I would suggest as complete a literature of the _Bluebeard_ subject as possible[2] and think perhaps it would be well to see what roots it had struck in German, Spanish, and Welsh soil,--fields always susceptible at that time to anything odd or romantic. When I was a child how often I cried with Sister Anne on the high tower, and looked for the three specks out on the ocean “no bigger than the head of a pin.” Thank God! their steeds always breasted the flood bravely and _arrived in time to save injured innocence_. Is not that the true origin of _Bluebeard_, in an age of chivalrous ideal, of strict theologico-popular views of justice and of feudal individualism? The box of Pandora and the key of Bluebeard may have some relationship--CURIOSITY, irrepressible though dangerous, is its keynote, and I wonder if it does not all come from India, like those mediæval tales that Gaston Paris tells about, or if it is not an old Gaelic myth, like that of _Balor-of-the-Mighty-Blows_ so well translated by Standish O’Grady in his _Silva Gadelica_.... Yours very truly, (Signed)  THOMAS J. SHAHAN. [2] See Appendix B. [Illustration] [Illustration] BLUEBEARD CHAPTER I GILLES DE RETZ _His Name, Family, Marriage, and Education_ The original of Bluebeard in the Mother Goose story was Gilles de Rais (changed in 1581 to Retz), though he is sometimes called _Gilles de Laval_ in history. Neither the date nor place of his birth is known with precision, but it took place in the autumn of 1404, probably at Machecoul, one of the family châteaux in the southern part of Brittany. The ancestors of Gilles de Retz belonged to four noble and illustrious families in Brittany: 1. Laval, sometimes called Montmorency-Laval; 2. Rais (changed to Retz in 1581); 3. Machecoul; and 4. Craon. These families could trace their ancestry to the eleventh or twelfth centuries. Gilles’s father was a Laval or Montmorency-Laval, named Guy; his grandfather was also Guy, and many of his ancestry bore the same surname. His grandmother was a sister of the great Du Guesclin; his great-grandmother was Joan, called _la Folle_, or “the Crazy.”