SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 4, 2021] “The State of Grace”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
This story was funny but also had a moral.
Set in 1939, we meet the best Christian in all of Rue Gabrielle and indeed all Montmartre. Monsieur Duperrier was “a man of such piety, uprightness and charity that God, without awaiting his death… crowned his head with never left it by day or by night.”
He was grateful, of course, but his modesty did not allow him to show it off in public. However, his wife did have to look at it and she was filled with resentment and exasperation. She was afraid of what others would think of him if they saw him like that, so she encouraged him to sin a little but to lose the halo.
He started out by being vain. he told her that he deserved the halo and should in fact have even more rewards heaped upon him. But the halo remained. So he moved on to gluttony and began to eat the richest foods in larger and larger portions. When that didn’t work his wife wanted to take him off of the food, but h grew angry with her. And suddenly his temper flared.
But his heart was full of Christian charity, so it had no effect on his halo.
He looked around and started to grow envious of others who had more than he did, and he soon gave into sloth as well. He began to think that perhaps these sins were all relatively minor–that god overlooked them. The final sin was lust and there was no way God could overlook it if he gave into the ways of the flesh.
He and his wife had been chaste, but now his wife set about seducing him. But he didn’t want her to get in trouble with the lord, so he went to see professionals instead. The twist ending is pretty darn dark.
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