Contes d’un buveur de bière
| Author | Charles Deulin |
|---|---|
| Original title | Contes d’un buveur de bière |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Genres | Folklore, short stories |
| Published | 1868 (A. Lacroix) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 321 |
| OCLC | 15145437 |
| Followed by | Contes du roi Cambrinus |
Contes d’un buveur de bière ("Tales of a Beer Drinker") is an 1868 collection of short stories by Charles Deulin, a French author, journalist, and drama critic who adapted elements of European folklore into his work.
Deulin based one of the stories, "Cambrinus, Roi de la Bière" ("Cambrinus, King of Beer"), on folktales about the origin of a beer-brewing mythological king called Gambrinus. In the story, a lovelorn Gambrinus makes a deal with the Devil, and Beelzebub teaches him about brewing.
A few years later, Deulin made his Cambrinus character the focus of his next anthology of short stories, Contes du roi Cambrinus ("Tales of King Cambrinus"), which was published in 1874.
In this, the seminal Cambrinus short story, Cambrinus is an apprentice glassblower in the Flemish village of Fresnes-sur-Escaut, but he believes that he lacks the skill and upward mobility to succeed in glassblowing. He becomes smitten with the master glassblower's daughter, Flandrine. When he tells her, she rebuffs him and he leaves in disgrace. He apprentices himself to a viol master and becomes a great player. One day, he summons the courage to climb on a barrel and play publicly. He plays well, but just as he has whipped the crowd into a dance, the sight of Flandrine flusters him, and he bungles his playing. The villagers, believing Cambrinus tripped them up on purpose, pull him off the barrel to jeer and strike him. A contemptuous judge called Jocko sentences Cambrinus to a month in prison. When Cambrinus emerges a month later, he feels so ashamed that he prepares to hang himself. As he stands with the noose around his neck, a colourfully-dressed stranger appears. Cambrinus recognizes him by his horns: it is Beelzebub. As they chat, Beelzebub reveals that he has killed the judge, and now expects to collect Cambrinus' soul, for, he says, such is his fate if he hangs himself. Not wanting to go to hell or to return to life as he knew it, Cambrinus tries to bargain. Beelzebub cannot make Flandrine love him, so Cambrinus settles for forgetting his affection for her; he also wants revenge on the villagers. Beelzebub tells him that the way to forget is if "one nail drives out another".
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