found a
trace of his grandfather. Satan has probably been adopted by the
grandmother of Grendel, the Anglo-Saxon evil demon. The horns have
been inherited by Satan from Dionysos. This Greek god had bull-feet
and bull's horns.

The reader, who is interested in the origin of the European Carnival
(Shrove Tuesday) customs, is referred to the editor's monograph _The
Origin of the German Carnival Comedy_ (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co.,
1920).

THE LEGEND OF MONT ST.-MICHEL

BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT

No greater proof of the permanence and persistence of the devil as a
character in literature can be adduced than the fact that this writer,
in whom we find the purest expression of Naturalism, for whom the
visible world was absolutely all that there is, was attracted by a
devil-legend. But on this point he had a good example in his
god-father and master Gustave Flaubert, who, though a realist of
realists, showed deep interest in the Tempter of St. Anthony.

This legend of the fraudulent bargain between a sprite and a farmer as
to alternate upper- and under-ground crops, with which "the great
vision of the guarded mount" is here connected, is of Northern origin,
but has travelled South as far as Arabia. It will be found in Grimm's
_Fairy Tales_ (No. 189); Thiele's _Danish Legends_ (No. 122), and T.
Sternberg's _The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northampshire_ (p. 140).
Rabelais used it as a French legend, and in its Oriental form it
served as a subject for a poem by the German Friedrich Rueckert ("Der
betrogene Teufel"). In all these versions the agreement is entered
into between the devil (in the Northampshire form it is a bogie or
some other field spirit) and a peasant. It was reserved for Maupassant
to make St. Michael get the better of Satan on earth as in heaven.

According to this legend the devil broke his leg when, in his flight
from St. Michael, he jumped off the roof of the castle into which he
had been lured by the saint. The traditional explanation for the
devil's broken leg is his fall from heaven. "I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven" (Luke x, 18). All rebellious deities, who
were universally supposed to have fallen from heaven, have crooked or
crippled legs. Hephaestos, Vulcan, Loki and Wieland, each has a broken
leg. This idea has probably been derived from the crooked lightning
flashes. The devil's mother in the mediaeval German mystery-plays
walks on crutches. Asmodeus, the Persian demon Aeshma d