"I've just read Marcel Schwob's The Children's Crusade twice over,
with deep admiration and reverence. I am profoundly moved: what a work!
And to think I'd never heard the name of Marcel Schwob. Who is
he?"--Rainer Maria Rilke
Marcel Schwob's 1896 novella The Children's Crusade retells the
medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries
to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which--instead
of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem--instead delivered
them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered
them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling
history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight
different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric,
a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children,
whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish.
Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents
it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented
coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different
narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to
such diverse works as Alfred Jarry's The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke
Akutagawa's "In a Grove," William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Jerzy
Andrzejewski's The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet
understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in
which innocence must perish.
