Blue Beard's Castle

The Vendée was a bit of a downer, so afterward, to brighten our weekend adventure, we hit up the chateau of a child molester… Yeah, it was kind of a depressing weekend. Gilles de Rais, or Blue Beard as he was later nicknamed, was a friend of Joan of Arc’s, no joke, but after she was put to death he may have gone a little wacky.  Don’t worry, that was just the biggest understatement of the last several centuries.  It’s unclear whether he had these pedophilic tendencies while he was palling around with Joan of Arc, but what is clear is that he suffered from a split personality and after her death, he was responsible for the rape, torture, and murder of over a hundred young children in his dominion.  The number of victims may be as high as 250, but there’s no real way to know these days, but he confessed to over 100 of these crimes shortly before his death.  One of his castles, the one we visited, is now used to display medieval weaponry.  There’s also a room underground with a very creepy show about the search for the sorcerer’s stone through alchemy with references to human sacrifice and the occasional screams of cats in the distance.  In light of the horrible things that had probably happened in that very castle, I thought it in poor taste.