Pranks of oral tradition

"But," Chantelouve went on, "there is one point which I never have been able to understand. I have never been able to explain to myself why the name Bluebeard should have been attached to the Marshal, whose history certainly has no relation to the tale of the good Perrault."

"As a matter of fact the real Bluebeard was not Gilles de Rais, but probably a Breton king, Comor, a fragment of whose castle, dating from the sixth century, is still standing, on the confines of the forest of Carnoet. The legend is simple. The king asked Guerock, count of Vannes, for the hand of his daughter, Triphine. Guerock refused, because he had heard that the king maintained himself in a constant state of widowerhood by cutting his wives' throats. Finally Saint Gildas promised Guerock to return his daughter to him safe and sound when he should reclaim her, and the union was celebrated.

"Some months later Triphine learned that Comor did indeed kill his consorts as soon as they became pregnant. She was big with child, so she fled, but her husband pursued her and cut her throat. The weeping father commanded Saint Gildas to keep his promise, and the Saint resuscitated Triphine.

"As you see, this legend comes much nearer than the history of our Bluebeard to the told tale arranged by the ingenious Perrault. Now, why and how the name Bluebeard passed from King Comor to the Marshal de Rais, I cannot tell. You know what pranks oral tradition can play."

From Là-bas by J-K Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans among his books, which did not include a reliable biography of Gilles de Rais

There is a complex relationship between the Abbé Bossard and J-K Huysmans. The latter's novel À Rebours, "the breviary of the Decadence", was published in 1884 and arguably his representation of his protagonist, Des Esseintes, influenced Bossard in his depiction of Gilles de Rais as an educated, refined aesthete. We know little enough of Gilles as a person, and to parlay his possession of a number of books into a love of literature is probably stretching the evidence; however, Bossard's attempt to show him as a cultured man as well as a warrior has been hugely influential. The Gilles de Rais we imagine today is essentially Bossard's creation. Without his intervention, Gilbert Prouteau would have been unable to present Gilles to a modern court as a man who announced the Renaissance.

When Huysmans himself wanted to make use of Gilles in a novel, he had little choice but to follow Bossard's narrative, padded out with juicy, mostly invented, details from the Bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix). No other complete biography was available. Huysmans questioned almost nothing in his sources, and was responsible for spreading a number of mendacities that are still believed to this day.

The one point at which he drew the line was Bossard's ill-informed or mischievous attempt to link Gilles with the legend of Bluebeard, as we see from the above passage. The hero of  Là-Bas, Durtal, is researching for a biography of Gilles de Rais which never seems to be completed. Questioned about the Bluebeard connection, Durtal completely repudiates the notion. As an educated and well-read man, like the author he acts as a mouthpiece for, he knows that there is a far better claimant to the Bluebeard title in another local figure, Comorre.  Tactfully, he does not mention Bossard - " You know what pranks oral tradition can play". 

Even Huysmans, who swallowed every word of the Bibliophile Jacob and unwittingly unleashed so many falsehoods on the world, could see that Bossard's Bluebeard thesis was a canard. 

The English language version of Là-Bas is available here at Project Gutenberg, a great source of older and out-of-copyright books.

Gilles as werewolf: the Bibliophile Jacob anglicised

It is a given that all biographies of Gilles de Rais have been influenced by Paul Lacroix, the Bibliophile Jacob, either directly or indirectly. However, since there is no English translation of Lacroix's febrile prose, it is not easy for an English language blogger to underline the point.

Enter, with a roll of drums and clash of cymbals, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould. Writing his Book of Werewolves in 1865, he was clearly short of a few pages, and had the ingenious idea of padding it out with three lengthy chapters about Gilles de Rais. Of course, Gilles was no werewolf and Baring-Gould makes no attempt to show that he was; the only vaguely lycanthropic element is the extreme savagery of the alleged murders and the odd description of his features, which at certain moments become inhuman -

No one at a first glance would have thought the Sire de Retz to be by nature so cruel and vicious as he was supposed to be. On the contrary, his physiognomy was calm and phlegmatic, somewhat pale, and expressive of melancholy. His hair and moustache were light brown, and his beard was clipped to a point. This beard, which resembled no other beard, was black, but under certain lights it assumed a blue hue, and it was this peculiarity which obtained for the Sire de Retz the surname of Blue-beard, a name which has attached to him in popular romance, at the same time that his story has undergone strange metamorphoses.

But on closer examination of the countenance of Gilles de Retz, contraction in the muscles of the face, nervous quivering of the mouth, spasmodic twitchings of the brows, and above all, the sinister expression of the eyes, showed that there was something strange and frightful in the man. At intervals he ground his teeth like a wild beast preparing to dash upon his prey, and then his lips became so contracted, as they were drawn in and glued, as it were, to his teeth, that their very colour was indiscernible.

At times also his eyes became fixed, and the pupils dilated to such an extent, with a sombre fire quivering in them, that the iris seemed to fill the whole orbit, which became circular, and sank back into the head. At these moments his complexion became livid and cadaverous; his brow, especially just over the nose, was covered with deep wrinkles, and his beard appeared to bristle, and to assume its bluish hues. But, after a few moments, his features became again serene, with a sweet smile reposing upon them, and his expression relaxed into a vague and tender melancholy.

For Baring-Gould's purposes, this is sufficient proof of Gilles' wolfish nature. Without it, the book would have been some fifty pages shorter, which must have been a consideration.

Now, in 1858 Lacroix had printed his Grand Guignol version of Gilles' trial, which Baring-Gould mentions as an influence; the description of those lycanthropic facial contortions comes direct from the Frenchman's overheated imagination. On closer examination, the whole text is a condensed translation of the Bibliophile into English. In what would now be regarded as flagrant copyright theft, the Reverend merely stole his content from the earlier writer.

For Gilles de Rais it was a posthumous public relations disaster that a sensationalist hack like Lacroix was the first to pen a detailed account of his life, influencing both his first true biographer, the Abbé Bossard, and the scandalously popular novelist J-K Huysmans. The misfortune was compounded when Baring-Gould, one of the earliest English writers to address his case, swallowed the Bibliophile's fantasies piecemeal, including (as we see in the extract) the controversial identification with Bluebeard. Every contentious myth that makes the study of his life so fraught with difficulties can be found in this 19th century text: the description of his clothes, the prototype veiling of the cross, the characterisation of Poitou and Henriet, the Barbe Bleue connection...

The one consolation is that all this mythologising has left a clear trail, both in French and English, for anybody who wants to know the truth. The chapters in The Book of Werewolves are a useful aid for those who are interested in finding the truth about Gilles de Rais but whose French is not up to reading the Bibliophile in his entirety.

Read chapters X-XII in The Book of Werewolves 
Or read the whole text of Paul Lacroix, the Bibliophile Jacob in French

Whichever you choose, it will be a revelation; those myth-ridden biographies, from Bossard to Bataille, will never be the same again.

Opening lines

Everybody who has heard the name of Gilles de Rais knows the outline of his story, together with a few mordant details. He was one of Joan of Arc’s captains, but after her death he went mad. He shut himself up in his gloomy castles and surrounded himself with alchemists and magicians. Having bankrupted himself on selfish pleasures, he attempted to create gold by alchemical means. When this failed, he turned to the Devil and held Black Masses at which children were sacrificed. Strange lights were seen in a tower, screams were heard and a constant pall of smoke hung over the castle. Wherever the Baron de Rais travelled, boys vanished, to the point where some villages had no children left at all. Eventually, the bereaved parents complained to the Bishop of Nantes and Gilles was arrested. The evidence at his trial was so lurid that at one point the bishop rose to his feet and veiled the face of Christ on the crucifix. A parade of mothers and fathers bore witness to the loss of their sons and daughters. Eventually Rais repented his sins and made a full confession, after which he was condemned, hanged and burned. He is remembered today as the legendary Bluebeard.

A striking story. As we shall see, barely a word of it is true.

(This blog has gone part-time because of the pressing need 

to write an English-language revisionist biography that will 

go a lot further than Fleuret or Prouteau. 

These are the first few lines of the introduction.)

Death of Michel Tournier

RIP, M. Tournier. One of the good guys, see a previous blog post here.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/books/michel-tournier-french-novelist-who-fused-myth-and-philosophy-dies-at-91.html?_r=0

The Ghost of Gilles de Rais

As soon as the moon got up, I walked once

more down into the beautiful valley. to enjoy

the scenery by that peculiar light. All three

of my landladies joined in entreating me not to

think of going into or near the castle, assuring

me that it was extremely dangerous; that nobody

in Tiffauges would dream of going near

the ruins after dark, for that "il était impossible

de dire ce qu'il pouvait y arriver." lt is

curious that, of all the various names attached

to this old castle, and all the motley records

of its eventful history, the only name which

yet lives in the memory of the people, and the

only historical facts which have made a lasting

impression on the popular mind, are that

of Gilles de Laval, the wicked Marechal de

Retz, and the atrocities committed there by

him — so prone is the uncultivated mind to

the contemplation of horrors.

Throughout the neighbourhood a thousand

superstitions are current about the ruins of

the dwelling of the murderer and necromancer.

The hideous half-burnt body of the monster

himself, circled with flames, pale, indeed, and

faint in colour, but more lasting than those

the hangman kindled around his mortal form

in the meadow under the walls of Nantes, is

seen, on bright moonlight nights, standing

now on one topmost point of craggy wall, and

now on another, and is heard mingling his

moan with the sough of the night-wind. Pale,

bloodless forms, too, of youthful growth and

mien, the restless, unsepulchred ghosts of the

unfortunates who perished in these dungeons.

unassoiled, with lingering agony, as their

lifeblood flowed from their veins for the

impure purposes of' the tyrant's demon-worship

— these, too, may at similar times be seen

flitting backwards and forwards, in numerous

groups, across the space enclosed by the

ruined wall, with more than mortal speed, or

glancing hurriedly from window to window of

the fabric, as still seeking to escape from its

hateful confinement.

Despite these terrors, with which their old

tyrant still contrives to torment the descendants

of his former vassals, I enjoyed my

moonlight stroll exceedingly. The dancing

stream, the grey rocks on the side of the hill,

lying half in shade, half silvered by the cold

pale rays, ghosts of the departed sunbeams,

the ruins of the castle, exhibiting a thousand

capricious changes of light and shade, are all

well calculated to form a lovely moonlight

scene. And though possibly I might have

seen —nay, am rather inclined to think I did

see—some of the appearances of whose existence

 l had been warned, as the fitful light,

changing with every passing cloud that flitted

across the sky, brought now one part and now

another of the fantastically-shaped fragments

into relief, yet I had the comfort of knowing

that the Sévre's running stream was at

the time between me and them; and, thus

secured from their doing me a mischief, I

returned to my bed, and, I believe, to my good

hostesses' surprise, safe and sound from my

ramble.

Thomas Adolphus Trollope

from A Summer In Western France

A little treat for the Hallowe'en season. This account of supposed hauntings at Tiffauges is occasionally quoted but never given in full. It is the only reference to Gilles or his victims walking as ghosts, and whether it owes more to the imagination of Mr Trollope or his mischievous landladies is difficult to tell. At any rate, it is at least as reliable as much of Bossard. 

Gilles de Rais Day

How I became Gilles de Rais' representative on earth

Gilles de Rais has fascinated me for many years. I first encountered him when I was a teenager, in a book I had just bought, The Devil And All His Works by Dennis Wheatley; I was flicking through it idly and came across a small black-and-white picture of a dark man in armour leaning on a battle-axe. I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. The caption read: “Gilles de Rais, one of the blackest sorcerers in history”. He obviously stuck in my head, because when, a few months later, I read a review of a new book, Gilles de Rais, the Authentic Bluebeard by Jean Benedetti, I immediately ordered a copy, something I had never done before and very seldom do now. I still have the clipping of that review that changed my life: it was headlined The Beast who saved Joan of Arc before he became ‘Bluebeard’.

I was on the cusp of 16 when I started reading Jean Benedetti's biography; I had my birthday while I was reading it. And I read it perfectly straight. I knew about miscarriages of justice, but I assumed that this was History and couldn't be questioned. It  must have happened, just as written. I didn't know about the revisionist viewpoint, because Benedetti doesn't mention that, and I didn't find out about it for many years. But I was sympathetic towards Gilles, because Benedetti was sympathetic; I do sometimes wonder what might have happened if my first encounter had been with a less kind biographer. I read the book, and it stayed with me, and not long after I started to wonder. Benedetti had made it quite plain that there was a plot against Gilles, that his judges had an agenda, and I began to think he might have been framed. This seemed a crazy idea, as far as I knew nobody else felt that way. I was outraged by the thought of such an injustice, because I was sixteen.

I started looking for books about him, which wasn't easy - no Amazon, no internet, just book search companies and ransacking every antiquarian book shop I could find. I still remember the helpful bookseller who sold me a book from his private library, the magical moment when I found a copy of Vizetelly in a small shop next to York Minster, the day when I had a sudden impulse to go back the way I'd come and look in a certain charity shop, where a copy of Frances Winwar's The Saint and the Devil was waiting for me on the bookshelves. What I could never find was Bataille's book, with the trial records in. That was RPND - reprinting, no date - every time I tried to order it. And when I finally did get it, well. It was in French. I  had learned French at school, but back then I "read French" in the same way I danced the polka - I had done it, but not with much success, and didn't fancy trying it again. I had to wait till a rather rickety English translation came out, in the nineties. And then I didn't want to read it, because I'd pretty much convinced myself that Gilles was innocent, but I expected the evidence against him to be overwhelming. I'd only read biographies: that's what I'd been told.

By this time, I knew I wasn't the only person who believed in Gilles' innocence, because some of the biographers addressed that issue, with a great deal of scorn. One June day in 1992 I woke to find that famous, fake picture of Gilles on the front page of my newspaper and the announcement of his retrial, based on Gilbert Prouteau's best-selling  revisionist biography; that was the greatest adrenaline jolt of my life. But there wasn't - and still isn't – a revisionist biography in English, and none of the French ones had been translated. I still had no idea how the evidence could be explained away, because I hadn't yet read the evidence and imagined that it was as I had been told: hordes of grieving parents telling their unimpeachable stories in court.

Now round about the turn of the millennium there was one revisionist website, by Kathleen Lehman; she later took it down, I suspect because trolls or other ne'er-do-wells had put pressure on her. Luckily I'd printed off a just-legible draft copy so I could still refer to it. Ms Lehman said there was no accurate biography of Gilles, that the people who wrote about him were "pseudobiographers". At the time, I thought that was hyperbole. She also strongly  implied that the evidence wasn't as watertight as it was reputed to be. At that point I had to bite the bullet and read the trial record.

I was completely blown away, because the evidence is tissue-thin. The point at which it really came home to me was when I read Poitou and Henriet's testimony before the ecclesiastical court. I knew the argument that the two statements were so similar that they could only have been produced by torture, but there's a difference between knowing something theoretically and experiencing it. The two statements are as near as damn it identical. I knew I'd been right all along. That was when I started my Gilles de Rais was Innocent blog and upped my web presence. I'm shameless, I will call out people who post mindless plagiarised articles about Gilles.

Two years ago I re-read all the books I had about him in English and then took a deep breath and decided to have a go at the Prouteau book that started all the fuss and led to the successful 1992 retrial. Then I tackled Bossard. And every other French book I could get my hands on. At some point I realised that I was researching my own book, which at that time I envisioned as a long essay more than anything. But reading all those biographies made me see that they really are a poor bunch, beset with myths. To cut through the myth, I'd have to write a proper biography.

I'm not a prose writer. I used to write poetry years ago. Short poetry. If the lines have to reach the right hand side of the page, I get uneasy. But the book has slowly taken shape. It started as a bundle of ragtag fragments, now it's a book with bits missing. That's why the blog looks so dead – all my energy is going into the book. I have gone through the account of the trial obsessively, sifting the evidence, pointing up the absurdities and contradictions. I have found unnoticed, damning details that even the revisionist writers failed to notice. When I finally present my evidence, I believe that it will be both persuasive and shocking, since I have gone much further than previous revisionists.

Nobody can prove that Gilles de Rais was innocent, after 500-odd years and with only a couple of corrupted and biased sources to rely on. But I am now one hundred percent certain that he was, and this conviction is sustained by my researches and not by the vague sense of injustice that inspired my adolescent self. I am not arrogant enough to suppose that I will be the one who finally restores Gilles to his proper place in history, but I hope that I am a strong link in the chain that goes back to Reinach and Fleuret, and that I will live to see the next biographer, or the one after, achieve that end. I am proud to be Gilles de Rais' representative on earth.

Margot K Juby