Doubtless “A Legend of Jesus Christ in Flanders” is Balzac’s most ethically idealistic story—a true symbolical tale of Hawthorne’s legendary type.
Night was falling. The ferry-boat that carried passengers from the island of Cadzand to Ostend was ready to depart. Just then a man appeared who wished to enter the boat. It was already full. There was no place in the stern for the stranger, for the “aristocrats” of Flanders were seated there—a baroness, a cavalier, a young lady, a bishop, a rich merchant, and a doctor. So he made his way to the bow, where the more humble folk were seated. They at once made room for him.
As soon as the boat had moved out on the water, the skipper called to his rowers to pull with all their might, for they were in the face of a storm. All the while the tempest was growing more terrifying, and all the while the men and women in the boat questioned in their hearts who might the stranger be. On his face shone a light and a quiet peace they could not understand.
Finally, the boat was capsized. Then the stranger said to them, “Those who have faith shall be saved; let them follow me.” With a firm step he walked upon the waves, and those who followed him came safe to shore.
When they were all seated near the fire in a fisherman’s hut, they looked round for the man who had brought them safely out of the sea. But he was not there, having gone down to the water to rescue the skipper, who had been washed ashore. He carried him to the door of the hut, and when the door of the humble refuge was opened, the Saviour disappeared—for it was He.
And so on this spot the convent of Mercy was built, as a shelter for storm-beleaguered sailors, and it was said by humble folk that for many years the foot-prints of Jesus Christ could be seen there in the sands of Flanders.
There is little charm in Balzac’s work, much coarseness, much detail of vileness, much to cause the sensitive to shudder; but there is much, too, that causes the soul to judge itself honestly, and many a beauty-crowned peak rising nobly from the valley darkness.
In the story which here follows in full, in translation, appear all of Balzac’s characteristic traits. Happily, its theme leads us above the sordid and the filthy, up to the heights which he knew and sometimes extolled.
“An Episode Under the Terror,” which Ferdinand Brunetière has pronounced to be “in its artistic brevity one of Balzac’s most tragic and finished narratives,” was written in 1830 as an introduction to the fictitious Memoirs of Sanson, who is the Stranger referred to in the story.