issance.

Through Florence at that hour stalked the Black Pest. The narrow streets
were choked with corpses. The people were dying. So too was an epoch.
While grave-diggers were at work a page of history was being turned. On
the other side was a dawn which now is day. The knell of expiring night
Boccaccio answered with laughter. Into a shroud he tossed flowers. Of
these many were frail, some blood-red, others toxic; a few only were
white. From them come the odors that formed the moral atmosphere of
indifferent Italy, of careless France, of England after the Restoration.
They were the parterre on which gallantry grew.

VI

BLUEBEARD

Before the parterre of gallantry budded, at an epoch when the Middle Ages
were passing away, there appeared a man, known to amateurs of light opera
and of fairy tales as Bluebeard, but who, everywhere, save in the nursery
and the study, has been regarded as unreal.

Bluebeard was no more a creation of Perrault or of Offenbach than Don Juan
was a creation of Mozart or of Moliere. Both really lived, but Bluebeard
the more demoniacally. According to the documents contained in what is
technically known as his _proces_, his name was Gilles de Retz and, at a
period contemporaneous with the apparition of Jehanne d'Arc, he was a
great Breton lord, seigneur of appreciable domains.[56]

At Tiffauges, one of his seats, the towers of the castle have fallen, the
drawbridge has crumbled, the moat is choked. Only the walls remain. Within
is an odor of ruin, a sensation of chill, a savor of things damned, an
impression of space, of shapes of sin, of monstrous crimes, of sacrilege
and sorcery. But in his day it probably differed very little from other
keeps except in its extreme fastidiousness. Gilles de Retz was a poet. In
a land where no one read, he wrote. At a time when the chief relaxation of
a baron was rapine, he preferred the conversation of thinkers. Very rich
and equally sumptuous, the spectacle which he presented must have been
that of a great noble living nobly, one who, as was usual, had his own
men-at-arms, his own garrison, pages, squires, the customary right of
justice high and low, but, over and above these things, a taste for
elegancies, for refinements, for illuminated missals, for the music of
grave hymns. He was devout. In addition to a garrison, he had a chapel
and, for it, almoners, acolytes, choristers. Necessarily a soldier, he had
been a brave one. In serving featly hi