The idea that Satan would gamble for a human soul is of mediaeval origin and may have been taken by Baudelaire from Gérard de Nerval, who in his mystery play Le Prince des Sots (1830) has the devil play at dice with an angel, with human souls as stakes. As a dice-player Satan resembles Wuotan. Mr. H. G. Wells in The Undying Fire (1919) has Diabolus play chess with the Deity in Heaven.
The devil in this story falls back into speaking Hebrew when the days of his ancient celestial glory are brought back to his mind. In Louis Ménard’s Le Diable au café the devil calls Hebrew a dead language, and as a modern prefers to be called by the French equivalent of his original Hebrew name. In the Middle Ages the devil’s favourite language was Latin. Marlowe’s Mephistopheles also speaks this language. Satan is known to be a linguist. “It is the Devil by his several languages,” said Ben Jonson.
According to popular belief the devil is a learned scholar and a profound thinker. He has all science, philosophy, and theology at his tongue’s end.
The Shavian devil in contradistinction to the Baudelairian fiend does bitterly complain that he is so little appreciated on earth. Walter Scott’s devil (in “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” 1824) also complains that he has been “sair miscaa’d in the world.”
The preacher to whom our author refers is the Jesuit Ravignan, who declared that the disbelief in the devil was one of the most cunning devices of the great enemy himself. (La plus grande force du diable, c’est d’être parvenu à se faire nier.) Baudelaire’s disciple J. K. Huysmans similarly expresses in his novel Là-Bas (1891) the view that “the greatest power of Satan lies in the fact that he gets men to deny him.” (Cf. the present writer’s essay “The Satanism of Huysmans” in The Open Court for April, 1920.) The devil mocks at this theological dictum in Pierre Veber’s story “L’Homme qui vendit son âme au Diable” (1918). In Perkins’s story “The Devil-Puzzlers” the devil expresses his satisfaction over his success in this regard.
The story “The Generous Gambler” first appeared in the Figaro of February, 1864, was reprinted under the title of “Le Diable” in the Revue du Dix-Neuvième Siècle of June, 1866, and was finally included in Poèmes en Prose. This story has also been translated into English by Joseph T. Shipley.
THE THREE LOW MASSES
A CHRISTMAS STORY
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET[Story]
Daudet and Maupassant furnish the best proof of the assertion made in the Introduction to this book that even the Naturalists who, as a rule, disdained the phantastic plots of the Romanticists, whose imagination was rigorously earth-bound, felt themselves nevertheless attracted by devil-lore. Although most of Daudet’s subjects are chosen from contemporary French life, this short-story treats a devil-legend of the seventeenth century. This story as “The Pope’s Mule” and “The Elixir of the Reverend Père Gaucher” obviously has no other object but to poke fun at the Catholic Church. It belongs to the literary type known as the Satirical Supernatural.
This story is characteristic of Daudet’s art, containing as it does all of his delicacy and daintiness of pathos, of raillery, of humour. It originally appeared in that delightful group of stories Lettres de Mon Moulin (1869).