Daudet and Maupassant furnish the best proof of the assertion made in the Introduction to this book that even the Naturalists who, as a rule, disdained the phantastic plots of the Romanticists, whose imagination was rigorously earth-bound, felt themselves nevertheless attracted by devil-lore. Although most of Daudet's subjects are chosen from contemporary French life, this short-story treats a devil-legend of the seventeenth century. This story as "The Pope's Mule" and "The Elixir of the Reverend Pere Gaucher" obviously has no other object but to poke fun at the Catholic Church. It belongs to the literary type known as the Satirical Supernatural.
This story is characteristic of Daudet's art, containing as it does all of his delicacy and daintiness of pathos, of raillery, of humour. It originally appeared in that delightful group of stories Lettres de Mon Moulin (1869).
The horns and tail of his Satanic majesty peep out as vividly in this book as the disguised devils in Ingoldsby's Legend of the North Countrie.
Although hating all men, the devil has a special hatred for the priests, and he delights in bringing them to fall. Satan loathes the priests, because, as Anatole France says, they teach that "God takes delight in seeing His creatures languish in penitence and abstain from His most precious gifts" (Les Dieux ont soif, p. 278).
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