others implicated; and (deeply penitent, by all accounts) lie suffered the penalty for his hideous crimes in Nantes, in the autumn of 1440. He was only some thirty-six years old. Apart from the growth in him of his passion for pederasty, in connection with death and blood de Rais was a man of singularly sensitive aesthetic nature and culture, as well as of high intellectuality.
Blood-Lust and
Similisexualism.
Blood-lust is frequently the inseparable accompaniment of the sexual instinct. If so, to gratify the sexual passion stirs up at once the wish to see suffering, to shed blood, even to murder. We meet this fearful instinct, in many individuals, both heterosexual and homosexual. The sentiment put vice-versa—blood-lust breeding sex-lust—is met often. This fact enters into many assassinations and mysterious murders. Thus acts the passion well-known in sexual parlance as 'sadism,' a word derived from the famous French eroto-maniac, the Marquis de Sade, whose instincts were particularly of the kind. The maniacal instinct to dismember and to disfigure the body of some victim, either before or after sexual use of it, is not at all rare, either in heterosexual or homosexual erotism. The constantly recurring cases of murder with mutilation, the "Jack the Ripper" types of assassination, are almost invariably so explained. It is often associated with the instinct of fiendish cruelty to children, and with their murder, as in the classic (but not at all unique) case of Grilles de Rais. A noteworthy sadistic case occurred some years ago in France—the arrest and execution of a vagrant named Vacher, who had ravished dozens of young country-lads and then killed them, or vice-versa, before he was apprehended. The Paris apache has often been observed to possess the sadistic quality.
The "Dippold
Case," in 1903.
The shocking "Dippold Case," before the Baireuth assises in October 1903, was a typical instance of homosexuality and lust of cruelty. In
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