"Bluebeard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immeasurably greater interest in the House of Commons than the health, the taxation, and the education, of a whole people. I will not penetrate into the mysteries of that secret chamber in which the Bluebeard of Party keeps his strangled public questions, and with regard to which, when he gives the key to his wife, the new comer, he strictly charges her on no account to open the door. I will merely put it to the experience of everybody ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... into the living-room. There might be more notes there. Her spirits had gone up, and she was laughing to herself a little—it felt like exploring Bluebeard's castle. She investigated the book case, shaking out every book. She ran up to the toy balcony and even pushed out the couch there, noticing for the first time that the balcony had curtains which could be drawn. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... feme coverte [Fr.]; squaw, lady; matron, matronage, matronhood^; man and wife; wedded pair, Darby and Joan; spiritual wife. monogamy, bigamy, digamy^, deuterogamy^, trigamy^, polygamy; mormonism; levirate^; spiritual wifery^, spiritual wifeism^; polyandrism^; Turk, bluebeard^. unlawful marriage, left-handed marriage, morganatic marriage, ill- assorted marriage; mesalliance; mariage de convenance [Fr.]. marriage broker; matrimonial agency, matrimonial agent, matrimonial bureau, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... as if something or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was something to be hidden in those dark mahogany presses. Is there an inner apartment that I have not seen? The way in which the house is built might admit of it. As I thought it over, I at once imagined a Bluebeard's chamber. Suppose, for instance, that the narrow bookshelves to the right are really only a masked door, such as we remember leading to the private study of one of our most distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately library to that little silent cell. If this were lighted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... varieties of which he was a firm believer. He told me that his astral colors were red and blue, and that a phrenologist had told him that a bump on the back of his head indicated that he ought never to buy mining stock. With the same instinct that undid Bluebeard's and Lot's wives he had tried it, and is once more back at his job of gardening with an increased ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... I know every inch of this palace. It was left to the Fairy Berylune by Bluebeard.... Let us make the most of our last minute of liberty, while the children and Light pay their visit to the Fairy's little daughter.... I have brought you here in order to discuss the position in which we are placed.... ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... nor wit helped the man much. Even Bluebeard in the end fell a victim to the superior qualities of his last wife, and Scheherazade's wit alone has preserved the memory of her royal husband. The tradition of thirteenth-century society still rules the French stage. The struggle between two strong-willed women to control one ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... dear girl," said Bluebeard, "remember you can go anywhere in the house but the pantry. That is locked up, and the key will be placed under the mat. ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... really pleased at such whole-hearted devotion and such Bluebeard-like views—especially when they were not going to be carried out. Edith was thrilled by the passionate emotion she felt near her. How cold it would be when he had gone! He was nice, ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... him. This mastery of a fellow creature was by far the most engrossing pastime life had offered her. There was something about him, a suggestion of depths hidden and shut away from her that filled her with the venturesome curiosity of Fatima opening the cupboards in Bluebeard's castle. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... there is to be found the genuine amateur, the orgiastic flogging schoolmaster or the nagging warder, who has sought out a cruel profession for the sake of its cruelty. But it is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark of the practice, because, though you can excite public fury against a Sade, a Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against dull Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing. He is so obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is difficult to conceive ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... pilgrimage around the cellar with a flaring candle—furtive explorations of the storeroom. And when we came to a door that was locked—Aha! Here was a puzzle and a problem! We tried every key in the house, right side up and upside down. Bluebeard's wife, poor creature,—if I read the tale aright,—was merely seeking her Christmas presents around the ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... daughter has shown me your note, and it has impressed me with the horrible determination to become a new kind of Bluebeard, and lay an awful injunction of secrecy on you for ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... a separate and distinct hook for each and every one of my most obscure garments. I tried to spread them out. I used two hooks to every petticoat, and three for my kimono, and when I had finished there were rows of hooks to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for hat-boxes which I possessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a family reunion in that closet and invited all of Solomon's spouses. Finally, in desperation, I gathered all my poor garments together and hung them in a sociable bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have loved to have shown that closet to ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the wife of the Parisian "Bluebeard," has been granted a divorce. We gather that there is something or other about her husband which made their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... hoped our brilliant scholar, Mister Champneys, knew now what the boy got for his chestnuts. The class laughed as good scholars are expected to laugh on such occasions. Peter came to the conclusion that Herod, Nero, Bluebeard, and The Cruel Stepmother all probably began ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... settled, so you will probably find out all about him for yourselves before many weeks are over. It's no use asking questions. He was willing to pay down the money, and that was all that Braithwaite cared about. He may be a bachelor or a second Bluebeard, for all I know; but I suppose in either case he will ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... an excellent fancy of the ancients to make woman the incarnation of original sin,—the tempter and the temptation in one,—a combination of the apple and the serpent. King David, Herod, and even the terrible Bluebeard, might have behaved well in a world without women. It is proverbial that there is no quarrel without a woman ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... takes the wise in their own craftiness, the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII., for that of the Pope, in the English Church. It had little in common with the revolution of 1642. The field of its action was the closet of selfish intrigue,—the stalls of discontented prelates,—the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... bare canyon thrilled her. She felt as though she were breaking into some mysterious, Bluebeard region where danger, adventure and intrigue awaited her. The mine, indeed, remained a mere vague possibility, hoped for but hardly expected. But her father's slayer and the vengeance that she had nursed so long became realities. The rocks that blocked the way might hide him and, somewhere in ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... The Esthonian version of "Bluebeard" (the Wife-Murderer) is very similar to the usual story. A rich lord, reported to have vast treasure-vaults under his castle, lost his wives very fast, and married, as his twelfth wife, the youngest of ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... say that forbidden doors and rooms form a lieu-commun in Fairie: they are found in the Hindu Katha Sarit Sagara and became familiar to our childhood by "Bluebeard." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and went to her closet for another; but it was as good (or as bad) as Bluebeard's closet, for there hung the pretty crimson merino, with delicate lace at the throat and round the short sleeves, in which Miss Lizzy Griswold once intended to electrify Mr. John Boynton this very evening. True it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... man he knew who played a flute in the orchestra, that he gained admittance behind the scenes. Going to the men's dressing-room, he found there all the male performers. Some were changing their clothes, others were painting their faces, others were smoking. Bluebeard was standing with King ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... with tracing a certain similitude between the story of Caleb Williams and the tale of Bluebeard, than derived any hints from that admirable specimen of the terrific. Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes, which, if discovered, he might expect to have all the world roused to revenge against him. Caleb Williams was the wife who, in spite of warning, persisted ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... inhabited by devils, and neither are the sane people. Most men want one wife and most women want one husband. Even in the polygamous countries you'll not find any more real polygamy than you find in the countries with the strictest marriage laws. Bluebeard was a Mohammedan, but Don Juan was a Christian. Spain has no divorce on any grounds; neither has Italy. Would you point to those countries as models of domestic purity? Does any sane person dare say that home life in Spain is purer than ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... I 'ave two or three wives on the rates, For I'm free wi' my fancy an' fly wi' my picks, And I've promised 'em plenty, an' given 'em nix, But have left ev'ry one in a 'ell of a fix! 'Ooever said Bluebeard was brother to ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Bluebeard: An account of Comorre the Cursed and Gilles de Rais. With 9 Illustrations. Demy 8vo, cloth, ...
— Chatto & Windus Alphabetical Catalogue of Books in Fiction and General Literature, Sept. 1905 • Various
... "You are just like Bluebeard's wife," began Rudolf, but Peter—as was his way—paid no attention to either of them. He put the box down on the hearth-rug, and got on his hands and knees to open it. Then, of course, the other two thought they might as well see what there was to see, and all three heads ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... and it was only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident. The "Parent's Assistant," "Rob Roy," "Waverley," and "Guy Mannering," the "Voyages of Captain Woods Rogers," Fuller's and Bunyan's "Holy Wars," "The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe," "The Female Bluebeard," G. Sand's "Mare au Diable"—(how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's "Tower of London," and four old volumes of Punch—these were the chief exceptions. In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not, nor does he chide her, And she has nothing new to say; If he were Bluebeard he could hide her, But that's not written in the play, And there will be no change to-day; Although, to the serene outsider, There still would ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... dismay, Albinia could not help thinking of Bluebeard's closet. Her inclination was to stay where she was, and take her chance of losing her head, yet she felt as if she could not bear to be found invading a sanctuary of past recollections, and was relieved to find that it was a false alarm, though not relieved by the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... few days after our arrival, my time was agreeably spent in receiving the visits of the nobility and gentry who came to pay their respects to the noble new-married couple, and, like Bluebeard's wife in the fairy tale, in inspecting the treasures, the furniture, and the numerous chambers of the castle. It is a huge old place, built as far back as Henry V.'s time, besieged and battered by the Cromwellians in the Revolution, and altered ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to literature's idol, one might even venture to question which receives honor by the comparison, Shakespeare or the folk-tales? It might be rather a pleasant task to discover who is the Cordelia, the Othello, the Rosalind, and the Portia of the folk-tales; or who the Beauty, the Bluebeard, the Cinderella, the Puss-in-Boots, and the Hop-o'-my-Thumb, ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment, fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales would soon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fear is a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard's wife to explore the hidden chamber lures us on to know the worst, and as we listen to horrid stories, we snatch a fearful joy. Human nature desires not only to be amused and entertained, but moved to pity and fear. All can ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the next thing to keeping a secret well is, not to desire to possess one—talkativeness and curiosity generally go together. Now I shall make test of you, in the first place, respecting the latter of these qualities. I shall be your BLUEBEARD—tush, why do I trifle thus? Listen to me, my dear Fanny; I speak now in solemn earnest. What I desire is intimately, inseparably, connected with your happiness and honour as well as my own; and your compliance with my request will not ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... love. Could it be but his morbidly repellant pride, his jealous guarding of the domestic privacies, his vigilant pacing up and down forever before the close-drawn curtain of the heart?—was there no Bluebeard's chamber there? No! Pride was all the matter,—pride was the Spartan fox that tore the vitals of Pintal, while he but bit his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... genii, and all manner of evil things? I declare I should be ashamed of myself if I did not; and I am sure that none of us, who are good for anything, have altogether lost that old belief; and when we look back at those days of young romance, and remember the thrill with which we read of Bluebeard's punishment, and Beauty's reward, we feel that it would be better for us if they had more of that old childlike faith. And so I encourage my youngsters to read and listen to, over and over again, the same old stories that, when ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... varied, the most erroneous opinions have been expressed with regard to the famous individual commonly known as Bluebeard. None, perhaps, was less tenable than that which made of this gentleman a personification of the Sun. For this is what a certain school of comparative mythology set itself to do, some forty years ago. It informed the world that the seven wives of Bluebeard were the ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... show off on their inanimate busts and shoulders the sweetest assortments ever seen of new things in summer fashions. These headless dummies of the Bowery have a very ghastly look at night. They suggest a procession of the ghosts of Bluebeard's wives, who, true to their instincts while in life, nightly revisit the "ladies' furnishing establishments" here, to rummage among scarfs and ribbons, and don for the brief hour before cock-crow the valuable stuffs and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and the truth is, that for reasons you may understand some day—though I hope to Heaven you'll never have to!—my association with those men is one of the things I long to turn the key upon. I know that that sounds like Bluebeard to Fatima, but it isn't as bad as that. To me, it doesn't seem bad at all. And I swear that whatever mystery—if you call it 'mystery'—there is about me, it sha'n't hurt you. Will you believe this—and ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... opportunity, she sounded her relative on the subject, and was laughingly informed that she might go anywhere about the place she pleased, saving to one spot, namely, "Bluebeard's Chamber"; and there she could certainly never succeed in poking her nose, as its locality was known only to three people, all of whom were pledged never to reveal it. At the commencement of her tour of inspection, Mrs. Gibbons was disappointed—she was disappointed ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... offer my practically priceless manuscript of "Bluebeard" for production in French at the Metropolitan, and in English at the Century Opera House; meantime Mr. Hammerstein is so impressed with its originality, audacity, and tragic power that he is laying the corner-stone for a magnificent new building and will open and close it with "Bluebeard" ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... them with all the reality of a fate not by any means to be lived down. If George rode the huge rocking-horse, he was Paul Revere, or some equally historic figure, and sometimes, to Edith's terror, he was compelled to assume the role of Bluebeard, when Honora submitted to decapitation with a fortitude amounting to stoicism. Hide and seek was altogether too tame for her, a stake of life and death, or imprisonment or treasure, being a necessity. And many times was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... felt or affected much grief on that account, perhaps because he had not had the pleasure of cutting off her head. Here he married his sixth wife, Lady Catherine Parr, widow of Neville, Lord Latimer, and sister of the Marquis of Northampton. This lady, who had the hardihood to marry this royal Bluebeard, after he had divorced two wives and chopped off the heads of two others, narrowly escaped the fate she so rashly hazarded. The very warrant for her committal to the Tower, whence she was only to be brought forth to be burned at the stake for heresy, was signed, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... had in St. Thomas while the Diana put off hundreds of barrels of cement; but what with the gayly painted boats and their dark-skinned crews, the naked brown boys diving and swimming for pennies and dimes in the harbor, a walk to Bluebeard's Tower and Blackbeard's Castle, we were well amused. Particularly so was Dorothea, who disappeared from my side for a half-hour while I chatted with the captain, rejoining me in the tiny palm-bordered park ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dishonoured man in his own land. They were married in Buda Pesth. All Europe pitied her at the time; there was but one form of prophecy as to her future. There were those who went so far as to say that her father had delivered her into the hands of a latter-day Bluebeard, who whisked her off into the highlands many ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... show: Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail A banner flaunted in disdain Of human stratagems and shifts: King over All the Catlands, present and past And future, that moustached Artificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots! Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood, And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases - Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part A faery chamber hazily seen And hazily figured—on dark afternoons And windy ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... embodiments of Evil: 1. The Snake as the Stealer of Daylight; 2. Norka the Beast, Lord of the Lower World; 3. Koshchei the Deathless, The Stealer of Fair Princesses—his connexion with Punchkin and "the Giant who had no Heart in his Body"—Excursus on Bluebeard's Chamber; 4. The Water King or Subaqueous Demon—Female Embodiments of Evil: 1. The Baba Yaga or Hag, and 2. The Witch, feminine counterparts of ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... can glean from his own voluminous writings it would seem to be extremely doubtful whether he ever saw Anne of Cleves at all, and we suspect him here of being no more than a slavish echo of the common voice, which attributed Cromwell's downfall to the ugliness of this bride he procured for his Bluebeard master. To the common voice from the brush of Holbein, which permits us to form our own opinions and shows us a lady who is certainly very far from deserving his lordship's harsh stricture. Similarly, I like to believe that Lord Henry ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... inmost recesses of your Sanctum—it is an ingrained curiosity. And this feminine weakness, which dates from Eve, is a common motive in the stories of our oldest literature and Folk-lore. What made Fatima so anxious to know the contents of the room forbidden her by Bluebeard? It was positively nothing to her, and its contents caused not the slightest annoyance to anybody. That story has a bad moral, and it would, in many ways, have been more satisfactory had the heroine been left to take her place ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... heads off and smoking your best cigars—eh, what? Why, I kept myself in weeds a few years ago—got 'em for twopence halfpenny from a butler in Curzon Street and never smoked better. You don't want to do that, for you can bottle old Bluebeard's and try 'em on the dog—eh, what? When you marry, don't you take a house. A man who lives in a hotel doesn't seem as though he were married and that's good for the filly. Look at these angels here. Why, half of them sold the family oak tree a generation ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... resumed, "he'd better watch his reputation, for he was beginning to be regarded as the local Bluebeard. Oh, I was as frank as George Washington. And I told him also that there isn't a man inside the U.S.A. that would treat a black as he treats his wife. I think that surprised him some, for he began to stutter, and then of course I had the ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... clothing, from shoes to hats, from gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles. All of Bluebeard's wives could have been tucked away in one corner of the remotest and least of these, and no one the wiser. All grimly shut and locked, they are, with the key in Josie's pocket. But when, at the behest of McCabe, or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of these doors, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... woman's reason; even my own fails sometimes to deal with all its delicate shades; but I think I must have run away chiefly to taste the pleasure of being pursued and brought back. If it is necessary to your happiness that you should explore all the Bluebeard chambers of my being, I will confess further that it has taken you nearly three weeks to accomplish what I supposed you would do ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... "already said." The most gifted of them coldly devoted themselves to working contrariwise. The process was childishly simple: they pitched on some beautiful legend or fairy-story, and turned it upside down. Thus, Bluebeard was beaten by his wives, or Polyphemus was kind enough to pluck out his eye by way of sacrificing himself to the happiness of Acis and Galatea. And they thought of nothing but form. And once more it seemed to Christophe (though ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... are a great many boys and girls, who love to read such nonsense as one finds in comic almanacs, and books like "Bluebeard," and "Jack the Giant Killer," but who, like the youth I met in the book store, could very easily learn to like useful books just as well, and better too, if they would only take them up, and ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... positively sacrilegious. I wonder the arms of the men who ventured upon such sacred ground did not wither at their sides. To paint old men with tremendous white flowing beards—a cross between Santa Claus and Bluebeard—and call them God! Here is materialism for you with a vengeance. These audacious men forgot that He was not seen in the whirlwind, neither in the storm, but never seen at all; only heard in the ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... 'my soul's pretty clean-swept, I think, save for one Bluebeard chamber in it that's been kep' locked ever so many years. It's nice and dirty by this time, I expect,' he says. Then the grin comes on his mouth again. 'I'll open it some day,' he says, 'and look. There's something ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... outrage was committed,—and such matters were of daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence,—a bell, the rope of which descended into the hall, brought the whole of the turnkeys to their assistance. A narrow passage at the north of the Stone Hall led to the Bluebeard's room of this enchanted castle, a place shunned even by the reckless crew who were compelled to pass it. It was a sort of cooking-room, with an immense fire-place flanked by a couple of cauldrons, and was called Jack Ketch's Kitchen, because the quarters of persons executed ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the Parisian Bluebeard (alleged), is said to be very morose and ill. It is felt that something or other must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... make pompadour. Last week when they have tableaux, Patty has borrowed it and has dyed it with blueing to make a beard for Bluebeard. But being yellow to start, it has become green, and the color will not wash out. The sweetch is ruin—entirely ruin—and Patty is desolate. She has apologize. She thought it would wash, but since it will not wash, ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... coffee-pot was a fraud the very first day old Bluebeard tried to palm it off on us! You will never distinguish between beauty ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of the "big cut," and the function became as exclusive and esoteric as a Masonic initiation. From that day to this it has, with few exceptions, been held januis clausis; and beside it the Literary Ladies' Dinner and Bluebeard's Chamber are as open to the world and free from mystery as the public ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... BLUEBEARD, a wealthy seigneur, the owner of a castle; marries a beautiful woman, and leaves her in charge of the keys of the apartments in his absence, with injunctions not to unlock any of the doors, an injunction which she fails to respect, and finds to her horror the remains ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... into his Bluebeard dreams, or his fairyland of love, the deeper I got into my hobby, political economy, and to thinking of ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... made her husband laugh still more. "They are well matched," he said; "Morton is as cool as she is. He might be Bluebeard proposing ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... declared, as she looked around her, "that I should ever find myself inside this house. It has always seemed to me like one great bluebeard's chamber. If ever my father spoke of it at all, it was as of a place which he intended to convert into a ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in little girls more hateful than another, it is curiosity," answered Chirper, with her mouth half-full of nails. "Curiosity has been the bane of many of our sex. Witness Bluebeard's unhappy wife. If you want to know more, you must ask Mrs. Whitehead. I have my instructions ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... tall," linked forever to the dwarf Perrywinkle; there was my friend Porphyro, the poet, with his delicate genius shrivelled in the glare of the youngest Miss Lucifer's eyes; there they were, Beauty and the Beast, Pride and Humility, Bluebeard and Fatima, Prose and Poetry, Riches and Poverty, Youth and Crabbed Age— Oh, sorrowful procession! All so wretched, when perhaps all might have been so happy if they had only paired differently! I halted ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... beautiful girl selected by the Catholics to play the same part for them that Anne Boleyn had played for the Lutherans, and who did so more exactly than her backers intended. Like her predecessor she was beheaded for adultery on February 13, 1542. On July 12, 1543, Bluebeard concluded his matrimonial adventures by taking Catharine Parr, a lady who, like Sieyes after the Terror, must have congratulated herself on her ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... hastens the wedding so vehemently. He knows, if you once go into the world, you will be surrounded by admirers who may eclipse and supplant him. But I tell thee one thing, my dear creature, you will have no chance to shine as a belle, as the wife of Ernest. If he does not prove a second Bluebeard, my name is not Meg ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... glad to experience the feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the smoking advance of Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like gifted children, and are seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say that mine got no further than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard's sister looking out for her brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady B.'s repeated and agonized entreaty, "O sister, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... common, and for whom every day increases his disgust. And the people who have ruined his life have not even the sorry excuse that they wished to better hers. Their one thought was to get rid of her as speedily as possible, no matter to whom; and they would rather have had Bluebeard at a two-months' engagement than any other man at one of six. There is something so coarse and revolting, so brutal, in the notion of bringing two people together into such a relation as that of marriage on purely selfish grounds, and ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... as a young man who promised to be a great king. There are, as Chesterton points out, two great things that intruded into his reign: the one was the difficulty of his marriages, the other was the question of the monasteries. If Henry was a Bluebeard, he was such because his wives were not a fortunate selection. 'He was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband.' But the one thing that Chesterton feels broke Henry's honour was the question of his divorce. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... answered, "Les Touches for you is Bluebeard's chamber. There is nothing so dangerous as to wake a ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... he gets you there! He has dead men's legs and hands. Sam says he's seen them through the window! He's a Bluebeard; he always keeps the room locked, and doesn't let any one in. And if he takes you in there to-morrow afternoon, you'll never ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... replied Helen. "No superman ever said 'I want,' because 'I want' must lead to the question, 'Who am I?' and so to Pity and to Justice. He only says 'want.' 'Want Europe,' if he's Napoleon; 'want wives,' if he's Bluebeard; 'want Botticelli,' if he's Pierpont Morgan. Never the 'I'; and if you could pierce through him, you'd find panic and emptiness in ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... The spirit of his work is, as it should be, intensely serious, yet the conceits which are showered upon it exactly harmonise with the mood of most of the stories that have attracted his pencil. Grimm's "Household Stories," as he pictured them, are a lasting joy. The "Bluebeard" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" toy books, the "Princess Belle Etoile," and a dozen others are nursery classics, and classics also of the other nursery where children of a larger growth ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... captains "an army of shining and generous dreams," an army that is easily routed, an army that the wife too often puts to flight with an injudicious criticism. It is said that since Prohibition came in the cases of cruelty to wives have increased greatly in number. We do not disbelieve this. Bluebeard was a dry. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... and extravagances. Robert Macaire had all these to exploiter. Of all the empire, through all the ranks, professions, the lies, crimes, and absurdities of men, he may make sport at will; of all except of a certain class. Like Bluebeard's wife, he may see everything, but is bidden TO BEWARE OF THE BLUE CHAMBER. Robert is more wise than Bluebeard's wife, and knows that it would cost him his head to enter it. Robert, therefore, keeps aloof for the moment. Would there be any use in his martyrdom? ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with a pettish manner, "you may put on your Bluebeard airs, but you will not frighten me, I assure you. I know you, Charming, and I warn you that if you do not put an end to this bad jest, I will not only give you one box on the ear, but three, before I forgive you. Make haste and let me go out, or I vow ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... not "well enough," as you call it. I am going to see into it, and why they hide it. I declare,' and she examined the door critically, 'it looks like the entrance to Bluebeard's chamber. Look at these queer marks, these dents and stains, as if there had been a struggle. It is our duty to investigate;' and her voice grew impressive. 'Perhaps we have been brought here for that very purpose, and, Jane, if there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... speak Spanish, and Mr. Lenox spoke German. Whether well or ill, Lois did not know; but in any case, how many doors, in literature and in life, stood open to them; which were closed and locked doors to her! And we all know, that ever since Bluebeard's time—I might go back further, and say, ever since Eve's time—Eve's daughters have been unable to stand before a closed door without the wish to open it. The impulse, partly for good, partly for evil, is incontestable. ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... that a mysterious door at the end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy wife immured and fed on bread and water. When she finally gains admission to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of modern rooms, "the visions of romance were over. . . Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Ann of Bluebeard fame, gazed anxiously around and listened with all the intensity born of her desperate state; but there was nothing to be seen or heard. Only Bruin had risen again and was coming slowly towards the hut. A bright scheme ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... knew, moreover, what it was; but then it was to be got only by a sacrifice, and that sacrifice she also knew, though it must of necessity be kept in the meantime as secret as the wonderful doings in the death-chamber of the palace of a certain Bluebeard. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... we may call 'To Rescue from Imminent Danger,' has been widely popular alike with the ancients and the moderns, so we have in subdivision (A) a condemned person rescued by a hero, as in the myth of Andromeda, the folk-tale of Bluebeard, and the first act of 'Lohengrin'; and in subdivision (B2) a condemned person rescued by a guest of the house, as ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... 'A Bluebeard's cupboard,' said Clare delightedly. 'Why, this is most interesting. I am longing to take ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... own up—we men of above forty who aspire to respectability and do actually live orderly lives and achieve even the odor of sanctity—have we not been stained with murder?—aye worse! What man has not his Bluebeard closet, full of early crimes and villainies? A certain boy in whom I take a particular interest, who goes to Sunday-school and whose life is outwardly proper—is he not now on week days a robber of ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... psychology under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the surface of Law, even though ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the Place I soon bethought myself of the Red Room—for I had a great love for it. But I had got no further than the steps when Mrs. Montressor came sweeping down the hall in haste and, catching me by the arm, pulled me back as roughly as if it had been Bluebeard's chamber itself into which ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... say upon the subject—I have said you were to go. You act as if I were sending you to some place where you might catch the scarlet fever or the mumps. You amuse me; upon my word you do. Rex is not dangerous, neither is he a Bluebeard; his only fault is being alarmingly handsome. The best advice I can give you is, don't admire him too much. He should be labeled, 'Out of ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the words that justice utters over its doomed victims, "The Lord have mercy on your soul!"' There, it is true, the key in question unlocks the delicate instrument of the nervous system, and not necessarily a Bluebeard's chamber of guilt; but where the latter is also the case to some extent the remark by no means loses in significance, and if any man had the torturing instinct to perfection, Caffyn might be said to be that individual. There was nothing he would enjoy more than practising upon a ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... our neighbor—just gone for a ride Has three wives in the churchyard that lie side by side. So I call him "Bluebeard" in search of his bride, While I'm Sister Anne at ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... day, and was received by the veteran with the rough kindness of a backwoodsman. He was a gray-haired man, hardy and weather-beaten, with a blue wart, like a great beard, over one eye, whence he was nicknamed by the hunters 'Bluebeard Miller.' He had been in these parts from the earliest settlements, and had signalized himself in the hard conflicts with the Indians, which gained Kentucky the appellation of 'the Bloody Ground.' In one of these fights he had had an arm ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... unfortunately the press and the criminal law courts continually give us fresh examples. Some sadists assassinate children, others men, when their perversion is complicated with pederasty or sexual inversion. (The story of Bluebeard is probably based on the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... widely from that in which the archdeacon had been reared. To him a clergyman was a priest who belonged to a sacerdotal caste, and who ought not "to merge himself in the body of the nation." To him the Reformation was an infamous crime, and Henry VIII. was worse than the Bluebeard of the nursery. His hero was Thomas a Becket. He wrote a sketch of his life and career, which he did not live to finish. His friends ill-advisedly published it after his death. His ideal ecclesiastical statesman of modern times ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Pandora, through the epoch of Bluebeard's wife, down to the present time, one of the chief failings of humanity has been the disposition to open things that were better closed. It would have been simple for Archie to have taken another step and put a door between himself and ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... In a London home there is nothing to fascinate the eye. The contemplation of the mews and the chimney-pots through the back-windows of the nursery will not elevate even the most impressible child. There is no mystery, no dreamland, no Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by Cubitt, or a palace of terra-cotta on the Cadogan estate. There can be no traditions of the past, no inspiring memories of virtuous ancestry, in a house which your father bought five years ago and of which the previous owners are not known to you even by ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell |
