Gilles de Rais was coming out of his lodging when a mother commended her ten-year-old son to his care. He did not answer her. His servant had already promised her that the boy's schooling would continue. Two years later, she was telling an investigator how her son had disappeared.
On 26 October 1440, Gilles de Rais was executed at Nantes for crimes including the abduction and murder of children. Two of his servants, Poitou and Henriet, died with him. Among the families whose accounts had reached the inquiry was Peronne Loessart, the mother who had commended her schoolboy to him.
Gilles had fought alongside Joan of Arc against the English and become a marshal of France in 1429. His inheritance and marriage had brought him castles and estates across western France, including Machecoul, Tiffauges and Pouzauges. This was a household with mounted guards, chaplains and a choir of young singers, kept up with a magnificence that consumed an enormous fortune. A servant offering a child a place in it had a great deal behind his promises.
Peronne had something to protect already. Her son was at school at La Roche-Bernard and learning well. In September 1438 Gilles, returning from Vannes, came to lodge in the town at the house of her neighbour Jean Colin, and his servant Poitou asked her for the boy. She refused at first. She hoped that the schooling would one day be of benefit to her.
Poitou promised that the schooling would continue. He promised to keep the boy and to give her a hundred sous for a new dress. When the money came it was four livres, twenty sous short of what she said she had been promised. She told him that if he was already failing to keep this promise, he would hardly keep the others.
He answered with more promises.
She allowed the boy to go. Poitou bought a small horse from Jean Colin to carry him away. The next morning, as Gilles came out of Colin's house, Peronne addressed him herself, with her son beside her. She had taken assurances from the servant; now she commended the boy to the master. Gilles said nothing to her. To Poitou, who was standing there, he said that the child had been well chosen.
Afterwards she asked his men where the boy was. They thought he was at Tiffauges, they said, or at Pouzauges, other castles within their master's estates. The household was large enough for a missing child to be explained by another journey, another residence. The answer always left him somewhere else.
By 1440, Gilles's spending had forced repeated sales of property. In 1435, after complaints from his own family, Charles VII had forbidden him to sell any more of his lands. In May 1440, trying to recover the castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte after selling it, he entered its church with armed men during Mass and seized the cleric Jean Le Ferron. The act brought him into conflict with both the Duke of Brittany and the Church. At the end of July the Bishop of Nantes made public the rumours about children vanishing around his residences. Gilles was arrested at Machecoul on 15 September.
On 18 September, Peronne gave her account under oath to a commissioner of the Duke of Brittany. The promises, the departure and the enquiries afterwards could now be put before someone with authority to question the household that had taken her son.
Other parents and neighbours were questioned too. Their accounts established disappearances and encounters with Gilles's people. They could describe the children leaving; they could not describe what had happened to them afterwards. The case against Gilles also drew on the testimony of members of his own household, including Poitou and Henriet, who implicated him in the children's murders.
The proceedings ran through two jurisdictions. The church court examined religious offences as well as the abuse and killing of children. The duke's justice could impose the death sentence. Gilles faced charges of heresy and of invoking demons alongside the crimes against the children. In that courtroom, offences against divine authority and offences against a family belonged within the same prosecution.
At first he challenged the authority of his ecclesiastical judges and insulted them. They excommunicated him. He then accepted their jurisdiction, but the detailed confession came only after the threat of torture. On 21 October, faced with torture, he confessed out of court; the following day he repeated his confession before the church court. The man whose servants had supplied explanations to mothers was now supplying an account of his own crimes.
On 25 October the church court convicted him and the duke's court sentenced him to death. He had asked to die before his two servants, and the request was granted. The sentence was carried out the next morning. Poitou, who had promised Peronne that her son's education would continue, was executed with him.
The inquiry into her son's disappearance had also heard her neighbours. Jean Colin and the women of his household confirmed the boy's departure with Gilles's company. They too had asked questions afterwards. Some of the lord's men told them the boy was at Tiffauges. Others said he was dead, that the wind had blown him off one of the bridges at Nantes into the river. Peronne's son had left La Roche-Bernard on the little horse Poitou bought from Colin. Two or three months later, Colin saw that horse again in Nantes, with somebody else riding it.
