The Three Low Masses — A Christmas Story
Story
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET
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).
The horns and tail of his Satanic majesty peep out as vividly in this book as the disguised devils in Ingoldsby’s Legend of the North Countrie.
Although hating all men, the devil has a special hatred for the priests, and he delights in bringing them to fall. Satan loathes the priests, because, as Anatole France says, they teach that “God takes delight in seeing His creatures languish in penitence and abstain from His most precious gifts” (Les Dieux ont soif, p. 278).
It is evident from this story that the popular belief that the devil avoids holy edifices is not based on facts. Here the devil not only enters the church, but even performs the duties of a sacristan at the foot of the altar. According to mediaeval tradition the devil has his agents even in the churches. In the administration of hell where the tasks are carefully parcelled out among the thousands of imps, the church has been assigned to the fiend with the poetic name of Tutevillus. It is his duty to attend all services in order to listen to the gossips and to write down every word they say. After death these women are entertained in hell with their own speeches, which this diabolical church clerk has carefully noted down. Tradition has it that one fine Sunday this demon was sitting in a church on a beam, on which he held himself fast by his feet and his tail, right over two village gossips, who chattered so much during the Blessed Mass that he soon filled every corner of the parchment on both sides. Poor Tutevillus worked so hard that the sweat ran in great drops down his brow, and he was ready to sink with exhaustion. But the gossips ceased not to sin with their tongues, and he had no fair parchment left whereon to record their foul words. So having considered for a little while, he grasped one end of the roll with his teeth and seized the other end with his claws and pulled so hard as to stretch the parchment. He tugged and tugged with all his strength, jerking back his head mightily at each tug, and at last giving such a fierce jerk that he suddenly lost his balance and fell head over heels from the beam to the floor of the church. (From “The Vision of Saint Simon of Blewberry” in F. O. Mann’s collection of mediaeval tales.)