This work aims to get behind the myths and present the real Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, one of the most enduring baddies of history. What led the Marshal of France, scion of a great house, to turn to sorcery and from there to horrific deeds still shocking in their systematic cruelty many centuries later? Should we take de Rais' spectacular confession at face value, or like much which occurred at the hands of the Inquisition, is it a phantasmagoria of Satanism, letting a society hear the things which it secretly longs for yet publicly abominates? The infamy of Gilles de Rais lives on, the precursor of our own time's serial killers and a founding father of the cult of the child-snatching bogeyman.