It’s A Devil of a Time in Eseldorf: The Chronicle of Young Satan, Chapter 4 • The Devil According to Mark Twain

Chapter four of The Chronicle of Young Satan is where Eseldorf stops being a quirky medieval village and starts being a place where people get burned. The witch panic has expanded beyond old women — it's anyone now, children as young as eight or nine — and Twain illustrates this with two stories that land hard: eleven convent schoolgirls starved and isolated until one confessed to dancing with Satan at the sabbath (the commission fed her every detail from a papal checklist two centuries old), and Gottfried Narr's grandmother, who confessed immediately and voluntarily, because she'd done the math on her options.Into this atmosphere, Father Adolf spots his opening. Margaret's mysterious wealth — the cat's contributions, the lavish spreads, the wine nobody can explain — has people talking. He sends spies in disguised as friends, tests samples of the food, and when it stays real and rots on a normal schedule, decides that proves it's a new kind of witchcraft. Then he crashes her party for forty guests, and Satan slides into him like a transparent film and fills a wine bottle from a two-pint bottle, tells the room "it is nothing, anybody can do it," juggles a hundred brass balls in the market square, and walks a tightrope blindfolded. The crucifix doesn't help. This is Twain at his most subversive — and it's also exactly the scene Paine-Duneka reassigned to a made-up astrologer in the fraud version, because having the devil publicly humiliate an anointed priest was apparently too much.The chapter ends with Satan at Margaret's, playing Wilhelm's poem back as a full orchestral performance on a jangly old spinet, and Wilhelm correctly identifying him as the devil.The Devil's Details show page/archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X ---Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at OnceThe Exorcist Minute