Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/584

 The Case of Bluebeard. sturdy men who turned forests into fruitful fields, and built the log-cabins which have grown into great cities, and laid all the foun

543

dations on which we have builded up to this Columbian period of American greatness and glory.

THE CASE OF BLUEBEARD.1 BY PERCY EDWARDS. T TOW many of us, even children of a •*- -*- larger growth, know that such a char acter as Bluel5eard was no myth, invented, perhaps, to terrify us into restraining our inconvenient curiosity, but an actual fact, — a living, breathing man-monster. We know, of course, that French taste for highly seasoned sensationalism has wrought about this personage a fiction of highly wrought spectacular characteristic, rivalling, in this respect, the most famous Chamber of Horrors. According to a French romance, the Chevalier Raoul had a blue beard, from which he takes his name. He wished to test his wife's fidelity to him, and at the same time her curiosity. During his absence on a journey he intrusts her with the key to a secret chamber in the house into which she has been forbidden to enter. Curiosity gets the better of her 'fealty, and just as her Mother Eve weakened to the suggestion of her evil genius, so did she listen to the prompting of native curiosity. She peeped into the closet, — pictures of which we all remember to have seen at some period of our lives, with its awful reminders of the penalty of a too curious nature. Bluebeard puts her to death, and gives her a place in the closet, where are already the heads, with their long hair, of several former wives, all in a row. As the fiction has it, the old fellow is about to put to death his wife number seven, who had failed, as did the others before her, to restrain her curiosity, when her brothers rescue her, and Bluebeard is slain.

Of this story, Tieck has made a clever drama in his " Phantasus," and Grétry has worked the characters into his opera " Raoul." So much for the myth. Now comes the historical character and case. Bluebeard was none other than Gilles de Laval of Riaz, Marshal of France in 1429, and was burned at the stake in expiation of his many crimes in the year 1440. As a distinction between the myth and the fact, the real Bluebeard's victims were not women; they were children, and they were counted by the hundreds. An abstract of the papers relating to the case was made by order of Ann of Brittany, and placed in the Imperial Library. The original papers were in the Library of Nantes, and were destroyed by the Revolutionists; but an abridgment of these papers had been made, and from this the French antiquarian Lacroix published a circumstantial memoir, although he found it necessary to avoid much that the trial revealed. It is said of Bluebeard that when the thirst for blood was upon him his beard bristled and turned a bluish color. At all other times a cursory glance revealed no evidence of his real nature. " His physi ognomy was calm and phlegmatic, somewhat pale, and expressive of melancholy. His hair and mustache were light brown. But he had one peculiarity which earned for him the sobriquet so well known in nursery lore, and by which he will be known while the world lasts. The Marshal de Retz's beard was blue. It was clipped to a point and

1 See Belgravia, January, 1893.