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Malise wished to leave Paris and proceed at once to the De Retz country, there to attempt in succession the marshal's great castles of Machecoul, Tiffauges, and Champtocé, in some one of which he was sure that the stolen maids must be immured. But James Douglas and Sholto earnestly dissuaded him from the adventure.
I have discovered nothing, except that he had a pronounced taste for the gibbet; for he liked to string up all the renegade French whom he surprised in the ranks of the English or in the cities which were not very much devoted to the king. "We shall find his taste for this kind of torture manifesting itself later on in the château de Tiffauges.
The donjon was still shut off, on the Tiffauges side, by a vast moat, at the bottom of which mighty trees were growing. One would have had to pass over the tops of the trees, growing to the very verge of the wall, to gain a porch on the other side, for there was now no drawbridge. But quite accessible was another part which overhung the Sèvre.
"In arsenic, in ordinary mercury, tin, salts of vitriol, saltpetre and nitre; in the juices of spurge, poppy, and purslane; in the bellies of starved toads; in human urine, in the menstrual fluid and the milk of women." Now Gilles de Rais must have been completely baffled. Alone at Tiffauges, without the aid of initiates, he was incapable of making fruitful experiments.
The flouting of his actual surroundings brought peace to Durtal's soul, and he had completely reorganized his life, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furore of contemporary letters, in the château de Tiffauges with the monster Bluebeard, with whom he lived in perfect accord, even in mischievous amity.
Schoolmasters were there with the elder of their pupils. For many of the vanished children had disappeared on their way to school, and these men were in danger of losing both their credit and occupation. Towards Tiffauges, Champtocé, Machecoul, the angry populace, long repressed, surged tumultuously, and with them, much wondering at their orders, went the soldiers of the Duke.
"From Pouance, general." "What news?" "A letter from Tiffauges." "Give it to me." Georges snatched the letter hastily from Coeur-de-Roi's hand and read it. "Ah!" he exclaimed. Then he read it a second time, "Have you seen the man whose coming he speaks of?" inquired Cadoudal. "Yes, general," replied the courier. "What sort of a man is he?" "A handsome young fellow of twenty-six or seven."
At the end of their resources, these hermetists disappeared, and there ensued at Tiffauges an incredible coming-and-going of adepts and their helpers. They arrived from all parts of Brittany, Poitou, and Maine, alone or escorted by promoters and sorcerers.
"He had a guard of two hundred men, knights, captains, squires, pages, and all these people had personal attendants who were magnificently equipped at Gilles's expense. The luxury of his chapel and collegium was madly extravagant. There was in residence at Tiffauges a complete metropolitan clergy, deans, vicars, treasurers, canons, clerks, deacons, scholasters, and choir boys.
For three years, Georges had performed prodigies of valor, strength and dexterity; he now crossed the Loire and re-entered Morbihan with only one man left of all who had followed him. That man became his aide-de-camp, or rather his brother-in-arms. He never left him, and in memory of the hard campaign they had made together he changed his name from Lemercier to Tiffauges.
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