-_ Gilles De Rais, The Real "Blue Beard" _-
We are talking about a real character, a French nobleman who fought against the English in the Hundred Years War with Joan of Arc, back in 1430.
Reckless in combat and extremely aggressive, he always fought in the forefront with the soldiers and managed to earn the favor of Charles VII because of his famous and almost suicidal cavalry charges.
He won that way the Marshal degree.
Born in the black tower of the Champtocé's castle in the Brittany, he was orphaned by father and mother at an early age and was welcomed by his maternal grandfather.
He did not receive any type of ethics education, but rather the opposite, since in his grandfather he only saw the example of getting rich at any cost and not having any kind of scruples.
Soon he was carried away by his multiple violent impulses being considered a psychopath.
Showing only fidelity to her desire to become rich and to Joan of Arc, it was precisely her capture and execution at the stake that triggered the events that inspired Charles Perrault in 1697 to write the story of Blue Beard.
After the refusal of the king's right hand knight to implement the rescue plan of Joan of Arc drafted by Gilles De Rais, this one decided that the political world was not his.
So he retired to his castle and began to squander his great fortune treasured during wartime in a particular hobby: kidnapping, torturing, raping and murdering children, not always following that order.
The children began to disappear in the region of the violent noble, from vagabonds to children of lesser lords.
When they asked for them Gilles always replied that they had been kidnapped by robbers.
Gilles and his servants followed the same procedure with the children: they were dressed in luxurious clothes and sat down to dinner with them. When the dinner was over they were transferred to a room prepared for torture.
There they tortured and raped them to death. If the child screamed they hanged him and raped him in that posture.
The children were skinned, dismembered, decapitated, and Gilles used to keep the chunks of children who seemed most beautiful to him as a memory.
For eight years, a total of 150 children's lives were snatcheds, and the intense rumors became a secret to voices.
Corpses were found in different states of conservation in one of his castle towers and in different rooms.
But not even this scandalous fact was enough to judge such an important nobleman in that France.
Gilles ended up ruining himself with the passage of time and the expenses that his eccentricities, vices and horrors brought him, and this fact together with that he tried to kidnap a priest while celebrating a religious mass in official act, left in evidence the decadence and illness of De Rais.
Nor did it help him to refuse to answer the judges questions and to insult them with pride.
Gilles De Rais was hanged in Nantes on October 26th, 1440 giving way to a multitude of legends that have reached our times.
Sources:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais
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