Truth knows no season: in memory of Kathleen Lehman

On June 27th 2022, Team Gilles (as I call it) lost an illustrious member with the death of Kathleen Lehman. 

I exchanged emails with her for a while in the late nineties and will always regret that we lost touch. She was an original thinker and I wish that the book she planned to write had reached fruition. For a long time, she was the only person I knew of who shared my crazy notions about Gilles de Rais. 

Her dense and thoughtful essay, which graced the internet for two or three years at the turn of the century, will probably have been seen by few. I feel privileged to have read it, and still lament its loss, although if it had remained online I would possibly not have felt the need for this blog, which led directly to my book. Lehman struck a chord in me; she had discovered Gilles at fifteen, as I had, and developed a similar conviction of his innocence. On the other side of the Atlantic, she had uncovered the same flaws in the traditional narrative that I had, and drawn the same conclusions. I felt less alone. Her closing words had a particular resonance - 

It may be argued that the details of the life of Gilles de Rais are of no importance to the modern day, but they will always ultimately be important to Gilles de Rais, and truth knows no season. To bring him in death the justice which he did not receive in life is my pre-eminent goal.

Rest In Power, Kathy. 

 Official obituary of Kathleen Lehman here

The Martyr - an update

 In 2020 I announced that The Martyr, a short film by Edmund Stenson, would be "coming soon". On reflection, "soon" was a bit optimistic. Before it could have a permanent home on the internet, it had to do the rounds of the film festivals, most of which it was a tad too weird for. However, it did win Best Short Documentary at both Atlanta Shortsfest and FilmQuest.

It will take up 15 minutes of your time and is well worth it. You get to see me, and my dolls, and my Collyer brothers style home. And there are delightful illustrations by Robbie Ward, like the one below. 

It is available free-to-view in two places - 

YouTube  https://youtu.be/LBYgr7L-NSk

and Vimeo  https://vimeo.com/717518870 

from February 4th 2023.

Do watch, enjoy, and share. Reviews and comments welcome. 

A Childermass conundrum

At Orléans in 1434 Gilles de Rais  is supposed to have signed an infamous procuration, or deed of attorney, that put the management of his finances into the hands of Roger de Bricqueville. There are several reasons to be suspicious of this document. Firstly, there is no proof whatsoever that Bricqueville was in Orléans; he & Sillé are both omitted from the list of Gilles' entourage. Secondly, the document was dated 28th December, Holy Innocents Day, which, given that Bricqueville was accorded the right to marry off the infant Marie de Rais to whoever he chose, strikes an ominous chord to many writers. However, Gilles is consistently presented to us as a superstitious man, and Holy Innocents Day, or Childermass,  was regarded as the unluckiest day of the year, so ill-starred that the day it fell on was deemed unlucky for the whole year. Any enterprise begun on it would be doomed to failure. It seems highly improbable that Gilles, as a man of his time and one who particularly venerated the child martyrs, would have risked entering into such a vital contract on that day of all days. Also, it should be noted that Bricqueville never did arrange a marriage for young Marie, even though she was a good match; her late great grandfather Jean de Craon would certainly have found her a husband with no qualms at all. 

The Coventry Carol - "Herod the king in his raging..." 

Le Massacre des Innocents by Nicolas Poussin, 1628

Gilles de Rais Day 2022

 Ne craignez point la mort de ce monde, ce petit trépas...  

Illustration by Robbie Ward from the short film The Martyr

Beyond Copypasta

Time for another Bluebeardery and Copypasta post, I think, as we've been serious for a long time.

Some people come up with the most bizarre ideas and I'd love to know where they get them from -

But, sadly, they never tell me. They drift off, never to return. A proper cliff-hanger, you might say. 

Some commenters have noticed that the Shrek villain Lord Farquaad looks like Gilles de Rais, though they usually get it back to front and wonder why Gilles de Rais looks like Farquaaad. Clearly because Eloi Féron way back in the 19th century took his influence from Disney, dude. Others go even further astray -

Obviously, a topic like this offers great opportunities to be as edgy as hell, but that only works if nobody pops up to tell you how you got it all wrong -

It's important to point out to me how very weird I am for caring about the most egregious historic miscarriage of justice of all time -

And that old chestnut, "Gilles de Rais is my ancestor!" Which doesn't give them quite the épater les bourgeois distinctiveness they imagine -

I often think I should organise a get-together of all his descendants. Might be fun. 

Selection of idiocies -

Finally, the kind of foot-stamping that always draws me in -

Why do I respond to these idiots? Because, unless they dirty delete as they occasionally do, these posts are there for good. What I try to do is refute the lies in an entertaining way for future browsers. My motto has always been: seize the narrative. Looking at recent comments on more serious forums, it seems to be working. 

[The comments in this post were taken from Twitter and YouTube]

 

Printing the legend

While writing my book, and indeed in this blog, I always avoided following the various Jehanne alternative narratives down their various rabbit holes. This was a deliberate decision. I was heavily invested in the theory of Gilles de Rais' innocence, which was quite controversial when I began my work, and that was enough to make me look eccentric. I didn't need any more conspiracy theories to make me seem like a crazy woman. So - was Jehanne, in fact, a by-blow of nobility? Other than pointing out that she was not a lowly peasant but a gently-raised girl who certainly never tended the flocks, as she herself  indignantly asserted, I didn't go there. On the vexed issue of the False Pucelle, Jeanne des Armoises, I had no choice, since Gilles espoused her cause, but I took a conservative view -

The question must be asked: could Claude des Armoises have been the real Jehanne, somehow saved from burning? Rumours of her survival had proliferated from the moment of her death, and one chronicler wrote finalement la firent ardre publiquement, ou aultre femme en semblable d'elle [finally she was burned publicly, or another woman who looked like her], allowing for the possibility of some substitution. Francis Leary admitted that the only way this could have been done was before the handover to the English, since they had only seen her from a distance, in armour and helmet, and had little idea what she looked like. According to this unlikely theory, a false Jehanne stood trial and went to the stake in her place. Even Leary finds this scenario improbable, and a substitution at the last minute would have been next to impossible. Sadly, it is almost certain that the real Jehanne was handed over to her enemies, subjected to an unfair trial and executed. As we have seen, Gilles' own behaviour encourages this melancholy conclusion: he behaved consistently like a man bereaved and plunged into the deepest depression. He may have been temporarily fooled by a False Jehanne, or he may have used her knowingly for his political ends. But in the end, she was a forgery, like the tinsel that Prelati tried to pass off as gold.

[From my book, The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais]

These contentious issues were addressed directly in a 1961 book called Operation Shepherdess, by André Guérin and Jack Palmer White, described as "ineffably surreal" by The St Joan Centre. For many years I had a copy of this book on my shelves but, inexplicably,  I never read it. Then, a decade or more ago, it disappeared during a house move. I searched diligently, but it never reappeared, and I didn't need it for the book so I put it to the back of my mind. Recently I thought I might buy another copy - it's long out of print but not hard to obtain - and finally get round to reading it. 

Well. A quick flick through the index soon explained why I didn't bother with it all those years ago. From a promising start, the text went off the rails in the third sentence - "Moscow"? What?

... Gilles de Rais, whom Charles VII named Marshal of France after the Coronation in 1429, when de Rais was but twenty-five.

A very wealthy Breton, the newly honoured Marshal assembled about him workers of precious metals, silversmiths, jewellers, weavers, lace-makers and engravers of arms, also clowns, monks, troubadours, astrologers, and alchemists. [So far, so good.] The renown of his library reached Moscow. The councillors of Henry VI of England modelled the royal stables on his. Eventually, however, he fell into the hands of unscrupulous magicians, necromancers, sorcerers, and sundry mountebanks. Increasingly excited by them, he drove the artists away and, in the countryside around his château, inaugurated a reign of terror which ended only when he was hanged and burned by the Duke of Brittany at the age of thirty-six for having offered up to the Devil numberless women, especially his wives, and over 1,000 small children. Because he not only refused to be clean-shaven like the rest of the courtiers but had recourse to dye, he was popularly known as Bluebeard.

Numberless women! Wives! A thousand children! Bluebeard! This, of course, is the heavily mythologised version of Gilles that prevailed in the early sixties - Klossowski's modern French translation of the trial record was not published until 1965. It is painfully clear that, however deeply the authors researched Jehanne, they spent not even five minutes on her second in command. The notorious beard betrays its Shavian origins - Gilles is seen  "sporting the extravagance of a little curled beard dyed blue at a clean-shaven court", and, like Shaw, the authors thereafter routinely call him Bluebeard.

Perhaps, like me, Guérin and White merely wanted to concentrate on their protagonist without being distracted by the peripheral characters. However, they could not have provided a more salutary example of the dangers of printing the legend: when the reader comes across a serially polygamous, uxoricidal, beard-dying Gilles de Rais on page twenty of Operation Shepherdess, how likely is that reader to believe anything else in that text? 

Tryphina, Comorre, and the four dead wives

[This is an extract from The Martyrdom of Gilles de Rais. The tale is written in my own words, as it seemed wrong to steal an existing version.]

Gilles de Rais was not Bluebeard. No matter how desperately the Abbé Bossard tried to make the connection, arguably to the point of falsifying evidence to support his case, he never came close to justifying his thesis. In fact, Bossard was completely ignorant about folklore: popular tales seldom have one single source, and the Bluebeard motifs appear in myths from all over the world. If Perrault had been minded to take his inspiration from close to home, however, there was a tale of a Breton nobleman who was a serial uxoricide: Comorre, or Comor (the name is variously spelt). Many have argued that he was a far more likely Bluebeard than Gilles. Bossard was aware of this theory, but rejected Comorre completely; he insisted that the story bore no resemblance at all to the Bluebeard legend. Here is the story: judge for yourself.

Tryphina was the only daughter of the Count of Vannes, although she had four brothers. In some versions, her mother died when she was a child. In all versions, she was the prototypical fairy tale heroine, as good as she was beautiful, a combination that always seems to call down misfortune. Her father doted on her. 

When she grew into a young woman, a powerful lord named Comorre became enamoured of her and sent ambassadors to ask for her hand in marriage. He was twice her age and already a widower four times over, a giant of a man, terrifying in his aspect. Neither Tryphina nor her father was disposed to accept his proposal, in spite of the bribes that his representatives offered. However, the velvet glove hid an iron fist: when the Count politely declined, on the grounds of his daughter's youth, the ambassadors threatened war. 

Tryphina, distressed by the prospect of being the cause of a bloody conflict, consulted with Saint Gildas, a local holy man. He had little comfort for her. His advice was to save her people by sacrificing herself to her frightful suitor. He did promise, however, that one day he would bring her back safely to her father. 

So Tryphina dutifully married Comorre, and went with him to his own dark and menacing country. As one account expresses it, “Comorre carried off his young bride as a hawk carries off a little white dove.” She was well treated, because her new husband was genuinely fond of her, but she was deeply unhappy and spent much of  her time in the chapel, praying at the tombs of her four predecessors. 

After a few weeks, Comorre was compelled to leave his bride and travel to Rennes to attend a gathering of the princes of Brittany. He was absent for six months and, upon his return, was anxious to be reunited with his lovely wife, whom he had doubtless missed far more than she missed him. He entered her chamber, only to find her embroidering baby clothes. To her surprise, he paled and left her without uttering a word. Tryphina realised that she was in peril, for reasons she could not understand. 

She hastened to the chapel and cowered by the four tombs. On the last stroke of midnight, the dead wives of Comorre appeared to her and warned her to flee back to her father, because her husband planned to kill her as he had killed them. They explained that there was a prophecy that Comorre would be destroyed by his own son: to escape his destiny, he murdered his wives as soon as they conceived. 

Tryphina asked how she could escape the castle, given that Comorre's fierce hound guarded the courtyard.

 The first wife handed her a cup and told her: “This poison killed me, it will do the same to the dog.” 

And how, Tryphina asked, should she climb the high wall? 

“Use this rope that strangled me,” said the second ghost. 

But how could she find her way through the dark forest? 

“With the fire that burned me,” said the third, handing her a blazing torch. 

And how could she ever walk so far? 

“Lean on this staff that cleft my brow,” said the final phantom bride. 

Tryphina took the fatal gifts and fled into the night. Comorre was following close behind, however, and finally she was betrayed by an old magpie that overheard her laments and repeated them. Her husband caught her and struck her head off with his sword. 

This should have been the end of her story, but she was found lying dead in the woods by her grief-stricken father and Saint Gildas. The holy man told her father not to mourn: he bade Tryphina to rise up, and when she did he set her head firmly back on her shoulders. Thus he kept his word and brought her safely home, where in time she gave birth to a son. 

The child duly fulfilled the prophecy that his father had dreaded. When still a young boy, he idly threw a handful of stones against the wall of Comorre's castle. Magically, the walls crumbled into ruin and the tyrant died in their fall.

Magpie by Natalia Mikhalchuk