Trial of Gilles De Rais Read Online Free

last will and testament had no effect. Gilles, at eleven years old, passes into the hands of this grandfather to whom, in certain regards, he is identical; to whom, at the same time, he is the opposite.

The Maternal Grandfather: Jean de Craon
     
    We have just alluded to Jean de Craon’s immorality. This very great lord is in fact devoid of scruples: he is brutal, he is greedy; his methods depend on banditry. But he is to no extent anachronistic; his faults are not opposed to the character traits of his time. On the contrary, they accentuate them. Being a great lord, that he would have the outlook and the habits of a freebooter would not surprise anybody. What is more, he is precisely representative of feudal society in a period when the bourgeois ideal of management of interests and exploitation of goods prevails over the attention to traditional virtues bound to the notion of feudal honor. There is nothing romantic about the banditry of a Jean de Craons.
    His fortune is considerable. Except for the ducal family, his is the richest feudatory in Anjou. But one preoccupation dominates him: to augment his riches. He constructs intrigues that involve him in the great politics of his day; he is avaricious and no profit is negligible to him. He regularly resides in a castle dominating the Loire, at Champtocé, an important garrison and the military key to neighboring Brittany. He exercises a right of toll on the ferrymen’s commerce, but he uses violent means beyond the recognized rights; the ferrymen take him to court and the Parliament of Paris convicts him.
    We do not know whether he possesses the known courtliness and seductiveness of his father, better known than himself, one of the relatives of the Duke of Orléans whom Jean sans Peur had assassinated. It is possible; but from him he gets the sense and taste for politics. The father passes for having paid the greatest attention to honor. It is possible that above all honor indicates a fastidious sense of feudal decorum. But if the son resembles him in this regard, it is to the degree that occasionally the most double-dealing of gangsters has a sense for the rules in his neighborhood. If one puts aside a totally exterior respectability, Jean de Craon has the outlook and the facility, if one likes, of a purse snatcher. He is responsible for Gilles; he has the charge of his education but he mocks it. He leaves his grandson free, in his own manner, to do all the evil he pleases. If the grandfather intervenes, it is to set an example; he instructs him to feel above the law.
    We will see that it is not here that the young man is opposed to the old!
    Later (pp. 73-74) we find the account of an act of banditry in which the grandfather involves Gilles at the age of sixteen.
    It is a question of extortion by which a great lady, a relative, is abducted, imprisoned, and menaced with being put in a sack and drowned like a cat in the Loire. Three men, who come to reclaim her, are thrown into a dungeon, and one of them dies as a result of his stay there. Faced with Gilles and his grandfather, it is possible to imagine the brutalities of the Nazis …

The Grandfather and the Grandson
     
    But one difference quickly appears between the grandson and the grandfather. The latter, astute, manages his interests skillfully. The former occasionally profits by the calculations of the latter, but he does not calculate for himself. If Gilles is in agreement with the principle of reason which always, in an act, looks to the end result, that supposes another who guides and counsels him. He never acts on his own in the capacity of a shrewd man. Capable of base cruelties, he is incapable of calculation. Whatever reflection entered into his acts came from the intervention of another.
    Jean de Craon does not hesitate in the face of crime, but what attracts him to crime is the result. He has no other concern but advantage. With Gilles it is different. The grandfather dead, he continues the crimes into