Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Blood-Stained Velvet of Gilles de Rais

The Forgotten Prince of France Who Became the Blueprint for Bluebeard

He was said to have ridden into battle with banners sewn from gold thread, a boy-general with a face like a seraph and a hunger for glory that bordered on the divine. Picture him at sixteen, astride a stallion the color of coal smoke, galloping into the Hundred Years’ War like a comet—Gilles de Rais, scion of an ancient Breton house, war hero, companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc, and, depending on whom you ask, either history’s most misunderstood nobleman or one of its earliest serial killers.

Before the dungeons. Before the confessions. Before the little bodies laid out like broken dolls.

There was the boy with the bright blue eyes and a castle so lavish it made other nobles feel underdressed. Gilles de Rais was the kind of man whose life you’d want to turn into an epic—until it rotted into a horror story.

And here’s the catch: maybe it didn’t. Not entirely. Maybe the real Bluebeard wasn’t a monster, but a man caught in the gears of politics, war, and superstition. Or maybe he was the monster we fear when we turn off the lights. The truth is slippery. Especially when soaked in blood.

Born in 1405 into a dynasty of staggering wealth and dead parents, Gilles inherited too much too soon: land, titles, an imagination unchecked by reality. By ten, he had been orphaned. By twelve, he was ward to a grandfather more interested in arranging power marriages than offering bedtime stories. Gilles grew up learning Latin, law, and strategy—but also that people were pawns, currency to be spent.

At twenty-four, he was made Marshal of France for valor alongside Joan of Arc, whose flames hadn’t yet touched the stake. He was a battlefield legend—gallant, merciless, beautiful. France adored him. And he adored France right back, in the overblown, operatic way only a man raised in turrets and tragedy could.

But legends don’t age well.

When Joan was burned, something in Gilles snapped. The light that had lit his warpath was gone. And in the void: pageantry. Obsession. Ritual. The dark arts, perhaps. And, eventually, something worse.

What followed was the descent.

Gilles de Rais didn’t fade into poverty. He cannonballed into it. Squandered fortunes on alchemists and theatrical productions so bloated they required entire villages to stage. His court was a fever dream of excess—gold-encrusted manuscripts, silken robes, elaborate mass ceremonies, all while the peasantry scratched for bread in the mud outside his gates.

He built a chapel to summon demons. Hired magicians who promised the Philosopher’s Stone and claimed the Devil would make him rich again—if only he performed the right ritual. A man can only fall from such heights with flair.

By 1439, the rumors were ripe and red: children disappearing near his estates, peasant boys lured to castles on the promise of choir auditions or stable work, never seen again. The bodies—if found at all—were charred, dismembered, mutilated in ways even seasoned chroniclers hesitated to describe. Some stories say he confessed to over a hundred murders. Others say two hundred. He detailed, with calm precision, how he killed. How he knelt in prayer. How he sometimes wept afterward.

But here’s the twist in the tale: his trial wasn’t conducted solely by secular forces, but by ecclesiastical and political enemies. The Duke of Brittany, eager to seize Gilles’ dwindling lands. The Church, deeply suspicious of his occult dabblings. His trial reads more like theater than justice—confessions extracted under threat of torture, a script fit for a grim fairy tale. He was hanged, then burned, in October 1440. Just thirty-five years old.

Dead, disgraced, and immortal.

So was Gilles de Rais guilty?

It depends on who’s telling the story.

To the medieval court, he was a child murderer. A predator. A Satanist. A stain on the nobility.

To some modern historians, he was a scapegoat—an inconvenient noble with a penchant for bad investments and worse company, whose enemies used child murder as a cudgel to expedite his downfall. They point to inconsistencies in testimony, the fact that no physical evidence survives, and that the accusations only emerged when Gilles challenged the authority of the Church and state.

But then there are the details too specific to invent: the child-sized ropes. The servant confessions. The eerily consistent accounts of cruelty cloaked in religious fervor. It’s hard to fake horror so well you still feel the echo six centuries later.

So maybe he was both: a broken man and a beast. A war-forged aristocrat who turned trauma into violence. The same hands that cradled the wounded on French battlefields may have crushed the lives of the innocent. A saint’s companion turned storybook villain.

The myth of Bluebeard, written nearly two centuries later by Charles Perrault, has always hovered near Gilles de Rais’ shadow. In the fairy tale, Bluebeard is a wealthy nobleman who murders his wives and hides their corpses in a locked room—until one bride discovers the secret. While the connection is speculative, it fits: the castle, the secrecy, the murders hidden behind walls and rituals.

It fits too well.

Today, the ruins of Gilles’ castles are tourist sites. Brochures call him “The Real Bluebeard.” Horror buffs and medieval history nerds make pilgrimages. But the town of Tiffauges, once terrified, now sells refrigerator magnets and novelty mugs. The blood has dried into folklore.

And maybe that’s the most unsettling part. That time can bleach even the darkest crimes. That a man once feared as a Satanic killer of children is now a Halloween costume.

What do we make of Gilles de Rais?

A hero undone by grief? A noble who became a killer? Or a victim of history’s most sensational smear campaign?

The answer isn’t clear. But he leaves behind something more potent than truth: a story with sharp teeth. A cautionary tale of how power, loss, and myth can twist into something monstrous. Or maybe how monsters are made, not born.

He died believing he’d been forgiven. He asked the crowd to pray for him. And when the flames touched his robes, some say he didn’t scream.

Just imagine the velvet, catching fire. The scent of burning silk. The silence of the crowd, wondering whether they’d just watched justice—or tragedy.

Maybe both.