Can one sell their soul to the devil?

“The Yankee Faust”

A Fable of Old New England

This is a tale still told in some parts of New England, where the air is a little crisper and the distinction between reality and fiction just a little more relaxed. It begins with Gen. Jonathan Moulton, the hero of Hampton, New Hampshire, who had fought so valiantly in the Revolutionary War that Gen. Washington himself had pinned a metal on him. Well, the general was no bad man, and quite intelligent, but he was still young and therefore terribly impatient and impetuous. After the war had finished, he found himself bored in his newly-freed land, for the Indian attacks, too, had largely ceased, leaving him with little to do besides being fussed-over by adoring townsfolk—a situation which, to be honest, he liked least in the world.

Well, it so happened that one evening, March 31, just before the midnight hour, he sat in front of his fireplace, puffing dedicatedly on his pipe and musing over how he could escape his predicament, and realized that, if he only had money, he could escape Hampton and travel by coach down to Boston, and thence—who knew? Yes, if only he were more contented in his retirement, more—shall we say?—financially secure, Lord only knew the great things that Jonathan Moulton could do… Yes, yes, the more he thought of it, the better it sounded… But how? There was no way in this little village of farmers. God, how he longed for wealth! How he would sell his soul for riches!

“Your servant, sir.”

The voice was light, musical. Moulton looked up sharply from his thoughts and his pipe with surprise, for he had not heard anyone enter. And, indeed, no one had, at least by the doorway, which was still locked and bolted. Rather, a man, dressed from head to toe in black velvet, was emerging from the very fire in the grate. A curious personage, this fellow, without a mark of soot or smut upon him, and with a fine, handsome, and merry face—except for the eyes. Very queer, those eyes: as black as the soot that was not on his clothing, and with ovular pupils, like those of a cat. It was inane, a hearty man like the General knew, but he was afraid of those eyes.

“Your servant, sir,” the man repeated, removing his tricorne hat and bowing to Moulton. “I must apologize for having entered in such an ostentatious manner, but the door was locked, and I have an appointment with the Governor in a quarter of an hour and must make haste.”

With the Governor! But Exeter was five leagues away, and this stranger was talking of arriving there in fifteen minutes! Gen. Moulton was astonished, but, having collected his wits about him and thought on the stranger’s emergence from the flames, he stammered out:

“Then…Then… Then you must be… My God!”

“Not quite your god,” interrupted the stranger, charmingly and with a deprecating wave of the hand. “Quite to the contrary, in fact. But tush! What’s in a name? Let us make clear our terms. Do we understand each other? Is it a bargain, or not?”

At the word bargain Moulton pricked up his ears and began to laugh, a reaction at which the stranger seemed to grow somewhat insulted.

“Well, General,” he said, turning, “if that’s how you feel about it, then I’ll be off. I have my monthly payment due to the Governor, and I do not wish to be tardy.”

The laughter stopped as soon as it had started. “What do you mean, payment?” Moulton inquired, a quizzical look on his face.

“My, my, but haven’t you heard!” was the stranger’s reply. (He had turned back from the fireplace and was grinning quite gleefully.) “I thought they told of it in all the old stories: you know, in exchange for a soul—which is a paltry, pointless thing not much larger or more useful than the appendix, really—the applicant receives anything he wishes. Women, power, money…”

Money!

“Indeed, money,” said the stranger, as if he had read Moulton’s thoughts. “That is why I came, you know. You had just mentioned that you’d sell for your soul for riches. And here I am, a buyer ready to make the exchange. You render me one soul—and body, too, but only after you pass; I render you all the riches of the earth, but in particular 100 gold pieces on the first of every month. It’s a fairly simple bargain, General, enforceable in any court in this or any other land.”

“Hm,” said Moulton, leaning back in his chair. “But how do I know that you can perform what you promise—if, say, I did want all the riches of the earth?”

“Well, tut tut, at least I’m not going to say you have to do it on faith.” The stranger chuckled. “How about this?”

No sooner had he posed the question that on Gen. Moulton’s table appeared a golden coin, full weight and full ring, and worth a great deal of money, possibly enough to get him at least halfway to Boston.

“There is, as they say, more where that came from,” murmured the stranger.

“But what if I say no?”

“If you say no, my dear General, that’s your business. You can still keep the gold piece, and I will be off to see the Governor—and I must say that I am running awfully late!”

“But how do you know you’ll keep your side of the bargain?”

“If I don’t,” the stranger said, yawning, “then the contract is null and void. See here, I have experience in this business!” He snapped his fingers, and there appeared a grandiloquent document, with much detail and many legal clauses.

“You observe Subsection III of Section B? ‘If the party of the first part’—that is your humble servant—‘should fail to provide his piece of the exchange, then this contract shall be’—just as I said—‘null and void.’ All legal and aboveboard. If I renege on my part of the agreement, you will be under no—shall we say?—compulsion, legal, metaphysical, or otherwise, to give me your soul. But, as I say, the decision to enter into this arrangement is all yours.”

“But—!”

“You certainly have a lot of demands,” sighed the stranger. “I’m a simple and straightforward man myself.”

Well, Jonathan Moulton thought it over for a good while, making the stranger even later for his other appointment—which, if I may say so, the General did not particularly mind. As I noted, he was an intelligent man, and he knew the tales of Faust and others who had sold their souls, and he did not want to fall into the same trap.

“If you are going to be so long,” came the stranger’s sing-song voice, “have you anything to drink in this house?”

“There is some Old Jamaica in the cupboard.”

“Excellent!” cried the stranger. “I am as thirsty as a Puritan on election-day.”

Possibly—well—was there some way of making the stranger drunk? Yes, that would work quite well, and…

“No, no, no,” said the stranger. “It won’t wash, my friend, won’t wash at all. I’m not exactly a human being, you know. My word, General, I’ve tried to be frank with you. Either you sign, or you do not. I shall not try to trick you, I hope you will not try to trick me. So I repeat myself! Have we a bargain, or no?”

The General paused; the stranger, with a sweeping gesture, held out a pen.

“Need I sign in blood?” he asked, his voice quivering but his hand grasping the instrument.

“Not at all,” laughed the other. “That is far too passé, my dear man.”

What thoughts ran through Jonathan Moulton’s head at that moment? On this point even I do not know. What thoughts could be passing through a man’s head at a minute before midnight, as, having steadied himself with a gulp of rum and looked into the feline eyes of his infernal guest, he signed away his fate?


Well, the stranger was as good as his word after all. On the first morning of the next month, and of every first morning after that, Moulton found one hundred gold pieces in his chimney where the fire had been burning on that fateful evening. After a year, Moulton finally left the village and travelled to Boston, from whose port he then sailed to Europe. He danced the best dances, drank the best wine, ate the best food, and made love to the most beautiful girls. He was ribald, ungodly, and obstreperous, often carrying off a woman like some medieval rake if he did not get his way with her.

Satisfied? Of course—naturally, naturally! But, in the back of his mind, a little voice kept saying something, something very faint. A lifetime seems like an eternity to a young man, but as the years went by, time was catching up with Jonathan Moulton. One fine morning, in Paris on the first of the month, he left his bed (then being shared with a particularly beautiful Frenchwoman, an occurrence to which he had grown accustomed) and found 100 gold pieces, as usual. Well! He was almost sick at the sight of them.

Now, the general was no terrible man, and quite intelligent, but he was still only middle-aged and terribly impatient and impetuous. He had become quite satisfied with this lifestyle, but satisfaction—he was bored with it already. He left the room and travelled into the depths of Paris, eventually finding himself—he scarcely knew how—in a small church by the river. Now, for whatever reason—perhaps that little voice in the back of his mind—he was drawn to enter the confessional and tell what he had done to the padre, even though he was no Papist himself.

“I don’t know exactly where to begin, Father,” he said, in French, as he sat down.

“My dear Moulton, why don’t you tell me all about it?” the priest returned in English.

“Well, it— Wait a moment, how do you…!”

The grate in the priest box opened, and Moulton was horrified to see the stranger’s black cat eyes staring back at him.

“Apologies for the fright, my friend,” said the phony priest, smiling his terribly smile. “I thought you would appreciate a talk—and a reminder on the terms of our contract, particularly the business with reneging on it.”

“I won’t do it, I tell you!” Moulton shouted. “I’m bored of it all, and I don’t need to be damned on top of it!”

“My dear man, don’t use such language. This is a church, after all. But, I say, you should have thought of all that before you signed. I wouldn’t dream of getting out of my part of the bargain, and I should hope you wouldn’t of yours.”

“But what if I don’t take the gold, hey? You can’t take my soul then, can you!”

The stranger, sighing, adjusted his vestments and biretta. “It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid, General. Our contract was for me to provide the riches, not for you necessarily to accept them. Again, as I said then, it is all quite legal. And you…”

Struck again with sudden fury, Moulton grabbed the candlestick near him and smashed through the grate with it—but the stranger was gone.


Time, that cruellest of all cruel deities, ravages all men, and Jonathan Moulton was no exception. He was now very old. He had returned, many years earlier, to Hampton, New Hampshire, so that he could live out the rest of his days in peace and security. But peace there would be none, apparently. The village had changed since he left and was now a veritable city—and a tavern right next to Moulton’s cottage, too. Moulton now lived alone there, with not even a dog for company, and the neighborhood children all laughed at him and his long beard as he passed them on the street. He had unlimited gold but nothing to do with it, now that his health was failing and he couldn’t live the cottage. He barely lived, he simply existed, day after day, a broken little old man. He only existed, waiting, dreading now the first of month. Waiting, dreading... But one moment, now! In the distant reaches of his mind, a memory—and a faint flicker of hope…

The stranger arrived, the usual smile on his face, on the first of the month. Naturally, he looked the exact same as he had when this whole business started, and he carried a bag of gold coins, now worthless at least for Jonathan Moulton.

“Well, General?” said the stranger kindly. “How goes it?”

“It goes,” said the General, equally kindly. “But I have now found a certain puzzle that I cannot solve—you know how little I can do in my old age—and I may require your help with it.”

“Happy to help,” said the other, somewhat perplexed.

“It is like this,” said the crafty General Moulton: “if a man enters into a contract with another—er—individual, and this second individual agrees to give the first something on the first of every month, that means every month after the contract was signed, does it not?”

“Why, yes,” said the stranger, annoyed. “Of course.”

“And you and I signed a contract, did we not?”

“You know we did.”

“At what time did we sign it?”

“Oh—sometime late at night, I recall.”

“I recall something too. I recall the clock striking midnight immediately after I signed.”

“Well, I…” The stranger stopped. His sable eyes flashed. “What do you mean?”

“And do you remember the date? That’s the memory that just flashed into my brain. The date was March 31—making the next day the first of the month of April. And I did not receive a sack of gold until the first of May.”

The stranger was quite silent for a long moment. Then he began to scream.

It was like nothing Jonathan Moulton had ever heard before, the Devil’s screaming. It was as if all hell had—quite literally—broken loose, and the Day of Judgment wreaking havoc across the earth. He thought his old heart would fail at that very minute.

And then, just as the screaming started, it ceased.

“I am sorry, my dear fellow,” the Devil said, having fixed his hat and tie. “Most unbecoming of me, I do say. You are quite right. According to the terms of our contract, I reneged on my agreement. Therefore our contract is indeed null and void. I wish you a good day, sir.”

And, with that, the Devil left, his tail between his legs.


Moments before Jonathan Moulton died, he was sitting on his porch, regarding the sunset, when a fellow with dark eyes came up to the porch.

“My old friend!” cried the stranger.

“No…no,” muttered old General Moulton, filled with fear. “You… you left, and…”

“I did leave,” said the other, “but I have returned. It is your time to go, and I have come to claim you.”

“But our contract—”

“—is null and void, more’s my misfortune. But, in your cleverness, Jonathan Moulton, you forgot the simplest point of all: I keep the souls of all the wicked, whether they have a contract with me or not. And you have been very wicked, my friend. We may not have a contract any longer, Jonathan Moulton, but I have you for eternity.”


There were no mourners at Jonathan Moulton’s funeral, but the minister, when reading the last rites over the grave, was astonished to find that Moulton’s corpse now had a thin layer of soot over it—and, wouldn’t you know, it smelled terribly of brimstone.