the literary side of
his office, and could talk about French quite as knowledgeably as he
could about Arabic and Hebrew.[361] He was rather enthusiastic about the
book, an enthusiasm which, when I myself came to read it, for a
considerable time puzzled me a little. It opens pretty well, but already
with a good deal of the "possible-improbable" about it; for when some
twenty wolves have once pulled a horse down and a man off it, his chance
of escaping (especially without revolvers) seems small, even though two
rescuers come up, one of whom has a knack of shooting these
creatures[362] and the other of throttling them. It is on these rescuers
that the central interest of the story turns. Olivier de Karnak and
Tristan le Roux are, though they do not at the time know it, brothers by
the same mother, the guiltless Countess of Karnak having been drugged,
violated, and made a mother by Gilles de Retz's father. They are also
rivals for the love of their cousin Alix, and as she prefers Olivier,
this sends Tristan literally "to the Devil." The compact is effected by
means of a Breton sorceress, who has been concerned in the earlier
crime, and is an accomplice of Gilles himself. That eminent patriot
performs,[363] for Tristan's benefit or ruin, one of his black masses,
with a murdered child's blood for wine. Further _diablerie_ opens a
great tomb near Poitiers, where, seven hundred years earlier, in Charles
Martel's victory, an ancestor of the Karnaks has been buried alive,
with the Saracen Emir he had just slain, by the latter's followers; and
where the two have beguiled the time by continuous ghostly fighting. The
Saracen, when the tomb is opened, evades, seen by no one but Tristan,
and becomes the apostate's by no means guardian devil. Then we have the
introduction of the Maid (whom Tristan is specially set by his master to
catch), the siege of Orleans and the rest of it, to the tragedy of
Rouen.

Up to this point--that is to say, for some seven-eighths of the book--I
confess that I did not, and do not, think much of it. I am very fond of
fighting in novels; and of _diablerie_ even "more than reason"; and of
the Middle Ages; and of many other things connected with the work. But
it does not seem to me well managed or well told. One never can make out
whether the "Sarrazin" is, as he is actually sometimes called, Satan
himself, or not. If he is not, why call him so? If he is, why was there
so little evidence of his being constantl