GILLES DE RAIS. 475 him, and he would be heard of no more. It is rather curious, in- deed, how tardily suspicion was aroused, for up to within a year or two of the end there were mothers who had no hesitation in confiding their children to the terrible baron. At his castles of Tiffauges and Machecoul there was little disguise. He was hcmir justicier in his lands : between him and his villeins there was, as de Fontaines says, no judge but God ; they could not fly, for they were attached to the glebe, and they could only rest silent in dread suspense as to where the next bolt would fall. Even as far off as St. Jean-d'Angely, Machecoul had the name of a place where children were eaten, and at Tiffauges they said that for one child that disappeared at Machecoul there were seven at Tiffauges. Yet so far was the truth from being guessed that the story ran among the peasantry that Michel de Sille, when a prisoner with the Eng- lish, had been obliged to promise, as part of his ransom, twenty- four boys to serve as pages, and that when the tale was complete the disappearances would cease. Still suspicion grew. One of the marshal's confidants, though not fully initiated in his secrets, a priest named Eustache Blanchet, grew alarmed and ran away from Tiffauges, taking up his residence at Mortagne-sur-Sevre. Here he learned from Jean Mercier, castellan of La Eoche-sur- Yon, that in Nantes and Clisson and elsewhere it was public rumor that Gilles killed numbers of children, in order with their blood to write a necromantic book which, when completed, would enable him to capture any castle and prevent any one from with- standing him. This grew to be the popular belief, as recorded by Monstrelet, and so impressed was Blanchet's imagination with it that, after his return to Tiffauges, at Easter, 1440, just before the catastrophe, when Gilles invited him and another priest into his study to exhibit to them his ornamentation of the binding of the ceremonial book of his chapel, some sheets of paper written in red, lying on the desk, convinced him that the popular report was true. In this little scene, the contrast between the peaceful artistic labors of the marshal and the dread conjurations supposed to be written with his own hand in innocent blood, is a type of his strange career.* What was the number of his victims can never be known.
- Bossard et Maulde, Pr. pp. lxxv., lxxvii., lxxxviii.-xcii., xcv.-xcix., cxvii.-cxl.
