THE LEGEND OF MONT ST.-MICHEL
BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT
No greater proof of the permanence and persistence of the devil as a character in literature can be adduced than the fact that this writer, in whom we find the purest expression of Naturalism, for whom the visible world was absolutely all that there is, was attracted by a devil-legend. But on this point he had a good example in his god-father and master Gustave Flaubert, who, though a realist of realists, showed deep interest in the Tempter of St. Anthony.
This legend of the fraudulent bargain between a sprite and a farmer as to alternate upper- and under-ground crops, with which "the great vision of the guarded mount" is here connected, is of Northern origin, but has travelled South as far as Arabia. It will be found in Grimm's Fairy Tales (No. 189); Thiele's Danish Legends (No. 122), and T. Sternberg's The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northampshire (p. 140). Rabelais used it as a French legend, and in its Oriental form it served as a subject for a poem by the German Friedrich Rückert ("Der betrogene Teufel"). In all these versions the agreement is entered into between the devil (in the Northampshire form it is a bogie or some other field spirit) and a peasant. It was reserved for Maupassant to make St. Michael get the better of Satan on earth as in heaven.
According to this legend the devil broke his leg when, in his flight from St. Michael, he jumped off the roof of the castle into which he had been lured by the saint. The traditional explanation for the devil's broken leg is his fall from heaven.
[313]
