[7] In "Portrait de Femme" (Le double Jardin) Maeterlinck distinguishes between virtue and vice: they are the same forces, he says ... a virtue is only a vice that rises instead of falling.
[8] Verhaeren, p. 298.
[9] Les Heures d'après-midi.
[10] Wisdom and Destiny, Chapter I.
[11] Verhaeren, "La Foule" (Les Visages de la Vie).
CHAPTER X
Of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (Ardiane and Bluebeard) and Sœur Béatrice (Sister Beatrice) which are contained in the third volume of Théâtre (1901) Maeterlinck has said that they were written as libretti for musicians who had asked for them, and that they contain no philosophical or poetical arrière-pensée.[1] Critics, however, seem to be agreed in reading considerable meaning into both plays. The fact that of the six wives of Bluebeard five bear the names of Maeterlinck's previous heroines—Melisanda, Alladine, Ygraine, Bellangère, and Selysette—at once suggests a symbolic intention, which we are the more inclined to suspect when we find that Ardiane, though a new name, is in reality the same person, or the same idea, as both Astolaine and Aglavaine.
The drama was written under the direct inspiration, and probably collaboration, of Mme Leblanc, whose ideas, as expressed in Le Choix de la Vie, are emphasised in the second act, which, apart from its doctrine, is beautiful.