Then later we read: "What is this world? A wager between Christ and the
Demon. Thousands of years ago he challenged God, and when the great game
began, they played with great loose rocks from the hills, at quoits, and
if any one is unwilling to believe this, let him go to Mount Léberon and
see the stone thrown by Satan."

So we see that the theology was merely a means of leading up to a local
legend.

The story is briefly as follows: Nerto, like all Mistral's heroines, is
exceedingly young, thirteen years of age. Her father, the Baron Pons,
had gambled away everything he owned in this world, when she was a very
little child, and while walking along a lonely road one night he met the
Devil, who took advantage of his despair to tempt him with the sight of
heaps of money. The wretched father sold his daughter's soul to the Evil
One. Now on his death-bed he tells his child the fearful tale; one means
of salvation lies open for her--she must go to the Pope. Benedict XIII
is besieged in the great palace at Avignon, but the Baron knows of a
secret passage from his castle leading under the river Durance to one of
the towers of the papal residence. He bids Nerto go to seek deliverance
from the bond, and to make known to the Pope the means of escape. Nerto
reaches the palace at the moment when all is in great commotion, for the
enemy have succeeded in setting it on fire. She is first seen by the
Pope's nephew Don Rodrigue, an exceedingly wicked young man, a sort of
brawling Don Juan, who seems to have been guilty of numerous
assassinations. He immediately begins to talk love to the maiden, as the
means of saving her from the Devil, "the path of love is full of flowers
and leads to Paradise." But Nerto has been taught that the road to
Heaven is full of stones and thorns, and her innocence saves her from