t Morbihan in a Breton church
that dates from the fourteenth century, there was found a series of
paintings. One represents the marriage of Trophine, daughter of the Duc de
Vannes to a Breton lord. In another the lord is leaving his castle. As he
goes he warningly intrusts to his wife the key to a forbidden door. It is
spotted with blood. The scenes which follow represent the lady opening the
forbidden door and peering into a room from the rafters of which six women
hang. Then come the return of the lord, his questioning and menacing
glance, the tears of the lady, her prayers to her sister, the alarm given
by the latter, the irruption of her brothers and her rescue from that
room.

The story which the paintings tell still endures in Brittany. It has
Gilles de Retz for villain. Yet for the honor of his race and of the land,
instead of his name that of Bluebart, the cognomen of a public enemy, was
given.[59]

In the story, Gilles de Retz, after marrying Catherine de Thouars, one of
the great heiresses of the day, subsequently and successively married six
other women. Whether he murdered them all or whether they died of delight
is not historically certain. The key spotted with blood obviously is
fancy. But like other fancies it might be truth. It symbolizes the eternal
curiosity of the eternal Eve concerning that which has been forbidden.

VII

THE RENAISSANCE

Nominally with Bluebeard the Middle Ages cease. In the parturitions of
that curious period order emerged from chaos, language from dialects,
nations from hordes, ideals from dirt. Mediaevalism was the prelude,
mediocre and in minor key, to the great concert of civilization of which
the first chorus was the Renaissance, the second the Reformation, the
third the Revolution, and of which Democracy, the fourth, but presumably
not the last, is swelling now.

Meanwhile the world was haggard. The moral pendulum, that had oscillated
between mud and ether, was back again at the starting point. Death,
Fortune, Love, the three blind fates of life, were the only recognized
divinities. But beyond the monotonous fog that discolored the sky beauty
was waiting. With the fall of Constantinople it descended. The result was
the Renaissance. To the Renaissance many contributed; mainly the dead, the
artists of the past, but also the living, the prophets of the future.
Mediaevalism was a forgetting, the Renaissance a recovery. It was an epoch
from which the mediocre, in de