Bluebeard
By Charles Perrault

• Characters
• Bluebeard
• Was rich and had fine houses in city and country
• Had a blue beard which made him look ugly and frightful
• Women and girls fled at the sight of him
• Had already married several woman and no one knew what had become of them
• Neighbour
• Respectable lady
• Had two daughters and two sons
• Wife
• Younger daughter of neighbour
• Very beautiful
• Marries Bluebeard
• Has curious personality
• Sister Anne
• Two Brothers
• One a dragoon, the other a musketeer 

• Basic Plot Points
• Man with a bluebeard is looking for a wife. Eventually a beautiful girl decides to marry him.
• Bluebeard tells his wife that he must go away for business. He tells her to take her friends out to the country. He gives her the keys for different things in the house, which she is free explore. However he forbids her to enter the small room which one particular key opens. He warns her that “there will be no limit to his anger” if she disobeys him.
• Naturally the wife is curious as to what could be in that room, so she opens the forbidden door. In the room she finds blood all over the floor and several dead women, which are Bluebeard previous wives, hung up on the wall. With surprise the wife drops the key into a pool of blood which stains the key. The wife tries to wipe the blood off the key but it will not come off.
• Bluebeard returns home unexpectedly and asks his wife for the keys. When the wife brings them to him and he sees the blood on the small key he knows that she has disobeyed him and has gone into the forbidden room. He tells her she must die and gives her a quarter of an hour before he will kill her.
• The wife stalls bluebeard from killing her long enough to get her sister Anne to look out for her brothers who were coming to visit and tell them to hurry up.
• Bluebeard calls his wives downstairs and is about to chop off her head when her brothers burst into the room and kill Bluebeard by plunging their swords through his body
• The wife inherits the entire estate. She gets remarried and this rids her of the memory of the days spent with Bluebeard.

• Moral

“Curiosity, in spite of its many charms,
Can bring with it serious regrets
You can see a thousand examples of it everyday.
Woman succumb, but it’s a fleeting pleasure;
As soon as you satisfy it, it ceases to be.
And it always proves very, very costly. 

• Another moral
  If you just take a sensible point of view,
  And study this grim little story,
  You will understand that this tale
  Is one that took place many years ago.
  No longer are husbands so terrible,
  Demanding the impossible,
  Acting unhappy and jealous.
  With their wives they toe the line;
  And whatever colour their beads might be,
  It’s not hard to tell which of the pair is master.