#blue beard

[towns-end-bindery]

The Story of Blue Beard by Charles Perrault

🗝️💀

This is a letter octavo book hand foiled on the cover in silver, gold, and red. The story and the images in the book all came from Project Gutenberg.

I will be making a few of these to be sold at The Obscure Summer Solstice Night Market on June 16 in Los Angeles. Come by if you can!

[enchantedbook]

'Blue Beard', illustration by Volzhina Ekaterina

[expectoro]

Barbe Bleue (2009) dir. Catherine Breillat

[themancorialist]

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

[jabutipiranga]

It honestly makes more sense than I expected.

[adarkrainbow]

Sometimes, people wish fairy tales were real life. But in some cases, we deeply regret it...

Today I want to briefly talk about an actual real-life case of Bluebeard - the infamous French serial killer Landru. Of his full name, Henri Désiré Landru. Of his mediatic nickname, "The Gambais Blue Beard". Never had a criminal case been so close to the world of fairy tales: people like to call murderers "witches", "ogres", "devils", but this man is an actual real-life Bluebeard.

The criminal investigation began in 1918, when the mayor of the small town of Gambais (Yvellines) received a letter from a certain Miss Pellat. Miss Pellat was worried about one of her friends, Anne Collomb: she had recently taken domicile with her fiancé, Mister Dupont, at Gambais, but since then had abruptly cut off all communications. The mayor unfortunately could not be of help: he had no knowledge of any "mister Dupont" at Gambais. Not much later, the mayor received another letter about a missing woman - this time it was a "miss Lacoste", who asked about the wellness of her sister, Célestine Buisson, who had recently moved to Gambais with a "mister Frémyet". But again, the mayor was at loss: he knew not of anyone by this name.

The mayor however had the two families get in contact, and they realized that mister Dupont and mister Frémyet were one and the same... And both women had answered almost identical matrimonial advertisements. This opened an investigation, led by inspector Jules Belin. They found that the this mysterious man had taken his fiancées to an isolated villa near Gambais, called "L'Ermitage" (the place here the hermit dwells) because it was 300 meters away from the nearest house. The owner of the house explained that he did not live by it - he was renting it to "mister Frémyet". Said mister Frémyet claimed to live in Rouen, but this was a lie, and all of his letters were actually redirected to the mailbox of a certain "mister Guillet"... located at the house of Célestine Buisson, the second missing woman, in Paris.

The investigation could have stopped there, if a neighbor of miss Lacoste hadn't recognized the mysterious man, getting out of a Parisian earthenware shop with a a woman. The inspector Jules Belin discovered that this man was the famous "Lucien Guillet", and he had left an adress to the shop - for a special delivery. Finding the adress to be in Paris, he was arrested, in april of 1919, on the very day he was celebratng his fiftieth anniversary with... his family, his wife and kids. And this is where the inspector discovered that Dupont/Frémyet/Guillet was in reality called... Henri Désiré Landru.

Let us go back in time to understand how Landru became the monster he is known as. He was not born in a wealthy family, though his family was not miserable and he had quite a happy childhood. He was born in 1869, his mother was a seamstress, his father a factory worker. In school he proved to be excellent at drawings and mathematics, which led him to perform some architecture studies (though he did not pursue there very far - enough to get some low-ranking positions at an architecture firm as his first job).

In 1889, the same year he got said first job, he encountered his future wife, Marie-Catherine Remy, daughter of a laundress. To seduce her, he lied - the first of the many lies he would tell her. He pretended to have a better job within the firm he worked with than he really had, and as such he managed to marry her in 1893 (he had to do three years of military service in-between). Together they had, beteen 1891 and 1900, four children. After the crimes of their father was revealed, they demanded to have their family name changed to one of their mother, Remy.

Landru was not someone whom fortune smiled upon. Between 1893 and 1900, he practiced a dozen of different jobs and was hired by fifteen different people - sometimes he was a plumber, other times an accountant, sometimes he made roofs for houses, other times he draw maps for various projects... With four children to feed, this clearly wasn't enough - the Landru clan was living in poverty. So, to take care of his family as best as he could, Landru decided to abandon honest jobs, and he got into scams.

From 1900 to 1914, Landru organied many different scams and crooked operations to steal people's money. His first scam was organizing a national advertisement campaign about a future motorized bicycle factory (he had indeed prepared the previous year an actual, serious project for motorized bicycle, which he used to fuel his scam). He took pre-commands, but asked for a third of the price to be paid in advance - and of course, no bicycle was actually built...

Constantly switching names, he kept inventing more and more tricks. Buying garages but selling them immediately before even giving the original owner their money ; encouraging investors to fund a factory that did not exist ; organizing engagement celebrations with a woman only to run away after stealing her bank shares... Unfortunately he wasn't really good at fleeing justice - he regularly got minor condemnations to prison, spending there some months or years a handful of times. One of these condemnations was cut-short after he attempted a suicide, and the psychiatric reports of the time are very interesting when it comes to Landru's mental state. Because they noted that he clearly was not insane... but they still wrote that he was not fully sane. Not disturbed enough to have any mental disease, but still too disturbed to be treated like a regular person.

What happened in 1914 that made Landru fall into his "Blue Beard" ways? Why switch from being a petty crook to a serial killer? The most common and accepted theory is that it is due to the justice system. Due to having been sent to jail for a given amount of sentences "above three months", it was decided that his next sentence was to be sent "au bagne" - at the Guyane penal colony. Not only would this mean an exile and a life-long sentence, but back in the 1910s, many people di not survive the penal colonies due to the awful living conditions prisoners had to undergo. This was a true death sentence. So, Landru decided that, next time, he wouldn't be caught...

From 1914 onward, Landru put together a large "marital scam" with deadly conclusions. He put out matrimonial ads, again inventing all sorts of names and pseudonyms, but always presenting the same identity - he was a wealthy and lonely widow searching for a wife. By lying like this, he attracted 283 different women, that he seduced and entertained for a time - but many he rejected and did not do anything with. Why? Because they were ot isolated enough, or not rich enough. Landru was searching for victims with no direct family or close friends, and with some money and goods (even if they were not wealthy or upper-class). He managed to find some... he found ten of them, and he killed them one by one.

Landru was an expert liar and a sweet-talker. After making his victims believe he was indeed the wealthy widow he pretended, he convinced them to sign papers that would allow him to take control of their bank accounts. Then he took them to an isolated villa, where he killed them. He killed his four first victims in a villa of the small town of Vernouillet, but he then switched to the Gambais villa he is most famous for, where he murdered seven more people. Why the change? Because one day, as he got back from the Vernouillet house, he got caught with an expired train ticket and he was forced to leave papers with the villa's adress. Not wanting to get caught, he changed his "murder lair". Once the murders were performed, he took all of the money of his victims, and then went to their house to remove their furniture and belongings. He was even helped by one of his sons to move the items into garages and storage rooms he rented, before selling them at auctions.

His son, you ask? Well yes. Because you see: Landru pretended to his wife and kids that he was an antiquarian, and second-hand dealer - and they thought that all these furniture he handled, he had actually bought... And wait, you still ask, seven plus four? It makes eleven victims, not ten! Indeed... Not all of Landru's victims were women. One was a man. When he killed in 1915 his first victim, Jeanne Cuchet, a 39 year old widow... he also killed her son, the 17 years old André, who had been taken with his mother to the Vernouillet villa. Landru seemingly did not want to leave any "collatoral damage" behind... Not even animals were spared: we know that around the time of the murder of his final victim, Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, the 37 years old owner of a prostitution house, he also strangled her three dogs and left their corpses in her house in Paris.

It has been regularly pointed out that the context of World War One, "The Great War", whose dates match the dates of Landru's murder (he began his fake marital ads in 1914, killed his first victims in February 1915, his last in January 1919), it what definitively helped and eased Landru's transformation into a serial killer. His mental state, already withered by his family's poverty, his mythomania and his fear of the punishment of justice, clearly worsened with the ambiance of death and destruction of the conflict. And the confusion and chaos caused by the war made his murders much easier. If he could regularly return to his wife and kids for brief sojourns, even though justice knew he was a convicted crook fleeing his sentence and his sending at a penal colony, it was thanks to the war keeping everybody busy. If he managed to attract so many lonely bachelors and widows in search for some money and a more stable situation, it was thanks to the war. And the war even helped him with his lies and fake identities: he kept pretending he was a refugee from Northern France (which was then occupied by the German forces), and used this as an excuse for him not having any official papers.

Let us go back to when Landru was arrested.

The police found the many garages where he kept the furniture of his victims. It also found his full and complete comptability - which not only revealed the vastitude of his marital scam (as he had kept the names and adresses of all of his 283 "eventual fiancées"), but also listed all of the tools he had bought for his murders (metal saws, wood saws, lot of coal). How did Landru killed his victims? We don't know exactly how - did he poison them, strangle them? It is a mystery to this day. But we do know how he got rid of the bodies... When investigating the Gambais villa, police found burned remains in the chimney and in the stove. A few pieces of burned female garnment... and burned human bones. Three heads, five feet, six hands. It is considered today that Landru cut off the body of his victims in pieces - the large parts (torso, arms, legs) were buried in the forest or thrown in ponds, while the smaller parts (head, hands, feet) were burned in his stove and/or chimney. In fact, despite being isolated, L'Ermitage still got complaints by those living closest to it due to the "foul smells" that came out of its chimney from time to time.

But what condemned Landru more than anything was a little black notebook he had with him all the time... A notebook in which he had noted the name of the eleven missing person, with hours associated with them - likely the hours of the murders. As I said before, Landru had been an architect and accountant as well as a scammer - he was talented for mathematics and preparations, and from his days as a simple mythomaniac thief he had kept the habit of noting down everything. The name of his victims, the amount of money taken, his fake identities... And he had kept this habit, even as he had put up murderous plans. A final proof, which he tried to explain poorly to the justice: every time he brought one of his victims to Vernouillet or Gambais, it was by train, and he always got a two-way ticket for him... and a one way ticket for the woman.

Landru's trial began in 1921. It was one of the marking cases of the decade. All the newspapers were talking about this (even regularly mispelling Landru's name), and many famous singers and actors of Paris at the time came to assist to the trial - even foreign aristocrats came in France just for this occasion. It wasn't just because of the enormity and morbidity of such a case, as serial killers weren't truly a "thing" back then ; it was also due to Landru's own behavior.

Landru tried to use his eloquence, arrogance, humor and talent for acting to move the trial into his own way. It did not work, as he was condemned for his crimes, but it still managed to make his trial a true show. Many of Landru's lines were preserved by records and newspapers - his jury was known to often laugh at his jokes. He kept denying having killed anyone. "Show me the corpses!" he said. "If these women have any problem with me, they should file a complaint!". He admitted to the lies, the scams, the thief - he even cried when he admitted he cheated on his wife... But he pretended this story of "murders" was fully invented. "Mister, you keep speaking of my head - I am sorry I do not have many to offer you!" ; "Me? I made people disappear? Well, if you start believing anything the newspapers claim...". To the jury he kept saying they shouldn't bother to come all the way to the courtroom for "such small things", and he even had this crazy exchange with the judge. When the judge asked him what his children could think, seeing him with so many women, h answered "Mister the Judge, when I give orders to my children, they obey it, and I do not need to explain the why or the how. I wonder how you raise your own kids!"

The lawyers also kept putting out "coup de théâtre" after "coup de théâtre" - such as bringing in the courtroom the very stove in which Landru burned his victims. But the most famous episode is this one: the lawyer in charge of defending Landru claimed that the victims were not dead. They were alive, and about to enter the courtroom... right now! Immediately, all of the people of the jury turned their head towards the door, from which no one came. The lawyer, happy with his trick, explained that this was a proof that, deep in their heart, the jury knew there was a possibility for these women to not be dead, else they wouldn't have turned their head. He wanted to convince them that, subconsciously, they could feel these accusations were ridiculous and unfounded. However this turned against him when the other party noted "But... have you noticed? Landru did not turn his head."

Landru was beheaded at Versailles in 1922, and up until the end he still had a good word. To the priest who asked him if he believed in God, he answered "I am going to die, and you want me to play a guessing game?". To the man who offered him a last glass of rhum and a last cigarette, he answered "No, it's bad for the health." And to his own lawyer, who asked him if he was ready to finally confess to the murders before dying, he answered his last words: "This, Master, is my small luggage..."

There are many more things to say about the Landru case - the drawing he made of the stove, and behind which he wrote a mysterious sentence which might have been a confession ; the way his murder-villas and his stove kept being sold around and transformed through the following decades, but since we are looking at a Blue-Beard, I want to focus on how, despite being recognized as a well-known murderer, he still had women fall in love with him... After his arrest, and until his execution, he received four thousand letters of admiration from women, eight hundred of which were apparently marriage proposals.

The last of the lovers of Landru, the woman he was living with when he was arrested, and the one who might have been his next victim, was Fernande Segret. Fernande Segret, who admitted in court that Landru had tried to poison her two times during her relationship... Fernande Segret, who organized a trial for diffamation when in the 60s Claude Chabrol made a movie about Landru and partially won it... Fernande Segret who, on the anniversary of Landru's wedding proposal to her, in 1968, killed herself by drowning at the Flers castle: she still had a picture of Landru in her bedroom...

[ariel-seagull-wings]

The Cobbler and His Three Daughters (Blue Beard)

Basque Folktale

@themousefromfantasyland @the-blue-fairie @maimoncat

Like many others in the world, there was a cobbler who had three daughters.

They were very poor. He only earned enough just to feed his children.

He did not know what would become of him.

He went about in his grief, walking, walking sadly on, and he meets a gentleman, who asks him where he is going, melancholy like that.

He answers him, "Even if I shall tell you, I shall get no relief."

"Yes, yes; who knows? Tell it."

"I have three daughters, and I have not work enough to maintain them. I have famine in the house."

"If it is only that, we will manage it. You will give me one of your daughters, and I will give you so much money."

The father was, very grieved to make any such bargain; but at last he comes down to that. He gives him his eldest daughter.

This gentleman takes her to his palace, and, after having passed some time there, he said to her that he has a short journey to make -- that he will leave her all the keys, that she might see everything, but that there is one key that she must not make use of -- that it would bring misfortune on her.

He locks the door on the young lady.

This young girl goes into all the rooms, and finds them very beautiful, and she was curious to see what there was in that which was forbidden.

She goes in, and sees heaps of dead bodies. Judge of her fright! With her trembling she lets the key fall upon the ground.

She trembles for the coming of her husband. He arrives, and asks her if she has entered the forbidden chamber.

She tells him "Yes."

He takes her and puts her into an underground dungeon; hardly, hardly did he give her enough to eat (to live on), and that was human flesh.

This cobbler had finished his money, and he was again melancholy.

The gentleman meets him again, and says to him, "Your other daughter is not happy alone; you must give me another daughter. When she is happy, I will send her back; and I will give you so much money."

The father did not like it; but he was so poor that, in order to have a little money, he gives him his daughter.

The gentleman takes her home with him, like the other. After some days he said to her too, "I must take a short journey. I will give you all the keys of the house, but do not touch such a key of such a room."

He locks the house door, and goes off, after having left her the food she needed.

This young girl goes into all the rooms, and, as she was curious, she went to look into the forbidden chamber.

She was so terribly frightened at the sight of so many dead bodies in this room, that she lets the key fall, and it gets stained.

Our young girl was trembling as to what should become of her when the master should come back.

He arrives, and the first thing he asks, "Have you been in that room?"

She told him "Yes."

He takes her underground, like her other sister.

This cobbler had finished his money, and he was in misery; when the gentleman comes to him again, and says to him, "I will give you a great deal of money if you will let your daughter come to my house for a few days; the three will be happier together, and I will send you the two back again together."

The father believes it, and gives him his third daughter. The gentleman gives him the money, and he takes this young girl, like the others.

At the end of some days he leaves her, saying that he is going to make a short journey.

He gives her all the keys of the house, saying to her, "You will go into all the rooms except this one," pointing out the key to her.

He locks the outside door, and goes off.

This young girl goes straight, straight to the forbidden chamber; she opens it, and think of her horror at seeing so many dead people.

She thought that he would kill her too, and, as there were all kinds of arms in this chamber, she takes a sabre with her, and hides it under her dress.

She goes a little further on, and sees her two sisters almost dying with hunger, and a young man in the same condition.

She takes care of them as well as she can till the gentleman comes home.

On his arrival, he asks her, "Have you been in that room?"

She says, "Yes;" and, in giving him back the keys, she lets them fall on the ground, on purpose, and at the instant that this gentleman stoops to pick them up, the young lady cuts off his head (with her sword).

Oh, how glad she was! Quickly she runs to deliver her sisters and that young man, who was the son of a king. She sends for her father, the cobbler, and leaves him there with his two daughters, and the youngest daughter goes away with her young gentleman, after being married to him.

If they lived well, they died well too.

[emayuku]

Blue Hair

Blue Hair

~CLICK HERE~

Blue Beard is a fairy tale adapted by Elizabeth Mayuku, written by Ana Cristina Herreros, illustrated by Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou. This book was originally published in 1697 by the same author as Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beau and many more classic.

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