Bluebeard’s Two Morals

Perrault's 1697 Bluebeard has a room of murdered wives, a key that will not stop bleeding, and a sword raised over the heroine's head. Then it ends with two morals. The first scolds her curiosity. The second says relax, this is a tale of olden days: husbands are not like that anymore, and these days it is hard to tell which spouse is the boss.

The story as it is told

A rich man with a blue beard marries a young woman, gives her the keys, and forbids one room. She opens it, finds his dead wives, and is saved at the last second. In Perrault's telling, the first in print, it goes like this.

No woman will have the man with the blue beard, and nobody knows what became of his several wives. He takes a neighbour's two daughters, their mother and friends to a country house for eight days of hunting, dancing and feasts, until the younger one decides his beard is "not so blue" after all. A month after the wedding he leaves on a six-week trip and hands her every key, including one for a small room at the end of the lower gallery: "ouvrez tout, allez par tout, mais pour ce petit cabinet je vous deffens d'y entrer" (open everything, go everywhere, but this little room I forbid you to enter).

She leaves her guests and runs down a hidden staircase so fast she nearly breaks her neck. Inside, the floor is "tout couvert de sang caillé" (all covered with clotted blood) reflecting the bodies of dead women hung along the walls, all the wives he had married "& qu'il avoit égorgées l'une aprés l'autre" (and had cut the throats of, one after another). The key falls in the blood. She scrubs it with sand and grit, but "la clef estoit Fée" (the key was enchanted): when the blood came off one side it came back on the other.

He returns that very evening, sees the key, and gives her "un demy-quart-heure" (an eighth of an hour) to pray. Her sister Anne watches from the tower: "Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?" (Anne, sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?). He has her by the hair with his cutlass raised when her brothers, a dragoon and a musketeer, break in and run him through. He has no heirs, so the widow inherits everything, pays for her sister's marriage and her brothers' captaincies, and marries "un fort honneste homme" (a very decent man).

What we can confirm

"La Barbe bleüe" is the third tale in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, avec des Moralitez (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697), listed at page 57 in the book's table, between Le petit chaperon rouge (p. 47) and Le Maistre Chat (p. 83). The book's privilege, dated Fontainebleau, October 28, 1696, is in the name of "P. Darmancour", Charles Perrault's teenage son Pierre, and was registered in Paris on January 11, 1697.

Then the verse. The first "Moralité": curiosity, "malgré tous ses attraits" (for all its charms), often costs many regrets, and, "n'en deplaise au sexe" (no offence to the ladies), it is a fleeting pleasure that always costs too much. The "Autre Moralité" turns around: anyone with sense can see "que cette histoire / Est un conte du temps passé" (this story is a tale of times past). "Il n'est plus d'Epoux si terrible" (there is no longer a husband so terrible); even a jealous one now "filer doux" (behaves meekly) beside his wife, and whatever colour his beard, "On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maistre" (it is hard to tell which of the two is master). The book's own subtitle phrase, "contes du temps passé", is the joke.

The 1922 London edition illustrated by Harry Clarke prints both morals in the old Samber English: "No husbands now such panic terrors cast... it is hard to say / Which of the two, the man or wife, bears sway."

The facts

• Table: "La Barbe bleüe. p. 57"; next tale "Le Maistre Chat... pag. 83". 1697 first edition, French Wikisource transcription; scan on Commons (from Gallica bpt6k10545223).
• Privilege Oct 28, 1696, "Sieur P. Darmancour"; registered Jan 11, 1697. same. (The transcription spells the cession line "F. Darmancour", likely a transcription slip; the grant line reads "P.")
• Pierre Perrault d'Armancour, son, born 1678; book signed with his name. BnF Essentiels.
• Quotes: "ouvrez tout, allez par tout"; "sang caillé"; "qu'il avoit égorgées l'une aprés l'autre"; "la clef estoit Fée"; "un demy-quart-heure"; "Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir"; brothers "l'un Dragon & l'autre Mousquetaire"; "un fort honneste homme". 1697 text.
• Two morals, "MORALITÉ" and "AUTRE MORALITÉ", with "Il n'est plus d'Epoux si terrible" and "On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maistre". 1697 text.
• English: "That this a story is of time long pass'd; / No husbands now such panic terrors cast"; Harrap, London, "First published August 1922", illustrated by Harry Clarke; translators named as J.E. Mansion and Robert Samber. Gutenberg #29021.

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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