He establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses the cold lips.
"Vampirism satisfies him for months.

He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb.

He even goes so far--one day when his supply of children is exhausted--as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the foetus.
After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave.

But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.
"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin.

It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim.