The Marshal could not go to Paris because the English soldiers barred the roads.  There was only one thing to do.  He wrote to the most celebrated of the southern transmuters, and had them brought to Tiffauges at great expense.

“From documents which we posses we can see his supervising the construction of the athanor, or alchemists’ furnace, buying pelicans, crucibles, and retorts.  He turned one of the wings of his chateau into a laboratory and shut himself up in it with Antonio di Palermo, Francois Lombard, and ‘Jean Petit, goldsmith of Paris,’ all of whom busied themselves night and day with the concoction of the ‘great work.’”

They were completely unsuccessful.  At the end of their resources, these hermetists disappeared, and there ensued at Tiffauges an incredible coming-and-going of adepts and their helpers.  They arrived from all parts of Brittany, Poitou, and Maine, alone or escorted by promoters and sorcerers.  Gilles de Sille and Roger de Bricqueville, cousins and friends of the Marshal, scurried about the country, beating up the game and driving it in to Gilles de Rais, while a priest of his chapel, Eustache Blanchet, went to Italy where workers in metals were legion.

While waiting, Gilles de Rais, not to be discouraged, continued his experiments, all of which missed fire.  He finally came to believe that the magicians were right after all, and that no discovery was possible without the aid of Satan.

And one night, with a sorcerer newly arrived from Poitiers, Jean de la Riviere, he betakes himself to a forest in the vicinity of the chateau de Tiffauges.  With his servitors Henriet and Poitou, he remains on the verge of the wood into which the sorcerer penetrates.  The night is heavy and there is no moon.  Gilles becomes nervous, scrutinizing the shadows, listening to the muted sounds of the nocturnal landscape; his companions, terrified, huddle close together, trembling and whispering at the slightest stirring of the air.  Suddenly a cry of anguish is raised.  They hesitate, then they advance, groping in the darkness.  In a sudden flare of light they perceive de la Riviere trembling and deathly pale, clutching the handle of his lantern convulsively.  In a low voice he recounts how the Devil has risen in the form of a leopard and rushed past without looking at the evocator, without saying a word.

The next day the sorcerer vanished, but another arrived.  This was a bungler named Du Mesnil.  He required Gilles to sign with blood a deed binding him to give the Devil all the Devil asked of him “except his life and soul,” but, although to aid the conjurements Gilles consented to have the Office of the Damned sung in his chapel on All Saints’ Day, Satan did not appear.

The Marshal was beginning to doubt the powers of his magicians, when the outcome of a new endeavor convinced him that frequently the Devil does appear.

An evocator whose name has been lost held a seance with Gilles and de Sille in a chamber at Tiffauges.