The Grimmest Fairy Tale

When the French writer Vanessa Springora published her 2020 memoir, Consent, a chilling indictment of a culture that tolerates criminal behavior toward a minor when the abuser is an influential literary figure, it landed in France with what one reviewer called the force of a Molotov cocktail. That “abuse memoir” (now a genre unto itself) was written from the perspective of a victim—Springora—who had a clear understanding, in retrospect, of her predator’s strategies.

The distinguished abuser, referred to as “G.,” appeared to have taken his instructions directly from the “Bluebeard” playbook, with Springora herself explicitly referring to that classic French fairy tale. In the hair-raising story, a young woman marries a wealthy man, Bluebeard, whose past wives have all disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When he goes on a trip abroad, he leaves her the keys to the house—including the key to a secret chamber he has expressly forbidden her from entering. When she opens the chamber, she discovers the bloody corpses of his missing wives, whom Bluebeard has obviously murdered.

Its first print version appeared in Charles Perrault’s canonical in 1697, and it