THE DEVIL'S WAGER
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Devil's Wager is Thackeray's earliest attempt at story-writing, was contributed to a weekly literary paper with the imposing title The National Standard, and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, of which he was proprietor and editor, and was reprinted in the Paris Sketch Book (1840). The story first ended with the very Thackerayesque touch: "The moral of this story will be given in several successive numbers." In the Paris Sketch Book the last three words are changed into "the second edition." This comical tale was illustrated by an excellent wood-cut, representing the devil as sailing through the air, dragging after him the fat Sir Roger de Rollo by means of his tail, which is wound round Sir Roger's neck.
In the "Advertisement to the First Edition" of his Paris Sketch Book, Thackeray admits the French origin of this as well as of his other devil-story, The Painter's Bargain, to be found in the same volume. It was Thackeray's good fortune to live in Paris during the wildest and most brilliant years of Romanticism; and while his attitude towards this movement and its leaders, as presented in the Paris Sketch Book, is not wholly sympathetic, he is indebted to it for his interest in supernatural subjects. The Romanticism of Thackeray has been denied with great obstinacy and almost passion, for like Heinrich Heine, the chief of German Romantic ironists, he poked fun at this movement. But "to laugh at what you love," as Mr. George Saintsbury has pointed out in his History of
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