In December 1429, he had himself recaptured Louviers from the English. It stayed French ― and he was well known and well liked there. That would be their starting point for a raid on Rouen.


The spring of 1431 was one of the coldest and wettest ever recorded by the chroniclers. The small troop, led by Rais and La Hire, wound its way through a countryside devastated by war and foreign occupation. They passed dilapidated houses and corpses of horses; crows wheeled overhead. Sometimes they had to hide when a detachment of English passed. When the number of the enemy was not too great they attacked them, but then there were losses and these were irreparable. In spite of a few lucky encounters, Gilles de Rais’s men were decimated. The defences of Rouen proved formidable. They had to disperse and act under various disguises. Gilles managed to get into the city with one companion. He had no time to waste: there was a rumour that Jeanne had been condemned to the stake and was to be burnt that very week. Wounded, his clothes in rags, Gilles hardly looked better than a vagabond. Lost in the crowd, his heart heavy with hatred and grief, he watched the preparations for the execution. At the top of the pole stuck on to the pyre he could make out a scroll listing the sixteen charges of which Jeanne had been found guilty: Jeanne, who called herself the Maid, a liar, a pernicious woman, a betrayer of the people, a soothsayer, superstitious blasphemer of God, presumptuous, unbeliever in the faith, boastful, idolatrous, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic, heretic. A cardboard mitre had been stuck on her head derisively and it had fallen over her face. The stake was too high for the executioner to strangle her, as was the custom out of Christian charity, when the smoke first rose from the flames. So Jeanne had to endure inhuman torments to the end. As soon as the first flames reached her, she cried out ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’ And this cry did not cease until the last gasp, throughout the entire agony. In the end, the bailiff ordered the executioner to cut down the body, so that nobody could be in any doubt. She hung there on the pole, in the swirling smoke, a poor, half-charred carcass, a bald head, one eye burst open, hanging on a swollen torso, while a terrible smell of burning flesh floated over the town.

Gilles fled the scene. A wild flight indeed. He ran through the narrow streets, climbed over walls, jumped over ditches and stumbled across fields. He fell, got to his feet again, tore his face on brambles, waded through puddles, ran again, with the diabolical litany of the charges laid against Jeanne and her pitiful cries of ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!' echoing endlessly in his head.

He fell, his face buried in the dark earth. He lay there, as if dead, until the first light of dawn. Then he rose to his feet. But if anyone had seen his face he would have realized that something had changed inside him: he had the face of a lying, pernicious, dissolute, blaspheming invoker of devils. But this was nothing. A beaten, broken man, he went on and buried himself in his fortresses in the Vendée. For three years he became a cocooned caterpillar. When the malign metamorphosis was complete, he emerged, an infernal angel, unfurling his wings.


The death of Jean de Craon, Gilles’s grandfather and guardian, which occurred at Champtocé on 15 November 1432, put him at the head of a huge fortune and gave him free rein. Relations between the old man and the boy had been complex, for although the old villain had long chosen to see his heir as a somewhat timid disciple, he gradually discovered what a pale figure he himself cut in comparison to the abysses in which the young man’s soul usually wallowed. However this did not stop him wanting to lecture him for the last time with all the authority conferred on him by the deathbed.

‘This time you must listen to me,’ he told him, ‘for I am about to go.’

‘I listened to you throughout my childhood and throughout my youth,’ Gilles replied, ‘I’m not sure that your counsel has always been good for me.’

‘Don’t be ungrateful. I have worked long and hard to amass my own fortune, that’s true.’

‘. .