Bluebeard III
Welcome back! We’re going through Charles Perrault’s original Bluebeard story, helpfully providing him with some hot takes. We’ll see if it helps–he has yet to take my advice for some reason. Last time, we left off with Bluebeard's wife about to learn that curiosity kills cats (probably). Let’s continue, shall we?
The crowd of guests which had descended upon Second Daughter’s evening is upstairs oohing and aahing at a tapestry or something, and SD is going out of her mind with curiosity about the closet. She decides that she can’t wait, like, not even for another second: without considering the impropriety of it all, she leaves her guests and runs downstairs. (How cool is that tapestry, tho? V cool, apparently, because no one follows her). Probably would have been good if someone had: she’s so excited to get downstairs that she forgets how to go down stairs properly, falls, and almost breaks something. She should take that as a sign! (She won’t.)
She doesn’t. We pick up with Second Daughter standing in front of the forbidden closet door. She kills some time thinking about what Bluebeard had said, she thinks about being pre-guilty, but eventually she can’t take it anymore. She opens the door.
OOH! Whatever’s inside takes a few moments to register, so she’s standing there, heart hammering, blinking wildly, in front of an open murder chamber for a hot second. When her brain and her eyes begin to talk to each other again, she realizes that a) there’s blood on the floor, and b) “the bodies of several dead women” are lining the floorboards. Interesting.
CP takes a bit of wind out of the central mystery by telling us up front that these are Bluebeard’s previous/dead wives. (Note to CP: Tension often helps readers keep the pages turning! Providing the answer to a central story question in an anticlimactic aside is not the best way to stoke tension, buddy.)
As she’s standing there having this horrific scene downloaded into her brain, she freezes, and the ring of keys drops out of her hand. Now, she hasn’t gone into the murder chamber, or, if she has, Chaz has neglected to tell us this information; but, for the purposes of this story, let’s say she’s leaned into the room and is craning her neck around the corner or something when she drops the keys.
She recovers enough to pick up the keys, lock the door behind her, and to head to her bedroom. Hopefully her guests have tactfully shown themselves out at this point. They didn’t sound like the most aware bunch, but let’s assume that they ran out of ottomans to gander at. She’s sitting on her bed, rocking back and forth, trying to get a hold of herself—when she notices something unhelpful: there’s blood on the key. Which means that she was holding the key above a puddle of blood before dropping it. We’ve already talked about how, sure, she might have gone in the room, or something: but this means that the blood on the floor wasn’t dry—dry blood doesn’t transfer surfaces that easily. Let’s unpack that, shall we?
First up: if it’s not dry, it’s wet. (baby steps)
If it’s wet, then it’s gotta be somewhat fresh.
This means that at least one of the women in the room is recently dead. I have no idea how long it takes blood to dry, and I’m going to assume it has a lot to do with how even the floor is, the humidity in the area, what season it is…in what way the women were murdered…in short, a bunch of information that I don’t have. Let’s just say, for the purposes of this argument, that for there to be still-wet standing blood on the likely mostly even floor, the most recent murder occurred within the last week.
Bluebeard and his current wife have been married for one month. This means that at least one previous wife was kept alive, quiet, and hidden in a closet with either a bunch of corpses or a bunch of equally terrified ladies (or some mixture of the two), for at least three weeks. I don’t need to belabor this point/think about this too much, because I enjoy sleeping at night, but I’m just going to say that this is somehow much worse than the general “lol he murders his wives” reputation Bluebeard has, and way worse than a folksy tale I’d only remembered as a general origin story for the phrase “He’s got skeletons in his closet.” This is where that phrase came from, right?
Back to Second Daughter. She picks up the key and freaks out (again). She tries to wipe it off, she tries to wash it, she tries to wash it with soap, she tries to wash it with sand. Bloodstain remains. Relatable! Blood is super hard to get out of things, because prior to modern forensic technology, God was like, “people need a way to figure out whodunit,” and then He thought for a bit and then made murder messy and the cleanup a nightmare. Hashtag, theology.
Ah, but it turns out that her efforts were all in vain anyway, because we have here the first Magique of this story: the key is uncleanable. Seems like a really niche superpower, but, k. Way to write yourself out of that one, Chaz. Note to Second Daughter: You still could have probably figured a way out of this? As of right now, we believe that your creep of a husband’s going to be out of town for the next month and a half. Get thee to a locksmith, get a duplicate key made. Done.
Unfortunately, this would be too smart, and CP decides to up the timeline a bit. Later that same evening, Bluebeard comes back. (He’s been gone for like an hour. Did he even really pack his bags?) He provides the explanation that he received word on the road (within that hour of travel) that the business he was planning on doing abroad had been taken care of already! Well! Imagine that. Bluebeard, bb, it’s getting harder and harder to believe that you’re not just a psychopath, and that saddens me, man. Also: come up with better explanations for things, it’s not hard. “I forgot something,” for example, would have taken less time to say.
His poor wife tries to act super happy that he’s home inexplicably/early. She does love him, right? We glossed over their courtship, but the last thing I remember Second Daughter saying on the matter was that she began to find his beard less blue, which is hardly a cry of adoration.
He asks for his keys. I imagine her heart starts pounding even faster.
Her hand is trembling as she passes them over, poor girl. Bluebeard knows exactly what’s happened. (He’s seen this all before. C’mon, man.)
Bluebeard’s like, hey, there’s a key missing.
SD: I know.
BB: It’s the mystical magical murder closet key.
SD: Yep.
BB: Where is it?
SD: [RUNS UPSTAIRS TO FETCH]. Just saying, Second Daughter, this is when you flee. But fine, be obedient now.
I’ll stop blaming the victim. Maybe she’s in full blown PTSD at this point. I mean, I would be.
Bluebeard takes several minutes to examine it, because he’s a goofy drama boy, and then looks sharply at his wife, who is probably crying at this point. (Does he really love her?)
He asks why there is blood on the key. I hate it when people do this – make the recipient of a dressing-down state the obvious. It’s like, we get it, I messed up, let’s just get to the new information, please…but, okay, be pedantic about it.
She gulps and grasps at deniability straws. She says she doesn’t know.
Bluebeard loses it, cries out that obvi she knows what’s up, and tells her to “go back, and take your place among the ladies you saw there.” So far, I’m failing to see a reason for this series of crimes. Bb, you’re a loaded man in a small town. Tell me why killing your wives was necessary? Even assuming the first one was a nightmare and you felt somewhat justified (Ed. Note: I AM NOT CONDONING MURDER I’M JUST TRYING TO FIGURE OUT THE MOTIVATION HERE), you could have a) properly cleaned up after that whole situation instead of stowing the corpse in a very accessible location to decompose and b) actually started over with Lessons Learned from your first marriage. There are very few reasons to kill multiple wives, especially when it looks like (with current wife) you’re just performing some sort of questionable test on your spouse which you’re priming her to fail.
All of which merely means that (unless BB becomes suddenly very sympathetic in the remaining paragraphs) that he’s just a psycho serial killer, which is great.
Second Daughter falls at his feet and promises to sin no more. It’s all very moving, but, as CP notes: “She would have melted a rock, so beautiful and sorrowful was she, but Bluebeard had a heart harder than any rock!”
With which fantastic character synopsis we’ll leave it this time.