Finally, the peasant learns to look with horror upon an old woman, Perrine Martin, who wanders around, clad in grey, her face covered--as is that of Gilles de Sille--with a black stamin.

She accosts children, and her speech is so seductive, her face, when she raises her veil, so benign, that all follow her to the edge of a wood, where men carry them off, gagged, in sacks.

And the frightened people call this purveyor of flesh, this ogress, 'La Mefrraye,' from the name of a bird of prey.
"These emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets, tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sire de Bricqueville.

Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes to standing at a window of the chateau, and when young mendicants, attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs an appraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in and thrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being in appetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.
"How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them?
He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed.

The texts of the times enumerate between, seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems overconservative.