was led by the
sound of music into a large hall where were a great number of little
people feasting. Among them were some faces he seemed to know; but he
took no notice of them until the little folk offered him drink, when one
of them, whose features seemed not unknown to him, plucked him by the
coat and forbade him, whatever he did, to taste anything he saw before
him; "for if you do", he added, "you will be as I am, and return no more
to your family."[19]

It is necessary for the hero of a Picard story to go and seek the devil
in his own abode. The devil of popular imagination, though a terrific
ogre, is not the entirely Evil One of theologians; and one of his good
points in the story referred to is that he has three fair daughters, the
fairest of whom is compelled by the hero to help him in overcoming her
father. She accordingly instructs him to eat no meat and to drink no
wine at the devil's house, otherwise he will be poisoned. This may
remind us of Kan Puedaei, who in the Altaic ballad descends with his steed
to the middle of the earth and encounters various monsters. There the
grass and the water of the mountain forest through which he rode were
poison. In both cases, what is probably meant is, that to eat or drink
is to return no more from these mysterious abodes; and it may be to the
intent to obviate any such consequence that Saint Peter, in sending a
certain king's son down through a black and stinking hole a hundred
toises deep underground, in a Gascon tale, to fetch Saint Peter's own
sword, provides him with just enough bread in his wallet every morning
to prevent his bursting with hunger. An extension of this thought
sometimes even prohibits the hero from accepting a seat or a bed offered
by way of hospitality on the part of the devil, or the sorceress, to
whose dwelling his business may take him, or even to look at the fair
temptress who may seek to entice him to eat.[20]

The meaning of the superstition is not easy to trace, but it should be
remembered that in the lower stages of human civilization no distinction
is drawn between supernatural or spiritual beings who have never been
enclosed in human bodies, and the spirits of the dead. Savage philosophy
mingles them together in one phantasmagoria of grotesquery and horror.
The line which separates fairies and ogres from the souls of men has
gradually grown up through ages of Christian teaching; and, broad as it
may seem to us, it is occasionally hardly