Trial of the Warlock

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We see Paris on an autumn evening. We sense the period: It must be about 1890. Pavements are wet with mist. Carriages go by. We follow Durtal, a writer in his early 40s. He has dark hair and a pale complexion, mustache and goatee. He enters a house, rings at a first-floor apartment, is received by a servant, offers up hat and cape, is led into a vast, high-ceilinged drawing room where a party is going on.

On the walls are religious pictures, plus a portrait of the host, Chantelouve, three quarter length, his hand resting on a pile of his works. Chantelouve is small, rotund, with a well-fed stomach, red cheeks, long hair drawn up in crescents along his temples, smooth-shaven. His wife, standing for a moment next to him, is considerably younger than himself, a blonde with marvelous eyes, alternately cold and gleaming with sparks, thin sensuous lips. She is voluptuous for a slim woman and remote from the company, as if bored with her duties as a hostess.

Chantelouve: "What an honor! You are becoming the.most famous recluse in Paris."

Durtal: "On the contrary. Nobody invites me out. Fame has a way of walking around my books."

Chantelouve: "Everybody assures me you are a marvelous writer."

Durtal, looking around the room, takes in the throng now packed into Chantelouve's library and drawing room and sees a friend. "There's Des Hermies," he says to Chantelouve and moves along. Across the room we see a man who looks out of place. Tall, slender, somewhat pale, his eyes have a cold blue gleam. With his flaxen hair and Vandyke, he might be a Norwegian or an Englishman. His garments are of London make and the long, tight, wasp-waisted coat, buttoned clear up to the neck, encloses him like a box.He is very cold in the presence of strangers.

Durtal makes his way toward Des Hermies. We see faces that might belong to fin-de-siécle priests, poets, journalists, actresses, dabblers, occultists, a few scholars.

As Durtal and Des Hermies shake hands formally to greet each other, Des Hermies for the first time shows a friendly expression. "Never go to a party given by a Catholic historian."

"I don't know," Durtal replies. "I would think a priest comes here at the risk of his reputation."

Madame Chantelouve joins them. "What is the value of a reputation." she asks, "if it takes no risks?" She smiles at Durtal. "Tell me, if you will, the book you are working on now."

Durtal: "I confess I have in mind something on Monsieur Gilles de Rais."

Madame Chantelouve: "He was a soldier who fought by the side of Joan of Arc through all the campaigns. He was with her when she was wounded and adored her."

Durtal: "Yes."

Madame Chantelouve: "And with her again at Reims during the coronation of the dauphin. Of course, I remember. But then, there is something else about him that I forget. Something not so nice."

Durtal: "Oh, there's a great deal to him."

Des Hermies: "Wasn't he put on trial for something obscene and immense?"

Durtal: "All of that."

Madame Chantelouve: "I can hardly wait."

She moves on.

Des Hermies: "Let's go. I've seen nothing but patients all day and feel as if I still haven't left the hospital."

As they leave, we hear Madame Chantelouve say in annoyance at Durtal's departure, "The level at which Durtal flirts with the Church reminds me of the way a prostitute works up to entering a brothel. Ah, to be free of the chase and come in from the rain."

•

Durtal's apartment. A small sitting room and smaller bedroom. A fire on the hearth in the sitting room.

The place is furnished without luxury. The sitting room has been converted into a study. Black bookcases crammed with volumes hide the walls. In front of the window is a large table, a leather armchair and a few straight chairs.

In the study, there is a large print of a Crucifixion by Matthias Griinewald. As we hear the conversation of Durtal and Des Hermies, the titles begin and the camera offers us the print to examine.

Christ rises before us nailed to a cross of rough wood. His arms bend under the weight of his body and an enormous spike pierces his feet. Almost ripped out of their sockets, the tendons of his armpits seem ready to snap. His fingers are contorted. His thighs are greasy with sweat. His ribs are like staves. The flesh is swollen, blue, mottled with fleabites, specked with thorns broken off from the lashes of his scourging. These thorns are festering now beneath his skin.

The wound in his side drips thickly, his thigh shows blood congealing. A discharge oozes from his chest and drips to his abdomen and loincloth. His knees are forced together, but his lower legs are held apart. His feet, however, have been crisscrossed one on top of the other. They are turning green where the flesh has swollen over the head of the spike. His toes show horny blue nails.

Christ's head, encircled by a broken, disarrayed crown of thorns, hangs lifeless. One eye half opens with a shudder. All the drooping features weep, while the mouth is unnerved. Its under-jaw laughs atrociously.

While we look, Durtal is saying, "As you see, this is not the Christ of the rich, no, not that well-groomed boy with his curly brown hair, elegant beard and those doll-like features. No, this is the man who was abandoned by his Father to die like a thief in his own putrefaction. Yet, for me, this Christ is the Son of God."

Des Hermies replies, "Did you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms? It depends on whether you're fat or thin. In fat corpses, the rhizophagous maggot is found. In thin corpses, the phora, an aristocrat, a fastidious maggot that sneers at copious breasts and juicy fat bellies. It looks for a corpse that is chic. Just think, no equality, not even in the way we feed the worms."

Durtal: "Isn't it enough that you are famous for being on intimate terms with demonologists, alchemists and cabalists, without adding maggots to your list?"

Des Hermies: "Dear friend, I respect the innocence of your heart, for it can look on this painting every morning and then eat breakfast. I go back to the worms. There has to be a higher intelligence that designs different worms for the well bred and the obese. Don't look for compassion in that."

"It's not for God to prove the existence of compassion," Durtal answers. "It is for people."

"I agree with you," says Des Hermies.

"You amaze me."

"No, you think I'm interested only in twisted natures. I know a few who are not. Durtal, the time has come to introduce you to the one marvelous man I know, Louis Carhaix. He's an intelligent Catholic who, save us, is not sanctimonious. In fact, he is the one human I know who is without hatred or envy for anyone."

Last of the titles.

•

The Place St.-Sulpice: The square is almost deserted. A few women are going up the church steps, met by beggars who murmur prayers as they rattle their tin cups. An ecclesiastic, carrying a book bound in black cloth, salutes the women. A few dogs are running about. Children are jumping rope.

We see Durtal and Des Hermies. On a stone porch in the flank of the church of St.-Sulpice, they read the placard, Tower open to visitors.

At the back, a little kerosene lamp, hanging from a nail, lights a door to the tower entrance.

In close to utter darkness, they climb. Turning a corner, Durtal sees a shaft of light, then a door. Des Hermies pulls a bell cord and the door swings back. Above them on a landing they can see feet, whether of a man or of a woman, they cannot tell.

"Ah! It's you. Monsieur Des Hermies." A woman bends over, so that her head is in a stream of light. "Louis is in the tower."

"Permit me to introduce my friend Durtal."

Durtal makes a bow in the darkness.

"Ah, monsieur, how fortunate. Louis is anxious to meet you."

Durtal gropes along behind his friend. Finally, they come to a barred door, open it and find themselves on a balcony.

Beneath them, they can see a formidable array of bells hanging from oak supports lined with iron straps. The dark bell metal looks oiled. Above, in the upper abyss, are more bells. There is a place inside each, worn by the striking of the clapper, that shines golden.

The bells are quiet, but the wind rattles against the shutters, howls along the spiral stair and whines in the bell vases. Suddenly, a light breeze fans Durtal's cheek. He looks up. The current has been set in motion by a great bell beginning to get under way. There is a crash of sound, the bell gathers momentum, and now the gigantic clapper opens a deafening clamor. The tower trembles and the balcony on which Durtal is standing shakes like the floor of a railway coach.

Durtal manages to catch sight of a leg swinging out into space and back again in one of those wooden stirrups, two of which, he notices, are fastened to the bottom of every bell. Leaning out so that he is almost prone on one of the timbers, he finally perceives the bell ringer, clinging with his hands to two iron handles and balancing over the gulf.

Durtal is shocked by the face. Never has he seen such pallor. The man's eyes are blue and bulging, but their expression is contradicted by a truculent Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. The man seems at once a dreamer and a fighter.

He gives the bell stirrup a last yank with his foot and with a heave back to the platform regains his equilibrium. He mops his brow and descends, smiles at Des Hermies.

When he learns Durtal's name, he shakes hands cordially.

"I have read your books, monsieur. I know a man like you can't help falling in love with my bells."

Once more, they grope up the winding stairs in the near dark. Having reached the door to the room beneath the tower roof, Carhaix stands aside to let them pass. They are in a rotunda that is pierced in the center by a great circular hole that has around it a corroded iron railing orange with rust.

"Don't be afraid to lean over," says Carhaix.

But Durtal feels uneasy. As if drawn toward the chasm, the camera gives a vertiginous view of the fall.

They descend and Carhaix, in silence, opens a door to a large storeroom, containing colossal broken statues of saints, scaly and dilapidated apostles, Saint Matthew legless and armless. Saint Luke accompanied by a fragmentary stone ox, Saint Mark lacking a shoulder and part of his beard. Saint Peter holding up an arm from which the hand holding the keys is broken off.

"What is that over there?" inquires Durtal, perceiving, in a corner, an enormous fragment of rounded metal, like half a gigantic skullcap. On it, dust lies thick, and in the hollow are meshes on meshes of fine web, dotted with the bodies of lurking spiders.

"That? Ah, monsieur!"--there is fire in Carhaix's mild eyes--"That is the skull of an old, old bell whose like is not cast these days. The ring of that bell, monsieur, was like a voice from heaven." Suddenly, he explodes, "Bell ringing is a lost art. People will spend thirty thousand francs on an altar, but mention bells and they shrug their shoulders. Do you know, Monsieur Durtal, there is only one man in Paris besides myself who can still ring chords? Yet there's your real sacred music."

They descend to Carhaix's apartment. It is a vast room, vaulted, with walls of rough stone and lighted by a semicircular window just under the ceiling. The tiled floor is barely covered by a worn carpet and the furniture, very simple, consists of a round dining-room table, some old armchairs covered with slate-blue velvet, a little walnut sideboard on which are a few plates and pitchers of Breton faïence, and opposite the sideboard a little black bookcase, which might contain 50 books.

"If I had a place like this," Durtal says, "I would fix it up and work on my book and take my time about it." He smiles. "I certainly do like your place."

"Oh," says the wife, "it's so cold! And no kitchen--"

"You can't even drive a nail into the wall to hang things on," says Carhaix. "But I like this place too."

Des Hermies rises. All shake hands and Monsieur and Madame Carhaix ask Durtal to come again.

•

"What refreshing people!" exclaims Durtal as he and Des Hermies cross the square. "But why is an educated man like that working as a day laborer?"

"If Carhaix could hear you!" says Des Hermies. "You'd be in trouble. He lives for the bells. They're human to him. A bell, he told me, is baptized like a Christian. Then it's anointed with seven unctions of the oil of the infirm, in order to send a message to the dying. According to Carhaix, bells, like fine wines, mellow with age and lose their raw flavor."

•

The conversation is still with Durtal as he goes to bed. He hears Carhaix saying, "The ring of the bells is your real sacred music." As he lies in bed in his small bedroom, the moonlight of Paris is coming through his window. The sound of the bells starts up in his mind. He drifts on their sounds into a dream of a slow procession of monks kneeling to the call of the Angelus. Chimes sound over narrow medieval streets, over cornet towers and dentilated walls. The chimes shout Prime and Tierce, call out Sext and None, Vespers and Complin.

It is here in Durtal's dream that we receive our first view of Joan of Arc, and she is astride the stirrups that rock the bell in the tower of a church. Her feet are in the ropes like those of Carhaix, the bell ringer, so that she is alternately suspended over space and virtually embracing the bell. The sound of the bell becomes, ideally, married to our first sight of her face. She is lovely, but in no delicate fashion, handsome and strong as a rich peasant, not male nor female so much as quintessentially athletic, with a bright and smiling face, and perhaps by such measure five centuries ahead of her time. Her sexuality has become as simple and as separate from herself as the force of her vigor, and her vigor is a natural force apparent to us in the powerful reverberations of the bell--part of its resonance seems to come out of the gusto of her body.

As the bells stop, she calls down merrily to the market place below. "I told you I could ring them," she cries out. "Once our bell ringer at Domremy slipped and the bell sliced off his leg--what a sound it made when the leg hit the ground"--she makes a thwooping sound with her tongue, not crude but all too comfortable, a soldier's sound--"I was the only one the curé could get to climb up into the tower. The boys were afraid." She gives a great laugh, large as her sense of competition, but surprisingly attractive.

At the foot of the tower is Gilles de Rais. He is 25, also vigorous, a robust, active man immaculately dressed in light armor. His face is angelic in expression. His body is carnal in power. He is unbelievably handsome, a man--as described by contemporaries--"of striking beauty and rare elegance." If he is delighted with the sight of Joan swinging on the bell, she is also, by his measure, taunting him. He quits the soldiers grinning beside him and starts to climb.

In his reverie, Durtal is looking down the fall again from Carhaix's tower at St.-Sulpice and again feels the abysmal vertigo he has known that afternoon. He shudders in his bed. The image of his fall coalesces into the fall below Gilles and Joan, and we see them on opposite sides of the bell, ringing it back and forth. Since the bell is massive enough to provide stirrups on either side, they offer it a powerful momentum, sufficiently intense to suggest that union acrobats can know.

Gilles takes it further. He leaps out of the stirrups, races around the circular catwalk and jumps to grasp the bell rope above her hands. She immediately frees one of her feet to allow him a stirrup, and in this position, facing each other, each with a leg in a stirrup and the other over the abyss, each holding with one arm to the rope, they toll the bell, faces three inches apart.

"I've come to claim a kiss," says Gilles.

"Never."

"Not even for the bravest man in France?"

"I'll give you a kiss after we take Paris--if I give any man a kiss."

She is looking into the face of a diabolical angel.

"Joan, dear Joan," says Gilles. "Think of me as a girl. Leave a kiss on this brave girl's lips."

"You're mad. I wouldn't kiss a girl. I'd sooner eat garlic."

"You do," he says.

She jumps to the catwalk and tries to kick him. He jumps as well and they wrestle on near to equal terms, their armor thumping comically against each other. As they come to a stop, he is in the midst of a speech he has not expected to make and can no longer control. Half muttered, half growled, the words and sounds of a lover near to burned out of his senses come forth in a riprace of confession. "I could eat you. I could drive my hands through your body. I (continued on page 132)Warlock(continued from base 126) could drink your blood. Drink your blood and be blessed."

She shivers. She sees before her Grünewald's Christ freed of its frame. It is now a man rather than a portrait. As in the picture, however, we see the Virgin keeping watch. Her face is pale and swollen with weeping. The vision fades. Joan says to Gilles in a hoarse voice, "I do not live in my body, Gilles de Rais. as you live in yours."

He kneels on the narrow catwalk and touches his hand to her boot in apology.

"You light up a court of ruffians and bandits, arouse a cowardly king, purify a castle and wash the orgies off black old goats. You rouse everybody out of bed long enough to fight and even induce me to take Communion the morning of a battle. Maid of Orleans, fantastic Maid of Orleans, I confess I love you."

She looks more troubled. "Once," Joan says, "my Lady told me that I must protect the tears of her son from the evil of men. 'Beware of the French,' she said, 'for they are full of greed, and abhor the English, since they are next to Satan.' "

"I live just across the sea from England," he replies.

She looks at the Christ she perceives in the air, that quivering presence of the Grünewald head.

•

We see the same Christ again, back in its picture, back in its frame, there on the mantelpiece of Durtal's apartment. The author is talking to Des Hermies while he pets his cat. "Joan had her visions, and I must say, I am certainly beginning to have mine. I cannot get Gilles de Rais out of my mind. Yet, for all my research, I don't begin to comprehend him. A man of such contrasts is beyond all measure. There's no question he had to experience some mystical emotion when with Joan. Yet not ten years after her death, he is on trial for butchering children. Why? To enrich his Black Masses, he confesses. To bring him nearer to the powers of Satan. How do you comprehend a total paradox? He spoils my sleep. I don't know if I can manage this book."

Des Hermies: "Why don't we visit what's left of his chateau? Let's take a trip to Tiffauges."

Durtal: "One hundred and forty children, tortured and murdered. What frightful nights there must have been."

•

Durtal and Des Hermies are walking along a country road toward the chateau. The castle towers over the valleys of the CrÛme and the Sèvre, facing hills of granite overgrown with formidable oaks and the roots, protruding out of the ground, resemble nests of snakes.

One could believe oneself in medieval Brittany. The same melancholy heavy sky, the same sun, which seems older than in other parts of France, the gloomy age-old forest.

One feels this iron-gray sky, this starving soil, these roads, bordered with stone walls. One still sees the inhospitable fields and crippled beggars on the road, medieval in their sores and filth. Even the black sheep have blue eyes with a cold, pale gleam. The landscape appears unchanged through the centuries but for a factory chimney in the distance. Within the castle walls, traced by the ruins of the towers, is a miserable produce garden.

A thatched hut has been built in a corner. The peasant inhabitants move only when a silver coin is held up. Seizing it. they hand over some keys.

Durtal points to the cabbages and the carrots. "It may interest you," Durtal says, irritated by their apathy, "that where these vegetables now grow, knights once fought in tournaments."

Peasant (shakes his head): "It came to a bad end."

His wife crosses herself.

Durtal and Des Hermies enter the castle. We see them wandering around the ruins, climbing the towers. There is a great moat at the bottom of which huge trees are growing. The wall of the dungeon is broken and they can see into it near the foot of the moat.

Within, one vaulted room succeeds another, as close together as cabins in the hold of a ship. By spiral stairways they descend into cellar passageways.

In these corridors, so narrow two persons cannot walk along them abreast, they pass cells on whose walls mineral salts sparkle in the light of the lantern like grains of sugar. There are dungeons still beneath. Voices echo here.

As Durtal and Des Hermies make this trip, we begin to see the soldiers of Gilles de Rais, somewhat transparent, not wholly corporeal, standing in the corridors and up on the summits of the towers, as if the past has attempted to materialize for a moment.

The ruins seem to restore themselves. Transparencies of people in costume become manifest in the bare rooms.

The walls reclothe themselves with wainscots of Irish wood and tapestries of gold and thread of Arras. The hard black soil of the courtyard is repaved with green and yellow bricks and black and white flagstones. The roof vaults are starred with gold and crossbows on a field azure. The marshal's cross, sable on shield or, is set shining there.

The furnishings return, each to its own place. Here are high-backed signorial chairs, sideboards with carved bas-reliefs, painted and gilded statues of saints. Great beds are reached by carpeted steps.

Durtal, excited, is speaking all the while: "Why, Gilles was dabbling in alchemy long before he even met Joan. He knew more about perfumes and wines at the age of 20 than anyone alive. He was brilliant. Wrote a play at the age of 16 to celebrate his own wedding to the local heiress. Nine years later: He's with Joan. But there is so little known about them. It maddens me. He was supposed to be lurking in Rouen for days before she was burned at the stake. Was he plotting her rescue? How could he survive her death? And then to come back here, to these feasts and these debauches."

We see a banquet in a great room. The guests eat and disport. All men. No women. Gilles and his friends are not in their damaskeened field harness but in glittering pleated jackets that belly out in a small flounced skirt at the waist. The legs are shown in dark skintight hose. As they eat, call out, jostle one another, stand up and bow, Durtal's voice gives us a clue to what the camera sees of the bill of fare.

Durtal: "Beef pies, salmon pies, squab tarts, roast heron, stork, crane, peacock, bustard and swan; venison in verjuice; Nantes lampreys; salads of bryony, hops, beard of Judas; vehement dishes seasoned with marjoram and mace, coriander and sage, peony and rosemary, basil and hyssop--dishes to give one a violent thirst and drinks to spur the guests in this womenless castle to scandalous frenzies of lechery."

Durtal has a passing vision of men embracing men.

"Of course, there's also his wife, Catherine of Thouars," says Durtal.

"I have some recollection," says Des Hermies, "that she was an absolute bitch."

"There's a letter from her to the Duke of Brittany written just a few years after Joan perished at the stake. In the letter, she complains bitterly of Gilles's extravagance."

We sec an attractive woman (who looks somehow familiar to us). Dressed with consummate disregard for cost, she is speaking to a scribe who takes down her words. "My husband possesses a grand library with a painter to illuminate his books. He revels in rich materials and dreams of unknown gems, weird stones and uncanny metals. All this is very expensive."

As she speaks, we see the panoply she describes, and again, this evocation of the past sits like an overlay or transparency on the ruins of the château through which Durtal and Des Hermies are exploring.

The wife: "He has a guard of 200 men and all these people have personal attendants magnificently equipped. The luxury of his chapel is extravagant. He (continued on page 232)Warlock(continued from page 132) insists on clothing his vicars, treasurers, canons, deacons, scholastics and especially his choirboys. There are vermilion altar cloths, curtains of emerard silk and crimson and violet orphreys of cloth of gold.

"His funds are giving way. He borrows from unscrupulous people. An immense fortune is being squandered.

"Frightened by his mad course, the family of the marshal supplicates the king to intervene." So saying, her image fades.

•

A scene between Gilles de Rais and Jean V, the Duke of Brittany.

Jean V: "Spend less! Abjure alchemy. It is too expensive."

Gilles: "The star under which I was born is so potent that I must discover what no one in the world has found."

He has tried to say this mockingly, but the force of his absolute conviction leaves a vibration in the air.

Jean V: "You have too much lust for the extreme."

Gilles: "I fear neither angels nor demons. In the beyond, all things touch."

Durtal and Des Hermies are following the cracked walls of the ruins. The night is bright. One part of the castle is thrown back into shadow and the other stands forth, washed in silver and blue. Below is the Sèvre, along whose surface streaks of moonlight dart like the backs of fishes. The silence is overpowering. After nine o'clock, not a dog, not a soul.

Durtal (out of the silence): "Satan had to be a vivid figure in the Middle Ages--"

Des Hermies: "He's still about."

Durtal: "What do you mean?"

Des Hermies: "I expect Satanism has come down in an unbroken line from that age to this."

They return to their chamber at the inn, where an old woman, in black, wearing the cornet headdress her ancestors wore in the 16th Century, waits with a candle to bar the door as soon as they return.

Once in the room, Durtal bursts out, "You believe right now as we talk that ihe Devil is being evoked and the Black Mass celebrated?"

Des Hermies: "Yes."

Durtal (sardonically): "You have proofs, of course."

Des Hermies (shrugs): "Tomorrow evening, let's dine with Carhaix."

•

At Carhaix's, the table is set country style. Polished glasses, a covered dish of sweet butter, a cider pitcher, a somewhat battered lamp.

The diners are silent, their noses in their plates, their faces brightened by steam from the savory soup.

"I'm inclined toward Manichaeism," Des Hermies is saying. "An old and simple religion that helps explain our abominable mess. There they rule us: the God of Light and the Power of Darkness, two powers of omnipotence, two equals fighting for our souls. Carhaix, you look distressed by these theories."

"Manichaeism is impossible!" cries the bell ringer. "Two infinities cannot exist together."

"Is it more difficult to comprehend two infinities than one?" Des Hermies asks. But he is waiting till Madame Carhaix, who has got up to remove the plates, will go out of the room to fetch the beef. As soon as she is gone, he whispers, "I can tell you that the worst Manichaeans are no advertisement for their religion. They like to taste excrement."

"Horrible!" exclaims Carhaix.

"I am sure Monsieur Des Hermies has been saying something awful," murmurs Madame Carhaix as she comes back, bearing a platter on which is a piece of beef smothered in vegetables.

They burst out laughing. Carhaix cuts up the meat, while his wife pours the cider and Durtal uncorks a bottle of anchovies.

Carhaix's pale face is lighted up, his great canine eyes are becoming suspiciously moist. Visibly, he is jubilant. He is at table with friends, in his tower. "Empty your glasses. You are not drinking," he says, holding up the cider pot.

"Des Hermies, admit you said yesterday that Satanism has pursued an uninterrupted course since the Middle Ages," says Durtal.

"My thesis embarrasses me not at all. In the 15th Century, your own Gilles de Rais. By the 16th, Catherine de Médicis. In the 17th, the 'possessed' of Loudun. In the 18th, to give just one example, a certain Abbé Guibourg made a spectacle of his abominations. On a table serving as altar, a woman lies down, with her skirts lifted up over her head, arms outstretched. She holds the altar lights during the whole office.

"In this fashion, Guibourg celebrated Masses on the abdomen of Madame de Montespan, Madame d'Argenson and Madame de Saint-Point."

"My heavenly Savior!" sighs the bell ringer's wife. "What a lot of filth."

"That's a change," says Durtal. "In the Middle Ages, the Mass was celebrated on the naked buttocks of a woman."

"These frightful stories seem to have taken away your appetite," says Madame Carhaix. "Come, Monsieur Durtal, a little more salad?"

"No, thanks."

"My friends," says Carhaix, looking troubled, "I must sound the Angelus. Don't wait for me. Have your coffee."

He puts on a heavy coat, lights a lantern and opens the door. A stream of glacial air pours in. White flakes whirl in the blackness.

Once he is gone, his wife says, "Monsieur Des Hermies, here is the coffee. I appoint you to the task of serving it. At this hour of day, I must lie down."

"You were saying," says Durtal, when they have wished her good, night, "that the most important element in Satanism is the Black Mass."

"No, I wouldn't ignore witchcraft, in-cubacy, succubacy."

At this moment, the bell, set in motion in the tower, booms out. The chamber in which they are sitting trembles and waves of sound come out of the walls. Heard in the rooms of the tower, the reverberation is oppressive.

Now the booming of the bell comes more slowly. The humming departs from the air. The tumblers on the table cease to rattle and give off only a tenuous tinkling.

A step is heard on the stairs. Carhaix enters covered with snow.

"Christi, boys, it blows!" He shakes himself, throws his heavy outer garments onto a chair and extinguishes his lantern.

Carhaix goes up to the stove and pokes the fire, then dries his eyes, which the bitter cold has filled with tears, and drinks a great draught of coffee.

"How far did you get with your lecture, Des Hermies?"

"I'd like Durtal to see your friend Gévingey."

"Well, then I will arrange it."

"We'll give you a chance to get to bed."

Carhaix lights his lantern and in single file, shivering, they descend the glacial, pitch-dark, winding stairs.

•

Durtal is in his apartment, studying an alchcmistic document, The Chemical Coitus. The camera sees mysterious bottles and flasks. Each contains a liquid with a small creature in it. A green lion the size of a frog hangs head downward. Doves no larger than beetles are trying to fly up to the neck of another bottle. The liquid in one jar is black and undulates with waves of carmine and gold. Another is white and granulated with dots of ink. Sometimes these dots take the shape of a bat or a star. Some-times flames rise from a liquid. As we look, we hear Durtal's voice musing over his documents and his fantasies.

Durtal: "With the aid of the philosophers' stone, provided one could find it, mercury would be transmuted to silver and lead to gold. Where did they not look? In arsenic, saltpeter and niter; in the juices of spurge, poppy and purslane: in the bellies of starved mice and in human urine; in the menstrual fluid of women and in their milk. How Gilles de Rais must have been baffled!"

The second and more oppressive sound of the bells is heard again.

•

We see a small medieval procession, perhaps eight or ten priests, soldiers and servants, approaching the castle of Tif-fauges. We see Gilles de Rais crossing a drawbridge over the moat to greet them.

A young priest, exceptionally polished in appearance, approaches. He has features that speak of a formidable intelligence. The two men embrace.

"I salute Marshal Gilles de Rais, the most splendid mind of France," says the young priest.

"Francesco Prelati is the master of Florentine magic. There is no one I have dreamed of meeting more."

They smile. They walk off together. Their bodies move in immediate sympathy to each other.

•

We see Gilles de Rais and Francesco Prelati in the great laboratory that occupies one wing of die castle. It is filled with an alchemist's furnace and crucibles and retorts.

Gilles: "I conducted experiments for a year. Nothing but failure. My frustrations were considerable.". We have a glimpse, as he is speaking, of flames in many colors and burning powders; we hear the cries of animals being slaughtered sacrificially. "Nothing came near to finding the philosophers' stone."

Prelati: "The secret of alchemy is that no secret can be uncovered without the intervention of Satan."

Gilles does not look happy. "I have come to the same conclusion," he says, "but the thought is not happy. To combine my force with such a force. That is too powerful. Terrible things "have happened already."

•

We see a sorcerer trace a great circle on the floor of a large empty room. Now he asks De Rais and another nobleman to step inside the circle. The nobleman begins to tremble. Gilles, bolder, stands in the middle of the circle. At the first conjurations, however, he begins to pray to Our Lady. The sorcerer, furious, orders both men out of the room. Gilles and his friend rush through the door and wait below in the courtyard. Howls are suddenly heard from the chamber where the magician is operating alone. There is the sound of blows.

When the groans cease, they open the door and find the sorcerer lying in blood, his body mangled.

Prelati: "Did he live?"

Gilles: "Just about." (With a wry smile) "He doesn't practice sorcery anymore."

Prelati: "Your motive was improper. From the Devil's point of view, you asked for the use of his power yet gave back nothing in return."

Gilles: "What could I offer?"

Prelati: "A crime."

Gilles: "I am ready for any crime." (We have a glimpse of Gilles and Joan swinging in the tower. The sound of bells is intense.)

Gilles expels his breath. "No." he says, "not yet. Let us, for now, relight the furnaces."

•

We are treated to a montage of flames and invocations. Lead is being poured and we see a cross being waved upside down.

Prelati and Gilles are making adjurations. There is no result.

Prelati: "I must try it alone."

Gilles: "No, it is better if we fail together."

Prelati: "We have failed already. Nothing is worse than to stop at this place. That molten lead is now ready to become a pestilence in our organs. We will die of bloated bellies."

Gilles nods and steps back. At a sign from Prelati, he leaves the room.

Now he waits. Suddenly, he hears Prelati screaming. The priest emerges bleeding, staggers into his arms. We see the marshal take Prelati to his room and hold his hand by the side of his bed. The bells sound in the tower. The oppressive second sound of the bells.

"Yes," says Gilles de Rais, "the time has come to open my mind to the horrors of my imagination."

•

The concierge is dusting Durtal's living room. "This came for you," he says, handing over a letter.

"I am a woman of lassitude"--we are treated to a woman's voice as Durtal reads the letter--"who has just finished reading your last book. Though it is always folly to try to capture a desire, will you permit me to meet you some evening in a place which you shall designate? Afterward, we shall return, each of us, into our own lives. Understand, monsieur, I address you only because I consider you a marvelous writer in an era of scribblers. Therefore, this evening, a maid will call on your concierge and ask him if there is a letter for Madame Maubel."

"Hminm!" says Durtal, folding up the letter. "She must be 45 years old at least."

In spite of himself, he reopens the letter.

"Still, I commit myself to nothing by going to meet her."

He dashes off a note, looks up. "I better add that I'm in poor health. It'll be an excuse if she seems too energetic." He writes. "Dear Madame Maubel, a serious liaison is impossible."

To the room, he says: "Who knows? Maybe she is good-looking."

•

Durtal is before his desk. Now a number of letters are on it. He shakes his head as he passes through them. " 'Never accuse yourself,' " he reads aloud. " 'of being unable to give me consolation. Let us rather permit our souls to speak to each other--low, very low--as I have spoken to you this night.' "

"Four pages of the same sad tune," Durtal says to his cat.

"There is no misspelling," he says, studying her script, "and the handwriting is nice." He sniffs the envelope. "Discreet scent of heliotrope, pale-green ink. She must be a blonde. Yet I keep seeing her as a brunette." We are offered a Hash of his sexual inventories. A blonde and a brunette in Parisian costumes, half undressed, no, three quarters undressed--breasts visible and thighs, corsets, garters, stockings--cavort on either side of him. They are attractive but not wholly materialized. Now they give way to two ugly women, one small and thin, the other huge and fat, both in similar undress. They are hardly in costume to write a letter, but they are all writing letters.

"Last night," says a woman's voice, "your name was burning me. Unbearable shivers came to my flesh as I spoke of you to a common friend of yours and mine. But then, why should I not now tell you that you know me?"

Durtal is seeing women in partial states of nudity. "I wrote," he declares lo the empty room, as if the sound of his voice will fortify his sense of irony, "I wrote a burning reply. I, who gave up all carnal relations years ago. I, tranquil little man, dried up, safe from adventures, forgetful of sex for months at a time--why do I find myself aroused by the mystery of these letters?"

Another unseen woman's voice:

"Now you speak of your desire with a crudity of phrase which makes my body tingle. This morning, my husband wished to make love. I began to laugh crazily.'What would you think,' I asked him, 'of my dream? A woman without a head came to me and said, "I am your chamber succubus." ' 'My dear, you are ill,' he said. 'Worse than you think,' said I. Yes, your letter has unbalanced me." She laughs wildly.

Durtal: "No laughing matter. This woman is married to a man who knows me. But whom? Des Hermies is the only man I would call a friend." Durtal puts down her letter. Now he is seeing more blondes than brunettes, and they are reduced to their stockings. "It is too bad," says Durtal, "that we have both become inflamed at die same time. It's these ecclesiastical and demonic studies." He sighs. "I must see her. If she's good-looking, I'll sleep with her. That will bring peace." The pen shakes in his fingers as he tries to write. "Think of the harm we do ourselves teasing at a distance. Think of the remedy, my poor darling, that we have at hand."

•

Durtal is trying to sleep. It is impossible. His head is ringing with angelic and demonic bells. He hears the cries of Francesco Prelati and in the dark, Durtal's cat metamorphoses into a devil and makes low, spitting, urgent sounds. He sees a blonde removing the costume of Paris in die Nineties and putting on the dress of the early 15th Century. He can almost see her face, but the image withdraws and he sits up. By the clock, it is not yet midnight.

"Des Hermies must still be awake. He is always complaining of insomnia."

•

Des Hermies: "It's certainly the week for friends and acquaintances to be ill. I've been attending to Chantelouve, who has had an attack of gout. His wife, by the way, whom I would not have taken for an admirer of your books, speaks unceasingly of you. For a reserved woman, she certainly can't hold back on this enthusiasm."

"I think I'd better be going."

"You just got here. Are you certain you're feeling well?"

"Perfect."

•

We see Durtal walking along the streets of Paris at night. He is accompanied on either side by Madame Chantelouve fully dressed. To his right, she is a society woman, reserved and adept, a hostess smiling without animation.

On his other arm, he has Madame Chantelouve as a creature. Her eyes are wild, romantic and, by his lights, nym-phomaniacal.

"It can't be Madame Chantelouve," he says aloud to the empty streets. "Her husband has written a history of Pope Boniface VIII, a life of die blessed founder of the Annunciate, Jeanne de Valois, and a biography of Venerable Mother Anne de Xaintonge."

Church bells ring out suddenly, discordantly, and he comes close to racing down the dark, cold Paris street.

•

Next afternoon, Durtal is trying to write but puts down his pen. He again has the fantasy of the blonde woman who is changing her costume from Paris in the 1890s to the Brittany of the 14S0s. We see Madame Chantelouve in tentered stuffs with light sleeves, a great collar thrown back over the shoulders, a long train lined with fur. She thrusts her head under a two-horned steeple headdress. From behind the lace, she smiles. We realize that the face of Madame Chantelouve is equal to the face of Catherine of Thouars, the wife of Gilles de Rais.

Once again, Durtal picks up his pen, but the doorbell rings. He gets up, opens the door and falls a step backward.

Madame Chantelouve is before him.

Stupefied, he bows. Madame Chantelouve, without a word, goes straight into the study. Durtal follows.

"Won't you please sit down?" He advances an armchair. She makes a vague gesture and remains standing. She is wearing a tight black dress, long fawn-colored suede gloves, a fur cloak and no jewelry except sparkling blue-sapphire eardrops.

In a calm but low voice she says, "It is I who wrote you those mad letters. Since I have come to agree that nothing is possible between us, let us also agree to forget what has happened."

"I love you," he blurts out to his astonishment.

"Love me! You didn't even know who the letters were from."

"I knew very well it was Madame Chantelouve hiding behind the pseudonym of Madame Maubel."

She sits down and bursts out laughing.

Furious at seeing this woman behave differently from her letters, he asks irritably, "Am I to know why you laugh?"

"It's a trick my nerves play. Never mind. Let us talk things over. Chantelouve is a very nice man who loves me. His only crime is that he offers a somewhat insipid happiness. So I started this correspondence with you. But you have beautiful books to write. You don't need a crazy woman. I came to tell you we must remain friends and go no further."

"You wrote those letters. Now you speak of reason."

He takes her hands. She makes no resistance.

He presses her hands more tightly. She regards him with her smoky eyes, her subtly voluptuous lace. With a firm gesture, she frees her hands.

"Which saint is that?" she asks, getting up to examine a picture on the wall of a monk on his knees.

"I do not know."

"I will find out for you. I have the lives of all the saints at home."

"I don't care who he is!"

She comes closer.

"Are you angry at me?"

"I've been dreaming about this meeting. Now you tell me it is all over."

She is demure. "If I did not care about you, would I come to explain? No! Let me go." Her voice becomes a hint harder. "Do not squeeze me like that! I swear I will go away and you will never see me again if you do not let me loose." He lets go. "Sit there behind the table," she says. "Do that for me." She adds, in a lone of melancholy, "It is impossible to be friends with a man. It would be nice to come and see you without evil thoughts to fear." She is silent. "Yes, just to see each other."

Then she says. "I must go home."

"You leave me with no hope." he exclaims, kissing her gloved hands.

She does not answer. As he looks pleadingly at her, she says, "Listen. If you will promise to make no demands on me and be good. I will come here night after next at nine o'clock."

He promises. As he raises his head from her hands, she offers her neck to his lips. Then she is gone.

•

The Carhaix apartment:

We see Gévingey climbing the stairs. He is a little man. Has a head like an egg. The skull seems to have grown up out of the hair. His nose is bony and his nostrils open over a toothless mouth hidden by a mustache and goatee. Solemn voice and obsequious manners. Looks like he belongs in a sacristy.

Gévingey, as soon as he has seated himself, puts his hands on his knees. Enormous, freckled with blotches of orange, the fingers are covered with huge rings.

Seeing Durtal's gaze on his fingers, he smiles. "My valuables, monsieur, are of three metals, gold, platinum and silver. This ring bears a scorpion: that with its two triangles reproduces the image of the macrocosm. A story for each of my rings."

"Ah!" says Durtal. somewhat surprised at the man's self-satisfaction.

"Dinner is ready." says the bell ringer's wife.

Gévingey (at table): "Mysticism, astrology and alchemy were the great sciences of the Middle Ages."

Des Hermies: "It is too bad that the astrologers, occultists and cabalists of the present day know absolutely nothing."

Gévingey (nodding wisely): "Ignorant imbeciles. Nonetheless, the old theories can be upheld. Space is peopled by microbes. Why can't it also be crammed with spirits?" He puts his hands on his plump stomach.

Madame Carhaix: "Maybe that is why cats suddenly look at something we can't see."

Carhaix: "I'll be back." Gets up to ring the bells.

The bell ringer's wife bids them good night. Des Hermies gets the kettle and the coffeepot.

"Any help?" Durtal proposes.

"Get the little glasses and uncork the liqueur bottles, if you will."

As he opens the cupboard, Durtal sways from the strokes of the bells that shake the walls.

Carhaix returns, blowing out his lantern.

"I hear, monsieur, that you are occupied with a history of Gilles de Rais," says Gévingey to Durtal.

"Up to my eyes in Satanism with that man."

Des Hermies: "We are going to appeal to your knowledge. You can enlighten my friend on one of the obscure questions."

"Which?"

"Incubacy and succubacy."

Gévingey replies. "The Church, you know, does not like this subject."

"I beg your pardon," says Carhaix. "The Church has never hesitated to declare itself on this detestable matter. The existence of succubi and incubi is certified by Saint Augustine. Saint Thomas, Saint Bonaventure, and many others! The question is settled for every Catholic."

"Yes," says Gévingey, "the Church recognizes succubacy. But let me speak."

"I want to ask you." says Des Hermies, "does a woman receive the visit of the incubus while she is asleep or while she is awake?"

"A distinction has to be made. If the woman consorts willingly with the impure spirit, then she is certainly awake when the carnal act takes place. Of course, here the details are a little dirty," says Gévingey. He blushes. "The organ of the incubus, you see, has two branches." He extends his pinkie and forefinger like horns. "So the incubus is able to penetrate both vasa of the lady."

"Whereas, the succubus is a woman," says Des Hermies. "and so has no branches. But does she have four vasa?"

Gévingey says in rebuke, "The subject is grave. Messieurs. I slept once in the room of the only modern master Satanism can claim."

"Canon Docre," says Des Hermies.

"Yes. And I can tell you--my sleep was fitful. It was broad daylight. Yet I swear to you the succubus came to me."

"What was she like?" Durtal asks.

"Why, like any naked woman," the astrologer says hesitantly.

"I hear Canon Docre celebrates a Black Mass," Des Hermies remarks.

"With abominable men and women. Some people cross themselves when Docre's name is said in their presence."

"But how did a priest fall so low?" asks Durtal.

"I can't say. If you wish more information about him," says Gévingey, "you might question your friend Chantelouve."

"Chantelouve!" cries Durtal.

"Yes, he and his wife used to be friendly with Canon Docre. I hope for their sakes they have no further dealings with that monster."

•

Durtal's apartment. He is cleaning in preparation for Madame Chantelouve's second visit.

He consults his watch. "I am waiting for a woman," he says aloud. "I, who for years scorned the doings of lovers. Now I look at my watch every five minutes."

There is a gentle ring. "Not nine o'clock yet. It isn't she," he murmurs, opening the door.

He squeezes her hands and thanks her for being so punctual.

She says she is not feeling well. "I came only because I didn't want to keep you waiting in vain."

His heart sinks.

"I have a fearful headache," she says, passing her gloved hands over her forehead.

He takes her furs and motions her to the armchair. He sits down on the stool, but she refuses the armchair and takes a seat beside the table. Rising, he bends over her and catches hold of her fingers.

"Your hand is burning," she says.

"Yes, because I get so little sleep. If you knew how much I have thought about you!"

He sits down in front of her. His knee touches hers.

"Listen!" Her voice becomes grave and firm. "I do not wish to spoil the happiness our relation gives me. I do not know if I can explain, but try to comprehend: I am able to possess you in my mind when and how I please"--she snaps her fingers--"just as, for a long time, I have possessed Lord Byron, Baudelaire, Gérald de Nerval, all those writers I love--"

"You mean...?"

"I have only to desire them, or desire you, before I go to sleep...."

"And?"

"Dear man, you in your own flesh would have to be inferior to the fabulous writer Durtal who comes to me in my bed. That imaginary man offers caresses that make my night delirious!"

He looks at her and pictures Gevingey lying nude on a bed and Madame Chantelouve approaching GéVingey as a succubus. "We shall untangle all this later," Durtal says. "Meanwhile--" He takes her gently by the arms, draws her to him and abruptly kisses her mouth.

She rebounds as if she has had an electric shock. With a strange cry, she throws back her head.

He pushes her away. She stands there, pale, her eyes closed. Durtal comes up to her and catches her again, but she cries out, "No! I beseech you, let me go."

He holds her.

"I implore you, let me go."

Her accent is so despairing that he obeys.

She is breathing heavily. She leans, very pale, against the bookcase.

"Good God." he says, marching up and down, knocking into the furniture, "what are you made of?"

"Monsieur, I, too, suffer. Spare me. I have to think of my husband and my confessor." She is silent long enough to regain composure. Then, in a changed voice, she says, "Tell me, will you come to my house tomorrow night? Tell me you will come."

"Yes," he says at last. "I don't know why, but yes."

She readjusts herself and, without saying a word, quits the room.

•

During a storm, we see Gilles de Rais on one of the battlements of Tiffauges. The parapet is narrow, not six inches in width. A fall would be fatal. Gilles is forcing himself to advance. As he does, he calls to a voice he hears on the wind. "I will walk around the walls of Tiffauges," he cries out. "If I fall, I am yours." Then he turns to Prelati, who is standing below in the courtyard. "There is no answer," says Gilles de Rais. He moves and almost slips. The rain is icy.

The parapet is slippery.

"Come down."

"He says...I hear him."

"Come down."

"He says he has no interest in my fall." Gilles de Rais comes off the parapet. In the rain, he says to Prelati, "The Demon does not want my death. He wishes me to perform the deed."

"Do what he wants."

They have descended to the stone chamber where the marshal sleeps.

Gilles de Rais: "Prelati, I do not fear this Demon, because hell is where I live now. My blood is oppressed. I could meet a wild boar in a forest and it would flee my teeth. Wolves draw back when I go by. I cannot speak of the thoughts I have when young boys pass before my eyes."

"We have had our pleasure with young boys." says Prelati.

"The Demon tells me not to stop at their skins." He lifts his head. "Smell the wind. It stinks worse than any battlefield." He makes a violent move. "Tomorrow, I will disembowel a small boy."

"Who?"

"I have not seen him yet. You, Prelati, will find him for me. I am going to separate his hands from his arms and his eyes from his head."

Prelati crosses himself. Gilles de Rais picks up Prelati's cross and makes the same sign upside down.

"We will use the blood of this child," says Gilles de Rais, "to compose the ink of our formulas. Spirits will flower in that blood."

•

A scene in the same room where Prelati was attacked by the Devil. We see him enter with a few small objects on a tray. They are wrapped in bloody linen. He and Gilles de Rais kneel. With passion, they offer these sacrifices to the Demon. Their words are so thick we can hardly hear them. They both speak at once.

"To Asmodeus and Sammael...."

"By the law of pointed stakes...."

"By fire and grease...."

"In the way of the great work...."

"Through salts and retort...."

"In the grand magisterium of the ferment."

"By Xoxe. Xocheon and Xolostosos."

"In blood, in gold."

"Faeces urinam nascimur."

"By the snake of your intestine."

When they are done, we see Prelati gather up the bloodstained objects.

"Recognize," Prelati says to Gilles de Rais, "that the Devil did not attack me."

•

Chantelouve's apartment. Durtal is waiting in the same room where we first saw him at the party.

Monsieur and Madame Chantelouve enter. The lines of her figure are advantageously displayed by a wrapper of white swanskin. She sits down facing Durtal, and he perceives under the wrap her indigo silk stockings in little patent-leather boots with straps across the insteps. They are like the picture he has had of her in fantasy.

Chantelouve is in a dressing gown. "You catch me in the middle of my literary drudgeries," he tells Durtal. "I've taken on the worst kind of job. A quick series of unsigned volumes--unsigned, thank God!--on the lives of the saints."

"Yes," says his wife, laughing, "sadly neglected saints."

Chantelouve, also laughing, says, "My publisher has a nose for the unkempt martyrs: Saint Opportuna who never used water because she washed her bed with her tears; Saint Radegunde who never changed her hair shirt. I am asked to draw a golden halo around their heads."

Madame Chantelouve laughs gaily. "This disregard of cleanliness makes me suspicious of your beloved Middle Ages."

"Pardon me, my dear," says her husband, "it is not until the Renaissance that uncleanliness becomes common in France, and our good Henri Quatre will boast of his 'reeking feet and a fine armpit.' "

"For heaven's sake," says madame, "spare us one or two details. My dear," she says, addressing her husband, "you have forgotten to turn up your lamp-wick. I can smell it smoking from here."

Chantelouve rises, gathers up the skirts of his dressing gown and, with a vaguely malicious smile, excuses himself.

She assures herself the door is closed, then returns to Durtal, who is leaning against the mantel. Without a word, she takes his head between her hands, presses her lips to his mouth and opens it with her tongue.

He grunts with sudden appetite and agitation.

She passes her hands over her forehead. "You won't believe it. but I have to suffer when I think how hard he is working. If he had a few women, it would not be so bad."

Durtal rises to take leave.

"When shall I see you?" she murmurs.

"My apartment tomorrow night?"

She responds by a long kiss.

•

Durtal's apartment.

Madame Chantelouve is buried under the thick coverlet, her lips parted and her eyes closed, but she is studying Durtal through the fringe of her blonde eyelashes. He sits down on the edge of the bed. She draws the cover over her chin.

"Cold, dear?"

"No." She opens wide her eyes. They flash sparks.

He undresses. Her face is hidden in the darkness but is sometimes revealed by a Hare of the fire, as a smoldering log suddenly bursts into flame. Swiftly, he slips between the covers. Silently, she kisses his features. They thrash about. He cannot speak for the shower of kisses traveling over his face. It is too much. He pulls away.

"I detest you!" she exclaims.

"Why?"

"I detest you!"

"I can't stand you."

The fire is burning low. He sits up and looks into the darkness. His nightshirt is torn.

Once more, he is enlaced: the woman grips him again. This time, he responds. He tries to crush her with caresses. In a guttural voice, she cries out, "I love it, I love it, oh, piss, shit, I want to eat you." The bodies writhe under the covers, the bed creaks and he finally jumps over her, out of bed, and lights the candles. On the dresser, the cat sits motionless. He chases the animal away.

He puts some more wood on the fire and dresses. She calls him gently. He approaches the bed. She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him hungrily. Then she says. "The deed is done. Will you love me any better?"

He does not have the heart to answer.

•

"A woman of my age doing a mad thing like that!" she says as she emerges from the bedroom fully dressed. "You will sleep tonight," she adds sadly.

He begs her to sit down and warm herself, but she says she is not cold.

"Why," he says, "your body was cold as ice!"

"I am always that way. Winter and summer, my flesh is chilly. Even in August."

•

Durtal and Des Hermies are strolling by the Seine. Notre Dame is in the background.

"Tell me." Durtal asks Des Hermies, "do you know whether a woman can get a cold body as a result of making love to an incubus?"

"Gévingey told me that women who were attached to an incubus had icy flesh even in the month of August. All the books of the specialists bear witness to that. But now, such ladies show the opposite: a skin that is burning and dry to the touch."

"Odd," says Durtal.

•

Durtal and Madame Chantelouve are in bed. He is looking somewhat relieved the act is done. She puts her arm around his neck and kisses him forcibly--her tongue is not inactive. He remains apathetic. She slips under the sheets, works around, readies him and he groans.

"Ah," she exclaims, coming up from the covers, "at last I have heard you make a sound."

A little later. They are getting dressed.

"Does your husband suspect us?" he asks.

"He may, but I do not accept his right of control over me. He is free, and I am free, to go where we please. I keep house for him and watch out for his interests. I love him like a devoted companion. My acts, however, are none of his business."

She has spoken in a crisp, incisive tone.

"You certainly reduce the importance of the role of husband."

"My ideas do not belong to this period we live in. In my first marriage, they created a disaster. You see, I despise deceit. After I was married a few years, I fell in love with a most unusual man. And I proceeded to tell my first husband about that lover."

"How did he take such information?"

"He could not bear it. He called it treason. In one night, his hair turned white. A week later, he killed himself." She has spoken with a nondramatic and resolute air.

"Ah!" says Durtal. "Suppose he had strangled you first?"

She shrugs and picks a cat hair off her skirt.

"The result," he resumes after a silence, "being that you then looked for a new husband who would tolerate--"

"Let us not discuss my second husband. I receive enough trouble on this subject from my confessor."

"Is your confessor hard on you?"

"He is of the old school. Incorruptible. I chose him for that."

"If I were like you, I think I would look for a confessor who was indulgent." Something in her expression excites his intuition. "Of course, there's always the danger of seducing a priest who likes you too much."

"That would be sacrilege," she says quickly. But it is obvious he has guessed something of her past. "Oh," she says, half-pleased with the confession, "I was mad, mad--"

He observes her; sparks glint again in her eyes.

"When you are at home in bed, do you still summon me to make love to you?"

"I do not understand," she says.

"Didn't you used to have a visit from an incubus who resembled me?"

"No need now!"

"But you still receive Canon Docre? As an incubus?" His voice is not without anger. He is jealous at the thought.

"What are you saying?"

"You know him."

"Yes, I do."

"How much truth is there to stories about him?"

"I don't know. Docre was once a confessor to royalty. He would certainly have become a bishop if he had not quit the priesthood."

"You knew him personally?"

"I had him for a confessor."

"Is he young or old, handsome or ugly? Tell me."

"He is forty years old. He is very fastidious of his person."

"Do you believe he celebrates the Black Mass?"

"Possibly."

"Suppose I were to ask if your knowledge of incubacy...?"

"I received it from him. Now I hope you are satisfied."

"I don't know. I think I'm in pain. But I must say I'm curious. Do you know how I can see Canon Docre in person?"

"He's not in Paris."

"Pardon me. He is in Paris."

"It would not be good for you to see him."

"You admit he is dangerous?"

"I admit nothing. I deny nothing. I tell you simply: Have nothing to do with him."

"I need new material to stimulate my book."

"Get it from somebody else." Shaking her finger at him, she leaves with the remark, "Don't think too much about Canon Docre."

"Devil take you," he says after he closes the door.

•

Durtal is writing at his desk.

"From 1432 to 1440, the children of Brittany begin to disappear. Shepherds are abducted from the fields. Little boys who go to play in the woods fail to return. Whenever the marshal quits one castle for another, he leaves behind a devastation of tears. From Tiffauges to the château de Champtoce, and from La Suze to Nantes, children are missing. Entire regions are devastated. The hamlet of Tiffauges has no more young men. La Suze is without male posterity. At Champtoce, the whole foundation room of a tower is filled with corpses."

Durtal throws down his pen. "I write, but I do not know of what I am writing."

•

We see Gilles speaking. Just his head.

"I took pleasure in butchery. Once I slashed a boy's chest and drank the breath from his lungs. I would open another's stomach and smell it. I took carnal knowledge of the open guts of a third. I knew odors and felt sensations no other man has come near. I was rich in vitality. I lived in a country of my own habitation."

As he speaks, the camera passes over a great fire on a hearth where indistinct objects, the size of bodies, are burning. Scraps of charred clothing are visible.

We have a clear view of one of Gilles's henchmen scattering ashes to the wind from the top of a tower at Tiffauges on a dark dawn.

We see Gilles snoring in coma. Then we hear his voice, as if out of his sleep, "There is no man on earth who dare do as I have done."

The bell sounds in the tower.

"Who is ringing at this hour?" Gilles cries out.

No answer.

We see him rushing along the solitary corridors of the château. He is in the tower, looking at the bell. The last echoes of its reverberation sound in his ear. He has a partial image of Joan and himself swinging on the bell and howls like a wounded beast. "I swear to do penance," he cries out.

We see his face again, only his face.

"I had hoped to do penance." he declares. "Yet, on the next night, I gouged out the eyes of a child. I crushed its skull with a club."

He grinds his teeth. He laughs.

He is running through the woods.

His henchmen are cleaning stains on the floor of the castle and burying the garments.

More ashes are scattered from the tower.

We see Gilles wandering in the forest surrounding Tiffauges. He sees obscenity in the shape of the trees. Between two limbs, a branch is jammed in a stationary fornication. He sees the act repeated all the way up to the top of the tree. He sees the trunk as a phallus that disappears into a skirt of leaves.

More frightful images rise. The puckered orifice in the bark of an old oak simulates the protruding anus of a beast. In the trunks are incisions that spread out into great lips of vulvas beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.

The clouds overhead swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge with fecundity. Now they mingle with the somber foliage. Gilles sees images of giant hips, mouths of Sodom, glowing scars, humid wounds. He sees frightful cancers on the trunks and horrible wens. He observes ulcers, sores, chancres.

There, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech. Tensely, Gilles listens to the wind. Under the falling leaves, he feels spattered by a shower of blood. He runs until he reaches the château. He returns to his room exhausted and crawls to the crucifix like a wolf on all fours. He strains his lips to the feet of the Christ. It is the Grünewald Christ.

He adjures him to have pity, supplicates him to spare a sinner. Then he whimpers. In his own voice, he is hearing the lamentations of children.

•

A bell is ringing. We hear the voice of the bell at last. It says, "I call to the living. I mourn the dead. I break the thunder."

•

Durtal and Madame Chantelouve are walking on a Paris street.

"You're wrong," she says. "I am being consistent. I really don't want you to become acquainted with Canon Docre. But I understand your desire for new material. So I have arranged to let you see a ceremony."

"A Black Mass?"

"Yes. I'm disobeying my confessor in order to take you." She shivers visibly. "You will have no complaint if the spectacle terrifies you."

"Tell me," he asks, "are you still in love with Canon Docre?" A pause. "Admit you are in love with him."

"Not now. But once we were mad about each other. It was because of him that my first husband committed suicide."

"It is really over?"

"I swear it."

•

Durtal's apartment. Madame Chantelouve enters.

Madame Chantelouve: "It's on for tonight. I'll be back at nine. First you must sign this letter." She reads it aloud:

"I certify that all I write about the Black Mass is pure invention. I have imagined these incidents."

"Your canon distrusts me."

"Of course. You write books."

"What if I refuse to sign?"

"Then you will not go to the Black Mass."

He scratches his signature on the letter.

•

In a fiacre, they go up the Rue de Vaugirard.

The carriage turns up a dark street, swings around and stops.

Durtal and Madame Chantelouve find themselves confronted by a little door cut into a thick unlighted wall.

She rings. A grating opens. She raises her veil. A shaft of lantern light strikes her full in the face, the door opens and they penetrate into a garden.

A woman with a lantern scrutinizes Durtal. He sees, beneath a hood, wisps of gray hair over a wrinkled face, but she does not give him time to examine her.

He follows Madame Chantelouve down a dark lane between rows of palms to the entrance of a building.

"Be careful," she says, going through a vestibule. "There are three steps."

They come out into a court and stop before an old house. She rings. A man greets her in an affected voice. Durtal has a glimpse of cheeks plastered with cosmetics.

"You didn't tell me I was going to be in such company," he whispers to Madame Chantelouve.

"Did you expect to meet saints here?"

They go into a chapel with a low ceiling. The windows are hidden' by large drapes. The walls are cracked and dingy. Gusts of moldy air pour out of the heat registers to mingle with an irritating odor of alkali, burnt herbs and the acridity of a new stove. Durtal is choking.

He attempts to accustom his eyes to the half-darkness. The chapel is vaguely lighted by sanctuary lamps suspended from chandeliers of gilded bronze with pink glass pendants. Madame Chantelouve makes a sign to sit down. Durtal notices there are many women and few men present, but his efforts to see anyone's features are somewhat frustrated by the dim light. Not a laugh, not a raised voice is heard, only an irresolute, furtive whispering, unaccompanied by gesture.

A choirboy, dressed in red, advances to the end of the chapel and lights a stand of candles. Then the altar becomes visible. It is an ordinary church altar on a tabernacle. Above it stands a statue in parody of Christ. The head has been raised and the neck lengthened. Wrinkles, painted in the cheeks, transform the grieving face to a comic and bestial one twisted into a mean laugh. The figure is naked. Where the loincloth should have been, a virile phallus projects from a bush of horsehair. In front of the tabernacle, the chalice is covered with a pall. The choirboy, reaching up to light the black tapers, wiggles his hips, stands tip-toe on one foot and flips his arms, as if to fly away like a cherub.

Durtal recognizes him as the man in rouge and lipstick who guarded the chapel entrance.

Another choirboy now exhibits himself. Hollow-chested, racked by coughs, made up with white grease paint and vivid carmine, he approaches the tripods flanking the altar, stirs the smoldering incense pots and throws in leaves and chunks of resin.

Now Madame Chantelouve conducts Durtal to a seat far in the rear, behind all the rows of chairs.

"What's the matter with you?" she asks, looking at him closely.

"The odor from the incense burners is unbearable. What are they burning?"

"Asphalt and henbane, nightshade and myrrh. Perfumes delightful to Satan." She is speaking in the same guttural voice she uses in bed. "Here he comes!" she murmurs suddenly. The women in front of them kneel.

Preceded by the two choirboys, the canon enters wearing a scarlet bonnet with two horns of red cloth. Durtal examines him as he marches toward the altar. Canon Docre is tall but not well built. His large chest is out of proportion to the rest of his body. His forehead makes one line with his straight nose. His lips and cheeks bristle with beard. The eyes are close together and phosphorescent. An evil lace, and energetic.

The canon kneels before the altar. Then he mounts the steps and begins to say Mass. Durtal now sees that he has nothing on beneath his sacrificial habit. One can see his black socks and the flesh of his thighs bulging over his garters, which have been attached high on his legs. His chasuble has the shape of an ordinary chasuble but is the dark-red color of dried blood. In the middle is a triangle surrounding the figure of a black billy goat showing its horns.

Docre makes the genuflections specified by ritual. The kneeling choirboys sing the Latin responses; their voices trill on the final syllables of the words.

"It's a simple Low Mass." says Durtal to Madame Chantelouve.

She shakes her head. At that moment, the choirboys pass behind the altar and bring back copper chafing dishes and censers, which they distribute to the congregation. The women envelop themselves in smoke. Some hold their heads right over the chafing dishes and then, close to fainting, they unlace their bodices and make raucous sighs. As Canon Docre proceeds through the following invocation, so do they open their clothing and expose themselves.

"Master of Slanders," says Docre, descending the steps backward and kneeling on the last one, "Dispenser of the benefits of crime, Administrator of sumptuous sins and great vices, we bow to thee. Satan, thee we adore, for you are our reasonable God, our just Cod!

"You save the honor of families by aborting wombs impregnated in the forgetfulness of illicit fornication; you are the mainstay of the Poor and the Vanquished, for you endow them with hypocrisy, that they may defend themselves against the Rich, who are the only children to whom God speaks.

"Treasurer of old Humiliations, you alone fertilize the mind of a man whom injustice has crushed; you breathe the idea of vengeance, incite him to murder; you furnish the abundant joy of reprisal."

As he speaks, the choirboys tinkle prayer bells. The women fall to the carpet and writhe.

One of them seems to be worked by a spring. She throws herself prone and waves her legs in the air. Another stands with her mouth open, the tongue turned back, the tip cleaving to the palate. Another, pupils dilated, lolls her head back over her shoulders, then tears her breast with her nails. Another undoes her skirts and draws forth a rag. Her tongue, which she cannot control, sticks out, bitten at the edges, harrowed by red teeth, from a bloody mouth. As these acts continue, so does Docre's voice. Standing erect, with arms outstretched, he speaks in a ringing voice of hate:

"Jesus, Chief of Hoaxes, Thief of Homage, Counterfeit of Affection, hear! Since the day when thou did issue from the bowels of a Virgin, thou hast broken all thy promises. Centuries have wept, awaiting thee, mute God! Thou were to redeem man and thou hast not, thou were to appear in thy glory but slept. Thou dost say to the wretch who appeals to thee. 'Be patient and hope; the angels will assist thee.' Impostor! The angels abandon thee!

"Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach. Thou hast seen the weak crushed beneath the press of profit; thou hast heard the death whine of the weak paralyzed by famine and thou hast caused thy commercial agents, thy Popes, to answer by excuses and promises.

"We wish to violate the quiet of thy body, cursed Nazarene, do-nothing King, coward God!"

"Amen!" trill the soprano voices of the choirboys.

A silence succeeds the litany. The chapel is foggy with smoke.

Contemplating the Christ surmounting the tabernacle. Canon Docre says loudly, "Piss, Shit, Fuck and Blood. Hoc est enim corpus meum." He faces the congregation, haggard, dripping with sweat. The two choirboys raise the chasuble to display his naked belly. Docre passes the host around his groin and then sails it, tainted and soiled, into the congregation.

Hysteria shakes the room. While the choirboys sprinkle holy water on the naked pontiff, women rush upon the Eucharist. They crawl in front of the altar, clawing the bread.

A crone tears her hair, whirls around and around, and falls beside a young girl who is writhing in convulsions. Durtal sees the red horns of Docre. The canon is seated now. He is in a spasm of activity as he chews up sacramental wafers, takes them out of his mouth, wipes himself and distributes them to the women. They struggle over each other to get hold of the bread.

The place is a pandemonium. One could be looking at a congress of prostitutes and maniacs. Now the choirboys offer their buttocks to two of the men present. A woman climbs up onto the altar to take hold of the phallus of Christ. A young girl bends over and barks like a dog. Durtal looks for Madame Chantelouve. She is no longer at his side. He catches sight of her close to the canon and, stepping over writhing bodies, reaches her. She is in a trance. She is breathing the effluvia of the incense, the couples and the acts.

"Let's get out of this!"

She hesitates a moment, then follows him. He elbows his way through the crowd, jostling women whose teeth look as ready to bite as any snarling animal's. He pushes Madame Chantelouve to the entrance, crosses the court, traverses the vestibule, opens the door in the wall and finds himself in the street.

There he stops and looks at her. "Confess you would like to go back."

"No, these scenes shatter me," she says with an effort. "I need a glass of water."

She leans on him as they walk up the street to a nearby wineshop. Two day laborers are playing cards. They turn around and laugh at the sight of Durtal in his frock coat. The proprietor takes an excessively short-stemmed pipe from his mouth and spits into the sawdust. He seems not at all surprised to see this fashionably gowned woman in his dive. Durtal, who is watching him, surprises a look of complicity between the proprietor and Madame Chantelouve.

The proprietor lights a candle and mumbles into Durtal's ear, "Monsieur, you can't drink here with these people watching. I'll take you to a room where you can be alone."

"This," says Durtal to Madame Chantelouve as they climb an old wooden staircase, "is a lot of fuss for a glass of water!"

But she has already entered a room with paper peeling from walls, and a dirty bed. Her eyes are wild. She embraces Durtal.

"No!" he shouts, furious at having fallen into this trap. "I've had enough."

She does not even hear him.

"I want you," she says, and throws her skirts onto the floor. Lying on the bed, she rubs her spine over the coarse grain of the sheets. A look of ecstasy he has not seen before is in her eyes.

Durtal is shuddering in a bed strewn with fragments of dirty hosts. The bells are sounding in his brain. "I call to the living. I mourn the dead. I break the thunder."

•

An ecclesiastical courtroom. Massive and dark, it is upheld by heavy Roman pillars. An array of bishops presides over a troop of deans, jurists, advocates, curates and chancellors. Row on row of clerics form the juridical ranks of the court.

Gilles de Rais is speaking in a loud voice. "I do not recognize the competence of this tribunal," we hear him say. "I protest the nature of my arrest and the evidence collected against me."

"May the court rule," says the prosecutor, "that the objection of the accused is null in law and frivolous."

"So does the court rule. Proceed to inform the accused of those counts on which he will be tried."

Now the prosecutor begins to invoke the separate crimes of heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege and magic. "He has polluted and slain little children. He has violated the immunities of the Holy Church at St.-Etienne de Mer Morte."

Gilles cries out, "The prosecutor is a liar and a traitor."

The prosecutor extends his hand toward die crucifix. "I swear," he declares, "that my list is a true list. Will the marshal take an oath that he tells the truth?"

Gilles shouts, "I make no vows before God, you filthy liar!"

Alter a silence, the prosecutor demands that Gilles be struck with double excommunication, first as an evoker of demons, a heretic, apostate and renegade; second as a sodomist and perpetrator of sacrilege.

Gilles loses control of himself. He is in a greater rage than any we have witnessed until now. "You call yourselves judges and me a sodomist. On your knees, clergy. Let my pollutions drip from your mouth. Recognize yourselves as clowns, you buggered asses." He bellows like an animal in pain.

"Do you answer the questions?" asks the court.

"I answer no questions. I declare my presence to be equal in magnitude to this court."

"You are prepared to refute nothing?" asks the court.

"My refutation is my silence."

"You are in contempt. This court pronounces upon you the sentence of excommunication. The hearing will be continued tomorrow before a civil court that will decide the penalties."

"I am innocent in the eyes of Satan and God. Through me, they find peace with each other."

•

Gilles is in his cell. He is trying to evoke the image of Joan of Arc but cannot succeed in making her wholly visible. Glimpses of her, elusive as wings, glide by. The bells are muffled. Now his attempt betrays him and the sound of the bells becomes the sound of his bellow in court. Gilles is swinging on the bell, but a wild boar swings on the other side.

He hears a woman's voice. "When do you return to the Church?"

"I am excommunicated," he shouts. "The Church must return to me."

"But I am burning."

We see Gilles's face; but it is Joan's voice that issues from his face. "Why did you not rescue me at Rouen when I began to burn?" she asks out of his mouth.

He stares into the walls of his cell. We see Joan on the stake. We see the pain on her face. Now we see Gilles standing in the crowd that watches. He is 100 feet away, staring at the burning stake.

Gilles (his own voice): "I could not rescue you. If you lived, I would have had to follow you for the rest of my life." He cries out, "Better to love a dead woman than obey a live one. I was born to follow no one."

Joan: "You did not follow me. You followed my voices."

Gilles: "I wanted to hear my own voices. They told me that I was born to be the master of discovery. The planets were holding their secrets for me. And the minerals and the beasts. You were as blind as the muscle of my arm. Do you comprehend? I needed a greater courage than yours."

"Why?"

"Because I had to violate every holy covenant that resisted the advance of my knowledge."

Joan: "I am still burning."

Several times he is about to speak; several times he clamps shut his jaws. Finally, the words come out:

"Why, Joan, why do you continue to burn?"

"I do not know."

"Perhaps," he says, "you continue to burn because you are not a saint but a demon."

"I do not know what I am."

"Maybe the Devil is stronger than God," he says.

She shrieks through his lips.

He shrieks back in his own voice.

"I pray for you," Joan says. "In the flames of my fire, I pray for you. Yet the more I pray, the more you torture others."

"My desire to become evil," he says with pride, "is larger than your power to remain good."

Now she appears before him. Suddenly, he sees her speaking to him out of her own face. "My strength was my faith in My Lady, but I continued to think of you. That diminished my strength. I could not bear it when yon did not save me from the flames. The odor of my flesh was ugly as I burned."

He moans.

She disappears.

He is left alone in his cell. As light changes through the day and into the night, he meditates.

In the dawn, he stands. "I will speak," he says aloud, "out of all the arrogance of the Devil and in all the compassion of the Lord. Those priests will hear a truth like none heard before."

The trial recommences. Peasants in every variety of good and poor dress are sitting on the stairs, standing in the corridors, filling the neighboring courts, blocking the streets and lanes. From 20 miles around, they have come.

Suddenly, the trumpets blare, the room is lighted up. The bishops enter the civil court. Their golden miters flame like lightning. About their necks are brilliant collars with orphreys crusted. In silent processional, they advance and seat themselves in the front row. Their jewels animate the pale sun of a rainy day. They make the black vestments of the civil judges look wholly somber in contrast.

Under the escort of men-at-arms, Gilles, enters. He has aged 20 years in one night. He declares that he is ready to begin a full recital of his crimes.

In a slow, hoarse voice, he states, "I have committed countless abductions of children. I murdered hundreds. Before I killed them, I violated them. I have heard every sound of pain. I am able to reproduce in my ear the hoarse sound that is made by the rattle of a dying throat." He looks about him. "Does the court shudder? Hear that I confess to having wallowed in the warmth of open intestines. I have also held in my hands the sweet-smelling hearts I had just ripped out from wounds that opened before my fingers like ripe fruit." He holds up his hands.

Gasps rise from the audience. With the eyes of a somnambulist, he look sat his fingers. We see only a shaking hand. He sees blood still dripping. "Once, I had congress in the belly of a wound," he says. "That provided me with more pleasure than nature ever offered through her orifice. I found no pain in such an act. Previously, taking the way of nature, between the thighs of a woman, it hurt like a knife in my loins." Now the camera is once again close to his face and unlocated to anything else--"I even opened the incision in one stomach so wide that I could seat myself in it. As I squatted there, I had a vision of how in years to come there will be doctors who look like nuns in white. They will make just such cuts and slashes. They will transport organs from one body to another." (A quick view of an operating room where open-heart surgery takes place. It is, even by his scale, a bloody sight.) "But," says Gilles de Rais, "such doctors would never dare to defecate in the wound they created. Gentlemen, I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright and blood than in any other pleasure. There was nothing I did not do--I had only to think of it! I was looking, you see, for the philosophers' stone."

The audience is as silent as a forest after an animal has just been killed.

Tempered in extremes of medieval confession, familiar with demonomania and torture, the bishops, nonetheless, have never heard anything like this. As Gilles de Rais speaks, each is constantly making the sign of the cross. Now the presiding bishop rises and veils the face of Christ.

"Some nights," Gilles goes on, "I would sit in reverie over which of the three young heads arrayed before me might be most beautiful to kiss. No oneknows so well as I the peace that resides in the chill of dead lips." The marshal is bathed in sweat. He looks at the crucifix whose head is now covered. Only the crown of thorns thrusts up a shape beneath the veil. "I knew the loneliness of such a man," he says, pointing to Christ.

Gilles de Rais finishes his narrative with a look of surprise. "My God," he cries aloud, "I have boasted too much."

He falls over abruptly like a tree, true in its fall. On the floor, be begins to beat the flagstones with his forehead. "O my God, I smell the odor of her burning flesh."

The bishop Jean de Malestroit leaves Ins seat and raises the accused, raises him to his knees. "He laments his fault," says the bishop to the court.

Gilles de Rais is weeping. With his head down and his arms extended, helooks to the audience at the rear of the court. "Will the parents who have lost their children be able to pray for me?" he asks.

A sound of anguish comes up from the men and women in the court. Woe, rage, pity and outrage are heard, and terrible cries of pain. In the convulsions of these sounds can also be heard the murmur of prayer.

In the babble, the judge of the civil hearings, Pierre de l'Hôpital. intones, "Dispose yourself to die in good state with a great repentance for having committed such crimes."

•

Gilles de Rais is alone again in his cell. He is staring at the moon. "I now know," he says aloud, "a peace I have not known since I was born. Maybe I was born to commit a thousand murders and find peace.

"Maybe I have accomplished something 1 cannot quite name.

"Certainly. I have no fear. That is curious."

•

We are back on the cheap bed with the crumbs and fragments of soiled bread on the floor, on the bed linen and on Madame Chantelouve's face. "Dress." says Durlal. "Let's get out of here."

He picks up a piece of the host. "I am a rational man and do not think the Savior ever resided in this"--suddenly aware of where this has been, he Hips it away, as if holding a cockroach-- "still...." He does not finish.

They go out. Below, in die cheap bar, they face the smiles of the laborers. He pays and leaves without waiting for change.

•

They are traveling in a cab. It comes to her door.

"Soon?" she asks.

"No."

"You are not a big man."

"By your measure, I am now a determined little man."

She leaves.

He gives the cabman his address.

•

Des Hermies and Durtal, at a café.

Durtal: "Carhaix has been ill?"

Des Hermies: "He almost died two nights ago."

Durtal: "I was at a Black Mass two nights ago."

Des Hermies (a pause): "The older I get, the more I conclude that medieval reason is not utterly without logic."

Durtal: "I would like to see Carhaix. But I don't know if I have the right."

Des Hermies: "See him. Your Black Mass has probably had more power at a distance than it will in the same room."

Durtal: "Maybe I'll tell him about my researches on Gilles de Rais's trial. The end is surprising, you see."

•

At Carhaix's: Durtal is talking. Carhaix is in bed and the others sit around him. Durtal speaks animatedly, trying to interest the invalid.

"From his dungeon, Gilles de Rais appeals to the bishop to intercede with the fathers and mothers of the children Gilles has killed. Will they consent to be present at his execution?

"On the day, by nine in the morning, people are marching through the city in processional.

"Many of the parents are actually weeping in pity. Contemporary documents describe their sentiments as follows: They see a demonic nobleman who now knows the emotions of a poor man. He is about to confront divine wrath. What a fearsome journey must await him! So they take vows to fast three days for the repose of the marshal's soul. Isn't that incredible? I know no story that so captures the spirit of the Middle Ages," says Durtal. "Is itnot touching?"

Unwilling to be overcome by such sentiment, Des Hermies remarks, "It's a long way from the lynch law of those crazy Americans."

"At eleven that morning," Durtal goes on, "they wait at the prison for Gilles de Rais. There, at the prison gate, he prays to the Virgin. One document describes his conversation with Prelati. ' "Farewell, Francesco, my friend," ' he is reputed to say, ' "we shall never see each other again inthis world. But I pray God we meet again in great joy in paradise." ' In paradise, mind you," Durtal says.

"He goes to the stake. The clergy, the peasants and the people join in the strophes of the chant for the departed."

At last, we see the scene. The camera passes over the market place, thegreat square, the fiery stake and the thousands assembled on their knees in prayer. Hundreds are weeping. We hear the chant. We have a last look at the face of Gilles de Rais in the flames.

"Nos timenus diem judicii

Quid mali et nobis conscrii

Sed tu, Mater summi concilii,

Para nobis locum refugiiO Maria"

The chant fades. The flames fade. We hear Durtal's voice again. "As he burns, we are without a clue to his last thoughts."

Des Hermies: "Whatever they were, those peasants know enough to weep for him. They may have been naive then, but they were not as stupid as people today."

"That," cries Carhaix, "is because the great majority no longer believe Satan exists. That is what is frightening."

"Do you know," says Durtal, "when I think of the decades to come, I feel terror."

"No," says Carhaix, "don't say that. In the future, there will be light." With bowed head, he prays.

•

Durtal walks up into the tower by himself. He has a note from Madame Chan-telouve and hears her voice in his ear as he reads.

"You might at least have permitted a comradeship that would have allowed me to leave my sex at home so I could spend an evening with you now and then."

He gives a low laugh and descends the tower.

•

Walking along the street, he thinks aloud, "I wonder if I will ever comprehend Gilles de Rais. That man has such conviction. Even in his doom, hecan think only of paradise. He must be the very monster who brought science to the modern world."

As Durtal continues to walk, the streets of Paris go through a metamorphosis. The hacks become taxicabs. The horse-buses turn into autobuses. High-rise apartments go up in the bnnliettes. Traffic increases until we are witnessing scenes from Godard's Weekend. The sound of the bells becomes an electronic shriek and the low animal roar of the Demon turns into the shriek of jet planes at Orly. Durtal in his costume of 1890 is not at all out of date as he walks among all the recapitulations of the costumes of the past 100 years that tourists and hippies are wearing in lineat the ticket counters and in the plastic seats of the arcades and concourses.

"Dig those threads," says an adolescent to his sister as Durtal goes by. "Is it a boy or a girl?" And we see that Durtal has long hair, something like make-up and his stern 19th Century expression has moved into the clown's look of modern androgyny. Yes, we are suddenly aware that the nearest waiting room at Orly is filled with androgynous couples. But Durtal is seeing Gilles de Rais in his mind and the fires of the great crucible in the castle of Tiffauges at night. As he pictures those flames, a rocket lifts slowly out of the same great fires and the moon gives a cry like a wounded child.

No one will be seated during the black mass.