_La Barbe Bleue_ is founded, according to Mons. Colin de Plancy, on a
tradition of Lower Brittany; and he remarks that Perrault must have
heard it from the lips of nurses, or perhaps peasants, to have written
with so much _naïveté_ the scene of Sister Anne. He states also that
it is pretended that Blue Beard was actually a nobleman of the house
of Beaumanoir. He does not, however, seem to have been aware that the
original of this terrible portrait is also said to have been Gilles de
Laval, Seigneur de Raiz, created Maréchal de France, June 21st, 1429,
for his defence of Orleans against the English, but whose infamous
conduct in Brittany so exasperated the public against him, that in
1440 he was arrested by order of the Procureur-Général de Bretagne,
and having been tried and found guilty, was condemned to be hanged
and burnt, and underwent that sentence in a field at Nantes, on the
8th of October (some say 23rd of December) of that same year, after
exhibiting, says the chronicler, great signs of repentance; his body
was taken out of the flames, and buried in the church of the Carmelites
at Nantes. It was, we are told, his taste for luxury and libertinism
which plunged him into all the crimes for which he was so fearfully
punished. He squandered a revenue of two hundred thousand crowns per
annum, an enormous sum in those days, and which he had inherited at
the age of twenty. He never travelled without being accompanied by an
army of cooks, musicians, dancers of both sexes, packs of hounds,
and two hundred saddle horses. Unfortunately for him, he thought it
necessary to include in his suite of attendants some fortune-tellers
and pretended magicians, which it is possible in those days may have
caused the credulous multitude to impute to him some atrocities of
which he may have been innocent. The whole _procès_ is said to be still
extant: but we are not furnished with any details which would identify
him with the gentleman who rejoiced in a blue beard, and expiated his
offences by being run through the body with cold iron, instead of being
roasted at a stake like the guilty but penitent Marshal.[53] Whether
the line of Beaumanoir or of Laval has the best claim to the honour
of his relationship, may be still a matter of dispute; but the fact
more important to our present inquiry is, that in either case it is a
tradition of Bretagne, and therefore strengthens the theory of Mons. de
Plancy and the Baron Walkenaër.
There is no fairy in this story, but there is an enchanted key. "La
clef," says the author, "etait fée." In the old translations this is
rendered "the key was a fairy." "Fée" is, however, in such instances
as these, not a noun substantive, but an adjective, now obsolete, but
to be found in Cotgrave, spelt with a third e in the feminine. "Fée,
m.; éee, f.: Fatall appointed, destined; also, taken, _bewitched_ or
forespoken; also, _charmed_, _inchanted_."--EDIT. 1650.
There is another popular passage in this story which requires a word
of remark:--"Je ne vois rien que le soleil qui poudroie et l'herbe
qui verdoie." This has been generally translated, "I see nothing but
the sun which makes a dust, and the grass which _looks_ green." Mons.
de Plancy appends a note to this passage, as follows:--"1. Poudroyer,
darder, éblouir les yeux. 2. Verdoyer, jeter un éclat vert."
With great submission to so high an authority, I must venture to differ
with him on this point. "Poudroyer" is an old French verb, signifying
to reduce to powder. "Je poudroie, tu poudroies, il poudroie," &c.
"Un cheval Espagnol _poudroyant_ tous les champs," J. B. Rouss; and
Bescherelle, in his _Dictionnaire National_, remarks, quoting the
actual passage from Perrault, "Ce mot sonore poètique, épargnant une
périphrase est a regretter." Verdoyer is also a verb active, signifying
to grow or become green, and I have therefore taken the liberty to
render the above celebrated reply, "I see nothing but the sun making
dust" (that is to say, reducing the soil to dust by its heat), "and the
grass growing green." It is the flock of sheep that afterwards raise
or make _a_ dust. It may be thought I am "making a dust," to use a
familiar phrase, about a trifle; but I wished to point out that unless
we could say in English, "the sun that _dusts_ and the grass that
_greens_," we cannot approach the terse and graphic description of dear
Sister Anne.
Mons. de Plancy observes that the incidents of this story (excepting,
of course, that of the enchanted key) are not impossible, provided they
are supposed to have occurred in the middle ages; but that Perrault has
placed them nearer his own times, by saying that Blue Beard's widow
employed part of her fortune in purchasing commissions for her two
brothers, as the sale of commissions in the French army was not known
before the reign of Francis I.; but he does not notice that the mention
of dragoons and musqueteers brings them still nearer. Blue Beard has
been a favourite subject with the dramatists, both French and English.
The celebrated melodrama by George Colman the younger, produced at
Drury Lane Theatre, in 1798, in which the scene was transferred to the
East, was rendered still more popular by the music of Michael Kelly:
the "March in Blue Beard" was perpetrated on every piano alternately
with the "Duke of York's March," the "Battle of Prague," and the
"Overture to Lodoiska."