Between 1914 and 1923 Ramuz completed a sequence of works that David Bevan describes as “apocalyptic novels.” These works share a common theme, which Bevan describes as “the strange, unnatural plight of the villagers, faced with signs and events they can barely interpret, let alone counteract, is only resolved finally by the unintentionally redemptive quality of some naïve human action.” As luck would have it, these Biblically-adjacent themes were squarely in Ramuz’s wheelhouse, if not as matters of faith than as a source of literary inspiration dating back to his formative years.
Genesis was for me, well before the Odyssey, a book full of fascinating stories that was read to us on Sunday mornings, from eleven to mid-day, in the Church of St. Francis. A commentary used to be given on the chapter or part of a chapter for that day. But I have no memory of the commentaries, it is only the characters whom I see, Abram who becomes Abraham, Sarai who became Sarah, Noah and then his son who walks backwards in order not to see his father’s nakedness. They emerge from the depths of time and yet were also in mine, just like our own country people, cultivating the ground and the vine like them. There was a wonderful harmony between that childhood of the world and our own childhood. All those stories in the Bible, I have experienced them.
The influence of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is apparent in these works, never more so than in Le règne de l'esprit malin, The Reign of the Evil One en Anglais.
It is the story of a gregarious stranger named Branchu who moves to a small village and charms the hell out of the townspeople. On his very first night in the village, Branchu, plying the locals with a mix of charisma and alcohol, asks if he might find work as a shoemaker, to which the astonished crowd gathered at the tavern replies that their previous shoemaker died only three days prior. Setting up in the deceased man’s store, for which he paid an unreasonably high sum, Branchu begins selling the finest shoes anyone has ever seen for a fraction of what the deceased man charged. This business model is ruinous to the village’s other shoemaker, who loses what business he had been able to gin up to Branchu and hangs himself.
From there, the town descends into madness – people fighting, men beating their wives, all sorts of accidents – and people begin to suspect that Branchu is responsible, with Luc, the village “crazy,” being especially vociferous in his denunciations. Branchu’s ability to deceive the villagers, though, is unceasing, and he performs literal miracles to convince some of them of his goodness, with one man going so far as to declare that Branchu is Christ himself after he cured the man’s mother of paralysis. That same man, in a state of fervent worship brought on by his witness to this miracle, convinces some of the villagers to help him throw Luc into the fountain, where he catches pneumonia and subsequently dies. Branchu eventually reveals himself through acts of extreme malice, including an episode in which four pregnant women pass out directly in front of his shop and subsequently have still births. The town becomes divided between those who support Branchu, joining him at the tavern for drinking and general merriment, and those against Branchu, who continue to suffer tragedy after tragedy. Ramuz’s description of the villagers’ suffering is bone-chilling in its cruelty:
In a hundred other houses it was the same. Many had to crawl on their hands and knees, being unable to stand. Their mouths were like the mouths of beasts; saliva ran down over their chins. Some bit into the floorboards and tried to live on sawdust. Cats, dogs, and even mice had been killed; they had to be eaten raw for there was no firewood. Soon there were no animals left for them to kill, and the days of their existence could be counted. Eating raw flesh (it was almost like eating their own) doubled the violence of the disease: malignant ulcers in the case of the grownups, and twisted arms and legs with children. There was not a house in the village that did not contain at least one corpse, for no one dared to go as far as the cemetery. A beloved father lies dead in a corner of the kitchen on the bare earthen floor; all that can be done is to put a cushion beneath his head. His family look the other way when passing so as not to see him. Little Julien, scarcely two years old, was put in a cardboard box. His father fetched a pot of paint and painted it blue. Perhaps he was trying to cheat Time in this way, unless indeed he was trying to cheat himself, for it did not take much thinking to realize how soon his own death would follow his son’s. And there would probably be no coffin for him; to die unknown in some corner would be his fate.
Branchu’s defeat comes through his being confronted by a young girl who wants her father back, he having given himself over to wickedness in the form of greed earlier in the story. The young girl, somehow unafraid of literally The Devil, resurrects the village and its people through her purity and courage.
Ramuz’s novels of the period are but a drop in the ocean of a much broader trend in the arts that I, who is not the chair of a Humanities department at a major university, refer to as “devil stuff.”
The Devil was conceived at the same time as The Savior (every religion has some concept of good and evil, but we’re talking about European Christianity here, to be clear). Devil stuff, however, took a while to make its way into existence. In its early days, Christianity relied on scapegoating the Pagan gods for evil, especially the Greek god Pan, goat-legged wild man, sexual icon, and, worst of all, flute player. National Geographic suggests that the oldest representation of The Devil as we think of him today is a mosaic at the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy which shows Christ, already looking kinda exhausted from just a few hundred years of redeeming the souls of believers, separating the saved from the damned. The Devil is shown on Christ’s left, clad in a blue robe with a halo, looking pretty classy, very much the fallen angel from the Book of Isaiah. That the saved are represented as sheep and the damned as goats reminds us that early Christians still hated Pan and that they did not foresee the day when people kept goats as emotional support animals.
His liturgical evolution from mere adversary to spiritual enemy began in earnest in during Medieval times – not to be confused with Medieval Times, the “Dinner and Tournament” spectacle that is its own form of damnation – by which point any vestiges of his previous life as a fallen angel were removed in favor of representing him as a giant horned beast who always seems to have been caught eating a human being mid-bite. This transition happened in earnest at the same time that The Devil’s handiwork was being carried out across Europe. Massive crop failures throughout the continent in 1315 led to a famine so widespread and destructive that it bears the moniker “Great” with a capital G. Society descended into madness – people murdering one another for food, eating dogs and horses, rumors of cannibalism – and the church was unable to meaningfully intercede. The food supply would not be fully restored until 1322. Fifteen years later, the Hundred Years War broke out.
These were but trailers to The Devil’s feature presentation.
Human bodies were subjected to vile tortures cast upon them by an invisible hand. Large swollen masses appeared. Blood was vomited. Lungs were destroyed. The Black Death consumed souls rapaciously and, again, no intercession was possible. Take it away, Giovanni Boccaccio:
Let me say, then, that thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had already passed after the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God when into the distinguished city of Florence…there came a deadly pestilence. Either because of the influence of heavenly bodies or because of God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds, the pestilence, originating some years earlier in the East, killed an infinite number of people as it spread relentlessly from one place to another until finally it had stretched its miserable length all over the West. And against this pestilence no human wisdom or foresight was of any avail; quantities of filth were removed from the city by officials charged with the task; the entry of any sick person into the city was prohibited; and many directives were issued concerning the maintenance of good health. Nor were the humble supplications rendered not once, but many times, by the pious to God, through public processions or by other means, in any way efficacious.
One third of Europe’s population was taken by the Black Death. The Book of Revelation must have seemed awfully close to nigh. The failure of these humble supplications led to the conclusion that this was punishment for the multitude of sins being committed by the greedy, the blasphemous, the heretical, the worldly. Obtaining God’s forgiveness would require that communities be purged of these elements. These elements were, naturally, and you guys aren’t going to believe this, the Jews.
The Devil as the all-consuming dark lord of chaos and destruction thus entered the public consciousness. Dante Alighieri began his masterpiece The Divine Comedy with “Inferno,” a blow-by-blow account of his guided journey through the nine circles of Hell. Every painter of any significance in the Medieval and Renaissance periods depicted Hell in delightfully trippy ways. The old Italian and Flemish masters painted frescoes and triptychs that had little sections dedicated to showing the abject terror and utterly bizarre circumstances awaiting the end of a life of sin. The most famous of these works is probably The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, which vision of hell shows The Devil as a bird with legs eating a person (mid-bite!) amidst a cacophony of visual insanity that includes a giant pair of human ears brandishing a knife, some sort of long-snouted bird patrolling a frozen lake with a bow and arrow, and a man with a musical instrument in his ass.
This intensely moralistic version of The Devil persisted for centuries, reaching its end in and around the Elizabethan England of Christopher Marlowe and a host of witch trials. The Enlightenment would transform The Devil into a more complex figure, exchanging unironic superstition for metaphor on the human ability to create its own evil. By the time this strain of Devil had traced its journey from Paradise Lost to Goethe’s Faust, the graphic violence and horns and animal features had given way to Mephistopheles, the “shrewd and wily dandy” who wouldn’t so much snatch one’s soul as one of the requirements of being the manifestation of evil solely as it exists in relation to good as trick one out of it by letting one hang oneself with a rope made of one’s own faults. For reference, see Al Pacino’s performance in the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate. “I’m The Devil! HOO-AH!”
From the publication of Goethe’s Faust, there had been a steady stream of devil stuff all the way into the turn of the new century and beyond. The list of composers who took Faust itself as the inspiration for a work of their own is a veritable who’s who of the 19th century: Wagner, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Mahler. The Faust-ian take on The Devil is a main character or key element of short stories, poems, and novels from the likes of Chekhov, Gogol, Shelley, Stevenson, Hoffman, Irving, and Twain. The Expressionist painter Ernst Kirchner created a series of woodcut prints for Peter Schlemihl's Wondrous Story, about a man who sells his shadow to The Devil in exchange for a bottomless wallet and discovers himself shunned by society because he doesn’t have a shadow. The satirist and caricaturist Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm published Enoch Soames, about an author convinced of his own greatness who makes a deal with The Devil to spring forward in time a hundred years to see how he is viewed by posterity. Beerbohm is himself the narrator and real friends of his are among the characters. Imagine if Gay Talese and Charles Schulz had a baby who grew up to write The Blair Witch Project. It is almost impossible to describe how strange this story is.
Within this field of devil stuff exists a rich subset that I, who is also not a distinguished pedagogue and acknowledged subject matter expert on the history of the instrument, refer to as “The Devil seems to really like the violin.” While the roots of His affection for the violin can trace their roots back to ancient times depending upon your interpretation of scripture and what constitutes “worldly pleasures,” humankind’s discovery of The Devil’s love for the violin began with a dream.
Giuseppe Tartini spent the majority of his career as the violinist and concertmaster (which sounds so much cooler in his native Italian: primo violino e capo di concerto said while making substantial hand gestures) at the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, half an hour or so west of Venice, but his greatest contributions to music history are as a theorist and composer. He wrote several treatises on music and is credited with discovering “difference tones,” an acoustic phenomenon in which two sounds of differing frequency, when played in combination, can produce a resultant third sound based on the differential of those frequencies. If you search “Tartini tone” on YouTube, a lovely student from St. Olaf College will be happy to explain. He perfected a manner of bowing that became influential to subsequent generations of violinists. Milwaukee, Wisconsin residents may recall him as the first known owner of the 1715 Stradivarius violin used by their concertmaster and stolen from him in 2014 by a guy who tased him and drove off in a late ‘80’s minivan. But Tartini’s greatest fame comes from his most significant musical composition, a Violin Sonata in G minor known as Trillo del Diavolo or The Devil’s Trill.
Tartini recounted the inspiration for his work to celebrated French astronomer Jérôme Lalande, who shared it in one of his memoirs:
He dreamed one night, in 1713, that he had made a compact with the Devil, who promised him to be at his service on all occasions; and during this vision everything succeeded according to his mind. In short, he imagined he gave the Devil his violin, in order to discover what kind of musician he was; when to his great astonishment, he heard him play a solo so singularly beautiful and executed with such superior taste and precision, that it surpassed all he has ever heard or conceived in his life. So great was his surprise and so exquisite his delight upon this occasion that it deprived him of the power of breathing.
He awoke with the violence of his sensation and instantly seized his fiddle in hopes of expressing what he had just heard, but in vain; he, however, then composed a piece, which is perhaps the best of all his works (he called it the “Devil’s Sonata”) but it was so inferior to what his sleep had produced that he declared he should have broken his instrument and abandoned music forever, if he could have subsisted by any other means.
Scholars of Tartini dispute that the work was written in 1713 as it bears hallmarks of his more mature style, but the point is simply that The Devil was apparently a hell of a violinist and revealed himself as such to the greatest violinist of his era.
Tartini’s claim to the title of Greatest Violinist in the History of the World has but a few challengers. One of those men is Niccolo Paganini (hand gestures, y’all!), with whom The Devil reached a soul-for-violin-mastery agreement sometime in the 1790’s. From there, Paganini toured the world, mesmerizing audiences with said mastery and engaging in all manner of untoward behavior. He drank heavily and caroused with women, contracting syphilis by his 40th birthday. Rumors of his pact with The Devil spread everywhere he went, and even stranger rumors followed close behind, one particularly salacious rumor being that he had murdered a woman and used her intestines for strings, capturing HER soul in the process. People claimed to see doppelgängers of Paganini with cloven hooves or lightning strike his bow in concert. If there was any doubt about The Devil’s role in Paganini’s virtuosity, they were assuaged at the end of Paganini’s life when he refused last rites on his deathbed and was therefore not buried on consecrated ground. It would be four years until intercession came from Pope Gregory XVI, who allowed the master’s body to be buried at La Villetta Cemetery in Parma, Italy.
As the 20th century approached, The Devil’s violin legacy became firmly established through some of the greatest works of the Romantic period. Franz Liszt, whose unparalleled piano skills likely would have caused him to be accused of entering a pact with The Devil were he not also one of history’s great gentleman, composed his Mephisto Waltz no. 1 in 1860. The piece centers on a gathering at a tavern in which Mephisto’s violin playing is so rapturous that the villagers leave two by two for a night of sex. Fourteen years later, Camille Saint-Saëns mixed Liszt’s aesthetic with the Medieval legend of the Dance of Death in Danse macabre, in which Death plays the fiddle and skeletons dance on their graves. Saint-Saëns used a technique called scordatura, an intentional deviation from standard tuning, to create the violin’s diabolically creepy sound. This same technique was later employed by Gustav Mahler in the second movement of his Symphony no. 4, his own take on the Dance of Death, which he titled “Freund Hein spielt auf” or “Death Strikes Up.” Around the same time came Antonin Dvorak’s opera Kate and the Devil, in which the title character, avoided by the townspeople at a dance, announces that if no one will dance with her she will dance with The Devil himself. Guess who appears ready to display his violin prowess to seduce Kate down to Hell?
These works existed adjacent to the emergence of the Decadent movement, whose adherents devoted themselves to plundering the depths of the human sensual experience in all the beauty and depravity that such an endeavor entailed. Many prominent writers were aligned with the movement, including Baudelaire, Verlaine, Montesquiou, Huysmans, and Wilde. Among aligned visual artists the most famous is probably Aubrey Beardsley. The most notorious, however, is without question Félicien Rops, a Belgian caricaturist and illustrator whose images blast past the line of blasphemy at warp speed. Five images which Rops painted as part of a never-completed work called L’Album du Diable or The Devil’s Scrapbook were banned in France and even a hundred and forty years later it’s not hard to see why. One such image, titled Calvary, depicts Christ on the cross as Satan, surrounded by Gothic candles, goat legs holding tight to the hair of a nude woman and using it to choke her, his fan fiction-esque testicles and massive erection resting comfortably on the woman’s face. Google it if you dare. Rops was obsessed with the concept of the femme fatale and summarizes his position as such: “Woman is Satan’s accomplice, and becomes the supreme attraction which provokes the most extreme vices and torments in Man, a mere puppet.” We still have plenty of room to go for gender equality, but put your hands together for the old days, everybody!
From an academic standpoint, the movement was characterized by all manner of negative-seeming ideas. James Kearns, in Symbolist Landscapes: The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle, examines some of these ideas through a sonnet composed by Albert Aurier for the journal Le Décadent as “an anthology of decadent themes, among which a disgust with the self and the world, perversion, scepticism, and vulgar humour predominate.” The novelist Paul Bourget provides a much kinder view, which is entirely too long and beside the point such that I should not be spending this much time on including it here but is also an inspired ethos:
The great argument against decadence is that it knows no tomorrow and in the end is always destroyed by barbarity. But is it not the fate of the exquisite and the rare always to be in the wrong in the face of brutality? One is entitled to acknowledge this wrong and to prefer the defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of violent Macedonia. The same is true of the literatures of decadent periods. They too have no tomorrow. They lead to alterations of vocabulary, subtleties of meaning that make them unintelligible to the generations to come. Fifty years from now the style of the Goncourt brothers - I name men who have deliberately chosen the path of decadence - will be understood only by specialists. The theoreticians of decadence would retort: what does it matter? Is the writer's purpose to set himself up as a perpetual candidate before the universal suffrage of centuries to come? We delight in our so-called corruptions of style as well as in the refined beings of our race and our time. It remains to determine whether the exceptional group we constitute is not, in fact, an aristocracy and whether in the realm of aesthetics the plurality of votes does not, in fact, add up to a plurality of dunces. It is as childish to believe in the writer's immortality - soon the memory of men will be so overloaded by the prodigious quantity of books that any notion of glory will necessarily be bankrupt - as it is deceitful to lack the courage to sustain one's intellectual pleasure. Let us take pleasure, therefore, in the peculiarities of our ideals and forms, even if they imprison us in a solitude unbroken by visitors. Those who will still come to us will really be our brothers, and why sacrifice to others what is most intimate, most special, and most personal in us?
The timing of this movement certainly makes sense when viewed through history’s prism. The definition of “decadent” is, on the one hand, about matters of self-indulgence. On the other hand, it also means “marked by decay or decline,” a sort of mashup of “decade” and “descent.” Behaving as if there was no tomorrow became a self-fulfilling prophecy the moment “violent Macedonia” prevailed in 1914. The 20th century, in all its absurd extremes, saw The Devil fully repurposed for politics. This wasn’t in and of itself a new practice – the Catholics and Protestants have all sorts of fun accusatory propaganda showing the other side as an instrument of The Devil during the Reformation – but the invocation of the enemy as a tool of The Devil became an increasingly useful strategy. The finest of these efforts is unquestionably “The Pals,” a poster of a tippy-toed Kaiser Wilhelm passionately kissing a quintessential red Devil, their respective helmets at their feet next to The Kaiser’s bloody sword and The Devil’s pitchfork.
Given the decadence of the preceding years and its march towards the hellish bloodshed of the war, a return to the collective psychology of the Middle Ages seems entirely understandable. How else to explain such madness? Little did they know that The Devil was only getting started.
I only recently learned that the conception of Satan as a lava red pseudo-satyr really only goes as far back as Milton’s time. Satan as a pale blue but still be-haloed figure is much more consistent with the Biblical description of a fallen angel in Judaism and early Christianity. The idea of Devil as violinist is a fascinating one too - one rarely hears about the devil playing piano or singing as an operatic bass-baritone.