Blue Beard.
Perrault, the author of "Blue Beard," founded the story, popular belief assures us, on the history of a real person. The original was Giles de Retz, Lord of Laval, who was made Marshal of France in 1429. He was born in 1406, and fought under the command of Joan of Arc. He lived like a king in his castle, with two hundred horsemen for his guard of honor, besides fifty choristers, chaplains and musicians. He was wild and profligate, lavish with his own money and of other people's, and lived at the costliest rate.
When he had squandered his property, he took to the study of sorcery and magic, having an especial fancy for murdering young children. From the villages within a circuit of twenty miles, little boys and girls were seduced into his castle and there immolated according to some wild Pagan rites. Among his papers, history says, was found a list of two hundred children whom he had thus sacrificed.
On the 26th of October, 1440, then being thirty-four years old, he was burned in the city of Nantes, having been previously strangled in view of a vast multitude. The records of his trial, which lasted a whole month, are preserved among the manuscripts of the public library in Paris. In one of his castles the bones of forty-six, and in another of eighty children, were discovered. Marshal de Retz was certainly the type of Perrault's story. It appears that in his lifetime he was known by the sobriquet of Barbe Bleu.