Episode Details

Part Five of Folk Tales of France opens the book's third section, the diableries, sorceries and tales of revenants, with two tales in our own translation: a lonely farmer who signs the Devil's pact for a wife, and is saved on his wedding night by the one thing he cannot do; and a sleeper in a locked church who answers a dead priest's mass, and sets him free. Between them in the book stands tale XLI, the Devil caught and tormented by his own workmen, which stands held for a ruling; no completeness is claimed for the stretch.

Jean Lemaître of the Mare-au-Loup is his parish's reputed sorcerer and its loneliest man. At every evening gathering the talk stops at his coming, his cider bowl is kept apart, and the fire brands are always turned against him; past the age for marrying, no girl will even give him hopes. One spring night in his stable he says aloud that he would give himself to the Devil for a housewife — and a honeyed voice answers. The gentleman in brown, with the red beard and the bluish eyes, asks only one small condition, and Jean signs the pact in the book's own single clause, a knife's touch in his arm. The splinter of the bad thief's cross wins him Mathurine; but all his wedding day he cannot make her commit one mortal sin, and a little before midnight a stranger with black-gloved hands joins the dance. The tale stands as Sébillot told it: the signing is the book's one clause, and no other harm is done or suffered in the telling.

In the old church of Saint-Sébastien, on a wild March night before the Revolution, a tired man sleeps through evening prayer and is locked in alone. At the twelfth stroke of midnight the sacristy door opens of itself, the candles light with no hand to light them, and a priest who has come ten years of nights to ask his question asks it three times, in a voice that fades as it asks: is there anyone who will answer my mass?

Told at Matignon, and collected by Paul Sébillot (1843–1918).

Chapters:

00:09 The Pact

16:35 The Ghost's Mass

From Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne, Tome I (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering from the French.

Two tales of the other world knocking — a bargain struck in a stable, and a kindness done in a dark church. More of Brittany follows in Part Six.

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