SOURCE: "Tournier's Ultimate Perversion: The Historical Manipulation of Gilles et Jeanne," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 72-88.

[In the following essay, Levy discusses Tournier's alteration of historical fact in Gilles et Jeanne, comparing the novel's portrayal of the main characters with scholarly accounts of the historical figures upon which they are based.]

The contemporary French novelist and short story writer Michel Tournier has on numerous occasions stressed the various ways in which his works appropriate material from earlier literary texts, both those of others and his own, and from the multi-layered stories he describes as myth. He radically alters the configurations of his borrowings and incorporates them into what both he and many critics describe as perverted re-tellings that depict his own evolving obsessions and reveal the scope of his originality. Beginning with the Robinson Crusoe story, which acts as a springboard for his first novel, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, up to the final jubilatory tale of festive commemoration in his latest anthology, Le Médianoche amoureux, Tournier constructs an elaborate verbal network of intertextual resonances that disorient us as readers and challenge our imaginations.

Nowhere is the process of textual appropriation and perversion more intricate and more disconcerting than in Tournier's tale, Gilles et Jeanne, in which we encounter for the first time historical figures whose activities can be documented. Tournier recounts the grizzly tale of Gilles de Rais, fifteenth-century wealthy landowner, and Maréchal de France, who fought for a time beside Joan of Arc, and nine years after her martyrdom, was himself executed for having molested and grotesquely murdered numerous children, disposing of the evidence by burning their corpses in the giant fireplaces of his preferred castles of Machecoul and Tiffauges.

Tournier's literary sources for Gilles et Jeanne include Joris-Karl Huysmans's late nineteenth-century description of Gilles's experience in his novel Là-Bas; German expressionist Georg Kaiser, whose work gave Tournier the title for his own text; and more recently Georges Bataille's essay detailing the simultaneous exhibitionistic and tragic aspects of Gilles's drama [see Bataille, Le Procès de Gilles de Rais, 1965]. Bataille's essay provides the background for Tournier's version, which concentrates on the double-sided erotic and mystical fascination he envisions Gilles experiencing for the Maid of Orléans. Even more important than literary transformation, however, which Tournier has been practicing throughout his career, is the way in which he exploits the recorded historical data pertaining to Gilles's situation. He weaves a simultaneously outrageous and bewildering tale, which has polarized critical reaction perhaps more intensely than any of his other writings and become the subject of heated debate. The specific historical manipulation that Tournier undertakes reveals itself only when we unmask the elements which constitute the text's provocativeness and determine their specific function.

The structural simplicity and temporal condensation of Tournier's text suggest what Susan Petit has described as its fairy tale dimension. In her thoughtful study of the work, she argues that "because of its style and subject matter, Gilles et Jeanne may be viewed as Tournier's long-promised children's version of his earlier novel Le Roi des aulnes." Using Bruno Bettleheim's analysis of the structure of fairy tales and their importance in children's psychological development, Petit notes that "everywhere there is simplification" [see Petit, "Gilles et Jeanne: Tournier's Le Roi des aulnes Revisited," Romanic Review 76, 1985]. All that was either multidimensional or ambiguous in Le Roi des aulnes—point of view, chronology, character presentation and motivation—has been distilled to make the text acceptable for a young and vulnerable audience.

The narrator takes complete control of the material. He filters the historical information concerning Gilles's prolonged, eight-year massacre of innocents and specifies that Gilles was motivated, not by the desire to do evil, but rather by his fidelity to Joan of Arc—his promise to follow her to the depths of hell if necessary. He was, as the narrator stresses, "un brave garcon de son temps, ni pire ni meilleur d'un autre" 'a fine young man of his times, neither worse nor better than any other,' whose personality disintegrated when he witnessed the death of his idol and lost all ability to distinguish the so often finely delineated line separating good from evil. Gilles's ritual murders are never directly depicted in the text itself. The details of his sadism are presented only in excerpts from the testimony of witnesses at his trial in October 1440. Parents sketch the scenarios of their children's disappearances; and his codefendants describe what occurred in the vaulted rooms and fireplaces of Gilles's forbidding castles in southern Brittany and the Vendée. In reading Tournier's tale the reader "is being protected, as a child is when his parents assure him that there are no dragons any more." Faced with excommunication, Gilles publicly repents and dies invoking Joan's name, suggesting the traditional happy endings of fairy tales (Petit).

As appealing and reassuring as this interpretation may be, it poses some serious problems for the reader—for Tournier's work resolves nothing, even in a fairy tale context, and the tidy reconciliation of contraries it appears to depict is a lure whose seductiveness must be resisted. The apparent simplicity of the text, which proposes to explain Gilles's transformation through Tournier's familiar phenomenon of the double-sided "inversion maligne / bénigne" 'evil / benign inversion' (first explored in Le Roi des aulnes) is a screen which masks the complexity of its rhetorical strategies. In his lucid and highly innovative analysis of Gilles et Jeanne Colin Davis points out the way in which Tournier tries to entrap and compromise his reader. He argues that the text serves as "a parable of writing," which depicts the author's double-sided attitude toward his work and his public [see Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction, 1988]. Tournier seeks to control his reader while simultaneously insisting that he must interpret a work by himself, nourishing it with his own blood to make it come to life and suppressing the author in the process. The aggression implied in such a relationship leaves both writer and reader frustrated and alienated because, as Davis further notes, "the uncontrollable always resides somewhere other than where the author attempts to isolate it."

While Gilles et Jeanne may be treated as a parable for the writer / reader relationship, it is also parable perverted for a deliberately distorted purpose. Its function is not, as one might traditionally expect from a parable, to impart meaning or provide a moral lesson, but rather to expose some of the textual strategies by which a reassuring illusion of meaning is produced and consumed by the characters, only to be contested by the reader. Tournier exploits in particular the fact, as Rice and Schofer note, that "irony is not semantically marked … there is no incompatability between the microcontext and the macrocontext" [Donald Rice and Peter Schofer, Rhetorical Poetics, 1983]. Tournier uses irony to expose the way in which the text contests its own authority. The easily assimilated coherence which appeared to exist is called into question when, as Rice and Schofer note, "the 'voice' of the narration talks against itself by presenting signifiers which undermine the apparent signified." This process of undermining occurs in two intertwining contexts in Gilles et Jeanne, revealing the unacknowledged gap between historical referentiality and Tournier's invention, which in turn highlights the division that exists between the specifically fictional situations of the two protagonists. The text produces a complex counterpoint of self-deconstructing discourses, which abrogate the seeming legitimacy of its argumentation. It thereby enables us to understand more clearly the verbal maneuvering which seeks to excuse atrocity so that the menace it poses can be confronted more directly and its seductive power displaced.

This textual undermining centers around Gilles's identification with Joan. Gilles seizes upon Joan's image, first as a guide and then eventually as justification for his own disintegration, singling out the qualities that would gradually be highlighted in Joan's five-century rehabilitation as patriotic savior, innocent child, androgyne, sacrificed saint, and angel. The moment Gilles first notices Joan in the reception hall at the castle of Chinon in late February 1429 he sees what the narrator describes as "tout ce qu'il aime, tout ce qu'il attend depuis toujours: un jeune garçon, une femme et de surcroît une sainte …" 'everything he loves, everything he has always been waiting for: a young boy, a woman, and moreover a saint.' A little further on in the course of this initial meeting, Gilles himself adds, "Ne voyez-vous pas la pureté qui rayonne de son visage … une innocence enfantine … une lumière qui n'est pas de cette terre … Du ciel, parfaitement. Si Jeanne n'est ni une fille, ni un garçon, c'est parce qu'elle est ange" 'Don't you see the purity that shines from her face … a childlike innocence … a light which is not of this earth … from heaven, absolutely. If Joan is neither a girl nor a boy, it is because she is an angel.' The narrator condenses into a few concise pages the complexity of her historical reality, repeatedly stressing her purity, gentle candor, and fidelity to the voices which counseled her to be a good child. The voices had nothing to do with the devil. Gilles discovers in Joan "l'enivrante et dangereuse fusion de la sainteté et la guerre" 'the intoxicating and dangerous fusion of saintliness and war.' He seeks to follow her example in order to exorcise his own evil tendencies, becoming thereby the saint he already perceives her to be. And any hesitation he might feel stems, not from Joan's status, but rather from the ambivalence of his own inclinations.

Despite the enthusiasm of Gilles's commitment to Joan, his loyalty is extremely short-lived. Through the spring and summer of 1429, he serves beside her at Orléans and at Patay and accompanies her in glory to Reims for the coronation of Charles VII, but he abandons her as soon as her royal favor begins to wane. After the ill-fated attempt to capture Paris in September 1429 "Gilles disparaît mystérieusement" 'Gilles disappears mysteriously,' and from this point on the "voice" of Tournier's narration begins to expose the gap between words and meaning. When Joan is captured at Compiègne on 24 May 1430, one of many dates whose citation seems to indicate a concern for historical accuracy, the text stresses that Gilles tries to plead her case with Yolande d'Anjou, regent of that province and the king's mother-in-law, who had initially supported Joan's cause. Historically, there is no evidence that Gilles ever attempted to intercede with d'Anjou or ever tried to rescue Joan from prison. The king's mother-in-law and Gilles were vicious political enemies. We know that Gilles was actually plotting her death with the help of Charles VII's current favorite counsellor, Georges de la Trémouille. In Tournier's tale, Gilles does not move precipitously to help Joan; references both to Rouen and to Joan's trial date Gilles's attempt to intervene sometime in the winter or early spring of the following year. She was kept at the castle of Beaurevoir near Arras until December 1430 and depositions for her trial were not given until 13 January 1431. She was first summoned before her judges on 21 February. Hence Tournier's Gilles waits at least seven months after Joan's capture before interceding on her behalf. Furthermore, even Gilles's bold project to rescue Joan from her Rouen dungeon in the spring of 1431 is proposed by someone else. After his unsuccessful audience with the Queen Mother, Tournier's text notes that Gilles is ready to retreat once again to one of his many estates when La Hire, a former battle companion, proposes "Allons-y [à Rouen] ensemble. Jeanne ne sera pas surprise de voir arriver son compagnon Gilles et son vieux La Hire" 'Let's go there [to Rouen] together. Joan won't be surprised to see her companion Gilles and her old La Hire arrive.' Only at the latter's suggestion does Gilles consider a rescue attempt, and it is with troops loyal to La Hire that they undertake their expedition.

Tournier's work clearly indicates that as soon as Joan begins to lose political support, Gilles equates this fall from royal favor with a moral and spiritual defeat. "Or depuis l'échec devant Paris, il semble qu'a pris fin l'état de grâce où vivait Jeanne et qu'elle lui avait fait partager" 'Thus, since her defeat at Paris, it seems that the state of grace in which Joan was living and which she enabled him to share came to an end.' This initial reaction on his part seems to be confirmed by her trial, mentioned only cursorily, and her subsequent execution, which Tournier describes in all of its macabre detail, making it the focal point of Gilles's transformation. By situating Gilles in the crowd—"Perdu dans la foule, il assiste, le coeur crêvé de haine et de chagrins aux préparatifs du supplice" 'Lost in the crowd, his heart broken by hatred and sorrow, he witnesses the preparations for torture'—the text once again undermines its authority, since historically, Gilles was not present. Furthermore, Tournier's work does not acknowledge that throughout her trial Joan continually emphasized her loyalty to the voices she heard, which instructed her only to do good and her "unshakable conviction in … the rectitude of all her motives, her passions, and her enterprises" [Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, 1981]. It likewise ignores the fact that Joan heard Mass and received communion on the day she was to be burned. As Warner stresses, "Her judges failed to prove even to themselves that their victim was the thing of reviled pollution they had hoped. She died with the body of her maker inside her." Hence, even according to the ecclesiastical authority that condemns her, Joan died in the state of grace and therefore escapes hell.

When he witnesses Joan's execution, Gilles both confuses condemnation to death by an ecclesiastical court with personal damnation, and carries the process of appropriation to the lowest level of the abject. When Gilles witnesses Joan's death, he confronts the horror of her strictly physical destruction imposed on her by others, "une charogne à demi calcinée, un oeil éclaté qui s'incline sur un torse boursouflé" ("a half burned corpse, one eye burst open, hanging down over a bloated torso") and seizes upon it as emblem and justification for the final stages of his "métamorphose maligne …" ("evil metamorphosis.") In a double move he shifts the level of Joan's disintegration to that of the spiritual, implying her condemnation to hell, while simultaneously internalizing the image of her bodily suffering. He becomes an agent of the physical destruction she had endured as victim and, for the next eight years, he imposes on numerous others tortures even more grotesque than those to which the authorities had subjected Joan.

Once Joan is executed and Gilles's metamorphosis into 'infernal angel' is completed, which takes place in the first third of Tournier's work, the scope of the text's undermining process broadens and becomes more radical in its implications. As in the depiction of the initial stages of Gilles's transformation, careful attention is paid to the overall chronological accuracy of events, as well as to the precise identity of the individuals who played significant roles in the last period of Gilles's life (c. 1432–40), namely the priest Eustache Blanchet, the Italian alchernist and conjuror Francesco Prelati, and the various henchmen who assisted Gilles in carrying out his bloody rituals. Tournier manipulates the historical data, however, and widens the gap between the text's words and their meaning, between the signifiers and the signified.

The role of Eustache Blanchet in Tournier's plot is a typical revision. According to documents pertaining to Gilles's trial, Blanchet was in Florence on business in autumn 1438, when he met Prelati, who was eager to share his alchemic secrets with any French patron who might wish to engage his services. Blanchet had been commissioned by Gilles for several years to search out alchemists and conjurors whose skills could hopefully replenish his dissipated fortune; he proposed that Prelati accompany him back to Tiffauges, where they arrived on Ascension Day in 1439. In the following months Blanchet gradually came to realize the extent of Gilles's and Prelati's involvement with demons. He heard more and more disturbing rumors about Gilles's human sacrifices, and was forced to seek at least temporary refuge elsewhere when he tried to warn Gilles of the consequences of his scandalous behavior. Despite his discoveries, however, Blanchet remained in Gilles's service up to the time the arresting authorities arrived in September 1440, although he was never a member of the latter's inner circle (Bataille).

Tournier presents Blanchet as childlike and naïve in his beliefs, and enlarges his role in Gilles's life. At least from the time Gilles established an ecclesiastical school for young boys on his estate at Machecoul in March 1435, Blanchet was his personal confessor and heard firsthand Gilles's admission of the pleasure he experienced at seeing children suffer: "C'est si beau un petit corps ensanglanté, soulevé par les soupirs et les râles de l'agonie" 'A small blood-covered body, racked by the moans and groans of its death agony is so beautiful.' There is no indication in Tournier that Blanchet was commisioned to engage alchemists and conjurors for Gilles's experiments. But the priest's knowledge of Gilles's predilections was both more extensive and long-standing than historical evidence indicates, and his personal complicity greater. Awakened to the potential for violence in Gilles's remarks and further alerted by descriptions of a dark-cloaked horseman galloping over the fields with kidnapped children in the folds of his mantle, Blanchet does nothing. Ostensibly, he does not want to violate the sacred seal of confession; but his own cowardice and unwillingness to accept responsibility are equally strong motives. Tournier admits that the truth of the rumors floating up from the surrounding villages would have required "de lui des décisions si boulversantes qu'il préférait aussi longtemps que possible—mais pour combien de jours encore?—Se replier frileusement sur son ministère d'aumônier et de chapelain" 'such overwhelming decisions from him that he preferred as long as possible—but for how many days more?—to withdraw timidly into his role of personal priest and chaplain.' Only much later, when he can no longer dismiss the "odeur de chair carbonisée … cette puanteur de charogne carbonisée" 'odor of carbonized flesh … this stench of corpses reduced to ashes,' does Blanchet admit the desperateness of Gilles's situation and take action. He leaves Gilles to continue his sacrifices while he sets out for Florence to find someone capable of exorcising his charge's demons.

Once in Florence, however, Tournier's provincial Blanchet is unable to cope with the extremes of opulence and corruption he encounters in the city. He immediately falls prey to the charms of the elegant Prelati, who first saves him from a band of thieves and then proceeds to seduce him with arguments that poverty is the source of all vice, opened cadavers should be used to explore the anatomical secrets, and that one must necessarily descend to the depths of the diabolical to discover the unknown. Although he greatly fears Prelati's outrageous assertions, Blanchet nevertheless decides, without looking further, that only Prelati can help Gilles—"il ne voyait plus de ressource qu'en lui" 'he saw no possibility other than him.' Prelati proceeds to seduce Gilles with the same eloquence that so captivated Blanchet. Historical data indicates that he was both alchemist and conjuror, and was easily able to convince the acutely superstitious Gilles that, if he followed Prelati's directions, he would amass the wealth and power he desired without jeopardizing his life or his soul. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to make Prelati's private demon Barron appear, the Italian even managed to persuade Gilles to offer one of his victims in a diabolical sacrifice. Although Gilles feared the spiritual consequences of such an offering, he was sufficiently desperate about his financial situation to do anything to protect the assets he still possessed and eventually attain the level of financial omnipotence he so eagerly sought.

In Tournier's text Prelati is even more insidiously manipulative. Unfortunately, he does not live up to the image Mireille Rosello paints of him as a disinterested, truth seeking man of science whose gaze reveals "l'acuité froide d'un observateur, d'un sociologue extérieur aux phénomènes qu'il tente de comprendre" 'the coolheaded sharpness of an observer, of a sociologist detached from the phenomena he is trying to understand.' Prelati tells Gilles exactly what the latter wants to hear, equating, as did Gilles, Joan's political defeat with moral transgression and maintaining that since she was condemned by the Inquisition, she automatically went to hell—"au fond du gouffre ardent" 'to the depths of the burning chasm.' At the same time, in another manipulation of theology, Tournier's Prelati purports to offer Gilles a way to rise from the depths of his degradation through the purifying role of the very fire Joan experienced and to which he is subjecting his tortured victims. "Le pécheur plongé dans les abîmes de l'enfer pouvait en rejaillir revêtu d'innocence pourvu qu'il n'ait pas perdu la foi" 'The sinner, plunged into the abyss of hell, could reemerge, once again clothed in childlike innocence, provided he hadn't lost his faith.' Like Joan, whom Prelati cleverly assures Gilles "serait réhabilitée … elle connaitraît la béatification, qui sait même peut-être la canonisation" 'would be rehabilitated … she would undergo beatification, who knows, perhaps even canonization,' he too will be able to rise glorious and transfigured from the abyss of his abjection, provided he descends far enough.

Despite Prelati's eloquence he does not exorcise his patron's demons; instead, he encourages his continued massacre of innocents by stressing that the end justifies the means and radicalizing the situation by urging him to offer his sacrifices to Prelati's private demon: "Réussissez pour Barron le sacrifice d'Isaac. Offrez-lui la chair des enfants que vous immolez" 'Carry out for Barron Isaac's sacrifice. Offer him the flesh of the children you are immolating.' In keeping with the evidence of the trial testimony, Tournier has Prelati channel Gilles's narcissistic sacrifices in another direction; but his promise of transmutation, alchemically or morally, is part of his charade. Prelati's final prayer to Barron, after Gilles socially disgraces himself by viciously kidnapping the priest Jean de Fréron during Mass in the church adjoining the castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mermorte, reveals Prelati's intentions:

"je n'ai rien négligé pour élever cet homme jusqu'à ton seuil sublime … pour venir convertir sa violence en ferveur et ses bas appétits en élans vers ta face auguste…. Et sans doute y étais-je parvenu … ne sacrifiait-il pas désormais les enfants, non par basse volupté, mais à seule fin de t'offrir leurs dépouilles en holocauste!"

[I neglected nothing to raise this man to your sublime threshold … to succeed in converting his violence into fervor and his base appetites into passion for your noble countenance…. And undoubtedly I had succeeded in doing so … wasn't he henceforth sacrificing children, not out of base pleasure, but with the sole intention of offering you their remains as a holocaust!]

Serving Barron is not merely a stage in Prelati's cleverly argued plan, but rather his ultimate goal. He condemns only the puerile violence of Gilles's assault on Jean de Fréron because he had been forced to sell the property to the priest's brother Geoffrey for a pittance. Further, he was outraged when the new owner exacted the back taxes he himself had not collected from the peasants.

The final pages of Tournier's work concentrate on Gilles's trial and execution. They present excerpts from his testimony and that of Prelati; lengthy remarks by Gilles's most intimate and long-serving henchmen, Henriet Griart and Étienne Corrilaut, called Poitou, who describe specific crimes; and brief statements from some of the parents whose children disappeared. The transcript of Prelati's testimony details his experiments with alchemy and conjuring during the sixteen months of his service with Gilles. Prelati is careful, however, to blame Gilles for both the sacrificial offering of the child and the pact made with the devil (Bataille). Prelati invoked the devil purely for material gain, to rebuild Gilles's dissipated personal fortune and to reestablish his political dominance.

In Tournier's version the trial is presented more dramatically—consisting largely of dialogue between Prelati and his judges—and provocatively. It depicts Prelati in the most difficult role of his career, before a hostile and highly skilled audience. The tribunal is as adept as Prelati in manipulating arguments, which makes his triumph all the more dazzling. Prelati succeeds not only in saving his life, which at first seems beyond hope—"aucun calcul, aucune momerie, aucune bassesse ne pourrait sauver une cause aussi compromise que la sienne" 'no calculating, no mummery, no servility could save a cause as compromised as his'—but also in completely silencing all possible opposition. In a clearly calculated move, Prelati decides to push the defiant insolence of his "sourire ironique" 'ironic smile' further than ever before, daring his nonplussed judges to do anything about it and beating them at their own game. He turns the tribunal members' own objections against them in a mounting sequence of outrageous statements, noting God the Father's passion for bloody sacrifices, quoting with "une déférence ironique" 'an ironic deference' Christ's statement urging the children to come to him, stressing with "une douceur affectée" 'an affected gentleness' the essential resemblance between Satan and God, and eventually subdues them completely with the illusion of meaning he offers in his discourse on the parallelism between Gilles's situation and that of Joan of Arc. As the narrator indicates, "Malgré eux, tous ces théologiciens, grands amateurs de fines disputes, dressent l'oreille. Pierre de l'Hospital fait signe de laisser parler Prelati" 'In spite of themselves, all these theologians, great enthusiasts for subtle disputes, prick up their ears. Pierre de l'Hospital makes a sign to let Prelati speak.'

The same display of self-serving histrionics likewise characterizes Gilles's testimony. Tournier lifts a number of statements directly from the trial transcript and adheres to the chronological accuracy of Gilles's appearances. Consistantly, Tournier again revises historical data to highlight the contradictions in his protagonist's position and to reveal more precisely the differences between his situation and Joan's. In the transcript Gilles at first appeared as a defiant accuser, refusing to acknowledge the charges against him and attacking his judges as "simoniaques et des ribauds" traffickers in holy offices and thieves' (Bataille). Scandalized by Gilles's conduct, the tribunal in turn immediately excommunicated him, closing the session and scheduling his next appearance in two days. When Gilles resumed his testimony, he had changed from belligerent accuser to docile penitent. Confronted with the reality of excommunication, he tearfully confessed his crimes, "se mettant à genoux et exprimant la contrition par de grands soupirs, douloureusement et dans les larmes, sollicita d'être humblement absous … de la sentence d'excommunication" 'getting down on his knees and expressing his contrition with great sighs, he humbly begged to be absolved of the sentence of excommunication' (Bataille). This attitude persisted throughout the rest of the proceedings, and Gilles went to his death reconciled with the power of the ecclesiastical authorities and fully reinstated in the Church.

Tournier begins the trial testimony by changing the sequence of events, complicating the situation and revealing both the extent of Gilles's own ability to overwhelm his judges and the level of their vanity. The trial transcript reports that Gilles was excommunicated on 13 October. When the next session opened, he appeared an effusive penitent. In Tournier's work the initial meeting ends with Gilles's attack on his judges as vengeful debtors, who are jealous of his family's influence: "Non, vous n'êtes pas des juges: vous êtes des débiteurs. Je ne suis pas un accusé: je suis un créancier" 'No, you are not judges: you are debtors. I am not the accused: I am a creditor.' Through the power of his own social position, he forces them mutely out of the trial hall: "atterés, ils sortirent piteusement, les uns après les autres …" 'shattered, they left pitifully, one after the other.' When the next session opens on Saturday, 15 October, Gilles is equally aggressive, asserting that he is as good a Christian as any one else. He insists that since he confessed to Blanchet, he is "blanc et pur comme l'agneau qui vient de naître" 'as white and pure as the lamb which has just been born' and, like Prelati, dares the court to attack him. In the interim, however, the judges recovered from their humiliation of the last session and unanimously excommunicated him. In keeping with the reaction noted in the trial transcript, Tournier's Gilles is thunderstruck: "L'excommunication est pire que la mort, puisqu'elle débouche sur la damnation éternelle" 'Excommunication is worse than death because it leads to eternal damnation.' This statement is significant for the light it sheds on Gilles's much flaunted fidelity to Joan; the text separates for Gilles the issue of condemnation to death and damnation, which it had failed to do for Joan. Furthermore, despite his repeated assertions about being willing to follow Joan to hell, Gilles does everything possible during his trial to avoid going to hell and experiencing the fire which Joan had suffered during her execution and to which he had subjected his victims.

Descending into hell for Gilles is only a metaphor, another rhetorical strategy used to mask his duplicity. When the tribunal makes his damnation a reality, his reversal is instantaneous. The speed of this transformation could be said to correspond to the overnight reversal indicated in the trial documents; but in yet another revision of history, Tournier reinstates Gilles in the Church before he acknowledges any crimes. The excommunication order is rescinded as soon as he begs forgiveness for having insulted the judges, playing up to their own egoism: "Je leur demande humblement pardon pour les injures et les paroles blessantes que j'ai proférées" 'I humbly ask their pardon for the insults and offensive words I spoke.' Only when the decree is lifted does he admit culpability, but even then his arrogance stands out as clearly as ever, and his expressions of guilt overwhelm his judges even more profoundly than his earlier vituperative outbursts: "[ils] se sentaient humiliés plus encore que sous les injures" '[they] felt themselves more humiliated than by insults.' There is no indication at this point that either Gilles or his judges is treating the situation any more honestly and forthrightly than they had earlier. Each manipulates the other in a desperate struggle for power. Only the means have changed, from insults and threats to excessive mea culpas and condescending pardons.

The process of historical manipulation and textual subversion culminates in the scene of Gilles's execution. As indicated by the trial documents, Gilles goes to his death reconciled with the Church, exhorting his two companions to welcome the death that awaits them, for then "ils se reverraient dans la gloire, avec Dieu dans le paradis" they would see one another in glory, with God in paradise' (Bataille). Tournier's depiction carefully maintains chronological and geographical accuracy; it emphasizes Gilles's public repentance as he proclaims to Henriet Griart and Poitou, "Suivez-moi dans mon salut comme vous m'avez suivi dans mes crimes" 'Follow me in my salvation as you followed me in my crimes.' Once again, however, Tournier's treatment raises troubling questions and reveals dramatically how the signified slips ever further beneath the signifier to prevent the production of meaning. Along with seeking to describe Gilles's execution in terms of Christ's crucifixion, with Gilles being paraded through the streets of Nantes to die on "un étrange golgotha" 'a strange golgotha,' Tournier's work attempts one last time to make Gilles's image converge with that of his idol by stressing the parallels between their execution scenes. However, this strategy will not work, for although Gilles and Joan were both executed, they did not, as Tournier's work emphasizes, die in the same way. Joan was burned alive on the Place du Vieux Marché in Rouen, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine (Warner). Out of mercy, Gilles, the still privileged nobleman, was hanged and died before the fire was lighted. His body was also removed from the pyre "avant que son corps ne fût ouvert" 'before his body burst open' and was then entombed in the Carmelite church in Nantes (Bataille; Nettlebeck). Only Gilles's two servant accomplices were destroyed by fire "de telle sorte qu'ils furent réduits en poudre" 'so that they were reduced to ashes' but after they too had already died by hanging (Bataille).

Despite the frenzied invocation of Joan's name which Tournier's Gilles makes as an "appel célèste" 'celestial appeal' before the crowd at his execution, the images do not converge in either a historical or a fictional context. They cannot even be made to reflect one another as the inverted mirror images that haunt so many of Tournier's writings. Gilles's reaffirmation of Joan's short-lived apotheosis as sainted warrior and her subsequent condemnation by the Inquisition just before his own death merely repeats his earlier declarations and offers no new insight into the differences separating them. And in one final, and perhaps its most splendidly ironic move of all, Tournier passes over in silence the one essential and historically verifiable parallel that does exist between Gilles's situation and Joan's—namely that they both died reconciled with the Church. His work denies Joan the official reconciliation it so dramatically grants the master of Tiffauges. Gilles's last comments leave Joan still condemned as a witch, awaiting future rehabilitation, while he prepares to ascend directly "vers la porte du ciel" 'to the gate of heaven.'

Tournier leaves his readers poised on the edge of the abyss his text creates, struggling to find our footing amidst "un réseau de contradictions" 'a network of contradictions.' However, as the ironic "voice" of Tournier's narration exposes the gap between Gilles and the one he appropriated as his idol, it creates the essential space in which our own questioning and contesting can be formulated. It is precisely this ongoing activity on our part which the text itself so vigorously encourages. Tournier's work seeks not to entrap us, but rather to provide us with the means to avoid being "définitivement compromis" 'definitively compromised.' The echoes of Gilles's last dramatic invocation, reinforced by the chanting of the crowd and the roar of the storm, continue to resonate in history and fiction down through the centuries, and the stench from his private holocaust continues to pollute the atmosphere. These signs marking Gilles's spectacular cruelty reached the ultimate level of horror in our era in the Nazi apocalypse, a phenomenon Tournier explores in his earlier work Le Roi des aulnes, which creates the fictional experience of his twentieth-century ogre Abel Tiffauges, revealing how acutely urgent it has become for us to be able to decipher the strategies that nourish and sanction atrocity. Only then can the tirades of a Gilles be silenced and the air cleared. More intensely and directly than any of Tournier's other writings, Gilles et Jeanne enables us to participate in this process of displacement.