When he had squandered his property, he took to the study of sorcery and magic, having an especial fancy for murdering young children. From the villages within a circuit of twenty miles, little boys and girls were seduced into his castle and there immolated according to some wild Pagan rites. Among his papers, history says, was found a list of two hundred children whom he had thus sacrificed.
On the 26th of October, 1440, then being thirty-four years old, he was burned in the city of Nantes, having been previously strangled in view of a vast multitude. The records of his trial, which lasted a whole month, are preserved among the manuscripts of the public library in Paris. In one of his castles the bones of forty-six, and in another of eighty children, were discovered. Marshal de Retz was certainly the type of Perrault's story. It appears that in his lifetime he was known by the _sobriquet_ of Barbe Bleu.
How a belief in _imaginary_ virtues of things may grow out of the evidence of their _real_ virtues, is indicated by Dr. Livingstone, when speaking of the belief in rain-making among the tribes in the heart of South Africa. The African priest and the medicine-man is one and the same, and his chief function is to make the clouds to give out rain. The preparations for this purpose are various: charcoal made of burned bats; lion's hearts, and hairy calculi from the bowels of old cows; serpent skins and vertebræ, and every kind of tuber, bulb, root and plant to be found in the country.
"Although you disbelieve their efficacy in charming the clouds to pour out their refreshing treasures, yet, conscious that civility is useful everywhere, you kindly state that you think they are mistaken as to their power. The rain-doctor selects a particular bulbous root, pounds it, and administers a cold infusion of it to a sheep, which in five minutes afterwards expires in convulsions. Part of the same bulb is converted into smoke and ascends towards the sky: rain follows in a day or two. The inference is obvious."
This fable of the cat is borrowed from the East. Sir William Gore Ousely, speaking of the origin of the name of an island in the Persian Gulf, says that in the tenth century, one Keis, the son of a poor widow in Siraf, embarked for India with his sole property, a cat. "He fortunately arrived there at a time when the palace was so infested by mice or rats that they invaded the king's food, and persons were employed to drive them away from the royal banquet. Keis produced his cat; the noxious animals disappeared; Keis was magnificently rewarded, sent for his mother and brother, and settled on the island, which was subsequently called after him."