The Generous Gambler
Story
BY CHARLES PIERRE BAUDELAIRE
This worshipper and singer of Satan shared his American confrère’s predilection for the devil. He found his models in the diabolical scenes of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he interpreted to the Latin world. “Baudelaire,” said Théophile Gautier, his master and friend, “had a singular prepossession for the devil as a tempter, in whom he saw a dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime, and perversity.” To Baudelaire, the trier of men’s souls, the Tempter, was as real a person as he was to Job. He believed that the devil had a great deal to do with the direction of human destinies. “C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!” Men are mere puppets in the hands of the devil. “Baudelaire’s motto,” as Mr. James Huneker has well remarked, “might be the reverse of Browning’s lines: The Devil is in his heaven. All’s wrong with the world.”
Baudelaire’s devil is a dandy and a boulevardier with wings. Each author, it has been said, creates the devil in his own image.
The greatest boon which Satan could offer Baudelaire was to free him from that great modern monster, Ennui, which selects as its prey the most highly gifted natures. The boredom of life—this was, indeed, as this unhappy poet admits, the source of all his maladies and of all his miseries. He called it the “foulest of vices” and hoped to escape from it “by dreaming of the superlative emotional adventure, by indulging in infinite, indeterminate desire” (Irving Babbit). His preface to the Flowers of Evil, in which he addresses the reader, ends with the following statement in regard to the nature of this modern beast of prey: “Among the jackals, the panthers, the hounds, the apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents—the yelling, howling, growling, grovelling monsters which form the foul menagerie of our vices—there is one which is the most foul, the most wicked, the most unclean of all. This vice, although it uses neither extravagant gestures nor makes a great outcry, would willingly make a ruin of the earth, and swallow up all the world in a yawn. This is Ennui! who, with his eye moistened by an involuntary tear, dreams of scaffolds while smoking his hookah. Thou knowest him, this delicate monster, hypocritical reader, my like, my brother!”
In Gorky’s story “The Devil” the devil himself suffers from ennui.
But Baudelaire believed he had good reason to doubt Satan’s word, and, therefore, prayed to the Lord to make the devil keep his promise to him. He had little faith in the father of lies. In his book called Artificial Paradises (1860) Baudelaire expressed the thought that the devil would say to the eaters of hashish, the smokers of opium, as he did in the olden days to our first parents, “If you taste of the fruit, you will be as the gods,” and that the devil no more kept his word with them than he did with Adam and Eve, for the next day, the god, tempted, weakened, enervated, descended even lower than the beast.
The representation of the devil in the shape of a he-goat goes back to far antiquity. Goat-formed deities and spirits of the woods existed in the religions of India, Assyria, Greece and Egypt. The Assyrian god was often associated with the goat, which was supposed to possess the qualities for which he was worshipped. The he-goat was also the sacred beast of Donar or Thor, who was brought to Scandinavia by the Phoenicians. (On the relation of satyrs to goats see also James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. VIII, pp. 1 sqq.) At the revels on the Blocksberg Satan always appeared as a black buck.
Le bon diable, which is a favourite phrase in France, points to his simplicity of mind rather than generosity of spirit. It generally expresses the half-contemptuous pity with which the giants, these huge beings with weak minds, were regarded.
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.