Before the parterre of gallantry budded, at an epoch when the Middle Ages were passing away, there appeared a man, known to amateurs of light opera and of fairy tales as Bluebeard, but who, everywhere, save in the nursery and the study, has been regarded as unreal.

Bluebeard was no more a creation of Perrault or of Offenbach than Don Juan was a creation of Mozart or of Moliere.  Both really lived, but Bluebeard the more demoniacally.  According to the documents contained in what is technically known as his procès, his name was Gilles de Retz and, at a period contemporaneous with the apparition of Jehanne d’Arc, he was a great Breton lord, seigneur of appreciable domains.

At Tiffauges, one of his seats, the towers of the castle have fallen, the drawbridge has crumbled, the moat is choked.  Only the walls remain.  Within is an odor of ruin, a sensation of chill, a savor of things damned, an impression of space, of shapes of sin, of monstrous crimes, of sacrilege and sorcery.  But in his day it probably differed very little from other keeps except in its extreme fastidiousness.  Gilles de Retz was a poet.  In a land where no one read, he wrote.  At a time when the chief relaxation of a baron was rapine, he preferred the conversation of thinkers.  Very rich and equally sumptuous, the spectacle which he presented must have been that of a great noble living nobly, one who, as was usual, had his own men-at-arms, his own garrison, pages, squires, the customary right of justice high and low, but, over and above these things, a taste for elegancies, for refinements, for illuminated missals, for the music of grave hymns.  He was devout.  In addition to a garrison, he had a chapel and, for it, almoners, acolytes, choristers.  Necessarily a soldier, he had been a brave one.  In serving featly his God he had served loyally his king.  At the siege of Orleans, Charles VII rewarded him with the title and position of Marechal de France.  It was lofty, but not more so than he.  Meanwhile, during the progress of the war, for which he furnished troops; subsequently, in extravagant leisures at court; later, at Tiffauges, where he resided in a manner entirely princely, he exhausted his resources.

The one modern avenue to wealth then open was matrimony.  Gilles followed it.  But insufficiently.  The dower of one lady, then of others, however large, was not enough.  He needed more.  To get it he took a different route.  Contiguous to the avenue was a wider highway which, descending from the remotest past, had at the time narrowed into a blind alley.  In it was a cluster of alchemists.  They were hunting the golden chimera which Hermes was believed to have found, and whose escaping memories, first satraps, then emperors, had tried vainly to detain.

These memories Bacon sought in alembics, Thomas Aquinas in ink.  Experiments, not similar but cognate, had resulted in the theory that, at that later day, success was impossible without the direct assistance of the Very Low.  The secret had escaped too far, memories of it had been too long ablated to be rebeckoned by natural means.  For the recovery of the evaporated arcana it was necessary that Satan should be invoked.  Satan then was very real.  The atmosphere was so charged with his legions, that spitting was an act of worship.  In the cathedrals, through shudders of song, his voice had been heard inviting maidens to swell the red quadrilles of hell.  From encountering him at every turn man had become used to his ways, and had imagined a pact whereby, in exchange for the soul, Satan agrees to furnish whatever is wanted.

To get gold, Gilles de Retz prepared to enter into that pact.  What were the preliminary steps, more exactly, what were the preliminary thoughts, that led this man, who had been devout and a poet, into the infamies which then ensued, is problematic.  It is the opinion of psychologists that the most poignant excesses are induced by aspirations for superterrestrial felicities, by a desire, human, and therefore pitiable, to clutch some fringe of the mantle of stars.  Psychologists may be correct, but pathologists give these yearnings certain names, among which is haematomania, or blood-madness.  Caligula, Caracalla, Attila, Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Philip II had it.  Complicated with another disorder, it manifested itself in the Marquis de Sade.  It was that which affected Gilles de Retz.

Actuated by it, he lured alchemists to Tiffauges.  With them from the confines of the Sabbat, magicians came.  Conjointly it is not improbable that they succeeded then in really evoking Satan, whose response to any summons consists, perhaps, not in a visible apparition, but in making men as base as they have conceived him to be.

In the horrible keep something of the kind must have occurred.  Gilles de Retz became actually obsessed.  His soul turned a somersault.  Where the scholar had been, a vampire emerged.  Satan was believed to enjoy the blood of the young.  To minister to the taste, Gilles killed boys and girls.  For fourteen years he stalked them.  How many he bagged is conjectural.  He had omitted to keep tally.

His first victim was a child whose heart he extracted, and with whose blood he wrote an invocation to Satan.  Then the list elongated immeasurably.  That lair of his echoed with cries, dripped with gore, shuddered with sobs.  The oubliettes were turned into cemeteries, the halls reeked with the odor of burning bones.  Through them the monster prowled, virtuoso and vampire in one, determining how he might destroy not merely bodies but souls, inventing fresh repasts of flesh, devising new tortures, savoring tears as yet unshed, and, with them, the spectacle of helpless agony, of unutterable fear, the contortions of little limbs simultaneously subjected to hot irons and cold steel.  Witnesses deposed that some of the children cried very little, but that the color passed from their eyes.

There is a limit to all things earthly.  Precisely as no one may attain perfection, so has infamy its bounds.  There are depths beneath which there is nothing.  To their ultimate plane Gilles de Retz descended.  There, smitten with terror, he tried to grope back.  It was too late.  Leisurely, after fourteen years of Molochism, the echo of the cries and odor of the calcinated reached Nantes, with, for result, the besieging of Tiffauges, the taking of Gilles, his arrest, trial, confession-a confession so monstrous that women fainted of fright, while a priest, rising in horror, veiled the face on a crucifix which hung from the wall-a confession followed by excommunication and the stake.

In this super-Neronian story Bluebeard is not apparent.  Yet he is there.  It is he that is Gilles de Retz.  Years ago at Morbihan in a Breton church that dates from the fourteenth century, there was found a series of paintings.  One represents the marriage of Trophine, daughter of the Duc de Vannes to a Breton lord.  In another the lord is leaving his castle.  As he goes he warningly intrusts to his wife the key to a forbidden door.  It is spotted with blood.  The scenes which follow represent the lady opening the forbidden door and peering into a room from the rafters of which six women hang.  Then come the return of the lord, his questioning and menacing glance, the tears of the lady, her prayers to her sister, the alarm given by the latter, the irruption of her brothers and her rescue from that room.

The story which the paintings tell still endures in Brittany.  It has Gilles de Retz for villain.  Yet for the honor of his race and of the land, instead of his name that of Bluebart, the cognomen of a public enemy, was given.

In the story, Gilles de Retz, after marrying Catherine de Thouars, one of the great heiresses of the day, subsequently and successively married six other women.  Whether he murdered them all or whether they died of delight is not historically certain.  The key spotted with blood obviously is fancy.  But like other fancies it might be truth.  It symbolizes the eternal curiosity of the eternal Eve concerning that which has been forbidden.