when he was a child and new to Gilles' service, but as a young man of twenty, after he had seen incriminating evidence in the form of two dead children. In this case, the sex was a form of initiation into the sport of Caesars.

Almost all biographers ignore or conflate these incidents. Jean Benedetti makes a game effort to square the circle by theorising that there might, in fact, have been two attacks on Poitou, so similar that he confused them. This seems highly unlikely. Rape at knifepoint as a child of ten would have left a profound impression, not likely to be muddled with something, however traumatic, that happened less than three years before.

The best explanation is the simplest one. Poitou was tortured into reciting the words that were put into his mouth. When those words did not fit with his master's "confession", his torturers merely changed the script.

The Elephant in the Room

On September 13th, 1440, Jean de Malestroit wrote this -
"...we listened repeatedly to the shocking complaints made by as many good and discreet synodic witnesses...as by several other credible people of probity, at the same time as by many parishioners...as well by the oft-repeated public rumor as as by the preceding denunciations, we discovered that the said nobleman, Milord Gilles de Rais, baron of the said lands in our diocese, had killed, cut the throats of, and massacred many innocent children in an inhuman fashion, and with them committed, against nature, the abominable and execrable sin of sodomy, in various fashions and with unheard-of perversions that cannot presently be expounded upon by reason of their horror, but that will be disclosed in Latin at the appropriate time and place; that he had often and repeatedly practised the dreadful invocation of demons and took care that it be practised; that he sacrificed and made offerings to these same demons, contracted with them; and wickedly perpetrated other crimes and offenses, professing doctrinal heresy against Divine Majesty, in the subversion and distortion of our faith, offering a pernicious example unto many."
(The Trial of Gilles de Rais, by Georges Bataille, translated by Richard Robinson, Amok Books)

On October 13th, the Bill of Indictment was read and, as promised, did indeed go into more detail.

The interrogations of François Prelati, Eustache Blanchet, Etienne Corillaut (Poitou), and Henriet Griart took place between the 16th and the 17th of October. At the point when Jean de Malestroit wrote his initial letter, and when the Bill of Indictment was drafted, the only evidence before him was from the "public rumour" that children had gone missing and from his own interviews with parents and other concerned parties. All that they could tell him was that children were allegedly disappearing in the area, not what had happened to them. What de Malestroit writes is inside information and we are not told where it comes from.

Most writers do not address this discrepancy; I suspect that many do not even notice it. Among the ones who do is Frances Winwar, in The Saint and the Devil, who makes the logical assumption that somebody from Gilles's household had informed on him.

It is possible that François Prelati, Eustache Blanchet or André Buchet (who is named in the Bill of Indictment and was working for Jean V when he allegedly procured a child to be murdered) voluntarily gave information because they realised that Gilles de Rais was about to be arrested and sought to save their own skins. It is equally possible that they were tortured or threatened with torture. Or bribed. Or told that they would save their lives if they made a private confession inculpating their master. It is just as likely that the accusations were pure invention.

The only thing we know for certain is that Jean de Malestroit made allegations, later confirmed by confessions under torture, which he seems to have produced out of thin air and chose not to source.