Short Fiction

some good things to eat.”

Satan, who was as greedy as he was lazy, accepted eagerly. On the day which had been decided on, he donned his finest clothes and set out for the mount.

Saint Michel sat him down to a magnificent meal. First there was a vol-au-vent, full of cocks’ crests and kidneys, with meatballs, then two big red mullet with cream sauce, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts soaked in wine, some salt-marsh lamb as tender as possible, vegetables which melted in the mouth, and nice warm galette which was brought on smoking and gave out a delicious odour of butter.

They drank pure cider, sparkling and sweet, and powerful red wine, and after each course more room was made with some old apple brandy.

The Devil drank and ate to his heart’s content; in fact, he took so much that he found himself uncomfortable.

Then Saint Michel arose in anger, and cried, in a voice like thunder: “What! before me, rascal! you dare⁠—before me⁠—”

Satan, terrified, ran away, and the Saint, seizing a stick, pursued him. They ran around through the halls, turning around the pillars, running up the staircases, galloping along the cornices, jumping from gargoyle to gargoyle. The poor Demon, who was terribly ill, was running about madly and soiling the Saint’s home. At last he found himself at the top of the last terrace, from which could be seen the immense bay, with its distant cities, sands, and pastures. He could no longer escape, and the Saint came up behind him and gave him a furious kick, which shot him through space like a cannonball.

He shot through the air like a javelin and fell down heavily in front of the town of Mortain. His horns and claws stuck deep into the rock, which keeps through eternity the traces of this fall of Satan’s.

He stood up again, limping, crippled until the end of time, and as he looked at the fatal Abbey in the distance, standing out against the setting sun, he understood well that he would always be vanquished in this unequal struggle; and he went away limping, heading for distant countries, leaving to his enemy his fields, his hills, his valleys, and his pastures.

And this is how Saint Michel, the patron saint of Normandy, vanquished the Devil.

Another people would have dreamed of this battle in an entirely different manner.

Minuet

Great misfortunes do not affect me very much, said Jean Bridelle, an old bachelor who passed for a sceptic. I have seen war at quite close quarters; I walked across corpses without any feeling of pity. The great brutal facts of nature, or of humanity, may call forth cries of horror or indignation, but do not cause us that tightening of the heart, that shudder that goes down your spine at sight of certain little heartrending episodes.

The greatest sorrow that anyone can experience is certainly the loss of a child, to a mother; and the loss of his mother, to a man. It is intense, terrible, it rends your heart and upsets your mind; but one is healed of these shocks, just as large, bleeding wounds become healed. Certain meetings, certain things half perceived, or surmised, certain secret sorrows, certain tricks of fate which awake in us a whole world of painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose to us the mysterious door of moral suffering, complicated, incurable; all the deeper because they appear benign, all the more bitter because they are intangible, all the more tenacious because they appear almost factitious, leave in our souls a sort of trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a feeling of disenchantment, from which it takes a long time to free ourselves.

I have always present to my mind two or three things that others would surely not have noticed, but which penetrated my being like fine, sharp, incurable stings.

You might not perhaps understand the emotion that I retained from these hasty impressions. I will tell you one of them. It is very old, but as fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday. It may be that my imagination alone is responsible for my emotion.

I am fifty. I was young then and studying law. I was rather sad, somewhat of a dreamer, full of a pessimistic philosophy and did not care much for noisy cafés, boisterous companions, or stupid girls. I rose early and one of my chief enjoyments was to walk alone about eight o’clock in the morning in the nursery garden of the Luxembourg.

You people never knew that nursery garden. It was like a forgotten garden of the last century, as pretty as the gentle smile of an old lady. Thick hedges divided the narrow regular paths, peaceful paths between two walls of carefully trimmed foliage. The gardener’s great shears were pruning unceasingly these leafy partitions, and here and there one came across beds of flowers, lines of little trees looking like schoolboys out for a walk, companies of magnificent rose bushes, or regiments of fruit trees.

An entire corner of this charming spot was inhabited by bees. Their straw hives skilfully arranged at distances on boards had their entrances⁠—as large as the opening of a thimble⁠—turned towards the sun, and all along the paths one encountered these humming and gilded flies, the true masters of this peaceful spot, the real promenaders of these quiet paths.

I came there almost every morning. I sat down on a bench and read. Sometimes I let my book fall on my knees, to dream, to listen to the life of Paris around me, and to enjoy the infinite repose of these old-fashioned hedges.

But I soon perceived that I was not the only one to frequent this spot as soon as the gates were opened, and I occasionally met face to face, at a turn in the path, a strange little old man.

He wore shoes with silver buckles, knee-breeches, a snuff-coloured frock coat, a lace jabot, and an outlandish grey hat with wide brim and long-haired surface that might have come out of