La Barbe Bleue

The very first time I saw him, he was haloed by torchlight and the murmur of a crowd. His reputation was immense - almost impossibly heroic - claiming he had ridden beside Joan of Arc and that his sword carved a path for France herself. My father’s voice trembled with awe when he told me I was chosen. And I… I was seventeen, dazzled by a name, by a smile that seemed simultaneously generous and grand. His warm, strong hand rested on mine with a weight.

For months after our wedding, I carried that glow with me, as if his grandeur had seeped into my own skin. When he laughed, servants hurried to echo it. When he prayed, priests lowered their heads. The castle itself seemed to lean towards him, its windows bright, its stones warm. I told myself any shadows I felt were only the size of my own doubt.

But, of course, the shadows deepened.

It was small things at first.

His eyes, when he thought himself unobserved, were vacant, restless, his mind clearly elsewhere.

His touch in bed shifted without warning, tenderness turning to a grasp too tight, a breath leaving me cold, and a sense of remoteness. Though he had passion, it felt as if I were a doll; he used me, sometimes violently, but it wasn’t about me. I could sense that.

There were the locked doors. He would march around with his keys, heavy at his belt, jangling like a chain.

And there was the smell. The first time I noticed it, I thought it was the drains. The castle grounds were full of them, choked with filth and summer’s rot. But the odour lingered indoors too, and when I turned the sheets in the morning, there was always a trace—iron and meat, like butcher’s paper damp with blood.

I told myself a lord must keep secrets, that men who had seen battle carried their own chambers of silence. Yet the servants muttered when I passed. I saw their hands move in signs of the cross, their heads bowed not in reverence but in fear.

One night, I lay awake beside him, his arm a dead weight over my ribs, and wondered: what is it to share a bed with a man you are realising you will never truly know? What is it to turn toward his breath in the dark and feel not love but the prickling of dread?

I believe it was then, not later, that I first betrayed myself. Because instead of rising, instead of leaving, I closed my eyes and willed myself to believe in the hero I had married.

The key was cold and felt surprisingly light considering the importance he had bestowed on it. I had carried it all day in the pocket of my gown, its weight pressing against my thigh as if it were alive, as if it knew where it belonged. He had left at dawn, bound for Nantes, and his parting command was simple: “All the keys are yours, save one. Guard it well, but never use it.”

Never use it.

The words burned into me. For hours, I wandered the galleries, stood at the windows, listened to the hollow hush of the house. My own footsteps seemed to betray me, echoing down the corridors and sounding louder than they should on the stairs. And always the thought of that door, at the far end of the northern wing, where the air felt colder, where the candles burned low, no matter how many were lit.

By dusk, I could not bear it.

The lock turned willingly, almost with its own slow momentum, as if the door itself were keen to share its secret. The smell came first: iron, damp, something sweet and rotten beneath. I pressed my sleeve to my face and stepped inside.

At first, the gloom was shapeless. Then shapes gathered: a child’s shoe on the floor, pale cloth folded as if waiting for the wash, and then, God forgive me, the bones. They were not arranged with reverence, not buried, not blessed. They lay in heaps, tangled with ribbons, fragments of hair, rosaries broken into beads that glittered faintly in the candlelight. Against the wall, a chair still bound with rope. On the table, a knife.

I could not move. My body seemed to forget itself. Only my mind hurried, tossing up every memory: his hand on my cheek, his breath in my ear, the weight of him pressing me down into the bed. How many times had he come to me from this room, washed clean, smiling as if nothing clung to him? And I had welcomed him, kissed him, given myself as though he were whole.

The key slipped from my hand. It struck the stone floor with a sound too loud, too final. And in that ringing silence, a thought shot through me: I am not innocent. I have loved a monster. I have lain with him. His darkness has already entered me.

I staggered back into the hall, clutching the wall for balance. The door closed behind me, but the chamber did not. It was inside me, as surely as he had been. And there was no ridding of it now.

Had he given me the key, knowing I would use it? That he was, in fact, desperate for a co-conspirator, that I would bear his secret with him, and somehow we would be bound by this in a way that gave him comfort? And what a wretch he has made me. There will be no comfort for me, not here nor in Hell, for which he will surely damn me when he discovers I have betrayed him.

Historical Note
The legend of Bluebeard was popularised by Charles Perrault in 1697, but many scholars have connected it to the life of Gilles de Rais (1405–1440), a Breton nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc and later fell into infamy. After a brilliant military career, de Rais was accused of abducting and murdering children in his castles near Nantes. He confessed under torture and was executed in 1440. Though the direct link to the fairy tale cannot be proved, local memory fused his crimes with the archetype of the wealthy husband who conceals a chamber of horrors, giving rise to the enduring myth of Bluebeard. The echoes remain today: several restaurants in Loire-Atlantique still bear the name Barbe Bleue, and the castle at Pornic, where de Rais once resided, still stands—its towers a reminder of how easily legend and history entwine.