Notes on Marechal
1.
Case in point: The Marechal de Retz.
A French nobleman named Gilles de Laval had an impressive military career, and he was duly rewarded for it. He was appointed the Marechal of France, and his shrewdness and intelligence were well-noted, so that soon he was named a counselor to the King himself.
Things were indeed looking up for the Marechal of France. And then one day, he quietly and suddenly retired from military and public life. Taking a coterie of men with him, he retreated to the French countryside, but never to a single place. Rather, he wandered from village to village and at each he was always met with a warm welcome. He was after all a well-known and respected nobleman.
And yet, the Marechal always abandoned the warm welcomes of each village in search of the next. And with each town he left behind him he left something else: a sea of hushed whispers.
“Our children are gone. Where are our children? What has become of them?”
2.
In each new town it was the same. The Marechal would be greeted as the military hero he was, only to leave in his wake the bitter and mournful whispers of the French peasantry.
It wasn’t long before the countryside was steeped in a river of rumors:
“The Marechal is coming, and his approach signals death and mourning.”
At about this time the Marechal at last settled down in a large castle called Machecoul. It was by most accounts a forlorn and gloomy-looking place.
It was from the villages which surrounding the Castle of Machecoul that the hushed whispers at last erupted into a great flood of open accusations. The great secret of the Marechal of France could no longer be ignored.
3.
Up until this point, children had been going missing from the village in great numbers, and rumors had come from the villages where the Marechal had previously been.
“It is known the he likes to eat children,” they said.
The village was becoming alarmed. When one man came home to find his son missing one day he (perhaps foolishly) demanded information about his son’s whereabouts from the guards at the castle.
“Am I to believe,” he asked, “that it is fairy spirits that are taking and eating our little ones?”
The castle men responded with a terse warning.
“Believe what you want, but ask no questions here.”
One story tells of how the Marechal and his retinue happened to be passing by a woman’s cottage one day. Her boy was playing in the window and the Marechal approached the house and told the woman, “I will take your boy with me and I will train him to become a fine soldier.”
The woman begged them to leave her boy be, but the Marechal laid down such a large sum of money that she could not refuse him, and wept bitterly, begging him to be kind to her child.
When she later inquired about the boy’s military education, the Marechal’s men all laughed at her and told her, “Don’t worry, he must be somewhere or other.”
4.
The Marechal was inevitably tried and found guilty of torturing and slaying untold numbers of children, and one cannot help but notice how easy it was for this serial killer to maintain and indulge his sadism. And yet, what is more striking is that it was not only royalty who found it simple to practice serial murders.
One story tells of