Trial of Gilles De Rais by George Bataille Page A

that transfigured war. But in the years following the death of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, remaining Marshal of France, had ceased to be at home in the armies of his day, which were condemned to become regular. Since Constable Richemont had prevailed over La Trémoille in 1434, there was an embryo of the royal administration which resulted in the Estates General of Orléans in 1439.
    Gilles de Rais still held the title of Marshal of France in 1434. But after La Trémoille’s disgrace, he was no longer anything. He had been a “gallant knight of arms”; he knew how to mount an assault, to line up magnificent horses and superb knights. He knew how to drink, and evidently he enjoyed the worst confusion. Above all, he loved to fight, and beside Joan of Arc, he covered himself in glory at Tourelles, at Patay, and, even after the heroine’s death in 1432, at Lagny.
    The administration, being organized after the time when no rake was assuring him the favor of the King, saw to it that his military valor suddenly no longer held meaning. He was nothing on his own but a bungler; from this moment all that he was, his state of mind and his reactions, no longer suited the spirit of new necessities.
    From 1432 on, from the day he abandons himself to the obsession of cutting children’s throats, Gilles de Rais is nothing but a failure. Everything gets mixed up. In August 1432 at Lagny, he figures again as the glorious captain. His grandfather dies in November. The disappearance of this brutal force must free him, relieve him, and unhinge him at the same time. He is bound to badly handle a too complete, too sudden freedom, and a wealth that has become staggering. That following summer, La Trémoille falls. It must not be imagined that Rais took his disgrace lightly. I have spoken of his foolishness … But what I said of the game he played helps us see how he lived it, and how this game was confused with his life. The deprivation must have affected him all the more as he had just yielded to frightful habits …
    I have spoken of his childishness. It is, in fact, in a childish manner — consequently the most entirely, the most madly — that he incarnates this spirit of feudal society that with all its vivacity originated with the game that the Berserkir had played; he was riveted to war by an affinity that marked a taste for cruel pleasures. He had no place in the world, if not that which war gave him. A society steeped in feudal war alone could provide what it expected of this privileged man, who could do nothing other than drink to the dregs of privilege. Not only his vanity was affected, but his passion was hurt by the disfavor that caught up with him. This worn-out feudal world put him on the shelf. Under the appearance of wealth, what he had as yet to live was, in advance, blighted. However, one thing opposed him to these miserable lords, all ready to possess what remained: this privileged man could never, in the face of death, accept a life that would no longer fascinate him.
    In the tragedy of Gilles de Rais, there was at first a suffocation. There could be no question of admiring the wretch, or pitying him. But the tragedy took place upon the disappearance of the acquired conditions on which the life of the privileged class rested. What the feudal world had lived on disappeared. At the same moment, his castles began to smell of death. At Champtocé and Machecoul, bodies were drying up or putrefying at the bottom of certain towers (pp. 101 and 102). These castles were enormous masses of stone, inside of which the nooks could have been or very nearly were inaccessible, as deeply buried as burial vaults. These fortresses were the outward signs — or the sanctuaries — of ancient feudal wars, of which these lords were still gods. These wars insisted on drunkenness, they insisted on the vertigo and giddiness of those whom birth had consecrated to them. They insisted on rushing them into assaults, but occasionally suffocated them in