BLUEBEARD NO FICTION: THE DAILY MORNING JOURNAL AND COURIER, JULY 29, 1896

In the summer of 1896 a Connecticut morning paper told its readers that Bluebeard had been a real man. "Bluebeard No Fiction" filled the first column of page 6 of the Daily Morning Journal and Courier in New Haven on July 29, a feature by René Bache reprinted from the Hartford Times, and its hero is a scientist rather than a detective: Colonel Thomas Wilson of the Smithsonian, who went to Nantes a skeptic and came away, Bache writes, persuaded. The man behind the fairy tale was the Breton lord Gilles de Rais, printed here as "Gilles de Retz," and he was, the piece declares, "even worse than he was painted in the blood-curdling romance of Perrault."

Bache builds him as a man of contradictions, "first a loving husband and finally a fiend." He is the heir to castles and ready cash, married off by his grandfather Jean de Craon to Catherine de Thouars, then a soldier in the Hundred Years' War, captain of Joan of Arc's guard and a marshal of France at the coronation. Then comes the spending: a private troupe of actors, a chapel with a bishop's trappings, and two unfrocked priests brought from Italy as alchemists, Francois Prelati the better known, who in Bache's telling persuade him that their mixture needs the blood and heart of "a human being who had never had an impure thought." Children begin to disappear from the countryside, and the writer has them vanishing for eight years.

The ending moves fast. Rumors reach the bishop of Nantes, the lord is arrested in September 1440, and he refuses to plead before the church court until he is excommunicated, when, Bache says, he "broke down utterly." Pressed for details at the civil trial, he answers: "You torment me needlessly. I have already owned to enough crimes to send a thousand men to the scaffold. Why trouble me more?" The feature closes on his three last requests to the bishop, every one of them granted. In Bache's version the rope broke his neck before the flames could reach him, and his ashes went into a churchyard while those of his two condemned servants were thrown into the Loire.

This is a feature written more than four and a half centuries after the trial, not news and not a court record, and it mixes the record with legend; the Bluebeard link has never been established. The deck puts him "More Than Three Centuries Ago"; he died in 1440. Joan reaches Orléans here in 1424, but that campaign was in 1429. The church indictment ran to 49 articles, not forty-one, and the figure of 140 children appears in that indictment, where the paper gives it to the civil prosecutor. His body was taken from the pyre unburned and buried in the Carmelite church at Nantes. The secular court condemned him for murdering children, the church court for apostasy, invoking demons and sodomy; the 140 was an accusation, and the testimony concerns about 36 to 45 missing boys.

The Daily Morning Journal and Courier printed this piece in 1896, crediting it at the foot to "Rene Bache in the Hartford Times," and it is in the public domain in the United States. The page reproduced below is the Library of Congress scan from Chronicling America. The full citation, with the Library's own rights statement, sits under the scan.

Both parts of the story were captured: the headline, deck and all of column 1 in the first crop, and the short continuation at the top of column 2, ending "Hartford Times," in the second. The text is copied word for word, and nothing needed an [illegible] mark, though the first letters of many lines in column 1 are damaged in printing. The paper's own forms stand, among them "troubulous," the dropped word in "so far as it known," "Barbe Bleu" and "Abbe Boussard" for the priest Eugène Bossard. The name appears as "Gilles de Retz," "De Retz" and "de Retz," just as the compositor set it.

Transcription

Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.

BLUEBEARD NO FICTION.

Scientists Say That He Was An Actual Personage—Was a French Nobleman—Lived Near Nantes More Than Three Centuries Ago—Finally Executed for His Crimes—He Murdered No Fewer Than One Hundred and Forty Persons—A Criminal Monster Who Held the Baton of a Marshal.

Everybody has read about Bluebeard, and, having relinquished the confidence of childhood in fairy tales, has set him down as a figment of imagination. Nothing could be more unjust. A Smithsonian scientist, Colonel Thomas Wilson, has investigated him, and has found out that he was a real personage. His authentic history has thus been raked up out of what might have been oblivion, and it is proved with a fair degree of certainty that he was even worse than he was painted in the blood-curdling romance of Perrault.

To get at the facts of the case, Colonel Wilson recently visited the French city of Nantes, where the records of the veritable "Barbe Bleu" are officially filed. Skeptical at the start, he was surprised to find that the inhabitants of the town were well acquainted with the history of the criminally-disposed original of the storied monster. They showed him the chateau wherein he was imprisoned; they pointed out the cathedral which was the residence of the bishop who presided at the ecclesiastical tribunal by which he was tried; they indicated the place where he was condemned to death by a civil court, and finally they took him to the spot where Bluebeard was executed.

There was no proof of facts in these allegations; so Colonel Wilson started in to look up the evidence. He would not have got far if it had not been for good luck. It happened that a certain Abbe Boussard had newly written, as a prize essay, a translation into everyday Latin of the almost undecipherable Latin records of the Bluebeard case, preserved at Nantes in the archives of the Department of the Loire Inferieure. No ordinary scholar could have construed the archaic text; but, thanks to this assistance, Colonel Wilson was enabled to peruse the documents intelligently.

What the documents revealed was startling enough. They told the tale of the real Bluebeard—a human fiend, compared with whom the "Barbe Bleu" of the French romancer was almost mild and amiable. His true name was Gilles de Retz, and he lived about two hundred and fifty years before the time of Perrault, the story-teller. Be it understood that his identity must not be confounded with that of the Cardinal de Retz, who lived two hundred years later, and was imprisoned in the same Chateau de Nantes. His family was a great one, and was allied with many of the noblest of Brittany. The famous warrior, Bertrand du Guesclin, was a collateral ancestor of his.

Gilles de Retz was one of the most fortunate men of his time. He inherited numerous chateaux and estates, together with immense sums in ready cash. In fact, there was scarcely any nobleman of Brittany richer or more powerful than he. His father died early; his mother married again, and he was placed under the guardianship of his maternal grandfather, Jean de Craon. This Jean de Craon, by the way, was a descendant of the nobleman of the same name who suddenly encountered Charles V. in the forest, and, being himself esteemed a madman, predicted for that monarch such dire woe that the latter became insane on the spot and never recovered.

Jean de Craon married his grandson, Gilles de Retz, to a very charming young woman, whose name was Catherine de Thouars. She brought to him several valuable estates, and among them the Chateau de Machecoul, where he afterwards lived and where many of his horrible crimes were committed. The chateau was situated not far from Nantes. Perhaps the most interesting element in the whole narrative is the contradiction expressed by the life of this man, who was first a loving husband and finally a fiend; who was the bravest of the brave, and yet a coward of superstition; who was a patriot, and yet could murder innocent children wholesale, and apparently without remorse.

The old man, Jean de Craon, was a gallant fighter, and he took his grandson with him in his campaigns. When Gilles was only sixteen years old the two took their seats together in the great military council at Vannes. Those were troubulous days for Europe, when England was trying to wipe France out of existence, and the Hundred-Years' War was in full swing. From 1420 to 1424 the grandfather and grandson fought side by side. In 1424 came a meteor across France—Joan of Arc, who landed at Orleans, not far from the residence of Gilles de Retz. Gilles himself became captain of Joan's own guard, and did duty as her escort through the siege of Orleans and on the march to Rheims, where the king was to be crowned.

On the occasion of the coronation the baton of a marshal of France was bestowed upon de Retz. History tells of the events which followed, culminating in the trial and execution of the heroic Joan. Gilles went back to his estates in Brittany, and, so far as it known, he lived a peaceful and happy life, with his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, his nature was a restless one, and his fondness for display excessive. Though his fortune was immense his expenditures greatly exceeded his income. Foremost in rank among the nobles of his province, he considered it necessary to outshine all rivals.

At the same time he took up many fads that were as costly as they were bizarre. About the year 1432 he became infatuated with the theater, and maintained out of his own purse an entire troupe of actors, who performed on such occasions as he pleased at Orleans, at Nantes, at Vannes, or at Rennes. He besought the Pope to permit the establishment of a priest with the authority of bishop in his chateau. This petition was denied; nevertheless he maintained a chapel with all the paraphernalia of a bishop. Religious superstition was firmly grounded in the man's character, as will be seen later on. It was at about this period that he became enamored of the science of chemistry, through the aid of which he hoped to discover a means of converting base metals into gold. Success in the enterprise, he expected, would relieve him of his financial embarrassments.

With this end in view he brought from Italy two unfrocked priests who had gained fame as alchemists. The more renowned of the pair was one Francois Prelati. Over the credulous and superstition-haunted mind of De Retz these clever charlatans gained complete influence, and doubtless they egged him on to the crimes which were to make his name a byword of horror to generations yet unborn. They made him believe that they had intimate relations with the devil, and among the papers preserved in the archives at Nantes are a number of written agreements with his Satanic Majesty signed in their own blood by Gilles and his ingenious advisers. At length they induced him to think that he was independent of all law, human or divine, and in this notion he was persuaded to enter upon a veritable saturnalia of crime.

The clerical fakirs assured him that indispensable ingredients of the chemical mixture required were the blood and heart of a human being who had never had an impure thought. It was to satisfy this requirement that a regular system of abduction was inaugurated, agents being employed to steal children in the neighborhood and fetch them to the castle. Those were days when the disappearance of a child did not make such a disturbance as now. There was no police system; robbers and cut-throats roamed abroad, and there were wolves in the forests. Nobody was likely to suspect the first nobleman in Brittany of such crimes. Thus it is not so very surprising that the business of kidnapping and murder should have been carried on by De Retz and his associates for a period of eight years.

As subsequently appeared from the confessions of the guilty men, the children were killed in every way that imagination could suggest. Shut up in stone-walled rooms, where their appeals for mercy and cries of agony could be heard by nobody save their diabolical captors, they were subjected to inconceivable tortures. Some of them, finally, were torn limb from limb and burned. Their entrails were gloatingly inspected by the fiends—but it is impossible to go further; many of the acts to which de Retz and his confederates afterwards confessed are wholly indescribable in print. They merely afford an illustration of the possibilities of perversion of the human moral sense—the conditions under which a man is transformed into a beast infinitely more ferocious and pitiless than any wild animal.

The time came at length when certain rumors induced the bishop of Nantes to set on foot an investigation, which traced the mysterious abductions to the chateau of de Retz. He was arrested, in September, 1440, and thrown into prison at Nantes, together with the two priests. An ecclesiastical court was organized to try him, charges being preferred on forty-one articles of information. He was accused of practicing magic and of other offenses, including murder. The accused refused to plead, declaring that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in his case. This attitude he steadfastly preserved until a decree of excommunication was issued against him. Then he broke down utterly; for while careless as to the safety of his body, he believed that the decree would consign his soul to eternal perdition.

A civil trial followed, the prosecutor alleging against the defendant no fewer than one hundred and forty abductions and murders within eight years. Conviction and sentence promptly followed. De Retz confessed, as did also the two priests. When pressed for minute details, he said: "You torment me needlessly. I have already owned to enough crimes to send a thousand men to the scaffold. Why trouble me more?" He was condemned to be burned alive, with two of his criminal assistants. These, however, were not the priests, both of whom escaped punishment through clerical influence.

De Retz sent three last requests to the bishop of Nantes. The first of these was that the decree of excommunication issued against him might be revoked. The second was that he might be killed before being burned; and the third petition was that his ashes might be gathered and interred in holy ground. All these prayers were granted. His neck was broken by hanging in time enough to save him from the pain of the flames which started to consume the pyre of wood beneath his suspended body. His ashes were buried in a churchyard, while those of his two assistants, already mentioned, were thrown into the Loire.—Rene Bache in the Hartford Times.

Notes: Reprinted from the Hartford Times (credited at the end to René Bache, printed "Rene Bache"). The article fills column 1 under its headline and deck and continues at the top of column 2, ending at "Times." above the local item "WILL GO NEXT TUESDAY." Because column 1 is cut short by a hair-tonic advertisement at its foot, a single rectangle would take in that advertisement, so the story is supplied as ARTICLE-CROP.jpg (column 1) plus ARTICLE-CROP-PART-2.jpg (column 2). The printed forms are kept: "Gilles de Retz" / "De Retz" / "de Retz" (capitalisation varies in print), "Barbe Bleu", "Abbe Boussard", "Loire Inferieure", "Francois Prelati", "troubulous", "so far as it known" (word missing in print), "Hundred-Years' War". "Machecoul" has a damaged "h" but is readable. The deck calls him a man who lived "More Than Three Centuries Ago" while the text says about 250 years before Perrault; both are kept as printed. Line-end hyphenation from column setting has been joined (e.g. "Colo-/nel", "every-/day", "inheri-/ted", "Cath-/erine", "gloat-/ingly"); hyphens that occur within a line ("blood-curdling", "criminally-disposed", "story-teller", "superstition-haunted", "cut-throats", "stone-walled", "forty-one") are kept. The first letters of many lines at the left margin of column 1 are damaged in printing but readable. Readability: good; no [illegible] marks needed.