FRANCE: Inside the Castle

Past grazing cows, past a dried-up moat and ivied ruins, a curious procession trudged up the hill to the “haunted” castle of Tiffauges on the old Brittany frontier. First came Mayor Fernand Baron, followed by a gesticulating guide, two workmen with shovels, and a government archaeologist. The mayor led the party down a circular stone stairway to the crypt of the castle chapel. By flashlight the men saw two rows of granite columns dividing the vaulted 12-ft. ceiling into three naves. Before the granite altar at the end of the 27-ft. crypt lay a pile of stones.

“Dig here,” the mayor ordered the workmen, and in a few minutes they unearthed something that gleamed whiter than stone. It was a fragment of human bone. In “Bluebeard’s castle” they had found what they were looking for.

Grandfather Was Naughty. Bluebeard, the wife killer that Hollywood and the children know, is only a legend; but the real Bluebeard of Brittany—one Baron Gilles de Rais—lived all too real a life five centuries ago in the castle of Tiffauges. His parents died before he was twelve, and he came under the wing of his grandfather, Jean de Craon, a notorious libertine and murderer who felt nothing was too bad to teach the boy and nothing was too good to grab for him. Grandfather attempted to wed the boy at 13 to the four-year-old daughter of a Norman lord, but that was too much even for medieval sensitivities, and the Parliament of Caen blocked the marriage. So Grandfather kidnaped the young heiress to the barony of Tiffauges for him, insuring Gilles a dowry of chateaux and domains throughout western France.

Under Grandfather’s expert guidance, Gilles started on a career of pillage and debauchery, sadism and sodomy. The only year of his life that becomes him was 1429, when he fought side by side with Joan of Arc against the English, and King Charles VII made him, at 24, a marshal of France. But even this year of good behavior is challenged by those who believe that, aided by Burgundian friends, it was he who betrayed Joan. Skipping out on the wars, despite a pledge to the King to fight on, Gilles returned to Tiffauges, lived it up with gold borrowed from a cousin to “pay the soldiers,” raised a traveling troupe of actors to glorify the exploits of Joan (and Gilles), and established “La Collégiale,” a huge choir of children who sang religious songs. As his money melted away and the irritated King declared him a “spendthrift.” Gilles turned to alchemy in the hope of paying his debts.

Sacrifice to Satan. In the crypt of the chapel at Tiffauges, he gathered alchemists from all over Europe. They staged satanic orgies, sacrificing one after another of the child singers on the altar while begging the four principal figures of demonology—Satan, Beelzebub. Belial and Moloch—to help them turn base metal into gold. In 1440 Gilles was arrested and tried for murder. Before he was hanged at the age of 36, he confessed that he had presided over the murders of 140 children.

Inside the castle where workmen unearthed something that gleamed whiter than stone, further digging uncovered a small heap of bones—the remains of 48 child victims of Brittany’s Bluebeard.