The Fairy Tale:

“Bluebeard” (French: Barbe Bleue) is a French folktale, it’s origin is unknown. The most famous version of Bluebeard was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin Press of n 1697 in “Histoires ou contes du temps passé.” You can read the 1895 version  here on Gutenberg. The French fairy tales preced the German Grimm Brothers stories by several centuries.

The story tells of a wealthy and ugly man who sets up bizarre conditions for his wives around one particular room in his chateau (castle). He tells her that she can open any door in the house with them, which each contain his riches, except for an underground chamber that he strictly forbids her to enter lest she suffers his wrath.

               He then goes away and leaves the house and the keys in her hands. She invites her sister, Anne, and her friends and cousins over for a party. However, she is eventually overcome with the desire to see what the forbidden room holds; and she sneaks away from the party and ventures into the room.

            She immediately discovers the room is filled with blood and the murdered corpses of Bluebeard’s former wives hung on hooks from the walls. Horrified, she drops the key into a pool of blood, picks it up squeamishly and flees. Back in her rooms, she tries to wash the blood from the key, but the key is magical and the blood cannot be removed. Her husband will know that she knows his secret and end up like the rest but forewarned is forearmed and she plans her defense…

                                     Bluebeard and the Black Widow

Whenever there is a man who has a long list of wives that all died suddenly and he inherits it all, he is called a Bluebeard. If it is a woman, she is called The Black Widow, because female spiders kill and then eats her mate during sex the majority of the time.

                            ENTRE LANDRU

Henri Landru got this epithet of Bluebeard because he had ten fiancees that all mysteriously disappeared. Three were later found After sifting all of the cinders and the rubbish at his villas at Gamboise and Vernouillet, that are near each other (see the map above).  Examining the bones  doctors were able to piece together fragments and teeth which show that at least three human bodies burned wherein,  were these women.

Unlike the original Bluebeard, Landru chose his victims by several criteria. First, they would not be easily missed. And two, and this was the key point, they had very large insurance policies, that in his charm and savoir-faire he got to sign over to him or one of his accomplices; they then split the money. Once that feat was accomplished, Monsieur Landru invited them one day to luncheon at one of his villas and gave them a dish of morels from his garden, followed by a lovely cocktail carefully mixed with a culture of typhoid germs. In four cases, he succeeded in drawing for himself or his accomplice’s exceedingly large sums of francs. The insurance company got suspicious.

In 1912, Monsieur Landru’ s friend, Duroux insured himself for 20,000 francs in Landru’ s favor.  This was far too tantalizing for Landru and shortly thereafter Landru invited his best friend Duroux to a mushroom dinner and knockout cocktail. Amazingly Duroux was impervious to the drink and lived!  Unrebuffed, Landru invited him back for another repast – this one did the trick, but the attending physician was now suspicious. He could not figure out the culprit, though he knew he was poisoned and was forced to let the issue go. Years later, the doctor testified against Landru.

Nine years later they apprehended Landru they found his journal full of Invited X for morels, and a whole library filled with the studies of mushrooms, the published manuscripts of Louis Pasteur & medical books. Oh, and yes, tubes of typhoid bacilli.

Bluebeard Landru’s Map

Monsieur Landru is a bucket with a Saturn handle that just coincidentally falls in the eighth house of death and legacies, at 16+ in Sagittarius with the symbol of “seagulls watching a ship,” implying his ability to exploit another’s largesse. See the chart above that shows this layout.

Saturn’s own house happens to be the tenth where his midheaven falls at 15.50 Capricorn suggesting “boys and girls in gym suits” depicting Landru’s ability to unite many disparate people into his cause. That midheaven is sextile to a massive fire stellium in the twelfth house which is intercepted.

Intercepted signs are found between the cups of two house but most importantly, not on either of them. On Landru’s chart, Pisces is the sign of the twelfth house and Taurus is the sign of the first, but Aries is not shown on the cusps at all. On the chart shown, instead Aries is shown on the lines going from Pisces to Taurus, implying that it is intercepted.

Planets in intercepted signs have more importance than usual upon the affairs of the house in which they are found, so this stellium trine his Saturn handle, conjunct his ascendant, square his Uranus in Cancer and inconjunct his Mars in Leo, literally influences every aspect of Landru’s map. But interceptions make the sign hidden, so their influence while pervasive, is subtle, and it’s that elusive quality that causes so much trouble because it wants to get out of the shadows and shine.

For Landru, this is particularly rough, as within the insidious Arian group lies a Sun and Moon conjunction that is imprisoned, so his Line of Vitality is strangled. The group though searches for a way to manifest itself and show its creativity (trine Mars 16.02 Leo fifth house) and it is only through the Line of Personality in a trine aspect between the enthusiastic idealism of Jupiter & the cruel tenaciousness of Saturn in the eighth that it strikes out.

His Line of Efficiency is another venue to the outer chart. This time with hidden Venus to the manifestation of a creative and forced force inconjunct the Midheaven. Mars thus, has really nothing in the chart to inhibit or mollify it, and so its square to the Saturn handle has incredible power, and here in Leo, unleashes it animalistic impulses freely.

                                              In the end

Monsieur Landru was tried and found guilty of his crimes. He did have one lady friend who stood in his defense and said he was the nicest and kindest of men, but alas she was poor, and so ignored. He was guillotined on 25 February 1922. C’est la Vie

You can read the full obituary for Monsieur Landru here.98990039