Where the devil of Vauvert first appears

A French speaker who sends you “au diable Vauvert” means you should go very far away.⁷ The idiom is named after a devil said to haunt the château de Vauvert, outside Paris.⁸⁹ The Carthusians who were given the house in the 1250s left a royal charter behind.¹⁰ The first telling of its devil we could read was written about 1500.¹²

A phrase that outlived its story

Littré defines “aller au diable vauvert” as going very far, and says Vauvert is simply “val vert”, a green valley.⁷¹² Some people say “au diable au vert”. Littré calls that wrong, and Berty, writing in 1882, calls it a corruption of “au diable de Vauvert”.¹³

Berty also says that a common phrase kept the memory of the devil of Vauvert alive, and that he cannot admit so popular a tradition as pure invention.⁸ He records an explanation of the legend, that brigands who sheltered in the ruined buildings made the noise, and calls it a conjecture.¹⁴

Littré’s entry tells the story differently from Du Breul. It has the Carthusians covet the abandoned château and have a legion of spirits settle in it so that the king would give it up.¹⁵ We could not find that in the printing of Saint-Foix we read, where the spirits take the château by chance and the monks ask for it afterwards.⁶

A rumour in 1775, a green monster in 1762

Jaillot wrote in 1775 that the story was a “bruit populaire & ridicule”, and that it belonged with opinions that have “no other foundation than the pious credulity of our ancestors”.¹⁶ He found a plainer reason for the street’s name. The rue d’Enfer lies lower than the parallel rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, he writes, so it was called via inferior.¹⁷ Saint-Foix, in a printing of 1762, gives the same derivation, and says other people blamed the rogues who gathered in out-of-the-way streets.¹⁷

Saint-Foix also gives the spirit a shape.⁶ His château is full of spectres dragging chains, and among them is a green monster:⁶

He adds that the Carthusians asked St Louis for the château, and the “revenans” did not come back.⁶ It is the earliest source we read that gives the spirit this form.⁶

Sauval’s charter, with no devil in it

Henri Sauval’s history, printed in 1724, reports a different tradition about the house. King Robert, as tradition has it, built the Palais de Vauvert as a pleasure house, and when his successors left it empty the demons moved in.¹⁸ Berty found no testimony for the King Robert part, and notes that Du Breul, Félibien and Jaillot never mention it.¹⁸

Sauval goes on to say that in the act of 1269 the place is called a palace, but the king’s charter makes no mention of devils.¹⁹ It describes the palace and its dependencies as enclosed by very high walls.¹⁹ He suggests that the devils were thieves, and the howling the cries of crows and owls.¹⁴

Du Breul in 1612, citing a Latin chronicle

Du Breul prints the story in 1612 in his history of Paris, in the chapter on the Carthusian foundation.⁹ He names his sources: Pierre Sutor’s De vita Cartusiana and Dorland’s chronicle.³ The sentence that introduces the devil is short:

Dorland’s Chronicon Cartusiense, printed at Cologne in 1608, has the story in book 6, chapter 32.¹ Berty says the chronicle was written around 1500.² The chapter tells of a demon near Paris and a nun enclosed in a cell, and of a king and queen who each meant to found a house and joined their vow into one.¹ It does not name Vauvert, Louis IX or the rue d’Enfer, so the identification comes from Du Breul.¹³

Both texts have the same shape: a demon, a recluse, and a house of Carthusians that ends it.⁹¹

A devil everyone already knew

The oldest use of the name that we found is a joke. Guillaume Coquillart, in a passage of his Droits nouveaux about gossiping spinners, says their thread is so fine that “le grant diable de Vauvert” could hardly untangle it.⁴

The poem’s editor, Charles d’Héricault, argues that if its allusions to a canon’s rank are literal, it cannot have been written before 1482, when Coquillart became a canon.⁵ Littré lists the line as a fifteenth-century example.⁴ A joke like that only works if the devil is familiar, so the story was probably current by then. That is our reading; nothing we opened says how long it had been told.⁴

D’Héricault’s note to the line carries a slip of its own. It says the devils raged until 1251, when St Louis installed the monks, a date no other source gives.²⁰ Littré’s supplement adds a 1677 example from d’Assoucy’s Aventures, “On fait le diable de Vauver”.²¹

What the monks’ own dates say

Louis IX asked the Grande Chartreuse for monks, and a chapter of 4 August 1257 sent Dom Jean Joceran and four others.¹¹ They were lodged at Gentilly first.¹¹ Du Breul, Jaillot and Berty all give 21 November 1257 as the day they took Vauvert.²² Jaillot cites the Carthusians’ own titles for that date.²²

The Biblissima record, drawn from BnF notes, says the king gave the château in 1258 and the monks settled in November that year.²³ Jaillot does not support that. He read in the Grand Pastoral of Notre-Dame the Official’s letters of June 1258, in which canons of Saint-Étienne-des-Grès sold the prior and brothers of Vauvert two vineyard plots for 20 livres.²⁴ The royal charter is dated at Melun in May 1259.¹⁰ Jaillot reads it as a confirmation of an earlier gift.¹⁰

A royal act of September 1265 names the house in Latin, “prior et fratres Vallis Viridis prope Parisius, Cartusiensis ordinis”.²⁵ The place name was already old. Berty finds the Latin form in a cartulary of 1226.¹²

What the record cannot say is how old the story is. Du Breul and the heading of Dorland’s chapter both send the reader to Sutor’s De vita Cartusiana, and we could not open it.³