BLUEBEARD, the monster of Charles Perrault's tale of Barbe Bleue, who murdered his wives and hid their bodies in a locked room. Perrault's tale was first printed in his Histoires et contes du temps passe (1697). The essentials of the story—Blue beard's prohibition to his wife to open a certain door during his absence, her disobedience, her discovery of a gruesome secret, and her timely rescue from death—are to be found in other folklore stories, none of which, however, has attained the fame of Bluebeard. Though Perrault does not state the number of his crimes, Bluebeard is generally credited with the murder of seven wives. His history belongs to the common stock of folklore, and has even been ingeniously fitted with a mythical interpretation. In France the Bluebeard legend has its local habitation in Brit tany, but whether the existing traditions connecting him with Gilles de Rais (q.v.) or Comorre the Cursed, a Breton chief of the 6th century, were anterior to Perrault's time, we have no means of determining. The identification of Bluebeard with Gilles de Rais, the bete d'extermination of Michelet's forcible language, persists locally in the neighbourhood of the various castles of the baron, especially at Machecoul and Tiffauges, the chief scenes of his infamous crimes. Gilles de Rais, however, had only one wife, who survived him, and his victims were in the majority of cases young boys. The less widespread identification of Bluebeard with Comorre is supported by a series of frescoes dating only a few years later than the publication of Perrault's story, in a chapel at St. Nicolas de Bieuzy dedicated to St. Tryphine, in which the tale of Bluebeard is depicted as the story of the saint, who in history was the wife of Comorre. Comorre or Conomor had his original headquarters at Carhaix, in Finistere. Alain Bouchard (Grandes croniques, Nantes, i531) asserts that Comorre had al ready put several wives to death before he married Tryphine. In the Legendes bretonnes of the count d'Amezeuil the church legend becomes a charming fairy tale.