In his confession, Gilles maintained the first assaults on
children occurred between spring 1432 and spring 1433.[27] The first murders
occurred at Champtocé-sur-Loire; however, no account of these murders
survived.[28] Shortly after, Gilles moved to Machecoul where, as the record of
his confession states, he killed, or ordered to be killed, a great but
uncertain number of children after he sodomized them.[28] Forty bodies were
discovered in Machecoul in 1437.[28]
The first documented case of child-snatching and murder concerns
a boy of twelve called Jeudon (first name unknown), an apprentice to the
furrier Guillaume Hilairet.[29] Gilles de Rais' cousins, Gilles de Sillé and
Roger de Briqueville, asked the furrier to lend them the boy to take a message
to Machecoul, and, when Jeudon did not return, the two noblemen told the
inquiring furrier that they were ignorant of the boy's whereabouts and
suggested he had been carried off by thieves at Tiffauges to be made into a
page.[29] In Gilles de Rais' trial, the events were testified to by Hillairet
and his wife, the boy's father Jean Jeudon, and five others from Machecoul.
In his 1971 biography of Gilles de Rais, Jean Benedetti
tells how the children who fell into Rais's hands were put to death:
[The boy] was pampered and dressed in better clothes than he
had ever known. The evening began with a large meal and heavy drinking,
particularly hippocras, which acted as a stimulant. The boy was then taken to
an upper room to which only Gilles and his immediate circle were admitted. There
he was confronted with the true nature of his situation. The shock thus
produced on the boy was an initial source of pleasure for Gilles.[29]
Gilles' bodyservant Étienne Corrillaut, known as Poitou, was
an accomplice in many of the crimes and testified that his master hung his
victims with ropes from a hook to prevent the child from crying out, then
masturbated upon the child's belly or thighs. Taking the victim down, Rais
comforted the child and assured him he only wanted to play with him. Gilles
then either killed the child himself or had the child killed by his cousin
Gilles de Sillé, Poitou or another bodyservant called Henriet.[30] The victims
were killed by decapitation, cutting of their throats, dismemberment, or
breaking of their necks with a stick. A short, thick, double-edged sword called
a braquemard was kept at hand for the murders.[30] Poitou further testified
that Rais sometimes abused the victims (whether boys or girls) before wounding
them and at other times after the victim had been slashed in the throat or
decapitated. According to Poitou, Rais disdained the victim's sexual organs,
and took "infinitely more pleasure in debauching himself in this manner
... than in using their natural orifice, in the normal manner."[30]
In his own confession, Gilles testified that “when the said
children were dead, he kissed them and those who had the most handsome limbs
and heads he held up to admire them, and had their bodies cruelly cut open and
took delight at the sight of their inner organs; and very often when the
children were dying he sat on their stomachs and took pleasure in seeing them
die and laughed”.[31]
