es, meekly, more insult from the very executioner. At last he makes
the sign of the compact and summons the "Saracen" fiend. And then, after
a very good conversation, in which the Devil uses all his powers of
sarcasm to show his victim that, as usual, he has sold his soul for
naught, Tristan draws his sword, calls on the Trinity, Our Lady, and
Joan, and one of the strangest though not of the worst fights in fiction
begins.

The Red Bastard is himself almost a giant; but the Saracen is a fiend,
and though it seems that in this case the Devil _can_ be dead, he can,
it seems also, only be killed at Poitiers in his original tomb. So

They wrestle up, they wrestle down,
They wrestle still and sore,

for two whole years, the Demon constantly giving ground and misleading
his enemy as much as he can. But Tristan, in the strength of repentance
and with Joan's unseen help, lives, fights, and forces the fiend back
over half France and half the world. By a good touch, after long combat,
the Devil tries to tempt his adversary on the side of chivalry, asking
to be allowed to drink at a stream on a burning day, to warm himself at
a fire they pass in a snow-storm, to rest a moment. But Tristan has the
single word "Non!" for any further pact with or concession to the Evil
One; the two years' battle wears away his sin; and at last he finds
himself pressing his fainting foe towards the very tomb in the fields of
Poitou. It opens, and the combatants entering, find themselves by the
actual graves. They drop their swords and now literally wrestle. Tristan
wins, throws the Saracen into his own tomb, and runs him through the
body, once more inflicting on him such death as he may undergo.[366]

There is a grandiose extravagance about it which is really
Oriental;[367] and perhaps it was this which conciliated Robertson
Smith, as it certainly reconciled me.

[Sidenote: _Antonine._]

A third "book of the beginning," _Antonine_, is far inferior to these.
It is, in fact, little more than a decentish Paul-de-Kockery, with a
would-be philosophical conclusion. Two young men, Gustave Daunont and
Edmond de Pereux, saunter after breakfast looking for young ladies'
ankles, and Edmond sees a pair so beautiful that he follows the
possessor and her unobservant father home. Having then ascertained that
the father is a doctor, he adopts the surprisingly brilliant expedient
of going to consult him, and so engineering an entry. _He_ thinks there
is