he is vexatious and
unreasonable, and that I have no sympathy whatever with him. Of course
the book is of its own kind, and not of another. Some people may like
that kind less than others; some may not like it at all. But in that
case nobody obliges them to have anything to do with it.

Soulie wrote nearly two score novels or works of fiction, ranging from
_Contes pour les Enfants_ to _Memoires du Diable_. I do not pretend to
have read all or even very many of them, for, as I have confessed, they
are not my special kind. In novels of action there should be a great
deal of fighting and a great deal of love-making, and it does not seem
to me that either[280] was Soulie's forte. But as the _Memoires_ are
sometimes quoted as his masterpiece, something should, I suppose, be
said about them.

[Sidenote: _Les Memoires du Diable._]

One thing about the book is certain--that it is much more ambitiously
planned than the _Chateau_; and I do not think it uncritical to say that
the ambition is, to a certain extent, successful. One credit, at any
rate, can hardly be denied it. Considering the immense variety in
circumstances of the bargains with the Devil which are made in actual
life, it may seem strange that the literary treatment of the subject
should be so comparatively monotonous as it is. Soulie, I think, has
been at least as original as anybody else, though it was of course
almost impossible for him to avoid suggestions, if not of Marlowe, of
Lesage, Goethe, Maturin (whose wide popularity in France at this time
must never be forgotten), and others. At the very beginning there is one
touch which, if not absolutely invented, is newish in the connection.
The Chateau of Ronquerolles, again in the Pyrenean district (besides the
advantages of a mountainous country, Soulie himself was born at Foix),
has a range of mysterious windows, each of which has for many
generations emerged, with the room appertaining, from wall and corridor
without anybody remembering it before.[281] As a matter of fact these
chambers have been the scenes of successive bargains between the Lords
of Ronquerolles and the Prince of Darkness; and a fresh one is opened
whenever the last inheritor of an ancestral curse (details of which are
explained later) has gone to close his account. The new Count de Luizzi
knows what he has to do, which is to summon Satan by a certain little
silver bell at the not most usual but sufficiently witching hour of
_two_ A.M., sayi