The follies and ambition of Gilles not only required his theatrical costumes and property to be of the richest and most expensive stuffs, but in his maladministration they were bought at highest prices, payment frequently made with promises greatly increasing their cost. With all this, his pride was such that he never permitted the same dress to be worn twice; everything was required to be made anew for each representation, or for each series of representations. New costumes seem to have been his particular fad in that day, so that he could use the same terms which now appear in the playbills of the city--“entirely new and elegant costumes.” Having been once used, they were thrown aside or sold at whatever could be gotten for them. This meant to buy at the highest price and sell at the lowest, a system which we well know produces financial ruin. His ambition and desire to please led him into foolish and useless expenditures. All his theatres and the plays rendered by him were free; the people who attended paid nothing. Gilles paid the expenses of the entire entertainment. Consequently, one can easily understand the statements made in the _Mémoirs_ of the ruin wrought by these representations, the cost of each one being thirty, forty, and fifty thousand francs (six, eight, and ten thousand dollars). Gilles’s favourite play was the Mystery of the Siege of Orleans. Here he was not only actor but principal. It was a drama in verse though not in rhyme. It was based upon the events of that memorable siege. Quicherat says of it that its historic value is _nil_, not because the author has removed it from the domain of history, but for the contrary reason, that he was quite too near, both in space and time, to the events as they happened, and was, therefore, unable to take the rôle of historian, and make deductions. He could not form conclusions, nor announce principles: all that he did was to recount the actions and events as they happened day by day. He was a recorder, not an historian. The drama or poem was largely romance; while recounting the daily progress of the siege, it was not a veritable or trustworthy journal thereof. The words put into the mouths of the various actors were probably never spoken by them, certainly never were heard by the author. But they were the speech of the day; they were news gathered at the time and which might have appeared in the daily newspapers, if such things had then existed. It is because of their nearness to the events that they are not history. How long the Mystery of the Siege of Orleans continued to be represented in the theatre as a drama is immaterial.