The Legend of Mont St.-Michel
Story
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. “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke x, 18). All rebellious deities, who were universally supposed to have fallen from heaven, have crooked or crippled legs. Hephaestos, Vulcan, Loki and Wieland, each has a broken leg. This idea has probably been derived from the crooked lightning flashes. The devil’s mother in the mediaeval German mystery-plays walks on crutches. Asmodeus, the Persian demon Aeshma daeva, also had a lame foot. In Le Sage’s book Le Diable boiteux Asmodeus appears as a limping gentleman, who uses two sticks as crutches. According to rabbinical tradition this demon broke his leg when he hurried to meet King Solomon. In addition to his broken leg the devil inherited the goat-foot from Pan, the bull-foot from Dionysius and the horse-foot from Loki. The Ethiopic devil’s right foot is a claw, and his left a hoof.
The devil is erroneously represented in this story as very lazy. Industry, it has been said, is the great Satanic virtue. “If we were all as diligent and as conscientious as the devil,” observed an old Scotch woman to her minister, “it wad be muckle better for us.”
The highest peak of a mountain is always consecrated to St. Michael. The Mont St.-Michel on the Norman Coast played a conspicuous part in the wars of the sons of William the Conqueror. Maupassant uses it as the background for several of the chapters of his novel Notre Coeur (1890). The mountain also figures in his story “Le Horla” (1886).