Trial of Gilles De Rais by George Bataille Page A

still stalled him. Would he have thought that a repentant great lord could be forgiven for putting to death poor children, whereas the conjury of demons warranted fire? It is possible.
    It is difficult to believe, however, that the first leap, the most difficult, was superficial. I believe that the deep turmoil in which he struggled abandoned him again to tortuous thoughts. Though dimly, he must have been from the beginning no less open to the dizzying possibility that the confession of his repugnant crimes would fascinate those who heard them. Could he live without fascinating? Live without fascinating? Live without breathing! Whatever there was convulsing in him aspired to the moment when those who heard him would tremble. Fascinated, in their horror, they would tremble! The exhibitionism of criminals, compensating for the anxiety of dissimulation, generally has this aspect; it is on account of this that confession is the temptation of the guilty party who always, beginning from the disaster of crime, has the possibility of a blaze, disastrous in itself.
    The decisive confessions, Gilles de Rais’ inadmissible confessions, did not take place until October 21st, the date on which torture had been decided upon. These confessions could therefore have been the result of the threat. It seems to me less risky to believe that the threat facilitated what was a response to passion, but was not the cause of it. Threatened, Gilles de Rais beseeched the judges to grant him a postponement. He would reflect but, in advance, he promised to speak spontaneously in a manner that would satisfy them. He secured a hearing not by the ecclesiastical judges, but by the president of the secular tribunal — to whom the Bishop of Saint-Brieuc would be united. Torture deferred, Gilles entered upon the path of these unprecedented confessions, after which it became unthinkable to insist. The session of October 22nd was decisive: before the ecclesiastical judges, assembled in numerous attendance, Gilles exposed his depravities at length. He recalled the most dreadful thing. The decapitated heads that his accomplices and he himself examined in order to pick the most beautiful, which he then kissed. Finally the bursts of laughter that they had together on seeing the grimaces of the dying.
    This violent exhibitionism was itself only possible under the condition of an ambiguity. Would it have been imaginable without the great lord’s sobs? Or if the criminal who was crying had not been this great lord? In the moments of his confessions, there was a peak … They appeared in a sovereign, unusual light, from the fact of the criminal’s grandeur (doesn’t tragedy demand the criminal’s sovereignty); at the same time he is offered for the horror, the criminal is offered for the terrified sympathy, for the compassion of those who see him cry, who cry with him.
    What grips us in Gilles de Rais’ death is the compassion. It seems that this criminal moved his audience to compassion; in part by reason of his atrocity, in part by virtue of his nobility and the fact that he was crying.
    At the end of the secular trial, when the condemnation to death had been pronounced, and when the president of the tribunal and Gilles spoke together for several moments, the judge did not address himself like a judge to the accused; he bore him the deference that, under ordinary circumstances, a man has for another man. Doubtlessly, in his own eyes, the judge felt vindicated on account of the piety which Gilles de Rais gave proof of during these last moments. Doubtlessly the powerful family of the man he had just sentenced to death troubled him. I believe, above all, that the ignominy and the repugnant character of the butcheries — associated with this piety, these tears, and this grandeur — bewildered him; and that this judge had lost all possibility of discerning what opposed him to the criminal, what opposed him to his infamy.
    At the same time I believe that the guilty