“Pardon me, my dear,” said her husband, “you are greatly mistaken.  The Middle Ages were not, as you believe, an epoch of uncleanliness.  People frequented the baths assiduously.  At Paris, for example, where these establishments were numerous, the ‘stove-keepers’ went about the city announcing that the water was hot.  It is not until the Renaissance that uncleanliness becomes rife in France.  When you think that that delicious Reine Margot kept her body macerated with perfumes but as grimy as the inside of a stovepipe! and that Henri Quatre plumed himself on having ‘reeking feet and a fine armpit.’”

“My dear, for heaven’s sake,” said madame, “spare us the details.”

While Chantelouve was speaking, Durtal was watching him.  He was small and rotund, with a bay window which his arms would not have gone around.  He had rubicund cheeks, long hair very much pomaded, trailing in the back and drawn up in crescents along his temples.  He had pink cotton in his ears.  He was smooth shaven and looked like a pious but convivial notary.  But his quick, calculating eye belied his jovial and sugary mien.  One divined in his look the cool, unscrupulous man of affairs, capable, for all his honeyed ways, of doing one a bad turn.

“He must be aching to throw me into the street,” said Durtal to himself, “because he certainly knows all about his wife’s goings-on.”

But if Chantelouve wished to be rid of his guest he did not show it.  With his legs crossed and his hands folded one over the other, in the attitude of a priest, he appeared to be mightily interested in Durtal’s work.  Inclining a little, listening as if in a theatre, he said, “Yes, I know the material on the subject.  I read a book some time ago about Gilles de Rais which seemed to me well handled.  It was by abbe Bossard.”

“It is the most complete and reliable of the biographies of the Marshal.”

“But,” Chantelouve went on, “there is one point which I never have been able to understand.  I have never been able to explain to myself why the name Bluebeard should have been attached to the Marshal, whose history certainly has no relation to the tale of the good Perrault.”

“As a matter of fact the real Bluebeard was not Gilles de Rais, but probably a Breton king, Comor, a fragment of whose castle, dating from the sixth century, is still standing, on the confines of the forest of Carnoet.  The legend is simple.  The king asked Guerock, count of Vannes, for the hand of his daughter, Triphine.  Guerock refused, because he had heard that the king maintained himself in a constant state of widowerhood by cutting his wives’ throats.  Finally Saint Gildas promised Guerock to return his daughter to him safe and sound when he should reclaim her, and the union was celebrated.

“Some months later Triphine learned that Comor did indeed kill his consorts as soon as they became pregnant.  She was big with child, so she fled, but her husband pursued her and cut her throat.  The weeping father commanded Saint Gildas to keep his promise, and the Saint resuscitated Triphine.