AN INCIDENT WHICH BRINGS THE AUTHOR INTO A FORTUITOUS RESEMBLANCE WITH
THE PATRIARCH OF THE PREDICANT FRIARS. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FACT
AND THE FABLE; AND AN APPLICATION WHICH, UNLIKE THOSE THAT ARE USUALLY
APPENDED TO ESOP'S FABLES, THE READER IS LIKELY NEITHER TO SKIP NOR TO
FORGET.
_Diré aqui una maldad grande del Demonio._
PEDRO DE CIEÇA DE LEON.
While I was writing that last chapter, a flea appeared upon the page
before me, as there did once to St. Dominic.
But the circumstances in my case and in St. Dominic's were different.
For, in the first place I, as has already been said, was writing; but
St. Dominic was reading.
Secondly, the flea which came upon my paper was a real flea, a flea of
flea-flesh and blood, partly flea-blood and partly mine, which the
said flea had flea-feloniously appropriated to himself by his own
process of flea-botomy. That which appeared upon St. Dominic's book
was the Devil in disguise.
The intention with which the Devil abridged himself into so diminutive
a form, was that he might distract the Saint's attention from his
theological studies, by skipping upon the page, and perhaps provoke
him to unsaintlike impatience by eluding his fingers.
But St. Dominic was not so to be deceived: he knew who the false flea
was!
To punish him therefore for this diabolical intrusion, he laid upon
him a holy spell whereby Flea Beelzebub was made to serve as a marker
through the whole book. When Dominic, whether in the middle of a
sentence or at the end, lifted his eyes from the page in meditation,
Flea Beelzebub moved to the word at which the Saint had paused,—he
moved not by his own diabolical will, but in obedience to an impulse
which he had no power to resist; and there he remained, having as
little power to remove, till the Saint's eye having returned to the
book, and travelled farther, stopt at another passage. And thus St.
Dominic used him through the volume, putting him moreover whenever he
closed the book to the _peine forte et dure_.
When Dominic had finished the volume, he dismissed his marker. Had it
been a heretic, instead of the Devil, the canonized founder of the
Friars Predicant, and Patron Saint of the Inquisition, would not have
let him off so easily.
Indeed I cannot but think that his lenity in this case was ill-placed.
He should have dealt with that flea as I did with mine.
“How, Mr. Author, was that?”
“I dealt with it, Sir, as Agesilaus unceremoniously did with one
victim upon the altar of Chalciœcious Pallas, at the same time that
with all due ceremony he was sacrificing another. An ox was the
premeditated and customary victim; the extemporaneous and
extraordinary one was a six-footed ‘small deer.’ Plutarch thought the
fact worthy of being recorded; and we may infer from it that the
Spartans did not always comb their long hair so carefully as the Three
Hundred did at Thermopylæ, when on the morning of that ever glorious
fight, they made themselves ready to die there in obedience to the
institutions of their country. What the King of Lacedæmon did with his
crawler, I did with my skipper;—I cracked it, Sir.”
“And for what imaginable reason can you have thought fit to publish
such an incident to the world?”
“For what reason, Sir?—why, that Hop-o'-my-thumb the critic may know
what he has to expect, if I lay hold of him!”