For it is worth noting that this science, which threw him into demonomania when he hoped to stave off inevitable ruin with it, he had loved for its own sake when he was rich.
It was in fact toward the year 1426, when his coffers bulged with gold, that he attempted the 'great work' for the first time.
"We shall find him, then, bent over his retorts in the chateau de Tiffauges.

That is the point to which I have brought my history, and now I am about to begin on the series of crimes of magic and sadism." "But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls." "I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality.

To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic.

He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown.
Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine.

Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step.
In the Beyond all things touch.