BLUE BEARD.
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."