Page:Devil stories - an anthology.djvu/341

 LUCIFER

BY ANATOLE FRANCE

This writer has a great sympathy for devil-lore, and many of his characters show the cloven hoof. An analyst of illusions, he has a profound interest in the greatest of illusions. An assailant of every form of superstition, he has a tender affection for the greatest of superstitions. An exponent of the radical and ironical spirit in French literature, he feels irresistibly drawn to the eternal Denier and Mocker.

The story of the Florentine painter Spinello Spinelli, to whom Lucifer appeared in a dream to ask him in what place he had beheld him under so brutish a form as he had painted him, is told in Giorgio Vasari's Vite de' puì eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, ed Architteti (1550), which is the basis of the history of Italian art. It was treated by Barrili in his novel The Devil's Portrait (1882; Engl. tr. 1885), from whom Anatole France may have got the idea for his story. But there is also a mediaeval French legend about a monk (Du moine qui contrefyt l'ymage du Diahle, qui s'en corouça), who was forced by the indignant devil to paint him in a less ugly manner.

The devil is very sensitive in regard to his appearance. On a number of occasions he expressed his bitter resentment at the efforts of a certain class of artists to represent him in a hideous form (cf. M. D. Conway, Demonology and Devil-Lore), Daniel Defoe has well remarked that the devil does not think that the people would be terrified half so much if they were to converse face to face with him. "Really," this biographer of Satan goes on to say, "it were enough to fright the devil himself to meet himself in the dark, dressed up in the several figures [319]