Trial of Gilles De Rais by George Bataille Page B

dark obsessions. The game that these castles externalized was expected to be played to the hilt; possessing them, whoever resided in them could not have easily escaped. He could only do so if he rejected the spirit that these high, thick walls embodied. Whoever was effectively occupied with his interests — like Craon, managing his fortune with a bourgeois’ calculation and greed — was able to stop playing this game if he wanted. But he who is dominated by his interests is compromised: he works in some way, he is enslaved. In contrast, it was Gilles de Rais’ passion — far from giving in to the event — to be stubborn, to be obstinate to the point of ruin.
    The decline of Gilles de Rais has the look of funereal magnificence.
    His obsession with death is tangible: a man, little by little, locks himself up in the solitude of crime, of homosexuality and the tomb; in this profound silence, the faces that obsess him are those of dead children, whom he profanes with an abominable kiss.
    Before the backdrop of fortresses — and tombstones — Gilles de Rais’ decline takes on the appearance of a theatrical hallucination.
    We cannot judge the monster’s states of mind.
    But it is from the bloody room where the children’s heads stare at him that it evidently occurs to him early in the morning to wander through the village streets of Machecoul and Tiffauges.
    Could a long, intolerable hallucination possess a profounder truth?
    Gilles de Rais’ character is bound to this tragic apparition. This apparition is linked to the decisive disgrace that comes from La Trémoille’s fall.
    It is linked to that disgrace in a way that exposes Rais’ personal tragedy at the same time as it exposes the tragedy of a world to which a bloody figure is suited, who from the Berserkir to Proust’s M. de Charlus in every respect betrays a cruel foolishness. The feudal world, in fact, cannot be separated from excess, which is the principle of war. But at the instant that royal politics or intelligence alters it, it is no longer the feudal world. Intelligence or calculation are not noble. It is not noble to calculate or to reflect, and no philosopher could have been able to embody what is essentially the nobility. These truths said in regard to Gilles de Rais have precisely the advantage of seizing on the impure source of his life. Tragedy is necessarily impure; it is all the more real as it is impure.
    To what is this principle joined, which is no less sound for being misrecognized? That without the nobility, without the refusal to calculate and reflect (which is its essence), there would have been no tragedy; there would have been only reflection and calculation.
    I will go so far as to say that the tragedy of Gilles de Rais — considered as tragedy through ponderous reflection, through reflection taking into account a world that refused reflection (which even, by such a refusal, became the point of departure for it) — is the tragedy of feudal society, the tragedy of the nobility.
    But what does that affirmation mean?
    That without the profound foolishness in Gilles de Rais that ordered — commanded — the brutal refusal, there would have been no tragedy.
    We are not digressing from Gilles de Rais. These reflections would be meaningless if they could be separated from the character and all the blood clinging to him. But if it is true that only feudal society, which he embodies, renders him tragic, then feudal society, in this tragic game unquestionably and naïvely the force to bind the violence of life, does not differ from this sovereignty that is the principle not only of Greek tragedy but of Tragedy personified. Tragedy is the powerlessness of Reason.
    That does not mean that the laws of Tragedy are contrary to Reason. A law cannot truly belong to what is contrary to Reason. Could a law be opposed to Reason? But human violence, which has the strength to fall afoul of Reason, is tragic and, if possible, ought to be suppressed; at