In April 1934 Fitzgerald began a series of four linked stories set in ninth-century France, the nucleus of a historical novel he never finished.¹ Known as the Philippe or Count of Darkness stories, they were rejected by the Saturday Evening Post and purchased somewhat grudgingly by Redbook, as a favor to Fitzgerald, and published by Redbook in October 1934 and June and August 1935; the fourth and final story was not released until after Fitzgerald's death, in November 1941.² For a time, Fitzgerald considered extending the four stories rather than writing The Last Tycoon. He projected taking Philippe from the age of twenty, when the stories open, to the age of seventy, with eight stories or chapters dealing with his youth (with only four of the eight ever written), three chapters with his maturity, and two “great episodes” with his old age.³ He entertained the notion for two years, but finally, and wisely, abandoned it, for the Count of Darkness stories are seriously flawed by Fitzgerald's weakness in writing about unexperienced, completely imagined scenes and by laughable dialogue, a movie version of imagined medieval slang. Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie, thought the stories so inferior that they should not be collected or reprinted, but Fitzgerald himself had thought otherwise, writing in 1935 to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, listing stories to be collected and printed in the case of his (Fitzgerald's) sudden death, including consideration of all four Philippe stories.⁴ However, the stories, with one exception, have never been reprinted, never collected, making scholars work from microfilm of Redbook or poor photocopies of microfilm.⁵ This situation is regrettable, for the stories, despite their failings, reveal much about Fitzgerald, his mode of composition, his aims, both novelistic and human—Mangum talks of Fitzgerald's attempt to write salable popular fiction—and Fitzgerald's sympathy for feminism not yet adequately analyzed.⁶

To dispense with many of the weaknesses first, the stories are poorly put together. Bruccoli says that the stories were written on alcohol, and sometimes it shows, along with Redbook's poor editing.⁷ The first story begins in 872, but the second story, which takes place the next day, is headlined as occurring in 879. In the first story, Charles is Philippe's father; in the third story, his father is Bertram. Fitzgerald has Louis the Stammerer as king, saying that Charles the Bald had died five years before, in 867; Charles, however, died in 877. Moreover, Fitzgerald makes Charles Charlemagne's son, not the grandson he was.⁸ Louis's men are armed with crossbows (“Kingdom,” 60), not likely in ninth-century France. In the first story, Philippe's domain is fifty miles west of Tours; in the third story it seems east. Nor is the text sure whether Philippe's fortification is on the north bank of the Loire or the south; the third story has conflicting evidence for either interpretation. There are five Norse prisoners in the first story, reduced inexplicably to two in the second. Philippe's right-hand man is “Jacques” in the first two stories, “Jaques” in the last two; and, unfortunately, Fitzgerald evidently did not know the pun on “Jaques” as “jakes,” a privy (see, for example, As You Like It), provoking some unintentional humor, especially when he calls the peasant “Sir Jaques” (“Kingdom,” 60), and when Philippe calls the people on his land “these jakes” (“Hour,” 522).

Fitzgerald's attempt to write dialogue for the peasants and for Philippe as tough guy produced some ludicrous results. In the first story, Philippe eats “flapjacks” (514) and the Moors are “yeller devils” (515); he asks a Norseman, “No speak Lingua Franca?” (514); he greets two peasants with “Howdy,” and they respond to his question as to how many live in the region, which they interpret as his intention to steal from all, by saying, “Used to be a right smart lot of them. … You mought as well move along” (516). This is Hollywood's notion of how Ozark hillbillies talk; equally from a Hollywood western is Philippe's saying, “Answer me like that once more, and I'll let daylight through you” (518). In the second story we have such anachronisms as a “sugar daddy” (22), a sandwich (23), “pipe down” (68), “bunk,” “oke”—presumably short for “okay”—and “pup-tent” (69). Equally laughable, as several critics have pointed out, is Philippe's macho pose and language. To a French girl he has acquired by killing the Norsemen who had captured her, he commands, “Come here and see what you taste like.” When she calls him “darling,” he interrupts: “Call me ‘Sire!’ … And remember; there's no bedroom talk floating around this precinct!” (“Count,” 21; ellipsis and emphasis Fitzgerald's). Typical of Fitzgerald's general unawareness is the fact that he intended to call the completed novel The Castle, but then Kafka does not seem to be an author he read.⁹

There are other historical blunders. Philippe wears a gold-embroidered cloak and a moorish helmet in a country with good reason to loathe Moors, both items inviting attack and robbery; Fitzgerald's very story reveals, accurately, how bloodthirsty and rapacious were the people of the period, whether high- or lowborn. Few would take the time to ask Philippe his identity but would ambush him for his possessions, including the white Arab stallion he rides, but he is not attacked, not even by a Viking. The lone stranger on the white horse, defending the poor squatters against invading marauders, also suggests popular culture's influence on Fitzgerald in shaping his hero, as much or more than Fitzgerald's statement in his Notebooks that Hemingway was his model for Philippe.¹⁰ And here we get to Fitzgerald's concept of the hero. In his mature novels, his protagonists' misfortunes are always larger than themselves; that is, his protagonists are paradigmatic individuals. Thus “the foul dust” that preys on Gatsby is indicative of the corruption inherent in American capitalist society, especially during the immoral Roaring Twenties. Dick Diver's collapse echoes that of both the depression and Western civilization. Monroe Stahr embodies both America's love of illusion and the struggle of the individual artist working in a collaborative and commercial environment. It is apparent from the text that Fitzgerald wants Philippe to be more than an individual adventurer. His very surname, Villefranche, suggests how Fitzgerald associates Philippe with France. So do thoughts that Fitzgerald attributes to him: “Philippe's idea was a prefiguration of an age already beginning. …” (“Hour,” 524).

Thus, Fitzgerald casts Philippe as a Renaissance man, centuries before the event, or describes him, “Embodying in himself alone the future of his race, he walked to and fro in the starry darkness” (“Hour,” 529), a combination of Stephen Dedalus and Jay Gatsby. Equally pretentious and didactic:

This was an epoch of disturbance and change; all over Europe men were thinking exactly like Philippe, taking direction from the arrows of history that seemed to float dimly overhead. Each of those men thought himself to be alone, but really each was an instrument of response to a great human need. Each knew that the spirit of man was at low tide; each one felt in himself the necessity of seizing power by force and cunning.

(“Hour,” 522-23)

In short, Philippe as Machiavelli, six centuries in advance.¹¹

Each of the four stories has some form of the word “dark” in its title, a way of insisting on the tales as stories of the Dark Ages, perhaps reflecting on the Great Depression and perhaps on Fitzgerald's own state of depression in 1934 when Tender Is the Night did not do as well as he had expected.¹² What Philippe, in fact, brings to Touraine is the notion of vigorous feudalism, an organizing principle that has been missing since the destruction of the Roman empire and the subsequent raids by Moors and Vikings. Philippe will collect tolls from merchants crossing the ford of the Loire beneath his fortification and protect the peasants in return for a share of their produce on their tenant farms and their labor on his rough-hewn castle and their service to him. He, in turn, owes loyalty and service to the king. Yet the sentiments that Fitzgerald ascribes to Philippe are anachronistically democratic. (Beyond that, Fitzgerald hoped to include Marxist elements as well in the full novel.)¹³

Fitzgerald is accurate in portraying the squalor, misery, and lawlessness of the period, but his depiction of Philippe as democrat is either that of a most unusual hero, who has nothing in common with the class-conscious age the author seeks to represent, or Philippe is out of his time, a wished-for egalitarian in an undemocratic age. He is Philippe Count Villefranche, owner of twenty miles along the Loire (in one story, twenty square miles in another), and stepson of the Vizier of Cordova, at a time when class distinctions were impenetrable. His men are mocked for their poor weapons by the king's bodyguard (“Kingdom,” 62); the king refuses his hospitality, looking at “the flock of chickens and the litter of pigs that roamed the courtyard” (“Kingdom,” 64); the king's sentries refuse to wake a man of importance when Philippe brings warning of Vikings, summoning only a squire, whom Philippe must bribe to see a knight, and so up the social ladder to duke and then king (“Kingdom,” 64). In the fourth story, the Duke of Maine takes the ill-dressed Philippe for a messenger, calling him a clown and asking to see his master (“Gods,” 88). Yet Philippe advances the poor peasant Jacques to be his right-hand man, his assistant and counselor, and Fitzgerald knights the peasant, calling him Sir (“Kingdom,” 60), as Philippe himself does later (“Gods,” 88). Elsewhere, Brian, a monk, addresses Philippe impertinently,

“Pardon me master—or sire—or whatever you call yourself today—”

“Watch your tongue, you unfrocked devil!” said Philippe goodhumoredly.

“I'll call you Philippe, like it or not, my boy.”

(“Kingdom,” 60)

A nobleman of the era would not have liked it; Philippe would have been punished calling a duke or the king by his given name. Similarly, when Griselda, former mistress to King Louis, now Philippe's lover and fiancée, complains of his equal distribution of toll taken from merchants with “those monkeys in the valley” (“monkeys” as epithet is probably another anachronism), Philippe reacts most nobly: “They're not monkeys; and if they are, then I'm one. And if you can't get over that kind of talk, then you're no fit wife for a chieftain. They're us. I'm them—it's hard to explain—” (“Gods,” 32; emphasis Fitzgerald's). Social equality would indeed have been hard to explain in ninth-century France, and while Fitzgerald's intentions are commendable for his hero, their inappropriateness undermines the validity of the Count of Darkness stories.

On the other hand, under whatever circumstances Fitzgerald wrote the stories, they do show evidence of effort and foresight as to the integration of early details with later plot lines. In addition to the narrative description setting the stories in the Middle Ages, Fitzgerald lards his text with atmospheric terms: “pantler,” “slinger,” “abattis,” and “pennon,” to mention a few.¹⁴ In the first story, he is careful to provide Le Poire with a daughter (though not careful enough to provide “Poire” with the article of the proper gender in French), for Le Poire's daughter figures prominently in the fourth story, not written until seven months later, when the first story was already in print.¹⁵ Fitzgerald specifically notes the presence of caves in the area close to Jacques's hut, again an element that is important in the fourth story, as is Jacques's ability to rally a group of men to him quickly, seemingly without question or dispute, in spite of the fact that he is a lowly peasant and not the head man of the community. In all these details, Fitzgerald is providing material to build upon in the climactic fourth story, just as his line in the fourth story that the Duke of Maine was a man “with whom Philippe was to have much to do in later life” (“Gods,” 88), prepares us for later plot complications never written.

Most criticism of the stories, where there has been any, has been negative, including my own up to this point. Sergio Perosa, whose comments go beyond the biographical and are more extensive than most, thoroughly damns the stories thus: “There is no possible unity of vision or an informing idea.”¹⁶ Perosa is wrong. Although the idea is present only in embryonic form, its outline is readily apparent. Philippe is the wise fool, the type of rash, headstrong young man of courage but little sense who must learn through experience to control his impetuous impulses, the type from Parzival through Tom Jones, and thus the Count of Darkness stories begin a bildungsroman or Entwicklungsroman, as well as an epic. Griselda asks Philippe, “Don't you think you have any faults ever? Do you always think you're so perfect?” He replies, “I guess I do” (“Gods,” 33; Fitzgerald's emphasis). Pride goeth before a fall, and Philippe literally takes a fall. In an attempt to impress the Duke of Maine at their meeting, Philippe rides up quickly, jumps his horse over a row of stakes, and the horse lands badly, throwing Philippe. It is then that the Duke says:

“Catch your breath! I'm in no hurry! I want to see your master.”

Panting and dazed by his fall, Philippe could not articulate.

The Duke turned and said to an attendant: “Here, give this fellow a jolt of wine—maybe he's the local clown and we can use him.”

(“Gods,” 88)

Acting rashly and unable to speak when he should is something Philippe shares with Parzival at the Grail Ceremony, an attribute Eliot used in The Waste Land, lines 38-39: “I could not / Speak”—and Fitzgerald's admiration for Eliot's poem and his use of it in The Great Gatsby are well known. Philippe even plays Fisher King, teaching his peasants to spear eels at night by lantern light as a way to provide food for their barren wasteland.¹⁷ And if Fitzgerald extended his reading of source material beyond Weston, he would have found that Chrétien de Troyes's patron, for whom he wrote Li Conte del Graal, was Count Philip of Flanders.

Something else Philippe shares with Percival/Parzival is the sobriquet of clown. Heretofore Philippe has acted hastily, taking no one's advice but his own, frequently making mistakes. The most usual realm for him to err in is in his dealings with women. With them, Philippe is as inept as Parzival was with the damsel of the tent, Jeschute. And here, Fitzgerald's efforts to make Philippe an egalitarian, while out of place historically, are brilliantly integrated, for Philippe matures as he recognizes women as equals in thought, feelings, rights, and even power.

Fitzgerald begins the process in the second story. Philippe has acquired Letgarde, a seventeen-year-old girl, from the Vikings who had captured her, Vikings whom Philippe kills. He makes her his possession, servant, lover-to-be, while telling his men to acquire wives, in an approximation of the Rape of the Sabine Women. To supervise the construction of his fort, Philippe wants to ride his stallion to the top of a nearby hill:

Catching the beast and saddling him, he pulled Letgarde up with him after he had mounted. The force of his pull almost wrenched her arm from her socket.

Smarting with sudden rage at the indignity, she waited in fright as, guiding the animal with his legs only, he next swung her about from a position facing him, to one that would later be called postilion. Furious and uncomfortable, she rode off behind him toward a destination of which she knew nothing.

… On the summit, he … slung her to the ground with almost a reverse of the gesture with which he had taken her up. She stood shaken, injured, terrified. …

(“Count,” 21-22)

Letgarde deserts him that very day, hides, starves, and drowns trying to ford the Loire. Philippe mourns for her, recognizing that he is responsible for her death, “just because I used her rough on the horse when I was in a hurry” (“Count,” 70). In an attempt to atone, he adopts an orphan peasant girl (whom we never see in the next two stories), but he has learned a lesson, one made apparent in the fourth story.

Philippe has taken in Griselda, a mistress of King Louis who has escaped the king. Louis suspects Philippe of sheltering her but cannot prove it and sends men to burn Philippe's fort. Soon Philippe and Griselda become lovers, and Philippe visits the local abbot to have the banns announced for their marriage; while there, the abbot warns Philippe to beware a pagan cult flourishing in the area, one turning the inhabitants against Christ. Immediately thereafter, the Duke of Maine appears on the scene, hunting, with an enormous troop of five hundred men, far more than Philippe and his peasants could withstand. Griselda tries to persuade Philippe to accept her counsel: “‘You wouldn't take advice from a mere woman, would you? … Don't take our men down there to meet them,’ she said emphatically. ‘A woman telling me how I should do!’” (“Gods,” 33). But Philippe is persuaded and accedes, a step in his maturation, meeting the Duke with only his personal bodyguard of ten. Then Griselda tells him to accept the advice of Jacques also. Confused, Philippe wonders what the peasant can do. Griselda then introduces herself to Jacques as a member of a witch cult by chanting a simple charm, thereby gaining his cooperation: “Esta es buena parati. Esta parati lo toma” (“Gods,” 88). She has somehow recognized Jacques as a member of a witch cult (I hesitate to call either one a “witch” because of current connotations), realizing that it is his position of authority in the cult that enabled him to rally men to Philippe's cause in the first story and to cement his own authority over them. She also knows that there are many cult members among the Duke of Maine's men who, if they could be appealed to, would be loathe to attack fellow religionists. Convincing Jacques that she is also a cult member, she says to Philippe, “Darling, we can fix these men. … All you got to do is soft-soap the leader … [another anachronistic expression]. Jaques and I will fix the men” (“Gods,” 88).

After falling from his horse, recovering, and sizing up the situation, Philippe takes the Duke hostage, but he is still under possible siege by the Duke's five hundred men. That night, Griselda and Jacques take him to the esbat of the witch cult, presided over by Le Poire's daughter, Becquette, the local priestess. When Becquette, blaming Philippe for her father's death at Viking hands, demands Philippe's death at the hands of both coven members and those of the Duke's men attending the ritual, Griselda reveals herself to be high priestess of the witches of Touraine and countermands Becquette's demand, saying that Philippe is one of them and that she and he will be married according to the rites of the cult.

Although we see little of the witch cult, Fitzgerald was at pains to make it a pagan fertility cult, Wiccan in today's terms, rather than something Satanic and anti-Christian. Becquette, as priestess, presides on a stone couch before a waterfall; “other women carrying torches were posted at her head and feet, and piled about the sides of the stone couch were products of the harvest—grapes and apples, bundles of rye and wheat” (“Gods,” 90). The esbat takes place in a cave, the womb of mother earth, a frequent location for witch cult gatherings. Fitzgerald's sources were meager—they still are—for pagan rituals in the Middle Ages. Most sources of information about such cults come from witch trials of the fifteenth and later centuries, when Inquisitors and prosecutors saw anything pagan as specifically Satanic. Fitzgerald, though he mentions Satan in his manuscript, deletes any such reference from the published story.¹⁸ The cult is an alternative to Christianity, not a dedicated opponent. However, as implied by the etymology of “pagan” (country dweller) and “heathen” (one who lives on a heath), pagans and heathens were not city dwellers but country folk, farmers, people for whom fertility was a necessity for survival. They lived on the land and persisted in their worship of ancient nature deities, hence the cult's oft-used name, the Old Religion. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, was associated with royalty and nobility, established first in cities, and, as numerous reformation attempts made obvious, was often swollen with land and wealth. Thus, there was a political and economic opposition between pagan worshippers and the established Church, intuited by Fitzgerald, and it is this opposition that the abbot in the fourth story fears at least as much as he does the blasphemous acts of his parishioners, for whom he has shown no other concern in the stories.¹⁹ It is this same political power against the nobility that Griselda enlists for Philippe (a count, but hardly rich) against the Duke of Maine.

Thus Philippe's life is saved from Becquette's followers, as are his men and wood fort from attack by the forces of the Duke of Maine, both through Griselda's intercession. Philippe has listened to her advice and that of the peasant Jacques; he has curtailed his natural impetuosity, somewhat controlled his rashness, and benefited. He has, uncommonly so for a ninth-century leader (male, here, being understood), listened to a woman and a low-born peasant and discovered that they could help a count of France. Although he has considered himself a devout Christian—Fitzgerald has shown him praying throughout the stories and acknowledging fealty to Church and God—he is more pragmatist than Christian: “I haven't got any conscience except for my country, and for those who live in it. … All right—I'll use this cult—and maybe burn in hell forever after” (“Gods,” 91). The noble, altruistic, idealistic attitude is not typically ninth century, nor is the nationalism, and the willingness to burn in Hell echoes Huckleberry Finn. But Philippe concludes, “But if these witches know better, then I'll be one of them!” (“Gods,” 91). Fitzgerald ends the story with Griselda mocking both her own cult's fertility images and Philippe by suggesting that they carve a totemic beast on the gate of the fort that is half lion, half pig, “half for fighting, half for farming” (“Gods,” 91).²⁰

Perosa is wrong in stating that Fitzgerald had no “unity of vision or informing idea.” In the six months that the stories cover, we see twenty-year-old Philippe begin to mature and come to his majority, marked in part by his treatment of Griselda, a growth paralleled by the development of feudalism in ninth-century France. Philippe embodies what Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Parzival poet, says that he is recounting, an account of “a brave man slowly wise.”²¹ How far Fitzgerald would have taken intertwined ideas, it is impossible to say. To what extent the later stories would have continued to involve pagan witch cults is also impossible to say. But it is apparent, even in the four brief stories, that Philippe's maturity is marked by his growing self-control and growing willingness to recognize the rights of those the ninth century would have regarded as inferiors: peasants and women—especially women.

There is very little detailed critical analysis of Fitzgerald's treatment of women characters, the three main pieces being by Judith Fetterley, Mary A. McKay, and Sarah Beebe Fryer. Fetterley sees no distance whatsoever between author and narrator of The Great Gatsby, interpreting the novel as “centered in hostility to women,” with Daisy as the novel's scapegoat; The Great Gatsby is the only work of Fitzgerald's that she considers. Both Mary A. McKay and Sarah Beebe Fryer see a progression in Fitzgerald's works, from the vamps in This Side of Paradise to the self-supporting women of The Last Tycoon. Fryer considers the novels only, but she praises Fitzgerald for his accurate depiction of women's roles in the 1920s, and she traces a development of greater independence and self-sufficiency in the women characters over time; moreover, she sees the condescending behavior of the men toward women as an indictment of the male characters—particularly of Dick Diver—and not of the author. Fryer quotes Frances Kroll Ring, writing about Fitzgerald's attitude toward his daughter: “She must be prepared to have an independent life. … He was keenly aware of a changing world for women and he wanted his daughter to be ready for that world with education, goals, self esteem.”²²

McKay also sees a continuum of development from Fitzgerald's early work to the last, unfinished novel, a development that she, like Fryer, links first to his desire for his daughter, Scottie, to make the most of her opportunities for education and so be prepared for a career, and then to his relationship with self-sufficient career woman Sheilah Graham. The letters to Scottie stress her need to do well in math and science, the very subjects Fitzgerald himself did poorly in, and they go from 1933 (the year before the Philippe stories were written) until his death in 1940. McKay examines only one short story, “The Cut-Glass Bowl” (1920); she does not, for example, consider the early story “Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman” (1924), which has a forceful, nonworking female heroine and, like the Philippe stories, uses stilted, stereotypical dialogue.²³ No feminist critic has yet considered such strong women characters as Myra in “Myra Meets His Family” (1920), Daisy Cary in “The Bowl” (1928), or Nell Margery in “I Got Shoes” (1933); Daisy and Nell work to support themselves, Myra does not. Nor have they considered Caroline Dandy in “The Bridal Party” (1930), strong, but in rather conventional, old-fashioned ways.

There is a paucity of attention to Fitzgerald's treatment of women in both the novels and the short fiction, especially in the less-studied short stories. We do not know how he would have revised The Last Tycoon had he lived, nor how he would have developed his view of women or their treatment by men as a way to characterize the men; it is, however, a novel with a woman narrator. As a social chronicler, it would have been impossible for Fitzgerald to ignore the added responsibilities of women during World War II. But it is fascinating that Fitzgerald, writing in Christian Baltimore in 1934, when women were given only slightly more power and credence than in ninth-century France, should have matched his hero with a heroine out of Wicca, the pagan old religion in which divinity was feminine.

Notes

1. Historical romances were not new to Fitzgerald: He did an impressive job at Princeton in a little-considered short story, “Tarquin of Cheapside” (1917), that pictures Shakespeare as a rapist who used that experience to write “The Rape of Lucrece.” It is published as such in Tales of the Jazz Age, though Fitzgerald spelled the title's last word “Cheepside,” and it is under that title that John Kuehl reprints it in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 1909-1917. There are also, as Janet Lewis points out, “The Night at Chancellorsville” (1935) and “The Fiend” (1935) (“Fitzgerald's ‘Philippe, Count of Darkness,’” 30).

2. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 590. Bryant Mangum reports that Fitzgerald got ＄1,250 for the first story, ＄1,500 for each of the next two, but does not say what Redbook paid for the final posthumously run story (A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Stories, 144, 145).

3. Sergio Perosa, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 133. Since Perosa gives no other bibliographic information in his text, he is evidently working from Fitzgerald's manuscript notes; judging from his account of the stories, there are significant differences between the manuscript versions and their published form. Also, Perosa has only six stories dealing with Philippe's youth, whereas Bruccoli, also using the Princeton manuscript and quoting from Fitzgerald's notes, details the themes of the next four stories, or eight in all (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 388). Janet Lewis confirms the scheme of eight stories of youth, ages twenty to twenty-five, three of maturity—thirty, thirty-eight, forty-five—and two final episodes at ages fifty-five and seventy; she publishes Fitzgerald's typed “General Plan of Philippe” from the Princeton manuscript (“Fitzgerald's ‘Philippe, Count of Darkness,’” 10-11, 28).

4. Bruccoli, ed., The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 513; Bruccoli and Duggan, eds., Correspondence, 407.

5. The exception is the first story, “In the Darkest Hour,” reprinted in Bruccoli's Price Was High, 512-29, but Bruccoli has appended the wrong date to the story: it was published in October 1934, not 1935 as his headnote indicates.

6. Mangum, Fortune Yet, 143-44.

7. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 388.

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Kingdom in the Dark,” 59, 62. For reference within the text of my article, I will refer to the stories by abbreviated title: “In the Darkest Hour” as “Hour”; “The Count of Darkness” as “Count”; “The Kingdom in the Dark” as “Kingdom”; and “Gods of Darkness” as “Gods”—and then by page number. For the last three, I will supply the page number from the Redbook issue in which the stories appear, their only source; for the first, “Hour,” I will use the page numbers from Price Was High.

9. Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 387.

10. Ibid.; Bruccoli's source is Edmund Wilson, ed., The Crack-Up, 177.

11. Or, as Lehan sees it, Faustian man, the paradigmatic medieval man as described in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. See Richard D. Lehan, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction, 152; and Richard D. Lehan, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Romantic Destiny,” 150-51.

12. Perosa, Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 132; “Fitzgerald took refuge unconsciously among the specters and puppets of an age in which the fabric of history and society offered an ‘objective correlative’ to the conditions of chaos and darkness of his soul.”

13. Bruccoli and Duggan, eds., Correspondence, 590.

14. Janet Lewis mentions the “two pages of books and articles he used or intended to use in researching the novel. He consulted books on French and European history, the fifth volume of Gibbon, Belloc's Europe and the Faith, and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance.” She also reprints the two-page list of Encyclopaedia Britannica articles Fitzgerald consulted (“Fitzgerald's ‘Philippe, Count of Darkness,’” 9, 18-19).

15. Mangum, Fortune Yet, 180-81.

16. Perosa, Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 136.

17. Lewis (“Fitzgerald's ‘Philippe, Count of Darkness,’” 9) and Perosa (Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 133) acknowledge that Fitzgerald read Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance in preparation, and Fitzgerald would have found a discussion of Perceval/Parzival in Weston's book.

18. Perosa (Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 133) and Lewis (“Fitzgerald's ‘Philippe, Count of Darkness,’” 9) cite Fitzgerald's sources, in addition to Weston, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for which Margaret Murray wrote the entry on witchcraft for the 14th edition (1929; Murray's article was the Britannica's explanation until the 1974 edition), and Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Fitzgerald did get the charm by which Griselda identifies herself to Jacques from Murray, as well as the ritual marriage to Satan (Witch Cult, 179). Murray found the charm—Esta es buena parati / Esta parati lo toma—in Pierre de Lancre's tome, an account of fourteenth-century French witch trials (273). De Lancre misprints the Spanish: para is one word, a preposition, ti its object. They were spoken at ritual marriages, and can be translated as “This one is good for you / She is there for you. Do you accept?” Philippe, growing up in Spain, would have understood these words as Griselda spoke them, and he would not have called them a “secret lingo” (“Gods,” 88), nor would the celebrants at the esbat use them as a salutation to the priestess.

    Perosa says from the manuscript sources that Griselda admits to having been deflowered by Satan and must marry fellow cult member Jacques, not Philippe (Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 135). Lewis confirms this, quoting from Fitzgerald's text the ritual whereby Griselda and Jacques would separate witch cult followers from nonpagans among the Duke of Maine's men (“Fitzgerald's ‘Philippe, Count of Darkness,’” 16-17).

19. Murray cites no examples other than that of Joan of Arc and the antifertility charms of witches to hurt their enemies. But there were no sources available to Fitzgerald to document such class opposition in ninth-century France, and his putting it there is his own artistic creation. Similarly, the emerald that Griselda wears to identify her as chief priestess is Fitzgerald's invention (and an appropriately visual one for a Hollywood-influenced version of the ritual).

20. Lehan sees Griselda and her witch cult as evil (Craft of Fiction, 152), as does Mangum, who sees her power as evil and her as a corrupting force (Fortune Yet, 145-46). I do not agree, and certainly the humor of her remark, plus the fact that she has saved Philippe's life, argue against such a reading. However, we don't have any subsequent stories to see how the relationship between the characters and religion would have been developed.

21. Perosa, Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 136; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 5.

22. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, 72; Sarah Beebe Fryer, Fitzgerald's New Women: Harbingers of Change, 96; Frances Kroll Ring, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, 82.

23. Mary A. McKay, “Fitzgerald's Women: Beyond Winter Dreams,” 311-24.