These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent--wrongly, I think--as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century.

Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles.

And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them.
"To sum up: natural mysticism on one hand, and, on the other, daily association with savants obsessed by Satanism.

The sword of Damocles hanging over his head, to be conjured away by the will of the Devil, perhaps.

An ardent, a mad curiosity concerning the forbidden sciences.
All this explains why, little by little, as the bonds uniting him to the world of alchemists and sorcerers grow stronger, he throws himself into the occult and is swept on by it into the most unthinkable crimes.
"Then as to being a 'ripper' of children--and he didn't immediately become one, no, Gilles did not violate and trucidate little boys until after he became convinced of the vanity of alchemy--why, he does not differ greatly from the other barons of his times.
"He exceeds them in the magnitude of his debauches, in opulence of murders, and that's all.