Bluebeard Week

Something about a Barbe Bleu fires the emotions of Frenchmen. Men marry women and kill them for their wealth in every land; but in France a Barbe Bleu is news. Last week was bluebeard week at Marseilles, the chief and most casually immoral port city of France, and a famed stockade for transient White Slavers.

In the basement of a villa at Marseilles were found some weeks ago, the bodies of two women who appeared to have been bluebearded. The tenant, M. Camille Gaillard, was said to have been seen escaping with the body of a third woman slung over his shoulder in a sack.

Then from Algiers came sailing toward Marseilles, last week, another Barbe Blue, with 18 women to his discredit. He was 60, and named Jerome Drat. Through some occult divination the Marseilles poor unequalled for viciousness in all France, decided that the two Barbe Bleus were the same man under different aliases, and prepared to give him a brick-and-bludgeon reception.

The police, knowing their mob, avoided trouble by debarking Algeria's Barbe Bleu at the island in the harbor of Marseilles on which stands the Chateau d'If, made famed by Duma's Monte Cristo.

There 60-year-old Bluebeard Drat said to his police guards, "Kill me right away, don't bother me with questions about women."