la
Gloire" Baudelaire presents the Demon of Love as holding in his left
hand a violin "which without doubt served to sing his pleasures and
pains." The devil also appears as limping fiddler in a California
legend, which appeared under the title "The Devil's Fiddle" in a
Californian magazine in 1855. Death, the devil's first cousin, if not
his _alter ego_, has the souls, in the Dance of Death, march off to
hell to a merry tune on his violin. Death appears as a musician also
in the Piper of Hamlin. In this legend, well known to the English
world through Browning's poem "Pied Piper of Hamelin" (1843) and Miss
Peabody's play _The Piper_ (1909), the rats are the human souls, which
Death charms with his music into following him. In the Middle Ages the
soul was often represented as leaving the body in the form of a mouse.
The soul of a good man comes out of his mouth as a white mouse, while
at the death of a sinner the soul escapes as a black mouse, which the
devil catches and brings to hell. Mephistopheles, it will be recalled,
calls himself "the lord of rats and mice" (_Faust_, 1, 1516).
Devil-Death has inherited this wind instrument from the goat-footed
Pan.

"The Devil is more busy in the convents," we are told by J. K.
Huysmans in his novel _En route_ (1895), "than in the cities, as he
has a harder job on hand."

BELPHAGOR

BY NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

This story of the devil Belphagor, who was sent by his infernal chief
Pluto up to earth, where he married an earthly wife, but finally left
her in disgust to go back to hell, is also of mediaeval origin. It was
first printed by Giovanni Brevio in 1545, and appeared for the second
time with the name of Machiavelli in 1549, twenty-two years after the
death of the diabolical statesman. The two authors did not borrow from
each other, but had a common source in a mediaeval Latin manuscript,
which seems to have first fallen into the hands of Italians, but was
later brought to France where it has been lost. The tale of the
marriage of the devil appeared in several other Italian versions
during the sixteenth century. Among the Italian novelists, who retold
it for the benefit of their married friends, may be mentioned
Giovan-Francesco Straparola, Francesco Sansovino, and Gabriel
Chappuys. In England this story was no less popular. Barnabe Riche
inserted it in his collection of narratives in 1581, and we meet it
again later in the following plays: _Grim, the Collier of Croy