THE MARÉCHAL DE RETZ.—II. THE TRIAL.
The Appearance of the Marshal—Pierre de l’Hospital—The Requisition—The
Trial adjourned—Meeting of the Marshal and his Servants—The Confession
of Henriet—Pontou persuaded to confess all—The adjourned Trial not
hurried on—The hesitation of the Duke of Brittany.
On the 10th October, Nicolas Chateau, notary of the duke, went to the
Château of Bouffay, to read to the prisoner the summons to appear in
person on the morrow before Messire de l’Hospital, President of
Brittany, Seneschal of Rennes, and Chief Justice of the Duchy of
Brittany.
The Sire de Retz, who believed himself already a novice in the
Carmelite order, had dressed in white, and was engaged in singing
litanies. When the summons had been read, he ordered a page to give the
notary wine and cake, and then he returned to his prayers with every
appearance of compunction and piety.
On the morrow Jean Labbé and four soldiers conducted him to the hall of
justice. He asked for Pontou and Henriet to accompany him, but this was
not permitted.
He was adorned with all his military insignia, as though to impose on
his judges; he had around his neck massive chains of gold, and several
collars of knightly orders. His costume, with the exception of his
purpoint, was white, in token of his repentance. His purpoint was of
pearl-grey silk, studded with gold stars, and girded around his waist
by a scarlet belt, from which dangled a poignard in scarlet velvet
sheath. His collar, cufs, and the edging of his purpoint were of white
ermine, his little round cap or _chapel_ was white, surrounded with a
belt of ermine—a fur which only the great feudal lords of Brittany had
a right to wear. All the rest of his dress, to the shoes which were
long and pointed, was white.
No one at a first glance would have thought the Sire do 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 do 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.
“Messires,” said he, saluting his judges, “I pray you to expedite my
matter, and despatch as speedily as possible my unfortunate case; for I
am peculiarly anxious to consecrate myself to the service of God, who
has pardoned my great sins. I shall not fail, I assure you, to endow
several of the churches in Nantes, and I shall distribute the greater
portion of my goods among the poor, to secure the salvation of my
soul.”
“Monseigneur,” replied gravely Pierre de l’Hospital: “It is always well
to think of the salvation of one’s soul; but, if you please, think now
that we are concerned with the salvation of your body.”
“I have confessed to the father superior of the Carmelites,” replied
the marshal, with tranquillity; “and through his absolution I have been
able to communicate: I am, therefore, guiltless and purified.”
“Men’s justice is not in common with that of God, monseigneur, and I
cannot tell you what will be your sentence. Be ready to make your
defence, and listen to the charges brought against you, which M. le
lieutenant du Procureur de Nantes will read.”
The officer rose, and read the following paper of charges, which I
shall condense:—
“Having heard the bitter complaints of several of the inhabitants of
the diocese of Nantes, whose names follow hereinafter (here follow the
names of the parents of the lost children), we, Philippe do Livron,
lieutenant assesseur of Messire le Procureur de Nantes, have invited,
and do invite, the very noble and very wise Messire Pierre de
l’Hospital, President of Brittany, &c., to bring to trial the very high
and very powerful lord, Gilles de Laval, Sire de Retz, Machecoul,
Ingrande and other places, Councillor of his Majesty the King, and
Marshal of France:
“Forasmuch as the said Sire de Retz has seized and caused to be seized
several little children, not only ten or twenty, but thirty, forty,
fifty, sixty, one hundred, two hundred, and more, and has murdered and
slain them inhumanly, and then burned their bodies to convert them to
ashes:
“Forasmuch as persevering in evil, the said Sire, notwithstanding that
the powers that be are ordained of God, and that every one should be an
obedient subject to his prince, . . . has assaulted Jean Leferon,
subject of the Duke of Brittany, the said Jean Leferon being guardian
of the fortress of Malemort, in the name of Geoffrey Leferon, his
brother, to whom the said lord had made over the possession of the said
place:
“Forasmuch as the said Sire forced Jean Leferon to give up to him the
said place, and moreover retook the lordship of Malemort in despite of
the order of the duke and of justice:
“Forasmuch as the said Sire arrested Master Jean Rousseau, sergeant of
the duke, who was sent to him with injunctions from the said duke, and
beat his men with their own staves, although their persons were under
the protection of his grace:
“We conclude that the said Sire de Retz, homicide in fact and in intent
according to the first count, rebel and felon according to the second,
should be condemned to suffer corporal punishment, and to pay a fine of
his possessions in lands and goods held in fief to the said nobleman,
and that these should be confiscated and remitted to the crown of
Brittany.”
This requisition was evidently drawn up with the view of saving the
life of the Sire de Retz; for the crime of homicide was presented
without aggravating circumstances, in such a manner that it could be
denied or shelved, whilst the crimes of felony and rebellion against
the Duke of Brittany were brought into exaggerated prominence.
Gilles de Retz had undoubtedly been forewarned of the course which was
to be pursued, and he was prepared to deny totally the charges made in
the first count.
“Monseigneur,” said Pierre de l’Hospital, whom the form of the
requisition had visibly astonished: “What justification have you to
make? Take an oath on the Gospels to declare the truth.”
“No, messire!” answered the marshal. “The witnesses are bound to
declare what they know upon oath, but the accused is never put on his
oath.”
“Quite so,” replied the judge. “Because the accused may be put on the
rack and constrained to speak the truth, an’ please you.”
Gilles de Retz turned pale, bit his lips, and cast a glance of
malignant hate at Pierre de l’Hospital; then, composing his
countenance, he spoke with an appearance of calm:—
“Messires, I shall not deny that I behaved wrongfully in the case of
Jean Rousseau; but, in excuse, let me say that the said Rousseau was
full of wine, and he behaved with such indecorum towards me in the
presence of my servants, that it was quite intolerable. Nor will I deny
my revenge on the brothers Leferon: Jean had declared that the said
Grace of Brittany had confiscated my fortress of Malemort, which I had
sold to him, and for which I have not yet received payment; and
Geoffrey Leferon had announced far and wide that I was about to be
expelled Brittany as a traitor and a rebel. To punish them I re-entered
my fortress of Malemort.—As for the other charges, I shall say nothing
about them, they are simply false and calumnious.”
“Indeed exclaimed Pierre de l’Hospital, whose blood boiled with
indignation against the wretch who stood before him with such
effrontery. “All these witnesses who complain of having lost their
children, lied under oath!”
“Undoubtedly, if they accuse me of having anything to do with their
loss. What am I to know about them, am I their keeper?”
“The answer of Cain!” exclaimed Pierre de l’Hospital, rising from his
seat in the vehemence of his emotion. “However, as you solemnly deny
these charges, we must question Henriet and Pontou.”
“Henriet, Pontou!” cried the marshal, trembling; “they accuse me of
nothing, surely!”
“Not as yet, they have not been questioned, but they are about to be
brought into court, and I do not expect that they will lie in the face
of justice.”
“I demand that my servants be not brought forward as witnesses against
their master,” said the marshal, his eyes dilating, his brow wrinkling,
and his beard bristling blue upon his chin: “a master is above the
gossiping tales and charges of his servants.”
“Do you think then, messire, that your servants will accuse you?”
“I demand that I, a marshal of France, a baron of the duchy, should be
sheltered from the slanders of small folk, whom I disown as my servants
if they are untrue to their master.”
“Messire, I see we must put you on the rack, or nothing will be got
from you.”
“Hola! I appeal to his grace the Duke of Brittany, and ask an
adjournment, that I may take advice on the charges brought against me,
which I have denied, and which I deny still.”
“Well, I shall adjourn the case till the 25th of this month, that you
may be well prepared to meet the accusations.”
On his way back to prison, the marshal passed Henriet and Pontou as
they were being conducted to the court. Henriet pretended not to see
his master, but Pontou burst into tears on meeting him. The marshal
held out his hand, and Pontou kissed it affectionately.
“Remember what I have done for you, and be faithful servants,” said
Gilles de Retz. Henriet recoiled from him with a shudder, and the
marshal passed on.
“I shall speak,” whispered Henriet; “for we have another master beside
our poor master of Retz, and we shall soon be with the heavenly one.”
The president ordered the clerk to read again the requisition of the
lieutenant, that the two presumed accomplices of Gilles de Retz might
be informed of the charges brought against their master. Henriet burst
into tears, trembled violently, and cried out that he would tell all.
Pontou, alarmed, tried to hinder his companion, and said that Henriet
was touched in his head, and that what he was about to say would be the
ravings of insanity.
Silence was imposed upon him.
“I will speak out,” continued Henriet and yet I dare not speak of the
horrors which I know have taken place, before that image of my Lord
Christ; “and he pointed tremblingly to a large crucifix above the seat
of the judge.
“Henriet.” moaned Pontou, squeezing his hand, “you will destroy
yourself as well as your master.”
Pierre de l’Hospital rose, and the figure of our Redeemer was solemnly
veiled.
Henriet, who had great difficulty in overcoming his agitation, than
began his revelations.
The following is the substance of them:—
On leaving the university of Angers, he had taken the situation of
reader in the house of Gilles de Retz. The marshal took a liking to
him, and made him his chamberlain and confidant.
On the occasion of the Sire de la Suze, brother of the Sire de Retz,
taking possession of the castle of Chantoncé, Charles de Soenne, who
had arrived at Chantoncé, assured Henriet that he had found in the
oubliettes of a tower a number of dead children, some headless, others
frightfully mutilated. Henriet then thought that this was but a calumny
invented by the Sire de la Suze.
But when, some while after, the Sire de Retz retook the castle of
Chantoncé and had ceded it to the Duke of Brittany, he one evening
summoned Henriet, Pontou, and a certain Petit Robin to his room; the
two latter were already deep in the secrets of their master. But before
confiding anything to Henriet, De Retz made him take a solemn oath
never to reveal what he was about to tell him. The oath taken, the Sire
de Retz, addressing the three, said that on the morrow an officer of
the duke would take possession of the castle in the name of the duke,
and that it was necessary, before this took place, that a certain well
should be emptied of children’s corpses, and that their bodies should
be put into boxes and transported to Machecoul.
Henriet, Pontou, and Petit Robin went together, furnished with ropes
and hooks, to the tower where were the corpses. They toiled all night
in removing the half-decayed bodies, and with them they filled three
large cases, which they sent by a boat down the Loire to Machecoul,
where they were reduced to ashes.
Henriet counted thirty-six children’s heads, but there were more bodies
than heads. This night’s work, he said, bad produced a profound
impression on his imagination, and he was constantly haunted with a
vision of these heads rolling as in a game of skittles, and clashing
with a mournful wail. Henriet soon began to collect children for his
master, and was present whilst he massacred them. They were murdered
invariably in one room at Machecoul. The marshal used to bathe in their
blood; he was fond of making Gilles do Sillé, Pontou, or Henriet
torture them, and he experienced intense pleasure in seeing them in
their agonies. But his great passion was to welter in their blood. His
servants would stab a child in the jugular vein, and let the blood
squirt over him. The room was often steeped in blood. When the horrible
deed was done, and the child was dead, the marshal would be filled with
grief for what he had done, and would toss weeping and praying on a
bed, or recite fervent prayers and litanies on his knees, whilst his
servants washed the floor, and burned in the huge fireplace the bodies
of the murdered children. With the bodies were burned the clothes and
everything that had belonged to the little victims.
An insupportable odour filled the room, but the Maréchal do Retz
inhaled it with delight.
Henriet acknowledged that he had seen forty children put to death in
this manner, and he was able to give an account of several, so that it
was possible to identify them with the children reported to be lost.
“It is quite impossible,” said the lieutenant, who had been given the
cue to do all that was possible to save the marshal—“It is impossible
that bodies could be burned in a chamber fireplace.”
“It was done, for all that, messire,” replied Henriet. “The fireplace
was very large, both at the hotel Suze, and also at Machecoul; we piled
up great faggots and logs, and laid the dead children among them. In a
few hours the operation was complete, and we flung the ashes out of the
window into the moat.”
Henriet remembered the case of the two sons of Hamelin; he said that,
whilst the one child was being tortured, the other was on its knees
sobbing and praying to God, till its own turn came.
“What you have said concerning the excesses of Messire de Retz,”
exclaimed the lieutenant du procureur, “seems to be pure invention, and
destitute of all probability. The greatest monsters of iniquity never
committed such crimes, except perhaps some Cæsars of old Rome.”
“Messire, it was the acts of these Cæsars that my Lord of Retz desired
to imitate. I used to read to him the chronicles of Suetonius, and
Tacitus, in which their cruelties are recorded. He used to delight in
hearing of them, and he said that it gave him greater pleasure to hack
off a child’s head than to assist at a banquet. Sometimes he would seat
himself on the breast of a little one, and with a knife sever the head
from the body at a single blow; sometimes he cut the throat half
through very gently, that the child might languish, and he would wash
his hands and his beard in its blood. Sometimes he had all the limbs
chopped off at once from the trunk; at other times he ordered us to
hang the infants till they were nearly dead, and then take them down
and cut their throats. I remember having brought to him three little
girls who were asking charity at the castle gates. He bade me cut their
throats whilst he looked on. André Bricket found another little girl
crying on the steps of the house at Vannes because she had lost her
mother. He brought the little thing—it was but a babe—in his arms to my
lord, and it was killed before him. Pontou and I had to make away with
the body. We threw it down a privy in one of the towers, but the corpse
caught on a nail in the outer wall, so that it would be visible to all
who passed. Pontou was let down by a rope, and he disengaged it with
great difficulty.”
“How many children do you estimate that the Sire de Retz and his
servants have killed?”
“The reckoning is long. I, for my part, confess to having killed twelve
with my own hand, by my master’s orders, and I have brought him about
sixty. I knew that things of the kind went on before I was admitted to
the secret; for the castle of Machecoul had been occupied a short while
by the Sire do la Sage. My lord recovered it speedily, for he knew that
there were many children’s corpses hidden in a hayloft. There were
forty there quite dry and black as coal, because they had been charred.
One of the women of Madame de Retz came by chance into the loft and saw
the corpses. Roger de Briqueville wanted to kill her, but the maréchal
would not let him.”
“Have you nothing more to declare?
“Nothing. I ask Pontou, my friend, to corroborate what I have said.”
This deposition, so circumstantial and detailed, produced on the judges
a profound impression of horror. Human imagination at this time had not
penetrated such mysteries of refined cruelty. Several times, as Henriet
spake, the president had shown his astonishment and indignation by
signing himself with the cross. Several times his face had become
scarlet, and his eyes had fallen; he had pressed his hand to his brow,
to assure himself that he was not labouring under a hideous dream, and
a quiver of horror had run through his whole frame.
Pontou had taken no part in the revelation of Henriet; but when the
latter appealed to him he raised his head, looked sadly round the
court, and sighed.
“Etienne Cornillant, alias Pontou, I command you in the name of God and
of justice, to declare what you know.”
This injunction of Pierre do l’Hospital remained unresponded to, and
Pontou seemed to strengthen himself in his resolution not to accuse his
master.
But Henriet, flinging himself into the arms of his accomplice, implored
him, as he valued his soul, no longer to harden his heart to the calls
of God; but to bring to light the crimes he had committed along with
the Sire do Retz.
The lieutenant du procureur, who hitherto had endeavoured to extenuate
or discredit the charges brought against Gilles do Retz, tried a last
expedient to counterbalance the damaging confessions of Henriet, and to
withhold Pontou from giving way.
“You have heard, monseigneur,” said he to the president, “the
atrocities which have been acknowledged by Henriet, and you, as I do,
consider them to be pure inventions of the aforesaid, made out of
bitter hatred and envy with the purpose of ruining his master. I
therefore demand that Henriet should be put on the rack, that he may be
brought to give the lie to his former statements.”
“You forget,” replied de l’Hospital, “that the rack is for those who do
_not_ confess, and not for those who freely acknowledge their crimes.
Therefore I order the second accused, Etienne Cornillant, alias Pontou,
to be placed on the rack if he continues silent. Pontou! will you speak
or will you not?”
“Monseigneur, he will speak!” exclaimed Henriet. Oh, Pontou, dear
friend, resist not God any more.”
“Well then, messeigneurs,” said Pontou, with emotion; “I will satisfy
you; I cannot defend my poor lord against the allegations of Henriet,
who has confessed all through dread of eternal damnation.”
He then fully substantiated all the statements of the other, adding
other facts of the same character, known only to himself.
Notwithstanding the avowal of Pontou and Henriet, the adjourned trial
was not hurried on. It would have been easy to have captured some of
the accomplices of the wretched man; but the duke, who was informed of
the whole of the proceedings, did not wish to augment the scandal by
increasing the number of the accused. He even forbade researches to be
made in the castles and mansions of the Sire de Retz, fearing lest
proofs of fresh crimes, more mysterious and more horrible than those
already divulged, should come to light.
The dismay spread through the country by the revelations already made,
demanded that religion and morality, which had been so grossly
outraged, should be speedily avenged. People wondered at the delay in
pronouncing sentence, and it was loudly proclaimed in Nantes that the
Sire de Retz was rich enough to purchase his life. It is true that
Madame de Retz solicited the king and the duke again to give pardon to
her husband; but the duke, counselled by the bishop, refused to extend
his authority to interfere with the course of justice; and the king,
after having sent one of his councillors to Nantes to investigate the
case, determined not to stir in it.