Gilles de Rais: Who was the real Bluebeard?

"Bluebeard" is one of Charles Perrault's most disturbing and grisly stories -- but could it be true? Join Sarah and Katie as they explore the depraved life and crimes of Gilles de Rais, the real-life basis for Perrault's Bluebeard.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And before we
start today's episode, we'd like to say that there is
a lot of grisly content in this particular podcast and

(00:24):
it's not appropriate for kids. This is a rated R podcast,
and you should not be fooled by our fairytale title,
which is, of course, who was the real blue Beard?
And there are many versions of the blue Beard story,
but the one most of us know comes from Charles Perel,
who was the French author of many a fairy to
beat the best right type of things. You know. Um,

(00:47):
But the story of blue Beard isn't a nice fairy tale,
it's a grim one. In the story, a blue bearded
man has had many wives, but they all disappear and
no one knows what's become of them. But yet another
woman is married to him against her will, and after
their marriage, blue Beard leaves her in charge of the
house with an admonition to stay out of this one

(01:09):
particular room. But she, of course is human and can't resist,
and when she opens the door, all she sees is
blood and dead bodies on hooks, which are the wives
before her. And in Perolt's tale, of course, the wife
is rescued at the last moment, but in the story
we're going to tell that is possibly the inspiration for

(01:31):
the tale, the rescues were not to be had. So
before we get to all the gor nous, let's talk
a little bit about who we're dealing with. Gill Day
was born in fourteen oh four or thereabouts. There are
some discrepancies um as to the year, and he was
the son of Gui de Laval and Marie de Carolan,
and his father died when he was young. He and

(01:54):
his brother Renee were raised by their grandfather, and he
was married young as well, at sixteen, to Katwine de
tur who was also very rich. And I can't emphasize
enough just how rich Deray was. He was probably the
richest nobleman in Europe. But even then there were some
rumors about him that weren't so nice. Part of this

(02:15):
legend was that he had been affianced a few times
before Katraine, but they all died. Really, the reality is
probably just that the betrothals were broken off. And he's
impressive as a young man too, though, in addition to
being extremely wealthy, he distinguished himself fighting with Jean Dark
in the Hundred Years War Joan of Arc, of course

(02:35):
and um. He was there for the Siege of Orleans
and was recognized for being extremely brave. Right. He was
made Marshal of France at age by Charles the Seventh
because of everything he'd done in the war. But then
there comes a switch in his life. Gil tired of
military life, and his grandfather, who may have been a

(02:57):
check on his actions, died when he was in his
young thirties. So he began spending. So remember how gigantic
this fortune is. He spends pretty much all of it.
Much of it was on theatrical productions. He loved putting
on these very lavish plays for free. He hired hundreds
of extras, and I would have hundreds of costumes constructed

(03:20):
and then just thrown away and he would begin again. Yeah,
And he spends a lot of his money on bodyguards
and courtiers and entertaining as well, things that might be
more expected than his own personal theatrical productions. And he
also built a very fancy chapel, the Chapel of the
Holy Innocence, and in case you don't remember um biblically,

(03:41):
the Holy Innocence are all the innocent little boys that
Herod had killed to you know, avoid Jesus coming along
and deserving his power. This will come into play a
little later, remember the Holy Innocence. He eventually spend so
much money on all these plays and these building projects
that his family goes to the King see King and intervention,

(04:03):
and the King agrees to make life very difficult for
him in Orleans. So he left and he went to
Brittany and around this same time, being so wealthy but
also falling into this pit of money despair, he fell
prey to many con men, and when he started to
go broke, he turned to a rather bizarre way of

(04:25):
making money, at least to my mind, alchemy. So he
started spending he will literally turn other things into gold.
He started dealing with occultists and necromancers, and you know,
thought maybe he could sell a soul to Satan for wealth,
depending on you know how that went. So more money,
more problems, Sara and I said earlier, But it turns

(04:48):
out that this is not all he was doing at
the time, and he had many other unsavory activities going on.
And Um, his first murder was right after his grandfather died.
And again this is a little hard to listen to,
probably it was hard for us to research. But his
victims were usually young boys. They were tortured, raped, and killed.

(05:09):
He'd often hang them from hooks, according to testimony, Um,
but take them down to comfort them when they cried,
saying that he was only playing with them, before he
put them back and start the torturing again. Sometimes he
would rape them as they were dying. Um. He also
liked to cut them open and look at their insides
and laughed while they died. So this is pretty much

(05:30):
the most demonic portrait of a man you can imagine.
He'd also go to sleep afterwards, so when it was
all done, he'd have somebody else clean it up. So
some of the boys were kidnapped, some were tricked into coming,
you know, by saying maybe they'd get an apprenticeship at
the castle. Some showed up unawares of what was going
on and were tricked into it. And no one knows

(05:52):
exactly how many children he killed. There's a huge discrepancy
as far as numbers. Estimates ranged from the cousins to
more than six thousand so you don't even know where
he stands in that series of you know, prolific serial
killers that you think of. But of course he wasn't alone.
You can't you can't do killings like this, and especially

(06:14):
if it was more on the scale of six thousand,
without accomplices. And one of them was Gille de Sille,
who um brought boys to one of the castles and
helped clean up after after the murders had taken place,
and helped lie for him. You know, obviously you're gonna
have all these concerned parents who are wondering where their

(06:35):
children have gone, and he would tell them that their
sons had been sent to the king to train his pages.
You know, had all these great opportunities, and that's why
they disappeared. So suddenly, another one of his accomplices was
a T. N. Corio, who was known as Plot, and
with his testimony later we learned a little bit more
about what happened in that castle. Some of the most

(06:58):
damning testimony against him came from this guy, and he
talked about killing the boys because sometimes gilder I didn't
like to do it on his own. He'd rather have
someone else do it. And he liked to play with
the dead bodies, so his accomplices would kill them by
decapitation or dismemberment or cutting their throats, breaking your neck.
And he also said they usually were only allowed to

(07:19):
stay alive for one night. And another accomplice was Puin Marta,
who was also known as Lamfrey or the Terror. And
she sounds straight out of a fairy tale, some very
scary evil character, and she was the procure of many
of the children. She would wander around in a long
cloak looking for them. She at least suves me the shivers. Yeah,

(07:42):
and that's according to some accounts. Some of this is
based on little historical evidence, and a lot of it
is based on tales of the time, but that, of
course is part of the allure of his story. But
you must be wondering, like Sarah and I did, how
on earth if you've done all of these terrible things,
especially if the body count is up to about six thousand.

(08:02):
He wasn't found out, And it turns out that he
sort of was. People knew what was going on, especially
the peasants around there. Their kids were disappearing, and his
castle at mush Cool got the reputation of being this
evil place where people eight children, like the surrounding villages,
that's what they said. If someone else came from mush Cool,

(08:24):
well that's the place that the reputation that pursueded them. Yeah,
and some of his family and friends must have known
what was going on to some people have argued at
least at one point he sent some of his minions
to clean up his castles when he knows that family
was coming over. Um, but they couldn't get rid of
all the skeletons and body parts that littered the castle,

(08:46):
and the towers of the castles were filled with blood
and bodies that were later burned and tossed into the
moat and um, just as straight out of the blue
Beard fair Tail. Yeah, he was most caught several times.
According to some accounts, he was reckless about what he
was doing. He wasn't even trying very hard to hide

(09:07):
it because he was very, very rich and very powerful
and probably felt were afraid of it. Fairly invincible, Oh,
I'm sure. So he wasn't arrested until he abducted a
priest from a church, which is so ridiculous. You know,
people thought he was killing and raping children, but you
know once he took that priest out of that trust line,
the line had been crossed. So the bishop started an investigation,

(09:32):
found out all of these rumors, and then passed it
on to more secular sources of power who did their
own investigation. So he's ultimately charged with murder, sodomy, and heresy,
and of course kidnapping the priest from a church. His
trial was in fourteen forty, and at first he wouldn't
make a plea, and he denied the charges and even

(09:53):
said this court didn't have jurisdiction over him. But then
here's a twist. The church excommunicated him, and he was
terrified that he would go to hell, so he admitted
to some of his crimes and begged to be readmitted
to the church. And that's the crazy thing about Jill Deray,
all the things I was reading, he was tormented by

(10:16):
the idea of what would happen to his eternal soul,
and he was very religious. He built that Chapel of
the Holy Innocence, hoping it would expiate some of his sins.
And someone who fights alongside Joan of arc to imagine
you wouldn't see miracles in the fervor of your religion
if you are fighting with her, So you have to
somehow reconcile this idea of him as a giggling child

(10:41):
rapist who killed and killed again with the idea of
someone who wasn't even a sociopath, someone who had remorse
for everything he'd done and yet wouldn't stop. And that's
the scary part, because you can't say that he was
just mentally ill. He knew what he was doing, he
was sorry for what he was doing, and he kept
don't stop doing it. He's also accused of summoning demons

(11:02):
and dabbling in the occult and all of this with
a guy named Francesco Prelate and using children's innards as
sacrifices to the call up the devil. But um, going
back to that religious fervor, these are charges that he
would not admit to initially. None of those satanic stuff,

(11:23):
none of the summoning up of the demons. Those were
things he would not say that he did until he
was threatened with torture, and then he admitted everything. Or
someone who has tortured knows well just what that's like.
So all of the gory gory details came out during
the trial. For example, some of his associates that he
bathed in blood, which reminded us of Elizabeth Bathory, which

(11:46):
I think Canadas and joshed in a podcast the article
on it. So at the end of all this and
after his confessions, he's sentenced to be hanged and burned,
which interestingly kind of a luckier fate than Joan of Art.
Not luckier, but his body has taken out of the
flames and buried. And before he died, he sermonized to
the crowd and proclaimed himself a devout and good man.

(12:09):
So he was brought back into the church's fold at
the very end because of this um confession and repenting.
But that was the end of blue Beard, and again
the question how can a man be a hero of
war with Saint Joan no less and also a ruthless
child murderer. Some historians have argued that Jill Dere didn't

(12:33):
do it, that he was framed for what had happened,
that it was someone else committing the murders, and because
there were other people who had an interest in him
being gone for financial reasons, he was set up. And
others also say that the trial was a farce, and
I mean how much can you trust a confession made
under threat of torture? It was a coerced confession, So

(12:54):
is that even something that you can say is real
and honest? And and presumably his collabor raiders are under
similar pressure. Oh yes, two of them were killed as well,
and they did not get to be taken out of
the flames. They were burned to ash. But to sort
of bring this story full circle, we're gonna end up
how we began with the story of blue Beard and

(13:15):
this contradiction we were talking about earlier. Somebody who is
clearly not just a sociopath who has no sense of
right and wrong. I mean, he's somebody who repents what
he's doing. He just can't stop doing it is won't
or won't stop is hard for people to to make
sense of and to handle. And so consequently, uh, since then,

(13:37):
there have been all these myths that have sprung up
around him in comparisons to demonic creatures like vampires or
were wolves, because I guess it's easier to believe that
someone was driven by something evil, something other than their
own wills and desires to commit such terrible crime, because

(14:00):
vampire has a motive, a werewolf has a motive, you know,
something we can't tellin it. And these ideas that if
the vampire, the werewolf, or blue Beard, we're all made
after the fact, you know, after his life. Then to
explain it right, there are people who say that he
was just trying to emulate another monster of history, Caligula,

(14:22):
who keeps popping up lately. So we think we're going
to have to do a podcast maybe after we rest
a little bit here and you might need a little
breaks or here took its toll. But to end on
a lighter note, if you're interested in supernatural creatures like
vampires and werewolves, we have some pretty fantastic articles on
them on our web page at www dot how stuff

(14:44):
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
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