Christa Giles

ack to the prodigious sins of the fifteenth century and
concluding:
Rather petty, my own spiritual conflict
regarding a woman whose sin – like my own,
to be sure – is commonplace and bourgeois. 258
Gilles de Rais embodies the extremes of satanic behaviour.
He indulges in necrophilia and vampirism. These crimes
are, significantly, crimes which are perpetuated solely
against children. Like Dorian Gray’s satanic propensities
they are exemplified by the corruption and profanation of
the pure and the exhibition of ˝an ardent, a mad
curiosity˝ 259 concerning the forbidden. Gilles is ˝an artist
and man of letters˝ 260 who, in a fashion similar to Des
Esseintes and Dorian Gray, is a collector of beautiful and
unusual items. Yet his depravity still allows for, or rather
becomes, the source of his artistry:
He wearies of stuprating palpitant flesh and
becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate
artist, he kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the
well-made limbs of his victims. He establishes
sepulchral beauty contests… 261
Like Dorian Gray, although on a very different plane and
for different reasons, evil becomes his means of realizing
his conception of the beautiful. The violent extremes of the
Gilles de Rais myth are acceptable because it is the middle
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