Page:Devil stories - an anthology.djvu/322

 THE DEVIL'S MOTHER-IN-LAW

BY FERNÁN CABALLERO

Fernán Caballero is the pseudonym of Mrs. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, Marchioness de Arco-Hermoso, who was a Swiss by birth, daughter of the literary historian Johann Böhl von Faber, the Johannes of Campe's Robinson (1779). Her father initiated her early into Spanish literature, which he interpreted for her in the spirit of the Romantic movement of those early days. The interest in mediaeval traditions, which she owes to this early training, increased when, later, she went to Catholic Spain. The charm of her popular Andalusian tales consists in the fact that she fully shares with the Catholic peasants of that province an implicit faith in the truth of these mediaeval legends. In her stories we find perhaps the purest expression of mediaevalism in modem times. Fernán Caballero gradually drifted to the extreme Right in all questions of religion, art and life. She hated every liberal expression in matters of faith or art with the fanaticism of a Torquemada. This author not only shared the somewhat general Catholic view that all Protestants were eternally damned, but she naïvely believed that every son of Israel had a tail (Julian Schmidt).

The story of woman's triumph over the Devil is well characteristic of the Land of the Blessed Lady, as Andalusia is commonly called.

The legend of a devil imprisoned in a phial is also found in the work of the Spaniard Luis Velez de Guevara called El Diablo cojuelo (1641), from whom Alain Le Sage borrowed both title and plot for his novel Le Diable boiteux (1707). [300]